Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 12, 2022

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When Russias barbaric aggression against Ukraine began, Jewish aid organizations estimated that 200,000 Ukrainian Jews were integrated into the life of that country, making the Jewish community there the third-largest in Europe and the fifth-largest in the world.

Since March, Jews have fled in droves, mostly to Israel. Feeling helpless, my husband and I sent money through the Jewish Federation. At Passover, we placed a beetroot on our seder plate in solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

Borscht, the gorgeous garnet-colored soup, gets its radiant hue from beets. Popular throughout Eastern Europe, borscht was not only invented in Ukraine but is its most famous food. However, original recipes were made from a bitter white root called borsh.

Poverty prompted this unpleasant soup to become widespread.

But during the Renaissance, people began preparing this recipe from much sweeter beets, retaining the original name. Eventually, Ukrainians of means added beef, beans and vegetables to the recipe.

Jews created two different kinds of borscht: a thick, meat-based borscht and a thinner vegetarian version to which they added smetana, a sour cream-like cheese. When Jews immigrated to America, vegetable borscht was overshadowed by meat borscht.

Many celebrated Jewish foods have their roots in Ukraine. Babka, the cake baked in loaf pans in America, is baked in high round pans in Ukraine. In both Ukrainian and Yiddish, baba means grandmother; babka means little grandmother. Some say this tall cake resembles grandmas long skirt.

Many Ukrainian Jewish recipes are well known to Ashkenazi Jews, particularly challah and stuffed cabbage. Made with nutty-flavored buckwheat, kasha varnishkes evolved into bowtie pasta flavored with caramelized onions. Often prepared with butter and served with smetana, potato latkes are beloved in Ukraine. Jews created an oil-based version to eat with meat. This popular dish is served at Chanukah and throughout the year.

But there are some Ukrainian Jewish foods unfamiliar to most Americans. Carrot and zucchini muffins are popular at Passover but are eaten all year, kotlety are meat patties stuffed with mushrooms and syrniki, cheese pancakes, are a treasured treat.Since the crisis in Ukraine began, I have cooked these dishes as a tribute to Ukrainian Jews forced from their homeland by a cruel tyrant a theme that has replayed throughout Jewish history. While it is unclear if Jews have a future in Ukraine, Im trying to keep the memory of Jewish life there alive through food.

Ukrainian Borscht American-Style | MeatYield: 3 quarts

When you chop beets, your hands turn red. I, therefore, rely on bottled borscht, enhancing it so even a Ukrainian grandmother would think its homemade. The only way shed suspect the truth is that my hands are not stained.

2 (32-ounce) bottles of borscht (made from beets, not concentrate)3 (14-ounce) cans beef stock12 small pieces marrow bones3 pounds short ribs for flanken, sliced lengthwise between the bones2 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and diced5 carrots, peeled and sliced into circles2 medium onions, diced6 garlic cloves, minced2 bay leaves16 peppercorns cup red wine vinegar cup sugarKosher salt to taste

Three days before serving, place all the ingredients in a large stockpot. Simmer covered, stirring occasionally, for one hour, or until the meat and potatoes soften. Check the seasonings. If its too sweet, add a bit more vinegar. If its too tart, add a little sugar.

Refrigerate and skim the fat from the top. Remove the bay leaves, bones and peppercorns. Serve hot.

Syrniki (Cheese Pancakes) | DairyYield: Makes about 8 syrniki

Equipment: Preferably a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment or a large mixing bowl and electric mixer

cup flour, plus cup1 pound farmer cheese2 eggs cup sugar teaspoon salt cup golden raisins4-8 tablespoons vegetable oil, or more if neededAccompaniments: yogurt, sour cream, preserves or berries

Place cup of flour in a flat-bottomed bowl. Arrange 2 layers of paper towels on a platter. Reserve.

In the bowl of a stand mixer (or in a large mixing bowl if using an electric mixer), crumble the farmer cheese. Add the eggs. Mix well until combined. Add cup of flour, sugar and salt. Beat until the lumps disappear. Gently mix in the raisins. Let it rest for 5 minutes.Meanwhile, in a large skillet, heat 4 tablespoons of oil on a medium-low flame, adding more oil at any time, if needed.

Using a soup spoon, ladle a heaping spoonful of pancake batter, and drop it into the reserved flour. Gently roll the batter around in the flour. Lift the batter ball and, with your hands, form it into a flat pancake. Shake off as much excess flour as possible.

Move the pancake into the heated oil. Repeat, but dont put more than 4 pancakes into the skillet at a time. Fry them until the bottom sides are golden brown and firm. With a spatula, flip them to the other side until golden brown. Watch the pancakes carefully as they burn easily. Move them to paper towels to drain.

Before the second batch, you may need to drain the oil from the pan as it could be dusted with flour, which may burn. If so, when cool, wipe out the pan with paper towels, and start again with another 4 tablespoons of oil.

Serve immediately with yogurt or sour cream, preserves and/or berries.

Kotlety (meat patties) with Mushrooms | MeatYield 5-6 kotlety

Mushroom filling:2 tablespoons vegetable oil4 ounces mushrooms, diced fine small onion, diced fineKosher salt to taste1 garlic clove, minced cup breadcrumbs

In a medium-sized skillet, heat the oil on a medium flame. Add the mushrooms and onion. Sprinkle it with salt, and saut until the vegetables are wilted. Add the garlic and stir. When the garlic is fragrant, add the breadcrumbs and stir to combine for one minute. Remove it from the flame and reserve.

Kotlety:1 pound ground turkey small onion, diced fineKosher salt to tasteFreshly ground black pepper to taste cup flour3 tablespoons vegetable oil

Place the turkey in a medium-sized bowl. Add the onion, salt and pepper, and mix it together with a fork. Spread the flour on a dinner plate.

Set up the ingredients in the order that youll need them. Start with the bowl of turkey, followed by the mushroom filling and then the plate of flour, ending with a clean plate, placed next to the stovetop.

Place cup of turkey in your palm. Flatten the turkey into a thin burger patty and make an indentation in the center. Place 1 teaspoons of the mushroom filling in the indentation. Close the turkey around the filling, making sure there are no seams. Flatten the patty a little. Roll the patty in flour and shake off the excess. Reserve them on the clean plate.Repeat until all the turkey is gone. You will need to rinse your hands under cold water once or twice so they dont get sticky. Reserve the leftover mushroom filling.

Drizzle 3 tablespoons of oil in a large skillet and heat on a medium flame. Move the kotlety to the skillet and fry until its browned on the bottom. Turn them over and brown the top side. Turn them back and forth a couple of times until the turkey is no longer pink inside. If browning occurs too quickly, lower the flame.

Move the kotlety to a platter. Heat the reserved mushroom mixture on a medium flame and sprinkle it over the top of the kotlety.

Savory Carrot Zucchini Muffins | Pareve or dairyYield: approximately 18 muffins

Equipment: 2 muffin pans, a food processor and 2 large pots

3 jumbo carrots1 large sweet potato1 large white potato3 large zucchini2 medium onions2 tablespoons vegetable oil, or more if neededKosher salt to taste, plus teaspoon, and teaspoonNo-stick vegetable spray or 2 tablespoons butter teaspoon sugar, plus teaspoon1 egg, plus 1 egg cup potato starch, plus cup teaspoon lemon zest, plus teaspoon

Set up a food processor with the metal cutting blade. Pour the water into 2 large pots until they are two-thirds full.

Peel the carrots and both potatoes. Rinse them and the zucchini under cold water, then drain them on paper towels.

Dice the carrots and sweet potato into -inch pieces. Move them to one of the large pots of water. Cover the pot with a lid, and boil it on a high flame for 45 minutes, or until the vegetables are very soft when pierced with a utensil-sized fork.

Dice the white potato and zucchini into -inch pieces. Move them to the second pot of water. Cover it with a lid, and boil it on a high flame for 35 minutes, until the vegetables are very soft when pierced with a utensil-sized fork.

Meanwhile, dice the onions, then chop them. Heat the oil in a medium-sized skillet on a medium-low flame. Add the onions and sprinkle them with salt to taste. Saut them until the onions are fragrant and softened. Reserve.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Coat the muffin tins generously with no-stick vegetable spray or preferably with butter, as the muffins will release from the pans more easily. Do not use muffin pan liners, as these muffins are quite soft and fall apart when pulled from liners.

Drain the carrot mixture in a colander until the cooking liquids stop dripping. Move the carrot mixture to the food processor and puree. With a spatula, move it to a large bowl. Rinse out the food processor and dry it.

Drain the zucchini mixture in a colander until the cooking liquids stop dripping. Move it to the food processor. Pulse on and off to puree as the zucchini gets watery. With a spatula, move it to a second large bowl.

To both bowls, add half of the onions, teaspoon of salt, teaspoon of sugar, 1 egg, cup of potato starch and teaspoon of lemon zest. With a silicone or wooden spoon, mix the ingredients in each bowl until well combined.

Into each indentation in the muffin pans, place the zucchini mixture until one-third full. Smooth the zucchini mixture with the back of a teaspoon to create a smooth surface. Top it with the carrot mixture until two-thirds full.

Bake for 45-50 minutes. A cake tester inserted in the centers should come out clean. Remove the pan from the oven, and cool it completely to room temperature before removing from muffin pans.

Serve them muffins with borscht, kotlety, stuffed cabbage and even eggs.

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Ukrainian Jewish Food: Remember the Past Through Recipes - Jewish Exponent

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Posted By admin on May 12, 2022

From left, participants in the JOC Mishpacha "We Are Family" JOCSM Shabbaton: Maetal Gerson, Avodah Jewish Service Corps Chicago, and Kol Or of JCUA; Denise Dautoff, Jewtina y Co.; Riki Robinson, Jews of Color Initiative; Ari Monts (kneeling); Mackenzie Martinez, Avodah Jewish Service Corps, San Diego; Sabrina Sojourner, co-founding director, KHAZBAR; Erica Riddick, Jews of Color Sanctuary; Deitra Reiser, founder, Transform for Equity; Kiyomi Kowalski, co-founder, Jewbian Princess; and Ramona Tenorio, Tiyuv Initiative. Courtesy of JOCSM Shabbaton

By TaRessa StovallMay 11, 2022

How far would you travel for a Shabbat service?

Last week, 105 Jews and allies from around the country gathered at the Pearlstone Retreat Center in Baltimore County, Md. What brought them together was the Second Annual Jews of Color Mishpacha Project Shabbaton, a gathering to build community through worship, meals, conversation, and recreational fun.

The shabbaton was created when Harriette Wimms, a licensed clinical psychologist who works with children, adolescents, adults, and families in Maryland, responded to 2020s COVID-19 upheaval and lockdown with a vision of unity for Jews of Color.

I was sitting in my living room in the midst of COVID isolation missing people, said Wimms, who identifies as a Black queer Jew. She was inspired to create the Jews of Color Mishpacha Project to offer community workshops and gathering spaces. Then she posted on social media her desire to convene a gathering of Jews of Color in the Washington D.C., Virginia, Baltimore area. And the JOC National Shabbaton was born.

That first Shabbaton on May 14 16, 2021 was virtual, drawing some 450 participants from throughout the U.S., as well as Canada, Israel, and parts of Africa. Its success fueled Wimms determination to offer an in-person Shabbaton this year. After facing several challenges, including the date being pushed back three times, her vision was fully realized.

This years gathering, the We Are Family JOCSM Shabbaton, drew 105 diverse Jews and allies from 12 states and the District of Columbia together from May 6 8 at the Pearlstone Retreat Center in Baltimore County, MD to commune, worship, and celebrate together. They enjoyed activities for folks of all ages and denominations and services for all levels of observance, including Orthodox / traditional services with a mechitza. There were kosher meals and shomer Shabbat-friendly programs, plenty of outdoor activities, opportunities for solitude, activities for families with children, and affinity spaces for groups including LGBTQ+ JOC, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, white Jews, and elders.

It was a brand-new experience for many, many people, Wimms said. Some folks flew on the redeye from California; others drove from Cincinnati. We had a 10-day-old baby, elders, toddlers, and teens. All denominations from Orthodox to Renewal. There were intense games of spades and some folks ordered 16 Kosher pizzas, delivered near midnight for the late-night crew. We ate, dreamed, rested, and rejoiced together. It was lit!

Wimms said that a friend from California said to her at the Friday night dinner, When do we get this? When do we get to be the majority? Look around this room this is so powerful!

Heather Miller, the president of Flatbush & Shaare Torah Jewish Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., found her first Jews of Color Shabbaton to be spiritually fulfilling. There was a moment during services on Shabbat where I looked around, just soaking in the fact that many of us are usually the only ones or one of a few in Jewish spaces. Here we were all sitting, praying, enjoying space and community. It was like, wow, this is what it must be like for everyone else. I got chills.

Eric Greene, a board member of the Jewish Multiracial Network, which lent its expertise in creating inclusive programming for families and children to the Shabbaton, affirmed the events value. It felt wonderful to be with so many folks fully rooted in and embracing their identities as Jews and as People of Color, he said. There was no questioning of whether we belong, just recognition that we are.

Wimms said she especially enjoyed watching all the children sit together and make family. And she continues to receive inspiring feedback about the event. I got a text from a Jew of Color who came with her sister and her sisters children. When they got home, her oldest niece said, I want to be Jewish now, Mom, because they saw that Judaism wasnt about whiteness. That is one of my goals, Wimms said. We absolutely had allies and accomplices white Jews and non-Jewish POC and we all came together. People were hungry for connection with other Jews of Color. It was mighty powerful.

Greene noted the impact of that power. So many Jews of Color are coming into our own and finding a collective voice in community, he said. Not just saying that we exist, but also that we have something to contribute to the understanding of text and tradition. And that racial equity cannot be a marginal issue for the larger Jewish community. It must be central.

After the 2021 Shabbaton, Wimms found her vision expanding. As her activism grew and she worked with several Jews of Color groups, she experienced the power of building community and forming alliances with similar organizations. Simultaneously, Wimms had recently joined the board of Pearlstone, an agency of The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore. Its leadership had just secured a new multi-year grant to expand Jewish family camps from theFoundation for Jewish Camp.

This inaugural weekend was a JFAM Family Camp Program, built in partnership between the JOC Mishpacha Project and Pearlstone. To ensure a broad and inclusive event, Wimms engaged a diverse group of leading JOC organizations from across the country as partners and collaborators,including the Jews of Color Initiative,Keshet, Khazabar, Mitsui Collective, Jewish Multiracial Network, Jewtina y Co., Edot, Ammud, Avodah JOC BAYIT, JFNAs Jewish Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiative, LAB/SHUL, TFE Transform for Equity, Atlanta Jews of Color Council, and Jews in ALL Hues. The weekend was also supported by TheBlaustein Fund for Jewish Education.

Wimms stresses the necessity of bridging gaps in Jewish spaces. We often hear that Judaism is in trouble, she said. We often hear that there are several younger Jews who are feeling disconnected from Jewish events and organizations. Jews of Color that I know are hungry across identification. Across all our differences, we were able to come together. Connection is what we all needed at this time.

The main takeaway is the need to continue gathering, said Greene. There is beauty and complexity in our Jews of Color community but so many of us are isolated physically from each other. We can really feel that beauty when we can come together. Like the ancient prayer says, it is good for us to dwell together.

Wimms is planning a virtual retreat next January, and the next in-person Shabbaton for June 16 18, 2023. Some of this years participants are already planning to attend.

Its worth it to take the time out, Miller said. Despite the denominational differences, it was just amazing to be in a room together. Having conversations and talking about Halakah and studying Torah through our lens with a lot of denominations represented. We never have the opportunity to be in spaces like that. I say go!

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National Shabbaton inspires Jews of color with the power of connecting as family - Forward

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Posted By admin on May 12, 2022

Last week, I spoke at Park Avenue Synagogue (PAS) in New York City on the complexities of being a Zionist activist. I shared my own experiences of feeling ostracized from the progressive movement, feeling confused at the rhetoric surrounding Israel and Palestine on college campuses, and the implications of the BDS movement regarding contemporary antisemitism. In the audience, listening intently, was a cluster of teenage Hebrew school students from PAS, no doubt internalizing how they were meant to process this information ahead of their impending college career. When the panel was over, one of these students asked me: What do you mean when you say Zionism is the goal of a Jewish and democratic state? Because when I hear that definition, its like, you cannot have one and another at the same time.

How could I reconcile taking issue with the imprinting of In God We Trust on American money, or allocated time for prayer in public schools, while overlooking the blending of faith and politics when it comes to my own peoples civilization?

One of the reasons I loved this question was because it was a notable departure from most audience queries at congregations or Jewish community centers. Rather than giving advice on how Jewish students can combat anti-Zionism on campus or how they can organize pro-Israel advocacy in their communities, I was now propositioned to address the root of a problem that many Jews struggle with, an issue that I myself struggled with when I first began thinking about the contradictions of a Jewish state. I remember pondering, at the height of my left-wing college days, how I could possibly fight for the separation of church and state in my own country while fighting for a specifically Jewish homeland overseas? How could I reconcile taking issue with the imprinting of In God We Trust on American money, or allocated time for prayer in public schools, while overlooking the blending of faith and politics when it comes to my own peoples civilization?

If a Jewish student cannot answer this question sincerely and with enough conviction, it is pointless to expect them to stand up for Zionism. Therefore, I was sure to craft my answer with as much care as possible, highlighting simple truths that all in the public square can understand.

The idea to build a Jewish state is in part a secular idea to grant a nation the universal right to self-determination, especially considering the absence of this self-determination has borne the greatest human rights calamities our modern world has seen.

I first explained the fundamental difference between the Jewish people and the Christian, Buddhist or Muslim people. The Jewish people are an ethno-religion and a people, bound together by yes, religion, but also by national aspirations, common history, shared languages, and culture. The idea to build a Jewish state is in part a secular idea to grant a nation the universal right to self-determination, especially considering that the absence of this self-determination has borne the greatest human rights calamities our modern world has seen. But lets say one points to the clear religious influence in Israel, from the growing Haredi population to their burgeoning representation in the Knesset. It is important to add that religion has a place in many of the worlds liberal countries, as seen by crosses on the flags of European countries or the tethering of various royal families to the Church. This is not to say the presence of the Church is completely compatible with democracy, but it does not cancel out our thinking of such nations as democracies. And then, there is the example of the Arab Spring.

A Jewish democracy is a place we need to get to, not a place in which we can already revel.

During the Arab Spring, multiple Middle Eastern countries rebelled against either theocracy, authoritarianism, or both. The world cheered on, as many in the West correctly assumed that liberalism was possible to integrate into even the most illiberal of circumstances. Even if the Arab Spring largely failed and plunged the region deeper into war, it did so because of anti-democratic forces such as fundamentalist militias despotic tyrants. The Arab Spring also did not fail everywhere, considering Tunisia, a majority Muslim country and a part of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, now boasts a democratic republic with a President as Head of State and a Prime Minister. The valiant campaign to bend Islamic countries toward democracy while immediately casting off the principle of a Jewish democracy as an automatic impossibility is hypocritical, and indeed reveals a contempt for Jewish society in any form.

Next, like all the worlds democracies, a Jewish democracy is an aspiration, not a final status reality. A Jewish democracy is a place we need to get to, not a place in which we can already revel. One can argue that the United States was not a true democracy until the 1960s, for democracy is inchoate when Black Americans are prohibited from the ballot box by the millions and certainly when women, half the population, are banned from political participation. Yet the foundations of our nation are that of a republic, and within the words of the Constitution are the seeds to weed out tyranny, even if its writers were in part tyrannical. Or take, for instance, Great Britain and France, which have been considered democracies even while enslaving, plundering, and pillaging much of the planet. Germany was still considered a democracy when it decided to abandon democracy altogether at the start of the 1930s. As with many nations, democracy is a verb in Israel, a push and pull between conservative and liberal impulses that propulse a nation, albeit nonlinearly.

Finally, when we continued the conversation after the panel was over, I explained that part of the foundation of a Jewish democracy is the argument over how much religious law should be heeded. If arguments are essential to representing a pluralist country, surely the advancement of one Israeli ideal over the other and vice versa just years down the line represent a struggle over power, not a one-party hegemonic rule. We discussed the implications of the Star of David on the flag, the lyrics to Hatikvah, and the Law of Return for Jews, conversations I am sure she doesnt feel welcomed initiating in more establishment pro-Israel circles. I then informed her that we, right now in the moment, were contributing to Jewish democracy, simply by proposing ways in which we would like to see Israel better reflect our own political visions.

I informed this student that I would be making aliyah in the autumn, as I feel so strongly in the principle of Jewish democracy that I cannot help but participate. Every Jew, everywhere, has this right, I told her. Truthfully, I hope more American Jews make aliyah in the coming years, considering there is no point in us constantly complaining when Israel disappoints us if we dont have a direct stake in how the Jewish people form and reform our country and our destiny. A Jewish democracy is an aspiration, a dream, and as the founder of the modern idea of a Jewish democracy once promised, If you will it, it is no dream.

Blake Flayton is New Media Director and columnist at the Jewish Journal.

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The Aspiration of a Jewish Democracy - Jewish Journal

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Posted By admin on May 12, 2022

A rabbi and three mourners at a pandemic-era funeral at Garden of Remembrance Memorial Park in Clarksburg, Md. Courtesy of Garden of Remembrance Memorial Park

The U.S. death toll from the COVID-19 is fast approaching or has already passed 1 million.

Jews at about 2% of the population are the religious group with the lowest rate of vaccine hesitancy. Yet the community has been hit hard. Health agencies dont keep track of deaths by religion, but the number of American Jews who have died of COVID-19 is likely in the thousands.

Here are 10 of them. They ranged in age from 43 to 91, and include a tombstone maker, camp director, bank robber, songwriter and Holocaust survivors none household names. In different ways, though, each made their mark within and beyond the Jewish world.

Ted Ruskin taught in a federal prison, designed tombstones under the name of Tombstone Ted and spearheaded the renovation and annual cleanup of several Jewish cemeteries in the Denver area. He also helped establish a memorial park for Ukrainian Jews massacred during the Holocaust.

Death didnt hold a lot of terror for him, his friend Paul Thomas told Colorado Public Radio last year, noting his good sense of humor, and that Ruskins partner, Gary Bobbs, died of AIDS in 1994.

Ruskin died early in the pandemic, on April 7, 2020, at 76. His cousin Libby Gershansky said that catching COVID-19 so early, he didnt get the benefit of vaccines and treatments developed later, in the same way that Bobbs couldnt be saved by AIDS drugs unavailable when he fell ill. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y, Ruskin was buried next to Bobbs grave in Aurora, Colorado.

Judaism does put a value on what they call Tikkun Olam, repairing the world, Gershansky said. He took that value very seriously making the world a better place, to the extent that you can. A better place than you found it. And I think that value was reflected in his life.

Beth Salamensky was just starting to get involved at Beth Chayim Chadashim in Los Angeles, the first LGBTQ synagogue in the country, when financial challenges forced her to move back into her childhood home in Flossmoor, Illinois.

In 2019, four years after her return to the Chicago area, the state sold the house to cover the costs of caring for Salamenskys mother, who has dementia. Salamensky began living out of her car. Months later, she was hospitalized with severe diabetes and end-stage kidney failure. She was hospitalized again after testing positive for COVID-19.

She was alone when she died of the virus at 43 on April 17, 2020. Lacking a phone, she hadnt told her family she was sick.

Her cousin, Shelley Salamensky, first learned of her death two months later from a Google search alert that led her to the website of Chicago Jewish Funerals. The organization had recovered Salamenskys body from storage and planned a service for July.

Shelley didnt feel safe traveling, and Beths mother was ill, so she found four volunteers from the Jewish nonprofit group Reboot to attend the funeral.

Im just amazed by the people who came out, Shelley told The New York Times. I hope Beth someone who was so afraid to ask for help knows that so many strangers were willing to come to her aid.

Alan Hurwitz, born in Detroit in 1941, became a teacher and school administrator, and was widely admired for his work in social justice. He was a desegregation advisor to the Detroit Public Schools, a member of former Michigan Gov. William Millikens Task Force on School Violence and the deputy director of the Peace Corps in Kenya.

I was raised in the liberal Jewish tradition of justice, learning and equality, he told the Detroit Metro Times in 2005.

But the Reagan Revolution disillusioned Hurwitz. He felt all his work on behalf of Michigans poor children would unravel. Offered crack cocaine, he got hooked, and began to rob banks to support his habit. Over the course of nine weeks in 1992, he robbed 17 banks, and earned the nickname Zombie Bandit after witnesses described his blank stare to the FBI.

He robbed a total of 22 banks over the course of his criminal career, and was sentenced to 17 years in prison but granted compassionate release in May 2020 because COVID-19 was spreading among the inmates. On June 6, 2020 at 79, Hurwitz died from complications of COVID-19. He is survived by three children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Marcia Paris Waxman loved baking challah, dancing ballet and listening to Motown music.

For many years, she served as president of the Cleveland Chabads women division and ran the Camp Chabad summer program.

She was also a mother to four, a grandmother to 16 and a great-grandmother to 10.

In her later years, she would spend summers by the pool with them at her side.

She was 84 when she died on Dec. 30, 2021 of complications of COVID-19 and infections that followed a hip operation.

She was survived by her husband, Mel, of 65 years.

Avrohom Romi Cohen was 10 when the Nazis invaded his native Czechoslovakia in 1938. During the Holocaust, he was smuggled into Hungary; his mother and four siblings were killed in concentration camps.

As a teenager, with forged papers that identified him as a Christian, he returned to Czechoslovakia, and joined the partisan forces hiding in the mountains. He risked his life to help rescue 56 Jewish families from the Nazis, said U.S. Rep. Max Rose of New York in January 2020, when Cohn offered a prayer before Congress on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

In 1950, he moved to Canada, and then Brooklyn, where he got married and became a real estate developer on Staten Island. He also worked as a mohel, performing 3,000 circumcisions free of charge, according to JTA, and trained more than 100 young mohels on the condition that they also perform the service for free.

On March 24, 2020, he died of COVID-19 at the age of 91, less than two months after standing before Congress. As a young boy of 10 years, he had said, I was condemned to be dead, to be murdered.

Allyson Mestel-Schapira worked as a public school speech teacher in Queens, N.Y., for 25 years.

She organized birthday festivities and get-togethers at the school, keeping fun and joy in everyones lives, her colleague, Loretta Tumbarello, told the New York state teachers union.

She died April 19, 2020, at the age of 48 due to COVID-19. Those who were fortunate enough to know Allyson will forever remember her for being gracious, kind and compassionate, Tumbarello said.

Her impact on the lives of her colleagues and friends is immeasurable.

She enjoyed makeup, jewelry, fashion and travel, and was survived by her husband and two children, as well as her mother.

Born the same day in 1929 as Anne Frank, Margit Buchhalter Feldman was also sent to Bergen-Belson, where Frank died. But Feldman, who was also sent to Auschwitz, among other death and labor camps, survived the Holocaust, in part, she believes, because she lied to the Nazis. At 15, she told them she was 18, in hopes that she would be sent to forced labor, instead of condemned to a quick death.

A 2017 documentary called Margit: Not A23029 referring to the number tattooed on her by Nazis chronicled her life.

She moved to the U.S. after the war, and became a prominent Holocaust educator.

I am here and I firmly believe it is because God wanted me to survive and let others know what an uncaring world did to its fellow human beings, she said in the documentary.

She was a founding member of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education and the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Raritan Valley Community College. In 1994 Feldman helped pass a New Jersey bill that mandates Holocaust curriculum be taught in all public schools.

She died at 90 in April of 2020, one day before the 75th anniversary of her liberation of complications from COVID-19. Her husband of 66 years, died of the virus days later.

David Gitlitz made his mark in academia as an expert on Sephardic Jews, and won awards for his books, which included Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto Jews and a cookbook, A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spains Secret Jews. He did much of his research on trips to Spain, where he hiked the 500-mile Camino de Santiago with his wife, Linda Kay Davidson.

Gitlitz was first a Spanish and literature teacher at Indiana University and continued to teach for over 45 years at the University of Nebraska, SUNY Binghamton and the University of Rhode Island. He retired to Oaxaca, Mexico, where he died, at 78, on Dec. 30, 2020, of complications from COVID-19.

To our knowledge he was never bored, his two daughters Abby and Deborah wrote of their father. No matter where he was, or who he was with, there was always the delight of something new to learn.

If you were anywhere near a radio, television or movie theater in the past 25 years, youve heard Adam Schlesingers music, PJ Grisar wrote for the Forward in 2020.

His career began in 1996 with the song That Thing You Do! which he wrote for the Tom Hanks movie of the same name, earning him his first film credit and Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. This set off a career of scoring for film and television that would win Schlesinger a Grammy for Stephen Colberts 2008 Christmas Special and three Emmys, including two for composing parts of Neil Patrick Harris 2011 and 2012 Tony performances. He spanned different genres and mediums, writing for artists like the Jonas Brothers, The Monkees, Josie and the Pussycats and movies like Ice Age: Continental Drift, Shallow Hall and Theres Something About Mary.

He was also a founding member of the bands Fountain of Wayne and Ivy, which had a hit with Stacys Mom, a song about a hormonal teen with a crush on his girlfriends mom.

If there was a poet laureate of the unambitious Manhattan suburbs, Schlesinger might have earned that title, Grisar wrote.

On April 1, 2020, at 52, Schlesinger died of complications from COVID-19. Two months later, Father/Daughter Records released the tribute album Saving For A Custom Van in his memory. The proceeds were donated to a COVID relief fund.

Gladys Davis was an expert needle-pointer and gifted baker of Hungarian delicacies. By the time she was hospitalized in March 2020 at the age of 90 with pancreatitis, she had survived two hip replacements, a heart attack and breast cancer. She tested positive for COVID-19 in the hospital.

I couldnt kiss her, her son Rick Davis told The Detroit Jewish News. It was gut-wrenching and heartbreaking to watch her lose her breath as her lungs filled and there was nothing we could do.

Davis, who was known as Gaby, died on March 21, 2020, making her the first reported death from COVID-19 in Detroits Jewish community. Her family adorned her casket with red, purple and blue hearts, and live-streamed her funeral.

The virus, Rick Davis said, robbed us of the traditional process of humanness since the family couldnt sit shiva. Shiva is a time for family to get together and share. We couldnt tell the stories. There was no hugging.

This wasnt a statistic, he added, this is my mom.

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10 Jews who died of COVID-19 The Forward - Forward

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Southfield (CW50) There is over 350 years of Jewish history in American. Thousands of stories to be read, lessons to be learned, and moments in history that define a culture and its peoples generations of heritage.

At Temple Beth El, a team of archivists oversee the Rabbi Leo M. Franklin Archives and Anna S. and Meyer L. Prentis Memorial Library.In these archives, the history of Michigans Jewish roots can be found, and one archivist wanted more people to experience these stories themselves. During the COVID-19 pandemics initial lockdown, Temple Beth Els Director of Cultural Resources, Laura Gottlieb,saw an opportunity to create a social media series using the archives. Gottlieb created Out of the Box as a way to bring the stories within the archives to life. Her series made Jewish history more accessible to a generation of people who consumecontent through the internet. The series evolved into a show where Gottlieb and her team dive into a story each episode, showing historical photos, documents, objects, and expressing the importance of each story and the lessons that can be learned from them.

In her role at Beth El, Gottlieb works to bring Jewish stories and history to life through other programs, lectures, workshops, and book clubs. Her passion forthe Metro Detroit Jewish community is seen in her work across the community. She is a NEXTGen Detroit board member as well as a committee member for Tamarack Camps. She also teaches high school students at Temple Beth Els religious school (Masa), volunteers for JARC and hosts OneTable Shabbat dinners.

Gottlieb was named to The Detroit Jewish News 36 Under 36 in 2022. Her work in the community has been recognized by its members, and her continued work will help build a community filled with others with a similar passion for Jewish history, culture, and heritage.

Community Connect Host Lisa Germani, with Laura Gottlieb, Director of Cultural Resources at Temple Beth El

Gottlieb joins Lisa Germani on Community Connect to talk about how she took her job in the temples archives and brought the stories within its pages to life through social media.

Explore episodes of Out of the Box on Temple Beth Els Facebook page: Facebook.com/tbeonline

WatchCommunity Connect,Saturday at 7am on CW50.

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Archivist Brings Jewish History to Life with Out of the Box Social Media Series - CBS Local

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Thousands of years of history is a lot to capture in one Jewish American Heritage Month, which is celebrated in May. But an old joke admirably condenses it into one sentence: They tried to kill us, we survived, lets eat.

Passover is a perfect example of this sequence.

Always a favorite of mine, this spring holiday passed a few weeks ago. Across the country, Jewish families gathered to commemorate the story of the Jews escape from slavery in Egypt with beautiful food and well-worn prayers and songs. Chanting rapid-fire rounds of Chad Gadya with my family never gets old.

Its full of resilience and joy but increasingly, it also feels full of contradictions.

Like many Jewish holidays, Passover symbolizes the Jews reverence for freedom, how blessed we were to flee our bondage. But its many mentions of the ancient land of Israel cant help but conjure the injustices of the modern Israeli state.

Earlier this year, Amnesty International released a comprehensive report concluding that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians. Its not the first human rights organization to do so Human Rights Watch and the Israeli groups Yesh Din and BTselem have all concluded the same.

These reports and decades of grassroots advocacy have made it impossible to deny modern Israels systematic discrimination against Palestinians.

Of course, in the wake of the Holocaust, millions of Jewish refugees needed a safe place to call home. But the land between the river and the sea was never the land without a people for a people without a land as it was described.

Since its establishment by force in 1948 and especially its occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 Israel has demolished countless Palestinian homes to expand Jewish settlements. Millions of stateless Palestinians live under strict Israeli military control, while Palestinian citizens of Israel enjoy fewer rights than their Jewish counterparts.

For the 2 million Palestinians trapped in the Gaza strip, the daily denial of adequate water and electricity is compounded by the looming threat of Israeli bombing. In just 11 days of conflict this time last year, Israeli strikes killed up to 192 Gazan civilians, at least a third of them children.

These abuses stand painfully at odds with the Jewish history I know. Jewish people around the world should defend our heritage and stand up against these violent injustices in our name.

For American Jews, that means demanding an end to U.S. military funding to Israel. As international human rights groups have emphasized, the $3.8 billion the U.S. gives annually to Israel directly funds the advanced weaponry it uses, year after year, to control and oppress Palestinians.

Every other country in the world is subject to human rights laws restricting how U.S. arms and military support are used. We must apply the same rules to Israel.

The beautiful thing is, American Jewish history is full of advocacy like this. In 1969, hundreds of community members in Washington, D.C. Jewish and non-Jewish, white and African American joined together on Passover to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.s death.

This Freedom Seder wove together the histories of Jews, African Americans, and others who broke the chains of slavery. By reaching across communities it created strength, fortifying the ongoing movement for civil rights through age-old Jewish tradition.

We can, and must, do the same for Palestinians today. And at a time when far-right movements are on the rise in this country threatening Jews, Muslims, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and other minorities all of us need more than ever to join forces.

By choosing solidarity over fear, we can achieve not just freedom for some, but collective liberation for all. Like Moses with his staff, we can part the seas of oppression and move through them toward a brighter future, together.

And then, lets eat.

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Liberation Is Jewish History. Let's Make It Our Future, Too. - OtherWords

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With May designated as Jewish American Heritage Month, and with anti-Semitic incidents on the rise around the country, it is worth recognizing that anti-Semitism has been a consistent presence throughout American Jewish history. The Anti-Defamation League recently reported that anti-Semitic incidents hit a record high in 2021;an October 2021 report by the American Jewish Committee found that nearly one out of every four Jews in the U.S. has been the subject of antisemitism over the past year; the GOPs culture warriors are trying to convince Jews that it is in their interest to vote with their QAnon cohorts; Lara Logan, a Fox Nation host spewed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on a QAnon-adjacent online show; anti-Semitic flyers are popping up in neighborhoods across the country, including in such progressive bastions as the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area.

The Anti-Defamation League counted 2,717 antisemitic incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism in 2021, a 34% increase over the previous year and the highest number since the New York City-based group began tracking such incidents in 1979.

According to CNNs Nicole Chavez, Most of the incidents included in the report -- 1,776 -- were described as harassment, meaning one or more Jews or those perceived to be Jewish were the target of anti-Semitic slurs, stereotypes or conspiracy theories, the report states. A total of 853 incidents were acts of vandalism, and 88 were assaults. There were no deaths linked to anti-Semitic violence, the report said.

CNN reported that, Among the places where incidents were reported were Jewish institutions, including community centers, synagogues, grade schools and college campuses. There were 525 incidents at Jewish institutions; 331 were reported at non-Jewish K-12 schools and 155 at colleges and universities, the report found.

The American Jewish Committees report last year found that Seventeen percent of respondents said they had been the subject of an antisemitic remark in person, while 12% said they were the victim of an antisemitic remark online. Three percent of Jews who responded to the poll said they were the target of an antisemitic physical attack.

In March, after an eight-month delay, Deborah Lipstadt, the author of five books on antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and American responses to the Holocaust, and President Joe Bidens nominee to the post of US State Department special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, was confirmed by the Senate (https://jewishcurrents.org/deborah-lipstadt-vs-the-oldest-hatred).

Jewish Currents Mari Cohen recently reported that, Lipstadt assumes the role at a moment when most American Jews believe [and the ADL report confirmed] antisemitism is on the rise. In the last five years, they have witnessed unprecedented violent attacks on synagogues: the 2018 massacre at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh; the 2019 shooting at the Chabad of Poway in California; and, of course, the recent attack in Colleyville, Texas in January.

When you talk about antisemitism, depending on what youre talking about and who youre talking about, it can be used for totally different political agendasin fact, opposite political agendas, Omer Bartov, a leading Holocaust scholar at Brown University, told Cohen, who noted that, The left tends to raise the alarm about white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and antisemitic Q-anon conspiracists emboldened by the Trump administration, calling for solidarity among marginalized groups and measures like community safety patrols. The right insists that the primary danger comes from pro-Palestine activists, and therefore that Israel-advocacy effortssuch as crackdowns on Palestinian campus activism and legislation preventing boycotts of Israelconstitute a righteous anti-antisemitism crusade. The center prides itself on opposing what it sees as threats from all sides.

The New York Times Michelle Goldberg pointed out that, The radicalization of the Republican Party has helped white nationalism flourish. Antisemitism started increasing in 2015, when Donald Trump came on the political scene and electrified the far right, then spiked during his administration. Trump is now gone, but the Republican Party has grown more hospitable than ever to cranks and zealots. Two Republican members of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, spoke at a white nationalist conference this year.

According to Gale.coms short History of Anti-Semitism in America -- included in its Political Extremism and Radicalism series -- Today, complex social change, including anxiety about globalization, economic inequality, the COVID-19 pandemic, and changing demographics, has inspired a resurgence of bigotry, scapegoating, and mistrust. For some, including prominent conservative leaders surrounding former President Donald Trump, the Jewish community once again became the globalists responsible for complex social change. As Trump rallied behind the slogan America First, echoing prominent anti-Semites during World War II, his words found power in the alt-right and hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, QAnon, and the Proud Boys.

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Stunning Rise in Anti-Semitic Incidents in the US - Daily Kos

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In a corner of the Choral Synagogue in the western Ukrainian town of Drohobych, theres a stark display of pictures detailing the bloody and tragedy-strewn history of the areas Jewish community. One is especially horrifying: a black-and-white image of the corpses of four Jewish children killed by Nazis during World War II.

If you take a close look, there are parallels with right now, said Leonid Golberg, a 66-year-old member of the local Jewish Board, pointing to the image. Russia is now doing the same things in Ukraine.

Golberg is a senior member of the small, 40-member Jewish community of Drohobych, a town nestled in the rolling hills of Ukraine that grow into the Carpathian Mountains just a few miles further west.

The town used to have a far larger Jewish population. More than 12,000 Jews 40% of the towns population were killed in mass shootings, by starvation in the Nazi-established ghetto, or transported to the Beec extermination camp, just one small part of the systematic genocide of Jews during the Holocaust. In Drohobych, only 400 Jewish people survived the war.

The people of Drohobych know about Nazis. Which makes it all the more appalling that Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed his invasion of Ukraine was meant to de-Nazify the country a statement he reiterated on Monday.

On Monday, Putin delivered a speech at the annual Victory Day Parade on Moscows Red Square. During those remarks, Putin said a clash with the neo-Nazis, the Banderites, backed by the United States and their junior partners, was inevitable.

Putin also told Russians they were fighting for the Motherland, for its future, so that no one forgets the lessons of the Second World War, so that there is no place in the world for executioners, punishers and Nazis.

The claims may gain traction in the increasingly insular Russia, where the flow of information and news is becoming more restricted by the day. But nowhere remembers the lessons of the Second World War better than the town of Drohobych, the history of which lays bare the hypocrisy and deceit of Putins claims.

Far from learning the lessons of the Second World War, Golberg says Russia is repeating history, only on a wider scale. And, in an attempt to justify it, Putin is invoking claims about Jews that the whole civilized world said was a red line crossed.

In the same way that Nazis killed 6 million Jews during World War II, they are destroying Ukraine as a state, Golberg said. They already killed over 300 children, theyre killing thousands of civilians and have destroyed whole cities.

Golbergs voice was raspy from a recent bout of COVID-19 and the half-hourly cigarette breaks he took as he showed HuffPost around the synagogue.

One of the photos on display is from 1939. It shows a Soviet officer shaking hands with a Nazi officer after the two sides met after their successful invasion and partition of Poland, a result of the secret pact Josef Stalin entered into with Adolf Hitler shortly before the outbreak of World War II.

A sign behind the two men reads Drohobych, pointing in the direction of the town just a few kilometers down the road from where they stand.

Ukraines geography blessed it with lands so fertile its known the breadbasket of Europe, but cursed it to repeatedly being at the mercy of larger and more powerful neighbors to both its east and west as they battled for power and influence in Europe.

Nazi Germany captured Drohobych in 1941 and decimated the towns Jewish population.

Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sparked outrage by claiming Hitler had Jewish blood and that Jews were complicit in their own genocide, adding: For a long time now, weve been hearing the wise Jewish people say that the biggest anti-Semites are the Jews themselves.

Despite Putin reportedly offering an apology for Lavrovs remarks, Golberg remained incensed.

Lavrov said what he said because its actually them that are the thieves and the criminals, Golberg said. What theyre doing here is not only genocide, it can be called Ukrainicide.

After the Nazis were defeated, Drohobych and Ukraine fell under the Soviet sphere. The towns Jewish community continued to be persecuted and the Choral Synagogue was appropriated by the authorities and used as a warehouse, falling into disrepair for decades.

Drohobychs Jewish population is small, but proud. A huge renovation project starting in 2014 restored the Choral Synagogue to its former glory. It forms one part of a trinity of notable holy buildings in Drohobych, alongside the Eastern Orthodox St. Georges Church and the Catholic Church of Saint Bartholomew a nod to the towns multicultural heritage.

Golberg was baffled by the idea that the country in which he lives and practices freely as a Jew has been invaded by an army claiming to be fighting Nazism.

Theyre saying there are Nazis in Ukraine, but lets look at the facts, said Golberg. He noted the diversity of the Ukrainian army.

Jews serving in the battalions of the Ukrainian army and Ukrainian territorial defense were celebrating Passover last month. Muslims in Kyiv celebrated Ramadan, Golberg said. So where is the Nazism?

As HuffPost left the synagogue, Golberg was already busy with his next appointment: leading a free tour of the synagogue for displaced people who have recently arrived in Drohobych after being forced to leave their homes elsewhere in the country.

The war has impacted everyone, he said. Before people didnt really fully understand what was going on and what Russia is, but now its very different everyone understands what Russia is, that theres a war, that we have to fight until were victorious and until then we wont have peace.

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Putin Claims Hes Ridding Ukraine Of Nazis. Ukraines Jewish Population Knows Better. - HuffPost

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When we talk about religious framings of abortion ethics, particularly in the US, the discussion usually brings to mind positions advocated by some Christian institutions and their members, who largely support legal bans on the procedure (even if these groups didnt always). But, as physician and medical researcher Tomas J. Silber wrote back in 1980, Jewish tradition points in a very different direction.

Silber notes that, since antiquity, Jewish theologians have consistently put embryos and fetuses in different categories from infants. For example, Jews traditionally do not say the Mourners Kaddish in the case of a miscarriage. A fetus is considered part of the mother until birth. If someone converts to Judaism during pregnancy, when the child is born, its automatically recognized as Jewish, too.

Some rabbis have held that an embryo is a mere fluid of no moral concern for the first 40 days of a pregnancy. And, to the extent that its considered immoral to end a pregnancy, Jewish law does not put the offense in the same category as murder. Instead, some rabbis consider the issue to be neglecting ones duty of procreation.

On the other hand, Silber writes, if a fetus is considered part of an adults body, it may be unacceptable to destroy it, just as self-mutilation is considered unethical. This depends on the circumstances. The Mishnahthe first major written collection of the Jewish oral legal traditionstates that, in case of life-threatening danger to a woman during childbirth, one dismembers the embryo within her, limb by limb, because her life takes precedence over its life. But once its head [or its greater part] has emerged, it may not be touched, for we do not set aside one life for another.

In cases where the life of the pregnant person isnt threatened, Jewish theologians have debated where to draw the line(s). Rabbi Moshe Zweig of Antwerp argued that a husband couldnt stop his wife from eating foods she craved during pregnancy, even if he feared it would cause a miscarriage, for her physical pain [the pregnancy cravings] is to be considered first. Isser Yehuda Unterman, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1964 to 1972, argued that abortion should be allowed in life-threatening situations, including extreme mental anguish that could lead to suicide, but not in the case of milder mental health conditions.

In other instances, rabbis have argued that, while its unacceptable to end a pregnancy that would result in a severely disabled child on the grounds of pity for the baby, its allowable if the birth would cause extreme anguish to the mother.

As with many matters of Jewish ethics, the debate over these questions will probably never be settled definitively. The concepts articulated by scholars dont lend themselves to hard-and-fast rules, let alone laws enforceable by the government. Instead, Silber writes, they implicitly require a soul-searching and counseling process to be involved in every case.

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By: Tomas J. Silber

Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Fall 1980), pp. 231239

Springer

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In 1891, a time of heightened antisemitism and frequent pogroms across the Russian empire, the German Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch bought 17 million acres of rural Argentine land for Jews to farm. Refugees from tsarist Russia had already started emigrating to Argentina, whose government wanted immigrants to come cultivate its fertile pampasso much so that it cut a deal with de Hirsch and the organization he founded, the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), to allow them to acquire land tax-free. De Hirsch distributed these acres to the dispossessed Jews who had begun founding small towns in the rural province of Entre Ros, hoping that, through farming, they could take control of their fates.

After de Hirschs death, in 1896, Jews continued to flock to Argentina: In 1900, the nation was home to roughly 20,000 Jews; by 1920, it held some 150,000. While they found the safety and economic opportunity they needed to build thriving communities, they also faced widespread antisemitism. In 1919, a general strike in Buenos Aires set off a weeklong pogrom known as the Semana Trgica, or Tragic Week, in which the police and military, joined by wealthy right-wing civilians, attacked workers who looked Jewish. One journalist reported seeing innocent old men whose beards had been uprooted; after the violence ended, an army commander announced that, of the 193 workers whod been killed, all but 14 were Jews. Hate speech against Jews remained common in the decades after the Semana Trgica: Street-corner priests spouted antisemitic rhetoric; the writer and editor Jacobo Timerman, who grew up in 1930s Buenos Aires, writes of using heavy wooden ping-pong paddles to defend himself against antisemitic street gangs. In 1976, a right-wing coup unseated President Isabel Pern and installed a military junta that made hatred of Jews unofficial state policy. Though antisemitic sentiment waned after the return of democracy in 1983, Buenos Airess Jews suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in the countrys history in 1994, when Hezbollah assailants bombed the Asociacin Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), one of the citys biggest hubs of Jewish activity. The attack, sponsored by Iran, killed 86 people and destroyed much of the AMIA library, which held a centurys worth of Argentine Jewish books and newspapers.

In popular Argentine memory, the colonies financed by Baron de Hirsch stand as shining counterpoints to this difficult historyplaces where Jews flourished without prejudice. The journalist Javier Sinay, an assimilated Argentine Jew descended from JCA settlers, grew up with this sunny image of towns like the one where his ancestors lived, Moiss Ville, which was once known as the Jerusalem of South America. His childhood concept of the place emerged not from family lore, but from myths rooted in The Jewish Gauchos, a cozy 1910 story collection by Alberto Gerchunoff, a major figure of 20th-century Argentine letters whose work influenced Jorge Luis Borges. In Gerchunoffs tales, which were made into a well-received movie in 1975, a group of persecuted immigrants, aided by their neighbors, become happy, prosperous cowboys, known in Argentina as gauchos. As North Americans have long loved the myth of Native Americans teaching the Pilgrims to grow corn, so have Argentines of all faiths enjoyed the notion of rural criollosa term that describes anyone whose Spanish ancestors arrived before the nation achieved independence in 1816teaching shtetl Jews to ride.

But Sinays 2013 narrative nonfiction book, The Murders of Moiss Ville, recently translated by Robert Croll, highlights the violence lurking beneath these tales of harmony. Moiss Villes inhabitants speak of it today as a site of perfect accord between Jews and Christiansand yet, Sinay discovers, 22 Jews living there were murdered in the years surrounding the turn of the 20th century. Sinay decided to reconstruct the stories of these killings after his father stumbled on a partial Spanish translation of an article by the authors great-grandfather, Mijl Sinay, the editor of a Yiddish-language Buenos Aires newspaper, who described the murders in an effort to raise awareness about the precarious conditions in which rural Jews lived. In his quest to verify the essays claims, Sinay learns Yiddish, searches through the uncatalogued remains of the AMIA library, and seeks out the living relatives of Jews killed in Moiss Ville. What begins as an exercise in historical sleuthing evolves into a more ambitious exploration of Argentine Jewish history and identity.

Sinay could easily have positioned the Moiss Ville killings as precursors to the Semana Trgica and the antisemitism of the junta, reinforcing the ubiquitous narrative that the historian Salo Baron calls the lachrymose conception of Jewish history, which presents the Jewish story as one dominated or defined by suffering. Rather than assimilate the sad fates of the Jews murdered in Moiss Ville into this too-familiar framework, Sinay confronts the true impetus for the killings: not antisemitism, but the ethnic tension and class conflict that arose when European settlers, including but not limited to Jewish refugees, moved to what had long been criollo land. Sinay focuses equally on the Moisesvillians immigrant struggle and on the settler-colonial conditions of their immigration. Just as importantly, he divides his attention, to the extent that surviving records permit, between the JCA settlers from whom he is descended and the criollo Argentines they displaced. He thus not only avoids a lachrymose telling of the Moiss Ville story, but frankly examines the ways in which the Jews of the Argentine pampas became actors within a colonial system of state repression.

The Jews who emigrated to Moiss Ville arrived toward the end of a major economic and cultural shift in Argentine society. In the 1860s, Argentina had become an agricultural powerhouse. English and Italian immigrants had set up farms and ranches across the plains. Their structured form of agriculture, which centered on the enclosure of vast tracts of land, was antithetical toand, in the governments eyes, more modern and lucrative thanthe itinerant lifestyle of the regions gauchos. Though today gauchos are central to Argentinas national mythology, in the second half of the 19th century, the nations elites began to portray the cowboys as lazy and unruly, closer in spirit to the Indigenous peoples who had been chased out of Argentina than to the inhabitants of Buenos Aires and its surroundings. The state supported the new European ranchers and attempted to regulate the gaucho way of life out of existence: Gauchos could no longer travel or get paid without showing permits, and they were forbidden from renouncing their patronsthat is, from refusing to do casual labor for landowners. Any gaucho who sought to retain independence essentially became a fugitive.

Although gauchos were, by and large, criollos of Spanish descentwhich means they were descendants of the lands first colonizersmany allied themselves with Indigenous groups whod survived state extermination. Others, Sinay writes, joined bands of cruel thieves who appeared and disappeared like pirates on the Pampas, sewing terror through the fields now fenced and foreign, fields that had once been their own. Some local authorities, perhaps out of quiet antagonism toward government regulation or perhaps simply seeking profit, tacitly sided with the gauchos who had turned to banditry. As a result, the Jews who emigrated en masse to Moiss Ville and its environs found themselves in the midst of entrenched, unpredictable violence.

Sinay positions himself as heir to all of this fraught history. He plainly wants to counteract the anti-gaucho sentiment that dominated rural Argentina when his great-grandfather arrived and is evident in his ancestors writings. Even Sinays language reflects these sympathies: Although the towns Jewish immigrants came to Argentina after anti-gaucho regulation was well established, he positions them as part of the wave of settlers in whose favor the regulations were made by referring to them primarily as colonists, highlighting not their precarious status in the Old World but their connections to power in the New. Of course, these links were sometimes tenuous. Upon arriving in Argentina, the first Jewish colonists, who landed in Buenos Aires years before the JCA began buying up acreage, were defrauded in their first effort to purchase land and overcharged in the second. Once they reached the pampas, they suffered through a typhus epidemic and faced dire food shortages before Baron de Hirschs money reached them. Sinay describes this harsh period sensitively, but also emphasizes the plight of the gauchos whose traditional home the colonists, as well as many other European immigrants, now occupied.

In attempting to understand the Moiss Ville murders, Sinay finds that some are difficult or impossible to research, in part because the criminals names dont even appear in either his great-grandfathers work or his Spanish-language sources. It is as if they didnt matter, he writes. They are always just gauchos. As he reconstructs both the colonists and the gauchos motives and lives as best he can, his commitment to telling a balanced, unprejudiced story shifts The Murders of Moiss Ville away from the sensationalism of true crime and toward the rigor of history. One of the lives he conjures with considerable complexity is that of Alberto Gerchunoff, the author of The Jewish Gauchos. As Sinay discovers, Gerchunoff himself was a victim of the conflict he tried to elide in his fiction: His father, Gershom Gerchunoff, was stabbed to death by a gaucho in 1891, most likely after the assailant made a botched attempt to propose to Gerchunoffs sister. Gershoms death is one of the 22 that Sinay investigates; the proposal-gone-wrong strikes him as a relatively simple, though tragic, case of culture clash exacerbated by linguistic misunderstanding. It is also a case in which Jews and criollos prove equally violent. Sinay discovers that, according to a local paper called La Unin, after the murder, many Jewish Moissvillians joined together to take justice for themselves and lynch the wretched man who stabbed Gershom.

Yet extrajudicial killings appear nowhere in Alberto Gerchunoffs depictions of rural Argentine Jewish life. Baffled by this omission, Sinay interviews Gerchunoffs biographer, Mnica Szurmak, who sees The Jewish Gauchos as a retroactive effort to transform Moiss Ville into an idyllic place. Szurmak takes this transformation as a way for Gerchunoff to carry forward the optimism that led his father to emigrate. Gershom, according to his son, always wanted to come to Argentina, a promised land where his children would be free. By portraying Moiss Ville as an Eden, Gerchunoff retroactively fulfilled his fathers dreamat least in the eyes of Argentines who never set foot in Moiss Ville. Sinay persuasively connects this interpretation to Gerchunoffs choice to write in Spanish rather than Yiddish in order to pursue a gentile readership; indeed, the literary critic Edna Aizenberg interprets The Jewish Gauchos as a thank- you note to Argentina, understood as a motherly refuge where hard-working immigrants . . . had found a bountiful homeland of meat and grain, if not milk and honey. It was a Jewish version of Latin America as utopia.

It seems highly unlikely that anybody living in or near Moiss Ville in the years directly after its founding would have called it utopian. Poverty, hunger, and disease were rampant among the Jewish settlers. According to Mijl, so was fear, especially after a group of thieves murdered a family of Jewish shopkeepersJoseph Waisman, his wife, and seven of his nine childrenin 1987. They robbed everything, Mijl wrote, and disappeared without a trace. Sinay guesses that the thieves were motivated at least in part by need. Other murders also seem to spring from the gauchos dispossession, perhaps combined with their resentment of the government-backed takeover of their landthough in some cases Sinay cannot reconstruct a coherent motive at all. The murders of three Jewish brothers who left Moiss Ville to ask nearby Italian farmers for work and were later found dead in a stand of tall grass appear to be instances of random banditry. Other crimes, such as the towns first killingwhich took place in 1889, the year of its official foundingseem to stem from sheer miscommunication. In Sinays reconstruction, which is vivid enough to seem like a short story embedded in the book, a gaucho stumbles across the colonists bare-bones settlement, is struck by a Jewish womans beauty, and asks to marry her. Nobody understands his Spanish, but the Jews say, S, seor, then beg for food, which the gaucho brings. When the feast ends, he tries to leave with the woman he assumes is now his bride. She protests, and, in the chaos that ensues, both the gaucho and a colonist are killed. Sinay cannot verify this account, and after noticing how it overlaps with the story of Gershom Gerchunoffs death, he starts wondering how much confusion and how much truth is contained in each tale.

In The Murders of Moiss Ville, the answers to these questions are often lost in a history biased against the pampas early inhabitants. Sinay never manages to identify the nameless gauchos in his grandfathers text, though in some cases, he discovers that the killers werent gauchos at all. According to Mijl, a woman named Mara Alexanicer was brutally murdered during an Indian raid in 1906. In fact, no such raid ever occurred; Mara was shot by Moiss Villes police chief, Golpe Ramosneither a Jew nor a gauchowho had been courting her and may have raped her. Afterward, the Alexanicers covered for Golpe Ramosthus, as Sinay points out, allying themselves with state power and joining the governing elites in their willingness to throw non-Europeans under the bus. Perhaps, Sinay reasons, the Jewish family feared that holding the police chief accountable would have jeopardized their ability to assimilate into Argentine society

Today, Moiss Villes Jews have, in many cases, integrated fully and happily into Argentine society, whether they have remained on the pampas or migrated to Buenos Aires and other cities in search of work. In modern-day Moiss Ville, Sinay hears plenty of Gerchunoff-style utopian stories about the JCA yearsespecially from non-Jewish Moisesvillians, who are now the towns majority, yet take pride in their towns Jewish legacy, as well as its history of interfaith harmony. Every year, Moiss Ville crowns a Queen of Cultural Integration; small though its Jewish population is, Yiddish can still be heard on its streets. Still, many of Moiss Villes remaining Jews acknowledge that significant cultural differences between criollos and other Argentines remain. According to Ingue Kanzepolsky, one of Sinays guides to the town, Jews may have adopted the local criollo ways, but saying Jewish gaucho is like saying Jewish Bedouin: theres no such thing.

After 1948, Sinay notes, many Jews departed for Israel to live out the same colonizing ideal that their grandparents had known [in rural Argentina]. At no other point inThe Murders of Moiss Ville does Sinay draw a direct comparison between the state of Israel and Moiss Ville, though both are, of course, places where the JCA paid for Jews to settle land that was already inhabited. Still, it is difficult not to note that, as Argentina welcomed Jewish immigrants as a civilizing force, so England welcomed many of their onetime neighbors to Palestineand so Israel has continued to welcome their descendants, while driving Palestinians out of their homeland and systemically discriminating against those who remain. Sinay doesnt need to create a direct connection to this tragic present. It is more than enough that he refuses to flatten the Moiss Ville murders to fit a totalizing narrative of antisemitic violence in Argentina. In so doing, he not only rejects facile conceptions of Jewish victimhood, but also defies the Zionist idea that, by virtue of having suffered in one country, Jews are automatically entitled to land in another.

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Why There's No Such Thing as a Jewish Gaucho - Jewish Currents

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