Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

Jewish Journal-Massachusetts via JTA Its been nearly a decade since Phillip Weiner last lived in Sarajevo, where he served as an international war crimes judge.

But Weiner has remained in touch with the Bosnian Jews he met there, and when he heard about their plight during the COVID-19 pandemic, he knew he had to do something.

Serving in the Hague court at the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal, Weiner prosecuted those responsible for the atrocities committed during the Bosnian War from 1992 through 1995. He lived off and on in Sarajevo, now the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, for more than four years from 2006 to 2012, and attended Shabbat services at the Jewish Community Synagogue.

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Weiner became acquainted with many prominent members of the citys Jewish community, some of whom are now falling victim to COVID-19 amid a surge in cases there. His contacts say the pandemic has claimed the lives of as much as five percent of Bosnias tiny Jewish community.

Many Jews are dying. Its a horror show, Weiner said. David Kamhi, a prominent concert violinist and diplomat, died. Jakob Finci, the president of the Jewish Community of Bosnia-Herzegovina, is in serious condition.

More than 1,000 Bosnians marched through Sarajevo earlier this month to demand the resignation of the government over what they say is the countrys poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Bosnia has reported 7,000 deaths from the disease and has among the highest fatality rates in Europe.

Whats more, the country has not embarked on a vaccination program of any significance. So from his home in the Boston area, Weiner is working back channels to get doses of a vaccine to the Jewish community in Bosnia.

He has contacted the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the consul general of Israel to New England in Boston and the American Jewish Committee in Los Angeles. So far, he said, there has been no response.

Phillip Weiner on the toll COVID has taken on Bosnias Jewish community: Its a horror show. (Courtesy of Weiner/ via JTA)

Those who are able to travel have taken the six-hour trek to Belgrade, Serbia, for vaccinations, according to Igor Kozemjakin, the 41-year-old cantor and acting rabbi of Sarajevos Jewish Community Synagogue.

But traveling to a neighboring country is not possible for many elderly, including Bosnias 90 Holocaust survivors, said Kozemjakin, whose own mother died of COVID-19 in late March. His father, Boris, age 73, had a mild case and is not yet vaccinated.

The European Jewish Congress estimates there are about 500 Jews living in the country. Kozemjakin said he learned from Elma Softic-Kaunitz, secretary general of the Jewish Community of Bosnia-Herzegovina, that 5% of community members have died of COVID.

Mourners at the funeral of David Kamhi, a prominent concert violinist, diplomat and one-time Jewish community leader. (Phillip Weiner/ via JTA)

Kamhi, a community leader, was among the Holocaust survivors to succumb. He was 5 years old when a Muslim family helped his family flee Sarajevo in 1941.

David Kamhi was a very important member of our community and in general society, Kozemjakin said. I succeeded him as cantor. The Jewish community is 85% Sephardic and Kamhi kept the traditions. He was the last living speaker of Judaic Espaol Ladino the language of Sephardic Jews. It was his mother tongue.

Kamhi was active during and after the 1992-95 war, was president of the Commission for Culture for the Jewish community in Sarajevo, and researched the culture and traditions of Bosnian Jews. His brother-in-law also died of the virus, and Kamhis widow, Blanka, recovered after falling very ill, according to Kozemjakin.

Another survivor who remains gravely ill is Finci, who was born in 1943 in an Italian concentration camp on the island of Rab (now in Croatia) and has long been an advocate for Bosnian Jews.

Finci, a former ambassador, once was the president of the Jewish Community of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 2009, he and Dervo Sejdic contested a law that excluded Jews and other minorities from running for elected office. They won at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg the Supreme Court of Europe but Bosnia has still not implemented the judgment.

People wait for a COVID-19 vaccine, at a sports hall in the capital Sarajevo, Bosnia, Wednesday, April 21, 2021. (AP Photo/Eldar Emric)

Finci was treated for COVID-19 in the military hospital in Sarajevo. In a phone interview with the Jewish Journal, the hospitals director, Dr. Ismet Gavrankapetanovic, decried the countrys lack of vaccines to inoculate the population. Asked if he could expect the vaccine anytime soon, Gavrankapetanovic answered with exasperation.

We expect, we expect, but until now we have nothing, he said. How unjust everything is today. Four years in war. Four years without electricity. Four years without medical supplies. Now, no vaccine.

Bosnias government is uniquely ill-prepared to handle a crisis calling for immediate decision-making, according to a recent Politico Europe analysis. A multi-tiered administration created at the end of the war in 1995 guarantees representation for the Bosniak, Croat and Serb ethnic groups whose political leaders are locked in a perpetual fight but also fuels deadlock at a time of crisis, when quick decisions are vital. COVID-19 is now killing more civilians every day in Sarajevo than died during the Bosnian War in the 1990s, Politico concluded.

Weiner recounted his conversation with Blanka Kamhi.

Protesters march demanding the resignation of the government over the poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Tuesday, April 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Kemal Softic)

It feels like were back during the Bosnia War, she told him, according to Weiner. The only difference is that bombs are not falling from the sky. Instead, people are sick and dying.

This leaves Weiner and others who care deeply about the country and its fragile Jewish community wondering who will help Bosnia. He said he would continue seeking vaccines for the community.

The prime minister of Israel has indicated he would make sure that all Holocaust survivors throughout the world are vaccinated, and I would hope that Israel will now take action in Bosnia, Weiner said. Germany has announced the donation of $13.5 million to vaccinate Holocaust survivors worldwide. I hope they can implement that program very quickly.

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Bosnian War prosecutor from US tries to help Sarajevo's Jews survive virus surge - The Times of Israel

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Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

To measure was to apprehend and be made accountable, and nowhere was this more resonant than in the identification and classification of criminals.

Doris Abravaya stood just over five feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds when she graduated from Manhattan Technical High School in 1933. Her time there was documented on a single oversized card, preprinted with basic data entry fields school attendance logged in pencil, family facts registered in ink alongside cryptic acronyms and earnest equations, matriculation dates, and at least seven different addresses. A tiny photo of an elfin Doris peeks out from the bottom of that card, her expression a dreamy mixture of romance and resignation. She looks little. She looks lost.

Cards like these bespeak a kind of generic authority, giving us little reason to question their veracity, yet question them we must. To begin with, she was not Doris but Dora, the second daughter of Josef (not Joseph) and Rebekah (not Rebecca), young Sephardic Jews who had emigrated to the United States together with their four children in the early years of the 20th century. They were not Spanish but Turkish: Josefs naturalization papers suggest he worked as a barber and a restaurateur (not, as this data would suggest, a lamp maker).

Rebekahs address (possibly her place of work, possibly her residence) is given as the Manhattan State Hospital, an establishment that had been previously known as the New York Asylum. At first glance, it might appear that Rebekah was employed there, but a closer read suggests that it was probably her home at the time. Further digging reveals a death notice, sometime in the 1950s, in Wingdale, New York. Until the early 1990s, this was home to a mental health facility of some renown and may well be where Rebekah spent her last years.

Confidentiality in general (and HIPAA laws in particular) prevent even the most conscientious researcher from sharing Rebekahs medical history, but it is possible, even likely, that her prolonged hospitalizations explain why Dora lived with her aunt, why she had two social workers, and why she missed 55 days of school in a single year. What is not mentioned is that Doras older sister, Frida, likely lived under the jurisdiction of the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society: records show that Frida was sent to the convalescent home for Hebrew children, suggesting she may have been disabled. One can easily imagine that her father might have struggled to care for her as a single parent, especially with three younger children to support.

The pursuit of human metrics has a rich and fascinating history, dating back to the ancient Greeks, who viewed proportion itself as a physical projection of the harmony of the universe.

And what do we know of Dora herself? If we believe her given coordinates, she was born on June 12, 1915, on the same day and in the same city as David Rockefeller. Could their lives have been any more different, their destinies any more predetermined by the binary opposition of their initial, if accidental circumstances? And how do we even begin to measure that?

We are groomed, from an early age, to crave measurement. Notches on walls verify our height. Notes from doctors record our weight. We buy scales and diaries, save report cards and log achievements. As babies become toddlers become adolescents and adults, we take pictures lots of pictures. Memories registered and milestones passed, we willingly share our data by way of a host of forms that cumulatively present, over a lifetime, as a kind of gold standard. On paper or online, theyre our material witnesses, holding the temporal at bay.

Doras material witness is typical of the sorts of records to which all of us are attached, official documents that connect faces to places, snapshots to statistics. Bureaucratic and perfunctory, we seldom stop to question the silent power of these documents, even as they transport our collective selves across time and space. Lacking nuance, devoid of emotion, they nevertheless confer a kind of keen graphic authority, begetting permission, enabling access, presupposing legitimacy, and anticipating a host of needs. Framed by the records that circumscribe that legitimacy the records and diplomas, ID cards and passports and licenses the playing field of difference is homogenized by numerical necessity, making all of us, in a sense, prisoners of the indexical.

The pursuit of human metrics has a rich and fascinating history, dating back to the ancient Greeks, who viewed proportion itself as a physical projection of the harmony of the universe. Idealized proportion was synonymous with beauty, a physical expression of divine benevolence. (The good, of course, is always beautiful, wrote Plato, and the beautiful never lacks proportion.) From Drer to da Vinci, the notion that humans might aspire to a pure and balanced ideal would find expression in everything from the writings of Vitruvius to the gardens of Le Ntre to the evolution of the humanist alphabet. To the degree that proportion itself was deemed closer to the divine when realized as an expression of balance and geometry, proportion had everything to do with mathematics in general (and the golden section in particular) and found its most profound expression in the realization of the human form.

While there is ample evidence to suggest that the urge to measure had its origins in ancient civilizations, the science of bodily measurement was not recognized as a proper professional pursuit until the 19th century. With the advent of industry and the pragmatic concerns with which it was associated growth projections, profit motives, numerical evidence as approved metrics for evaluation certain public institutions were perhaps uniquely sensitized to appreciate the value of quantitative data. Statistics as a field of mathematical inquiry gained traction as a discipline thanks in no small part to the scholarship of Sir Francis Galton, whose obsession with counting and measuring everything imaginable (but especially human beings) warrants mention here. His 1851 Anthropometric Laboratory which was included in the International Health Exhibition held in London in 1885 was an attempt to show the public how human characteristics could be both measured and recorded. Add to this the rise in photography as a promising new technology and the idea of capturing evidence via methodical efforts in data mining was an idea whose time had clearly come.

Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso was particularly drawn to the fine-tuned measurement of the skull as an indicator of the savage proclivities of man.

To measure was to apprehend and be made accountable, and nowhere was this more resonant than in the identification and classification of criminals, led by the efforts of one particularly dedicated officer in Paris at the end of the 19th century.

Alphonse Bertillon was the black sheep of his largely intellectual family, many of whom were physicians and statisticians. A weak student with a reputedly obstinate manner, he flunked out of school twice, and found only entry-level work in the Paris Police Station, following a singularly unimpressive tour in the army as a bugle player, at the relatively advanced age of 26. Unceremoniously relegated to the basement, where he was charged with the laborious process of hand-copying prisoners admission forms, Bertillon soon began to notice a number of key discrepancies in language, description, order, and detail that caught his attention. There was too much reliance on eyewitness accounts, he believed, a poor organizational system, and a surprising scarcity of consistent input criteria. The idea that increasing rates of recidivism might bear a direct relationship to these ineffectual methods gave Bertillon cause for concern, and he set out to remedy what he perceived to be a deeply flawed system, one that failed to recognize, among other things, the specifics of facial discrepancy.

Bertillon understood that the study of evolutionary biology is based upon a careful examination of difference, noting in particular that difference itself is best understood (and ideally more accurate) when measured in a controlled environment. By reducing the variables and streamlining the input process itself, he wondered if there might not be a more effective system for identifying and by conjecture, capturing repeat criminals. Inspired by the writings of Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian statistician who had introduced the concept, in 1835, of what he termed lhomme moyen (the average man) a standard-bearer against which the general population might be effectively compared the young Bertillon chose to devote himself to the study of more precise visual observation. His system, which would become known as Bertillonage, revolutionized the field of criminal justice and lay the groundwork for what would emerge as a more efficient method for criminal management. And, as it happened, a more teachable one.

If Quetelets focus was on the average man, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso focused on a more delinquent model. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in 1835 (the same year Quetelet published his principal work, A Treatise of Man and the Development of His Faculties), Lombroso was trained as a physician, and later became a professor of forensic medicine. (He published his own book on human delinquency in 1878.) Over time, Lombroso would come to be known for his staunch belief in biological determinism: notably, the supposition that mental illness was genetic, and that criminals were born, not made. A fervent believer in atavism, he was particularly drawn to the fine-tuned measurement of the skull as an indicator of the savage proclivities of man. (Thieves had small eyes, for example, and rapists could be identified by their big ears.) Lombrosos unconventional methods ultimately proved wildly inconsistent, his conclusions far more quixotic than reliable. Though popular in his day, his controversial doctrines were ultimately discounted as ineffectual, inappropriate, and prejudicial.

For his part, Bertillons methodology was exacting, quantitative, and rigorous. He toured prisons, where he undertook measurements with calipers that allowed him to record his subjects with the utmost precision. (Every measurement slowly reveals the workings of the criminal, Bertillon would later write. Careful observation and patience will reveal the truth.) Head circumference and chin angle were more critical determinants than, for instance, a suspects surname, and over time, Bertillon compiled what was, in essence, a comparatively early (and radically inventive) database in which data was searchable by the metrics themselves. (The unusually time-consuming nature of this type of work eventually obliged the young criminologist to seek assistance: he later hired a young female helper, and once she proved her dedication by personally filling out more than 7,000 ID cards he married her.)

By 1888, the Paris prefecture had created an identification bureau helmed by Bertillon. Within a few short years, hed inaugurated an even more sophisticated system, which would become widely known as the portrait parl the speaking portrait. Parsed into descriptive sections with exhaustive notational criteria, the idea was that the face could be deconstructed by any intaking officer. In addition to racial determinants that included skin tone and hair color, Bertillon parsed the face itself into compartmentalized subsections allowing officers to log every possible mark, blemish, and visual detail. Such detailed analog input ultimately proved both time-consuming and inefficient, a slippery system for capturing the subtlety of facial variables. By the early 1900s, Bertillons once-innovative system had begun to fail.

The desire to measure the face has continued to remain a critical function in law enforcement, albeit a controversial one. Today, an increasingly more adept and agile machine landscape has reframed the once-flawed act of analog human measurement. Algorithms now do the work for us, but algorithms can often be wrong. (Such bias in machine learning is often referred to as a coded gaze.) When leveraged against the intricacies of biology, humanity, and personhood, the mechanical application of statistical analysis can easily miss the mark. Like Dora, whose truncated biography so poorly represented who she truly was, such documents often favor the format over the content, missing the bigger and more complex story a story that is, by its very nature, impossible to capture, let alone deliver, on an index card.

Jessica Helfand is a designer, artist, and writer. She is a cofounder of Design Observer and the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism, including Face: A Visual Odyssey, from which this article is excerpted.

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Alphonse Bertillon and the Troubling Pursuit of Human Metrics - The MIT Press Reader

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Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

Matt Baron/Shutterstock Alber Elbaz in 2016 - Matt Baron/Shutterstock

Alber Elbaz, who has died of Covid-19 aged 59, was the affable creative director of Lanvin from 2001 to 2015, transforming one of the oldest fashion houses in France into one of the 21st centurys most exciting luxury labels, defined by classic cuts and lush fabrics, offset by striking costume jewellery and a romantic, off-kilter aesthetic.

Elbaz created the gold dress worn by Meryl Streep when she accepted her Oscar for Best Actress in 2012 for The Iron Lady, while Kate Moss wore an Elbaz dress on her first night out after giving birth to her daughter, Lila Grace, and Tilda Swinton wore an Elbaz black bias-cut skirt and fawn chiffon blouse at the 2009 Oscars ceremony.

Elbazs creations for Lanvin came with astronomical price tags (2,000 to 6,000 for an evening dress) but his designs were always practical, easy to wear and highly desirable. When in 2010 he entered into a collaboration with the high street giant H & M with a one-off designer collection, some women were so keen to get their hands on high fashion at low prices that they camped outside the stores overnight.

He was born Albert Elbaz in Casablanca on February 6 1961 into a Sephardic Jewish family, the youngest of four children. The family moved to Israel, where his father worked as a colourist in a hair salon. His mother was a painter.

After studying fashion in Tel Aviv, he moved to New York aged 25 and found work with a bridal gown manufacturer. In 1985, through a fellow worker, he got a job as design assistant to Geoffrey Beene, moving in 1996 to Paris where, despite not having a word of French, he joined the house of Guy Laroche as head of prt--porter.

In 1998 Elbaz was invited by Pierre Berg, co-founder of Yves Saint Laurent, to take over as creative director. He recalled that when he phoned his mother to tell her the news she said: Thats great, Alber. But when are you getting married?

Soon afterwards, however, YSL was sold to the Gucci Group, whose creative director Tom Ford wanted the design role, and Elbaz was dismissed.

Rescue came in the form of Shaw-Lan Wang, who had bought Lanvin from LOral and appointed Elbaz its creative director in 2001, with freedom to develop his own aesthetic.

Elbaz went on to achieve the difficult feat of establishing Lanvin as a celebrity favourite but with an offbeat feel (signature touches included industrial zips on colourful cocktail dresses and raw edges) that made clients feel they had joined an exclusive club.

At shows, the self-effacing Elbaz, whose roly poly figure and Chaplinesque walk bore witness to his appreciation of a good lunch, was one of the few designers thoughtful enough to offer refreshments. We realise that when people are too hungry, they are really nasty, he told The Daily Telegraph. Especially those ladies who do all these shows during the day, and they eat nothing because they want to look skinnier than the models We give them a drink and something to eat and a forgiving light, so everybody feels comfortable.

In 2015 Wang sacked him after reported differences over strategy, a parting of ways he found deeply distressing. He eventually re-emerged, however, and in 2019 founded the AZ Factory label, dedicated to what he called purposeful, solutions-driven fashion that works for everyone, with affordable designs in sizes ranging from XXS to 4XL.

He was appointed an Officer of the Legion dhonneur in 2016.

He is survived by his partner, Alex Koo.

Alber Elbaz, born June 12 1961, died April 24 2021

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Alber Elbaz, affable designer who transformed the fortunes of the Lanvin fashion house obituary - MSN UK

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Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

James McHenry was a Maryland delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. He had been at the home of prominent socialite Elizabeth Willing Powel, which had become a prominent intellectual salon, especially during the heady days of the Convention.

The most popular guest of Mrs. Powels was Benjamin Franklin. One evening, according to McHenrys notes, A lady asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.

This quote -- a republic if you can keep it -- enjoyed major hit status last January during the impeachment proceedings. Mrs. Powell was never given credit for asking the setup question. And usually, the quote was located, wrongly, on the steps outside the Convention on its last day.

And never did we hear the rest of the story. Upon hearing Franklins witty mark about the hard work of keeping the republic, the salonnire Mrs. Powell asked the next logical question:

And why not keep it?

Franklin responds: Because the people, on tasting the dish, are always disposed to eat more of it than does them good.

The dish to which he was referring was sheer naked power. When George Washington was elected the first president, Franklin wrote that The first man put at the helm will be a good one. Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.

Thats not all. He continues: The executive will be always increasing here, as elsewhere, till it ends in a monarchy.

Here is where I part company with Franklin. We dont have to worry much about a monarchy. But we always have to worry about the strong man, about authoritarianism.

I wish people, in general, would be more concerned about authoritarianism than socialism or state communism (and no, these two things are not at all the same). Much as I despise the latter, the particular horror of Stalin was not so much his communism but his despotic and totalitarian reign of terror.

Authoritarianism has done more damage in history than any other ideology. Folks can complain about liberalism (or conservatism) all they want, but nothing has done more bloodletting in history than autocrats like Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Il Duce, Franco, and Pinochet (to name a few).

These authoritarian autocrats, interestingly, show up on the extremes of both left and right wings. All of them (Stalin in particular) adored Henry Fords model of assembly-line industrialization. All of them sacrificed goodness and kindness for the sake of wealth and domination. All of them -- right or left, communist or capitalist -- were adept in the dark arts of totalitarianism.

Nowadays, in some quarters, it is fashionable to complain about the soft totalitarianism of cancel culture, political correctness, entitlements, etc. This is laughable when soft totalitarianism is compared to the real totalitarianism of 20th-century strong men.

And all of these guys (authoritarianism is definitely a male phenomenon, which is not a compliment) were aided and abetted and welcomed with open arms by enthusiastic fanboys. Stalin (and his predecessor Lenin) was cheered by intellectual atheists. Hitler (along with Mussolini and Franco) was heralded by religious conservatives, who naively believed his promises of restoring traditional values. Mao and Pol Pot were deified by millions of abused and impoverished workers.

Without exception, the strong men of history betrayed their first fans. Stalin regularly rounded up and executed the most Marxist and atheist intelligentsia (e.g., Leon Trotsky). Hitler sent Evangelicals (and Roman Catholics and Orthodox and many others) off to concentration camps and the gallows (Im thinking especially of Dietrich Bonhoeffer here). Franco and Pinochet disappeared hundreds of thousands.

And Mao slaughtered his own poor farmers and factory workers. By the millions.

The Republic fashioned by the Constitutional Convention, as is true of all democracies, will always gravitate towards authoritarianism and despotism. Its just the nature of power, in a fallen world, to arrogate more power to itself: Because the people, on tasting the dish, are always disposed to eat more of it than does them good.

That is why we must always do the hard work of keeping the Republic. This requires a constant watch on the Executive. He must always be held accountable to the law like everyone else. He must not be permitted to flout decency and civility. He cannot be allowed the exploitation of single hot-button issues to manipulate entire constituencies. He must not be permitted to surround himself with a cadre of brownshirts who fall all over themselves to show simpering loyalty and subservience.

A President (or past or future President) cannot be permitted to construct his own narrative. Joseph Goebbels, Hitlers Minister of Propaganda (his real title!) was infamous for popularizing the technique of the Big Lie: if a strong man and his gang repeat a lie long enough, a critical mass of the population will soon come to believe it. Whats more, the Big Lie seems to get more effective the more outrageous it is -- especially if some people could make a lot of money off of it (which they did then and still do).

When German citizens heard whispers about the gas chambers at Auschwitz on one hand, and the loud Nazi denials on the other, newspaper editors and civic leaders and reasonable people said, Well, there are two sides to every story.

No, theres not. Truth and denial are not sides.

The horrifying truth of the Holocaust was conveniently disposed of under the rubric of suspecting liberal bias -- in Hitlers case, he was always scapegoating the usual liberal suspects, who were, of course, Jews and communists.

And there was another rubric at work: the almost religious devotion to the strong man. Loyalty to him was utmost, even if it meant swallowing the Big Lie.

Keeping the Republic is hard work. It isnt the easy and simplistic (and disastrous) tactic of single-issue voting -- Strong Men just adore single-issue voters. The best way to resist a wannabe autocrat is the grownup work of speaking truth to power and disbelieving his propaganda.

We must denounce, over and over again, the whole idea of party loyalty. Of all the poisons of the modern age, party loyalty to the point of repeating a Big Lie is most toxic to democracy.

We should demand courage -- not party loyalty -- of our Representatives and Senators, whether Republican or Democratic. If they are too afraid to stand up to a Strong Man or challenge his Big Lie, then they need to find another occupation that doesnt require that much honor.

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Keeping the Republic is hard work | Editorial Columnists | dailyadvance.com - The Daily Advance

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Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | May 3, 2021, 12:20 p.m.

On the afternoon of November 8, 1918, a celebratory conga line wound through a three-mile-long throng on Manhattans Fifth Avenue. From high-rise windows, office workers flung makeshift confetti, first ticker tape and then, when they ran out, torn-up paper. They werent rejoicing over the close of the influenza pandemic, although the citys death rate had begun to fall. That afternoon, New Yorkers let loose for another reason: the end of the Great War.

The jubilance proved short-lived. A report from the United Press had prematurely declared an armistice in Europe; in reality, it would be a few days more before the war officially ended. For the moment, reported the New York Times, the whole population of New York was absolutely unrestrained, giving way to its emotions without any consideration of anything but the desire to express what it felt.

In that same edition of the Times that detailed the celebration and described fake caskets for Kaiser Wilhelm being hoisted through the streets, a smaller headline documented 1061 new cases and 189 deaths from the influenza epidemic, still afflicting Americans coast to coast. About twenty persons applied to the Health Department yesterday personally or by letter to adopt children whose parents have died during the epidemic, the paper read.

Just a week earlier, over the East River in Queens, purpled bodies had piled up in the overflow shed of Cavalry Cemetery, enough that the mayor brought in 75 men to bury the accumulated corpses.

Together, the end of the war and the influenza pandemic closed out a tumultuous decade and introduced a new era with an indelible reputation: the Roaring Twenties.

* * *

On social media and in conversations from behind the shelter of masks, many Americans bat around the idea that the nation is poised for a post-Covid-19 summer of sin, spending and socializing, our own Roaring 2020s. On the surface, the similarities abound: A society emerges from a catastrophic pandemic in a time of extreme social inequality and nativism, and revelry ensues. But, historians say, the reality of the 1920s defies easy categorization. The experiences of the 1920s are uneven, says Peter Liebhold, curator emeritus at the Smithsonians National Museum of American History. If you make gross characterizations, youre dead wrong.

If the influenza pandemic shaped that uproarious decade, its impact cannot be neatly measured. The misnamed Spanish flu left some 675,000 Americans dead. The sickness particularly afflicted young people the average age of victims was 28. That death toll dwarfs the number of U.S. combat deaths (53,402, with some 45,000 additional soldiers dying of influenza or pneumonia) during World War I. Despite that disparity, authoritative histories of the era relegated the influenza pandemic on the fringes in favor of a narrative dominated by the war.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once described the 1920s as the most expensive orgy in history. Between quotes like that and canonical works like The Great Gatsby, the author has an outsized role in how the Roaring Twenties are viewed today. I blame Fitzgerald for a lot of [misconceptions] about the decade, says Lynn Dumenil, a historian who revisited the decade in her book The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. In her class at University of California, Irvine, Dumenil would show the feverish, champagne-fueled party scene in Baz Luhrmans movie adaptation of Gatsby, as good an example as any of the unnuanced pop-culture vision of the decade as a flapper bacchanal. Theres this notion of the 20s as a wild period where everyone is just grabbing everything they can get, adds Nancy Bristow, history chair at the University of Puget Sound. This idea is broad-brush hyperbole of a reality that held true for only a certain class of Americansnot everyone.

The 1920s were really a time of social ferment, says Ranjit Dighe, an economic historian at the State University of New York, Oswego. Shifts in womens roles, leisure time, spending and popular entertainment did characterize the 20s, so those exaggerated aspects of the decade, while focused on a primarily white and upper/middle-class experience, do have a firm basis in reality. Only [in the 1920s] did the Protestant work ethic and the old values of self-denial and frugality begin to give way to the fascination with consumption, leisure and self-realization that is the essence of modern American culture, Dumenil, David Brody and James Henretta write in a book chapter on the era.

Notably, these changes had been brewing for years, leaving historians with no obvious link between the Roaring Twenties reputation and the pandemic.

The New Woman of the 1920s, typically white and middle- or upper-class, with bobbed hair and newfound social freedom, departed drastically from Victorian norms. With the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, (white) women had won the right to vote, and divorce rates reached one-in-seven by the mid-decade. Respectable women now wore makeup, and flappers clad in shockingly short skirts wore sheer pantyhose and smoked. More traditional or religious Americans lamented the prevalence of petting parties. But, as Dumenil writes in The Modern Temper, the idea of the New Woman took root before the 1920s. As early as 1913, commentators noted that the nation had struck sex oclock; in the next three years, Margaret Sanger opened one of the countrys first birth control clinics and went to jail days later. These social changes applied mostly to more well-off white women, since other groups of women had been working and having premarital sex well before the 20s.

Prohibition is the backbone of 1920s mythology, which paints drinking as a glamorous indiscretion. Organizations like the Womens Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League had long agitated to dry up the nations heavy boozing. Such groups argued that an alcohol ban would reduce societal ills like domestic violence. They also capitalized on xenophobia, since saloons were political hubs for working-class people and immigrants. National success came in 1920, when a ban on selling alcohol went into effect.

The decades raucous reputation gets some things right: Prohibition did transform Americans relationship with alcohol, turning drinking into a coed, social activity that moved out of disreputable saloons into homes, Dighe says. New York alone housed more than 30,000 speakeasies, many run by gangsters.

But thats not the whole picture. Alcohol consumption itself decreased in the 20s. In rural areas, the reinvigorated Ku Klux Klan took it upon itself to enforce the Volstead Act and act upon anti-immigrant hostilities. (Historian Lisa McGirr has argued that Prohibition helped kickstart the penal state and the disproportionate imprisonment of people of color and immigrants.) This dark side of Prohibition highlights an undercurrent of nativism and racism throughout the 20s: White Oklahomans murdered several hundred Black neighbors in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and national quotas enacted in 1924 slammed the door closed on immigration. And those speakeasies in Harlem, with their chorus girl extravaganzas, bathtub gin, and Maddens No. 1 beer? White patrons came there to go slumming.

The 20s were a prosperity decade, no question about that, says Dighe. Gross national product ballooned by 40 percent between 1922 and 1929. The Second Industrial Revolutionmost notably electricity and the advent of the assembly lineled to a manufacturing boom. Cars could be put together in 93 minutes instead of half a day, and by the close of the decade, one-fifth of Americans owned an automobile, which they could use for leisure activities like traveling. The popularization of personal credit also enabled middle-class Americans to buy consumer goods in droves. The government, too, under the Republican administrations of Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, shared this spirit of wholehearted materialism, boosting corporations and otherwise taking a light touch to policy that corresponded with the prevailing anti-government sentiment of the time.

Examine this upbeat picture of consumerism more closely, though, and youll realize the economic boost of the 20s was checkered. A sharp recession kicked off the decade, caused partially by the declining demand for American agricultural products after the wars end brought European farming back into commission. (The limited data on the 1918 influenzas impact indicates that for the most part, it caused short-term, not prolonged, business losses; scholars havent linked it to the prosperity of the following decade.) Then, as now, income inequality reached staggering rates. By the end of the 20s, despite per capita income nearly doubling, the top 1 percent of U.S. families reaped more than 22 percent of the nations income.

The wealthy and middle class profited. African Americans, many of whom had moved to Northern cities for work as part of the Great Migration, newcomers to the country, and farmers did not share in that prosperity. The 1920 census marked the first time more than half the countrys population lived in urban areas. For rural Americans, particularly farmers, the 20s were roaring as in a roaring fire that was burning people out, says curator Liebhold.

* * *

The influenza pandemics origins remain contested, but the disease spread quickly through the world beginning in the spring of 1918, striking crowded military camps and then American cities and towns in three to four waves. The purple death got its name from the colors victims oxygen-starved bodies turned as their lungs drowned in their own fluid, and it killed quick, sometimes within hours of the first symptoms. Americans donned masks, schools and public gathering places temporarily shut down, and one-third of the globe fell ill. Doctors, with a flawed understanding of the virus cause, had few treatments to offer. Life insurance claims rose sevenfold, and American life expectancy decreased by 12 years.

Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis hypothesizes that the 1918 pandemic falls into an ages-old pandemic pattern, one that our Covid-19 present may mimic, too. In his 2020 book, Apollos Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, he argues that increasing religiosity, risk aversion and financial saving characterize times of widespread illness. Christakis expects the Covid-19 crisis to have a long tail, in terms of case numbers and social and economic impacts. But once the brunt of the disease abates in the U.S., which he forecasts for 2024, all of those trends will reverse, Christakis says. Religiosity will decline People will relentlessly seek out social interactions in nightclubs, in restaurants, in bars, in sporting events and musical concerts and political rallies. We might see some sexual licentiousness.

Like the 1920s, Christakis also predicts lasting social and technological innovations will characterize this decadethink of how remote work and mRNA vaccines might shift status quos permanently. People are going to want to make sense of what happened, he says, positing that well likely see an efflorescence of the arts post-pandemic. Thats not to say our A.C. (After Covid-19) reality will be all rosy. Well be living in a changed world, Christakis says, and that includes the lives lost (about 1 in 600 in the U.S.), the economic havoc wreaked, shortfalls in education, and the number of people left disabled due to Covid-19.

In Apollos Arrow, Christakis points to an Italian tax collector and shoemakers remembrance of the period that followed the Black Death in 1348 as an example of the collective relief we might experience at the pandemics end. Agnolo di Tura wrote:

And then, when the pestilence abated, all who survived gave themselves over to pleasures: monks, priests, nuns, and lay men and women all enjoyed themselves, and none worries about spending and gambling. And everyone thought himself rich because he had escaped and regained the world, and no one knew how to allow himself to do nothing.

* * *

Mapping the post-pandemic events of the 1920s onto the nations post-Covid-19 future resembles trying to trace the path of a nearly invisible thread in an elaborate tapestry. At its height, the influenza pandemic routinely made front-page headlines nationwide, says J. Alexander Navarro, a historian who co-edited the University of Michigans digital Influenza Encyclopedia, but by the beginning of 1919, before the pandemic had run its course, those articles grew shorter and less prominent.

When we look around, unlike the Great War, there are no monuments to the flu; there are no museums to the flu; there are no heritage sites to the flu; theres not a stamp for the flu, all the signs we associate with commemoration, Guy Beiner, a memory studies scholar, said during a presentation hosted by the Institute of Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He describes the pandemic as an instance of social forgetting, an event not wiped from memory but simply left unspoken.

Even historians largely neglected the 1918 pandemic, until Alfred Crosby reignited the field in a 1976 book, where he captured these contradictions:

Americans barely noticed and didnt recallbut if one turns to intimate accounts, to autobiographies of those who were not in positions of authority, to collections of letters written by friend to friendif one asks those who lived through the pandemic for their reminiscences, then it becomes apparent that Americans did notice, Americans were frightened, the courses of their lives were deflected into new channels, and that they remember the pandemic quite clearly and often acknowledge it as one of the most influential experiences of their lives.

One of the many theories about why 1918 influenza faded from historical memory holds that the trauma of World War I subsumed it. I dont think you can divorce the experience of the 1918 pandemic with that of the war, says Navarro, noting that in places like Denver, Armistice Day coincided with the day social distancing restrictions eased. Public health messaging intertwined the two crises, calling mask-wearing patriotic and promoting slogans like Help Fight the Grippe: Kaiser Wilhelms Ally. In Harpers editor Frederick Lewis Allens 1931 account of the previous decade, Only Yesterday, he labels the Twenties as the post-war decade and mentions the pandemic a grand total of once.

My guess is it did not sit with the story that Americans tell about themselves in public. Its not the story that they want to put in fifth-grade U.S. history textbooks, which is about us being born perfect and always getting better, says Bristow, who wrote American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic. Americans believed themselves on the verge of putting infections disease to rest forever, she explains, and instead, We couldnt do anything more about it than anybody else. Indeed, President Woodrow Wilson, who held the office throughout the multi-year pandemic, never once mentioned it in his public comments.

Navarro floats another theory: Deaths from infectious disease epidemics happened more routinely then, so the pandemic may not have been as shocking. (According to data compiled by the New York Times, despite the much higher proportion of deaths from the 1918 influenza, the Covid-19 pandemic has a larger gap between actual and expected deaths.) Without a solid scientific understanding of the flus causeevangelical preacher Billy Sunday told congregants it was a punishment for sinningpeople struggled to make sense of it.

Multiple historians pinpointed another significant discrepancy between the scarring impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and that of the 1918 influenza: Whereas many Americans today have remained masked and distanced for over a year, the 1918 influenza raged through communities quickly. Restrictions were lifted after two to six weeks, Navarro says, and most people still went in to work.

Talking about [influenza] being forgotten is different from whether it had an impact, Bristow says. But she hasnt found much evidence that concretely ties the under-discussed pandemic to the societal upheaval of the 20s. One of the places you could find it would be in the writing, and we dont see it there, she says. Hemingway briefly remembers the only natural death I have ever seen from the flu, but in a minor work. In Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Anne Porter draws on her bout of near-fatal flu, writing All the theatres and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals all day and ambulances all night. But that novella wasnt published until 1939.

When you look at the canon, of cultural literature, of cultural memory, Beiner points out, none of these works appear in it.

Arts and culture undoubtedly flourished in the 20s as a shared American pop culture emerged thanks to the advent of radio broadcasting, widely circulated magazines and movies. The first talkie debuted in 1927 and joined paid vacations and sports games in an explosion of for-fun entertainment options. The Harlem Renaissance gave the nation artists like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne, who performed at the glitzy speakeasy The Cotton Club. While a Clara Bow movie about WWI, Wings, won Best Picture at the first-ever Academy Awards, Bristow says the pandemic didnt appear much in cinemas, and musical references are also few and far between. (Essie Jenkins The 1919 Influenza Blues presents a rare exception to this rule: People was dying everywhere, death was creeping through the air, she sings.)

Young people, whod watched peers die from influenza, spearheaded these cultural shifts. After the Great War cost millions of lives, and the great influenza killed some 50 million [worldwide], manyparticularly young peoplewere eager to throw off the shackles of the old and bring in the new, says John Hasse, curator emeritus at the National Museum of American History. But keep in mind, Hasse explains, that the jazz music and dancing that characterized the performing arts of the decade had roots that preceded the pandemic, like the Great Migration, jazz recording technology, and evolving attitudes about dancing in public.

Just because the memory of the flu wasnt typeset, filmed or laid on a record doesnt mean it didnt bruise the American psyche. About, all 1 in 150 Americans died in the pandemic; one New Yorker recalled neighbors dying like leaves off trees.

Pandemics dont come with a consistent pattern of mental health side effects because humans have responded with different public health measures as our understanding of infectious diseases has evolved, says Steven Taylor, a University of British Columbia, Vancouver professor and the author of 2019s The Psychology of Pandemics. But he expects the Covid-19 pandemic to psychologically impact between 10 and 20 percent of North Americans (a number sourced from ongoing surveys and past research on natural disasters). Typically, one in ten bereaved people go through prolonged grief disorder, Taylor notes, and for every pandemic death, more family members are left mourning. Studies show that one-third of intensive care Covid-19 survivors exhibit PTSD symptoms, and first responders already report deteriorating mental health. Even people with a degree of insulation from this firsthand suffering might still experience what Taylor calls Covid stress syndrome, an adjustment disorder marked by extreme anxiety about contacting Covid-19, xenophobia and wariness of strangers, traumatic stress symptoms like coronavirus nightmares, concern about financial security, and repeated information or reassurance seeking (from the news or from friends).

A pandemic slowed to a simmer will, of course, mitigate some stressors. Like Christakis, Taylor says he anticipates an increase in sociability as people try to claw back the positive reinforcers theyve been deprived of in the past year. (Others, like people experiencing Covid stress syndrome, might struggle to recalibrate to yet another new normal.) His surveys of North American adults have also indicated a silver lining known as post-traumatic growth, with people reporting feeling more appreciative, spiritual and resilient, although its unknown whether this change will become permanent.

Most pandemics are messy and vague when they come to an end, says Taylor. It wont be waking up one morning and the sun is shining and theres no more coronavirus. Well doff our masks and let down our guards piecemeal. Overlay Covid-19 and the 2020s with the influenza pandemic and the 1920s and youll see unmistakable parallels, but looking closely, the comparison warps. If there were a causal link between the influenza pandemic and the Roaring Twenties, clear evidence of a collective exhalation of relief hasnt shown up under historical x-rays.

The historical record tells us this: Some 675,000 people in the U.S. died of influenza then, and in terms of a mass public mourning, people just went on with their lives Navarro says. An estimated 590,000 Americans will have died of Covid-19 by the third week of May. How Americans will rememberor choose to forgetthis pandemic remains an open question.

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What Caused the Roaring Twenties? | History - Smithsonian Magazine

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In mid-March of last year, against surreal new events occurring in the world, members of the Dublin theatre industry sought the warm camaraderie of peers inside a city centre pub. It looked like this might be the last night of live theatre for a while.

Actors from different productions arrived, unsure if their shows would close early or if rehearsals would be curtailed. The gathering, as described by John Doran, who was acting in the comedy The Fall of the Second Republic at the Abbey Theatre, sounded like an evening near-festive in its jollity (It was a piss-up, he says) but also an occasion to share in the bewilderment, allowing friends to console each other as months of work vanish before them.

Those were the strange early days of the pandemic when public-health advice on social interactions was mixed. At the Gate Theatre there were pithier signs of things to come. Blithn Mac Gabhann was acting in the psychological thriller Our New Girl when she noticed that nearly half the audience members were wearing masks. It gave me a lot of fear, she says on a video call, still dazed by the experience.

What does it mean to lose a year as a theatre actor? For Mac Gabhann, the shutdown hit during a crucial point in her career. After first attracting attention in the wild revenge tragedy Lex Talionis and showing up as a team player in the ensemble drama Citysong, she gave a breakthrough performance in Our New Girl, playing a rivetingly ambiguous nanny whose arrival complicates a couples teetering marriage. Her career seemed to have gained serious momentum, with further roles onscreen in Normal People and the single-take film The Way Out, just when everything ground to a halt.

Mac Gabhann has emerged from a frazzled period of questioning whether to freak out or not. She noticed that most of the concern seemed to be coming from outside, from people assuring her that everything would be fine, while she continued adjusting to a career very new to her. I was wondering should I be worried that its this early in my trajectory when everything is stopping. I decided to accept it as a big pause and trust it will continue to be fine, she says.

Through these weird days of Zoom auditions (Theyre like self-tapes. Theres no person-to-person contact) and discovering radio acting through a role in the RT Short Story Competition, she feels she has been very lucky. Being employed by the Gate at the beginning of the pandemic meant that she immediately received the pandemic unemployment payment whereas many freelance artists had difficulty accessing it.

Another revelation, amid the denial and panic of those first months, was that the shutdown gave her a break. Mac Gabhann had been in the middle of a 13-month stretch of non-stop work without any scheduled leave. Being new to the profession, she assumed this was the norm, that the relentless lining up of gigs was a widely accepted part of the grift. Now shes thinking about how to work differently when the pandemic is over.

What Ive learned is: take time off. Im insanely grateful for the last year and getting work regularly but when your actual body is your entire job and you have no time to take care of your body, its going to make you worse at your job, she says. That raises the question of not only when actors will go back to work but also what are they going back to.

David Fawaz has, similarly, made commitments to doing things differently. He was fresh from drama school when he got cast in Louise Lowes The Anvil, a contemporary play staged in Manchester. Set in the shadow of that citys Peterloo massacre in 1819, Fawaz played a Nigerian immigrant working as a food delivery cyclist whose precarious existence gets seen up close in Lowes intimate take on immersive theatre, bringing actor and audience near enough to confide in one another a directorial technique that may be impossible in an era of social distancing.

Fawaz would have been introduced to Dublin audiences in Lillian Hellmans 1939 play The Little Foxes at the Gate, one of many productions shut by the pandemic. What was he expecting from his first appearance on stage during a run that might have attracted a few thousand people? Id be really interested in experiencing what its like to perform in front of that large an audience. I feel it would be different somehow, he says.

Set in early 20th century Alabama, The Little Foxes centres on a corrupt white family of cotton plantation owners. Fawaz was cast as Cal, a black servant whose good-natured blunders conceal some pointed stings against the familys greed. He was enjoying working on it and was devastated when it was postponed.

Its not lost on him that The Little Foxes is typical of old-fashioned plays where only minor roles are written for black actors, something once considered progressive (Hellman was a liberal in her day) but now risks being a step backwards. Fawaz hasnt been able to work during the pandemic, a period when the theatre industry wasnt immune to the issues raised by Black Lives Matter. His own outlook remains bleak. Ill be honest, I dont see the opportunity for me. There are no plays here for actors of colour to get high on the ladder in the acting world, he says.

When I ask him what plays he would like to act in, he lists a number of prestigious American dramas including August Wilsons Fences and Seven Guitars, and the subversive murder mystery A Soldiers Play. He speaks most passionately of A Raisin in the Sun, and of his love for its original star Sidney Poitier. He says Poitiers experience as an immigrant in a new country, told he couldnt speak English well enough to become an actor, resonates with his own past.

Hes currently focused on screen work and, like Mac Gabhann, has begun to scrutinise his options more closely, sorting meaningful characters from flatter roles. By saying no to a lot of things I am now auditioning for casting directors I never saw when I was always saying yes, he says.

There are reasons to be optimistic about what the other side of the pandemic will look like. John Doran says hes heartened by the National Campaign for the Arts, which has amplified the conversation about artists basic needs to such a volume it seems to be catching serious attention.

Doran hasnt been idle during the pandemic. He normally spends half a year employed in development, intensively workshopping new plays prior to their production, and those jobs have continued with roles in a new comedy penned by Ali Hardiman and in Theatre Lovetts new play for young audiences. He also released a streamed theatre version of Were In Here, his touching new play about role models and parents that was thematically stealthy compared with the broad comedies he wrote a few years ago (what he calls his showcase plays).

Wanting to write about mental health and the internet, he originally grounded Were In Here in ideas about policing, conditions of enforcement that the pandemic coincidentally brought about. Either way, it works, he says. Among his influences had been the writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, whose memoir showed similar signs of longing to be something more surrealist (Levi eventually turned to science fiction). Doran is now writing a new play during the shutdown, signalling an intriguing new direction in his artistry.

Actors creativity can flourish within group environments and, to recapture that dynamic, Doran has been facilitating an actors workshop every week on Zoom. He describes it as an open gym which has been attended by players at all stages of their careers. He questioned stepping in during moments when the workshop seemed to stall but he realised everyone was actually pausing to listen carefully. It has just been so long since weve talked to each other, he says.

Those signals given from one actor to another, allowing new energy to be generated between them, is something that has been restricted by the pandemic but in Dorans workshop it can be recreated virtually. Actors are using technology to rediscover how to listen to each other, while waiting patiently to be heard in front of an audience again.

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What happens when a theatre actor loses a year? - The Irish Times

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The identification of all 45 victims from the Mount Meron tragedy has been completed, Israels Abu Kabir Forensic Institute said Sunday morning.

The victims, all male, included brothers, children as young as 9, young fathers, and rabbis. At least two families lost multiple children.

Among the victims of the fatal crush caused by overcrowding in a narrow walkway were 10 foreign citizens: six Americans, a British national, two Canadians, and an Argentinian.

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The incident, which happened early Friday during celebrations of the Lag BOmer festival, is the countrys deadliest-ever civilian disaster.

Dozens were buried Friday, but funeral services ceased during the Sabbath, from Friday evening until Saturday nightfall.

The Abu Kabir Forensic Institute said in a statement Sunday morning that by midnight it had completed the grim task of identifying all 45 victims.

By the morning 44 of the bodies had been released for burial and the last, at the request of the family, was to be released later in the day, the statement said.

Chen Kugel, director of the institute, said the process of identification was delicate, with the institute having to balance its professional duties with the needs of the bereaved families.

A disaster of this magnitude requires very complex assessments on the part of the institute staff. The need and request of the families for a speedy completion of the process was understandable and we acted in accordance, but we did not compromise on the professional steps required to do so. I would like to express my condolences to the families, he said in a statement.

People gather outside the home of a victim of the Meron crush, in the City of Bnei Brak, on April 30, 2021. (Flash90)

Among the victims were people whose families live overseas, further complicating the process. Six of the victims held US citizenship and one was from Argentina. Two were Canadian. One was British.

Following is a full list of the 45 victims.

Menahem Zeckbach, 24, of Modiin Illit was buried on Friday afternoon in his hometown of Bnei Brak. He is survived by his pregnant wife and their 1-year-old child.

Menahem Zakbah, 24, of Modiin Illit was killed during the crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (courtesy)

Simcha Diskind, 23, of Beit Shemesh was buried on Friday in Haifa. He is survived by his wife and two young children.

Simcha Diskind, 23, of Beit Shemesh was killed during the crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (courtesy)

Rabbi Shraga Gestetner of Montreal, Canada came to Israel for the Lag BOmer celebrations. A well-known singer in the Hasidic world, he was buried in Jerusalem on Friday afternoon but with no immediate family present in Israel. Hundreds turned out for the funeral to make up for the absence of his family abroad.

A member of the Skverer Hasidic sect, he is survived by his wife and five children. In recent years he had been living in Monsey, New York.

Shraga Gestetner, of Montreal, was killed during the fatal crush at Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (screenshot: YouTube)

Shimon Matalon, 38, of Beitar Illit is survived by his 11 children.

Shimon Matalon, 38, of Beitar Illit was killed during the crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (courtesy)

Yedidia, 13, was from Bnei Brak. He came to the event with his family.

Yedidia Hayut, 13 of Bnei Brak, killed during the deadly crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (Courtesy)

David Krauss, 33, from the city of Beit Shemesh is survived by nine children.

Moshe Bergman, 24, was originally from Manchester, England. He was studying in the Mir Yeshiva and living in Jerusalem.

Moshe Bergman, 24, was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

Haim Rock, 19, was from the central city of Beit Shemesh.

Yisrael Anakvah, 24, from Beit Shemesh is survived by his two children.

Yisrael Anakvah, 24 of Beit Shemesh, killed during the fatal crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (Courtesy)

Eliyahu Cohen, 16, was from Beitar Illit.

Eliyahu Cohen, 16, was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

Hanoch Slod, 52, was from Ashdod.

Hanoch Slod, 52, of Ashdod was killed during the deadly crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (courtesy)

Elazar Mordechai Goldberg, 37, of Beitar Illit, had four children.

Elazar Mordechai Goldberg, 37, of Beitar Illit was killed during the deadly crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (courtesy)

Moshe Ben Shalom, 20, was from Bnei Brak.

Moshe Ben Shalom, 20, of Bnei Brak was killed during the deadly crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (Courtesy)

Yedidya Fogel from Jerusalem studied in a yeshiva in the central city of Ramat Gan.

Yedidya Fogel, 22, of Jerusalem was killed during the deadly crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (courtesy)

Rabbi Yonatan Hebroni was a father of three from the city of Givat Shmuel.

Yonatan Hebroni, of Givat Shmuel was killed during the stampede in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (courtesy)

Brothers Moshe Mordechai Elhadad, 12, and Yosef David Elhadad, 18, were residents of Jerusalem.

Brothers Moshe Mordechai Elhadad, right, and Yosef David Elhadad, were killed during the deadly crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (courtesy)courtesy)

Brothers Moshe Natan Neta Englard, 14, and Yehoshua Englard, 9, were from Jerusalem.

Moshe Natan Neta Englard, 14, and Yehoshua Englard, 9, were from Jerusalem. (courtesy)

Haim Seler, 24, of Jerusalem is survived by his wife and 2-week-old daughter.

Haim Seler, 24, of Jerusalem was killed during the deadly crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (courtesy)

Yehuda Leib Rubin, 27, was from Beit Shemesh.

Yehuda Leib Rubin, 27 of Beit Shemesh, was killed during the deadly crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (Courtesy)

Shmuel Zvi Klagsbald, 43, is survived by eight children.

Shmuel Zvi Klagsbald, 43, who was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

Yosef Amram Tauber, 19, of Monsey, New York, was a student at the Brisk yeshiva. A relative said that he left for Israel to attend the yeshiva for the first time last week.

Donny Morris, 19, from Teaneck, New Jersey. Donny had been attending the event with a group from the Shaalvim yeshiva, where he was a student.

Daniel (Donny) Morris was killed during the deadly crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021.(Courtesy)

Moshe Levy was 14, from Bnei Brak.

Moshe Levy, 14, who was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

Yosef Yehuda Levy was 17, of Rechasim near Haifa.

Yosef Yehuda Levy, 17, who was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

Nahman Kirshbaum, 15, was from Beit Shemesh.

Nahman Kirshbaum, 15, of Beit Shemesh was killed during the deadly crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (courtesy)

Ariel Tzadik was 57, from Jerusalem.

Ariel Tzadik, 57 of Jerusalem, killed during the deadly crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (Courtesy)

Rabbi Eliezer Tzvi Joseph, 26, was a father of four from Kiryas Joel, New York. A Satmar Hasid, he was the father of four children.

Abraham Daniel Ambon, 21, was an Argentine studying at a yeshiva in Jerusalem.

Abraham Daniel Ambon, 21 of Argentina, killed during the deadly crush in Mt. Meron on April 30, 2021. (Courtesy)

Dubi Steinmetz, 21, was from Canada.

Dubi Steinmetz, 21, who was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

Yishai Mualem, 17, was from Rechasim near Haifa.

Yishai Mualem, 17, who was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

Yosef Mastorov, 18, was from Ramla.

Yosef Mastorov, 18, who was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

Yosef Greenbaum, 22, was from Haifa.

Yosef Greenbaum, 22, who was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

Elazar Yitzchok Koltai, 13, was from Jerusalem. He had lived in Passaic, New Jersey, before moving to Israel with his family.

Elazar Yitzchok Koltai, 13, who was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

Menachem Knoblowitz, 22, of Borough Park, Brooklyn. He was engaged to a young woman from Lakewood, New Jersey, according to social media.

Menachem Knoblowitz, 22, of Borough Park, Brooklyn was killed in the Meron disaster (Courtesy)

Elkana Shiloh, 28, was a resident of Jerusalem.

Elkana Shiloh, 28, who was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

Elazar Gafner, 52, was a resident of Jerusalem.

Yossi Kohn, 21, of Cleveland, Ohio, was a student at the Mir Yerushalayim yeshiva.

Yossi Kohn, 21, who was killed in the Meron deadly crush (courtesy)

Shlomo Zalman Leibowitz, 19, was a resident of Safed.

Shlomo Zalman Leibowitz, 19, of Safed was killed in the Meron deadly crush (Courtesy)

Moshe Tzarfati, 65, was from Jerusalem. He is survived by four children and 25 grandchildren.

Moshe Tzarfati, 65, was killed in the Lag BOmer Meron deadly crush (Courtesy)

Ariel Achdut, 20, was from Jerusalem, and studied at a yeshiva in Tel Aviv.

Chen Doron, 41, was a resident of Holon.

Mordechai Fakata, 24, of the Satmar Hasidic sect, was a father of two.

Mordechai Fakata, 24, who was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

Yaakov Elchanan Starkovsky, 20, from Elad, was a student at a yeshiva in Jerusalem.

Yaakov Elchanan Starkovsky, 20, who was killed in the Meron crush (courtesy)

On Sunday, Israel began a day of mourning for the victims, ordered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Flags were lowered to half-staff at the Knesset and President Reuven Rivlins official residence, and ceremonies were expected at the Knesset and army bases. A cabinet meeting scheduled for Sunday was canceled. Concerts and sports events were postponed. And the Jerusalem school system announced it would dedicate its studies on Sunday to the tragedy.

New York Jewish Week via JTA contributed to this report.

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A Hasidic singer, a dozen boys and teens, a father of 11: All 45 Meron victims - The Times of Israel

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Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

Judaism, monotheistic religion developed among the ancient Hebrews. Judaism is characterized by a belief in one transcendent God who revealed himself to Abraham, Moses, and the Hebrew prophets and by a religious life in accordance with Scriptures and rabbinic traditions. Judaism is the complex phenomenon of a total way of life for the Jewish people, comprising theology, law, and innumerable cultural traditions.

The first section of this article treats the history of Judaism in the broadest and most complete sense, from the early ancestral beginnings of the Jewish people to contemporary times. In the second section the beliefs, practices, and culture of Judaism are discussed.

It is history that provides the key to an understanding of Judaism, for its primal affirmations appear in early historical narratives. Thus, the Bible reports contemporary events and activities for essentially religious reasons. The biblical authors believed that the divine presence is encountered primarily within history. Gods presence is also experienced within the natural realm, but the more immediate or intimate disclosure occurs in human actions. Although other ancient communities also perceived a divine presence in history, the understanding of the ancient Israelites proved to be the most lasting and influential. It is this particular claimto have experienced Gods presence in human eventsand its subsequent development that is the differentiating factor in Jewish thought.

Moreover, the ancient Israelites entire mode of existence was affected by their belief that throughout history they stood in a unique relationship with the divine. The people of Israel believed that their response to the divine presence in history was central not only for themselves but for all humankind. Furthermore, Godas personhad revealed in a particular encounter the pattern and structure of communal and individual life to this people. Claiming sovereignty over the people because of his continuing action in history on their behalf, he had established a covenant (berit) with them and required from them obedience to his teaching, or law (Torah). This obedience was a further means by which the divine presence was made manifestexpressed in concrete human existence. The corporate life of the chosen community was thus a summons to the rest of humankind to recognize Gods presence, sovereignty, and purposethe establishment of peace and well-being in the universe and in humankind.

History, moreover, disclosed not only Gods purpose but also humankinds inability to live in accord with it. Even the chosen community failed in its obligation and had to be summoned back, time and again, to its responsibility by the prophetsthe divinely called spokespersons who warned of retribution within history and argued and reargued the case for affirmative human response. Israels role in the divine economy and thus Israels particular culpability were dominant themes sounded against the motif of fulfillment, the ultimate triumph of the divine purpose, and the establishment of divine sovereignty over all humankind.

In nearly 4,000 years of historical development, the Jewish people and their religion have displayed a remarkable adaptability and continuity. In their encounter with the great civilizations, from ancient Babylonia and Egypt to Western Christendom and modern secular culture, they have assimilated foreign elements and integrated them into their own social and religious systems, thus maintaining an unbroken religious and cultural tradition. Furthermore, each period of Jewish history has left behind it a specific element of a Judaic heritage that continued to influence subsequent developments, so that the total Jewish heritage at any given time is a combination of all these successive elements along with whatever adjustments and accretions have occurred in each new age.

The various teachings of Judaism have often been regarded as specifications of the central idea of monotheism. One God, the creator of the world, has freely elected the Jewish people for a unique covenantal relationship with himself. This one and only God has been affirmed by virtually all professing Jews in a variety of ways throughout the ages.

Jewish monotheism has had both universalistic and particularistic features. Along universal lines, it has affirmed a God who created and rules the entire world and who at the end of history will redeem all Israel (the classical name for the Jewish people), all humankind, and indeed the whole world. The ultimate goal of all nature and history is an unending reign of cosmic intimacy with God, entailing universal justice and peace. Between creation and redemption lies the particularistic designation of the Jewish people as the locus of Gods activity in the world, as the people chosen by God to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exodus 19:6). This arrangement is designated a covenant and is structured by an elaborate and intricate law. Thus, the Jewish people are both entitled to special privileges and burdened with special responsibilities from God. As the prophet Amos (8th century bce) expressed it: You alone have I intimately known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities (Amos 3:2). The universal goal of the Jewish people has frequently expressed itself in messianismthe idea of a universal, political realm of justice and peace. In one form or another, messianism has permeated Jewish thinking and action throughout the ages, and it has strongly influenced the outlook of many secular-minded Jews (see also eschatology).

Law embraces practically all domains of Jewish life, and it became the principle means by which Judaism was to bring about the reign of God on earth. It is a total guide to religious and ethical conduct, involving ritualistic observance as well as individual and social ethics. It is a liturgical and ethical way constantly expatiated on by the prophets and priests, by rabbinic sages, and by philosophers. Such conduct was to be performed in the service of God, the transcendent and immanent ruler of the universe, the Creator and the propelling force of nature, and the one giving guidance and purpose to history. According to Judaic belief, this divine guidance is manifested through the history of the Jewish people, which will culminate in the messianic age. Judaism, whether in its normative form or in its sectarian deviations, never completely departed from this basic ethical and historical monotheism.

The division of the millennia of Jewish history into periods is a procedure frequently dependent on philosophical predilections. The Christian world long believed that until the rise of Christianity the history of Judaism was but a preparation for the Gospel (preparatio evangelica) that was followed by the manifestation of the Gospel (demonstratio evangelica) as revealed by Christ and the Apostles. This formulation could be theologically reconciled with the assumption that Christianity had been preordained even before the creation of the world.

In the 19th century, biblical scholars moved the decisive division back to the period of the Babylonian Exile and the restoration of the Jews to the kingdom of Judah (6th5th century bce). They asserted that after the first fall of Jerusalem (586 bce) the ancient Israelitic religion gave way to a new form of the Jewish faith, or Judaism, as formulated by the reformer Ezra (5th century bce) and his school. In Die Entstehung des Judentums (1896; The Origin of Judaism) the German historian Eduard Meyer argued that Judaism originated in the Persian period, or the days of Ezra and Nehemiah (5th century bce); indeed, he attributed an important role in shaping the emergent religion to Persian imperialism.

These theories, however, have been discarded by most scholars in the light of a more comprehensive knowledge of the ancient Middle East and the abandonment of a theory of gradual evolutionary development that was dominant at the beginning of the 20th century. Most Jews share a long-accepted notion that there never was a real break in continuity and that Mosaic-prophetic-priestly Judaism was continued, with only a few modifications, in the work of the Pharisaic and rabbinic sages well into the modern period. Even today the various Jewish groupswhether Orthodox, Conservative, or Reformall claim direct spiritual descent from the Pharisees and the rabbinic sages. In fact, however, many developments have occurred within so-called normative or Rabbinic Judaism.

In any event, the history of Judaism can be divided into the following major periods: biblical Judaism (c. 20th4th century bce), Hellenistic Judaism (4th century bce2nd century ce), Rabbinic Judaism (2nd18th century ce), and modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present).

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Judaism | Definition, Origin, History, Beliefs, & Facts ...

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Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

It has been estimated that one-third of our Western civilization bears the marks of its Jewish ancestry.

--Huston Smith, The World's Religions

Judaism was founded as early as 2000 BCE as the religion of Abraham and of the small nation of the Hebrews. Through thousands of years of suffering, persecution, dispersion, and the occasional victory, Jewish religion and culture has been profoundly influential.

Today, about 14 million people identify themselves as Jews, and nearly 3.5 billion others follow belief systems directly influenced by Judaism (including Christianity, Islam, and the Baha'i Faith). Modern Judaism is a complex phenomenon that incorporates both a nation and a religion, and often combines strict adherence to ritual laws with a more liberal attitude towards religious doctrine.

The central religious belief of Judaism is that there is only one God. Monotheism was uncommon at the time Judaism was born, but according to Jewish tradition, God himself revealed it to Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people. Judaism teaches that God took special care of the Hebrews (who would later become the Jews). After rescuing them from slavery in Egypt, God revealed the Ten Commandments to Moses, and many more religious and ethical guidelines in the Torah ("the Law"). Many of the guidelines (mitzvah) emphasized ritual purity and the importance of remaining set apart from the surrounding polytheistic cultures.

Aside from its staunch monotheism, Judaism has few essential beliefs. Jewish identity arises primarily from belonging to an ancient people and upholding its traditions. Dogma, while important, is secondary. Although the medieval thinker Rabbi Maimonides once enumerated "13 Articles of Faith," many Jews do not accept all these, and Jewish beliefs vary widely on theological matters such as human nature and the afterlife.

Divisions within Judaism, known as "movements," have developed in modern times as varying responses to secularism and modernity. Orthodox Judaism is the most conservative group, retaining nearly all traditional rituals and practices. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Reform Jews retain their Jewish identity and some traditions but take a liberal approach to many Jewish beliefs and practices. Conservative Judaism lies in the middle of the spectrum, taking a moderate approach in its application of Judaism to the modern world.

Jews of all movements celebrate many special days throughout the year and throughout each person's life. Major Jewish holidays include Passover, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Hanukkah, historically a minor holiday, has become more prominent in the last century for Jews who live in areas that celebrate Christmas. The Sabbath, a day of rest and worship at the synagogue, is observed each Saturday. In Judaism, all days begin at sunset, so all holidays begin at sundown and end at sundown.

To recognize the role of God and the Jewish community in each person's life, numerous life cycle events are observed with traditional rituals. At the first Sabbath after the birth of a child, the proud father is called forward in the synagogue to recite blessings for mother and child. Eight days after birth, baby boys are circumcised.

At the age of 13, a boy becomes a Bar Mitzvah, or "Son of the Commandment"; at age 12 a girl becomes a Bat Mitzvah, "Daughter of the Commandment." The occasion is marked by the youth's first public reading of the Torah in the synagogue (only boys may do this in Orthodox congregations), followed by a large and joyous celebration.

Jewish wedding ceremonies incorporate many ancient traditions and symbolic gestures (including the well-known breaking of glass), and divorces are obtained within the Jewish community. At death, a Jewish person's body is cared for by the chevra kiddisha, the "holy society," who wash the body and prepare it for burial. The deceased is treated with great respect and never left alone. After burial, the deceased's loved ones enter a formal period of mourning, which decreased gradually over the course of a year. The dead is then remembered and honored each year on the anniversary of death.

In addition to these special days and ceremonies, the Jewish life is marked by regular religious observance. Each Saturday, Sabbath is observed by ceasing work and spending the day in worship at the synagogue and at home with family. The study of Torah and other Jewish scriptures is considered very important, and many Jewish children attend Hebrew school so they can study it in its original language. In everyday life, traditional Jews observe the laws of kashrut, eating only foods that God has designated "kosher." Among non-kosher, or prohibited, foods are pork, any meat that has not been ritually slaughtered, shellfish, and any meal that combines dairy with meat.

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Judaism - ReligionFacts

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Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

Oy gevalt!

Leah McSweeney defended her decision to convert to Judaism after critics said the star of The Real Housewives of New York was just following a fad.

The 38-year-old, who was born and raised Catholic, revealed her plans during Tuesdays Season 13 premiere, prompting some unsupportive reactions from fans online, including one who commented, I hope she finds what shes looking for. But this kinda reminds me of when celebrities got into Kabbalah as a cool trend.

Ok Im not going to respond to every dumb thing people have to say regarding my conversion but this is so ignorant I must, McSweeney responded on her Instagram Story, sharing the fans critique. Converting and studying Kabbalah are very different. And to compare my conversion and refer to it as a trend is highly dumb AF and offensive.

Stars like Madonna, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher have all famously studied kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, at different points.

McSweeney let viewers in to her conversion journey while on calls with her sister and father on Tuesdays episode. Coincidentally, she told them about her plans on one of the holiest days in the Jewish religion Yom Kippur.

Ive been thinking about converting to Judaism for many, many years, she explained in a confessional. Then when COVID hit, I was having, I would say, the only period of my life where I felt very disconnected from a god. I quit drinking again and I got a very deep calling to convert to Judaism.

She added, Im attracted to the challenge. I think Im attracted to all the rules and the rituals and the prayers. And look, its not like Im going to convert and like, thats it! Im a Jew! The conversion is the beginning for me.

The fashion designer who is known for her sexy get-ups told her sister that an Orthodox rabbi was helping her convert, but that she would be more modern in her dressing and not modest as is tradition. She then asked her dad for forgiveness in the spirit of Yom Kippur and apologized to him for being a bad daughter.

Just because Im converting to Judaism doesnt mean Im going to be the perfect Jew, she said in another confessional. Im not telling my rabbi this, but this is about progress, not perfection. Me converting is the beginning of like a very long spiritual journey.

Since starting the process, McSweeney has noticeably posted on social media about Shabbat, or the Jewish sabbath, and Hanukkah.

A rep for McSweeney did not immediately get back to us.

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Leah McSweeney defends her decision to convert to Judaism - Page Six

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