Young witnesses to the Holocaust share their stories—and fears for today
12
14 THE LAST GENERATION
By Hilary Danailova
Those still alive who bore witness to the Holocaust were, for the most part, children during the war, with the diffuse and impressionistic memories of youth. Such is the case for the five women profiled in this issue. While their parents were forced to make agonizing decisions, as children they lacked agency, living out those decisions amid a dystopia of lost families, ruptured friendships, seized homes and untimely lessons in human cruelty.
20 I FORGIVE A COUNTRY
By Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
“Restoring German citizenship,” writes Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, who recently went through that process almost 90 years after her grandfather fled Munich, “offers Holocaust survivors and their descendants an opportunity to try to recover from past trauma and encourage spiritual growth. I see it as an act of reunion that might help return us, more healed, to the world.”
DEPARTMENTS
12 COMMENTARY Lessons from the land on Tu B’Shevat
32 TRAVEL Volunteerism meets tourism in Israel
36 FOOD Hungarian classics get hipster updates
38 ARTS
• Quiltmaker and fabric artist Louise Silk
• Family history becomes saga for the Politzers
44 BOOKS
• Holocaust and Israelfocused nonfiction
• Tova Mirvis’s new novel, We Would Never
Holocaust survivor Marion Kreith, a resident of Boulder, Colo. See profiles of Kreith and other survivors beginning on page 14.
Photo by John Pregulman/KAVOD.
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24 THE ENDURING MYTHOLOGY OF ANNE FRANK
By Ruth Franklin
In an adapted excerpt from her new biography, The Many Lives of Anne Frank Ruth Franklin argues that “Anne’s transformation into an icon has obscured our view of who she really was—a German Jewish girl growing up in the Netherlands who became a victim of Nazi persecution.” After October 7, Franklin writes, Anne’s diary merits rereading “not just as an inspiring tale of a girl coming of age under unimaginable circumstances, but as a siren alerting us to the malevolent potential of antisemitism anywhere.”
Watersheds and Existential Threats
Whatever happens, Hadassah will be ready
By Carol Ann Schwartz
As the top spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari makes frequent appearances on Israeli and international media outlets. But when he visited Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem recently, it wasn’t to comment on military operations but to express gratitude for the dedication of the Hadassah Medical Organization staff in treating war casualties. Dr. Yoram Weiss, HMO’s director-general, welcomed Hagari and offered an overview of Hadassah hospitals’ services, including the most recent medical and technological advances.
Dr. Weiss also explained how our history and a certain amount of luck work to our advantage. With two major infrastructure projects nearing completion when the current hostilities began in October 2023, we were able to accelerate the opening of our Gandel Rehabilitation Center at Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus and the first floors of our renovated Round Building at Ein Kerem to meet the demands of war.
Hadassah’s story is one of working through watersheds and existential threats. Our founding generation may not have felt prepared for the journey they began in 1912, but they thrived on the challenge. Most were raising children, and few had ever worked outside the home. But they launched what grew into a network of hospitals, clinics, dispensaries and infant-welfare stations that became the framework of Israel’s health care system.
The world in which Hadassah embarked on its nation-building pro-
gram was marked by the Depression, two world wars, the Holocaust and the birth of the Jewish state. Every war Israel has fought since 1948 has been a clash with enemies aiming to destroy the country—the very definition of “existential.” Under that shadow, our institutions and our reputation for excellence in medical care, research and education have nevertheless grown steadily.
ADVERSITY CREATES A DEMAND FOR SOLIDARITY, SISTERHOOD AND PROMOTING OUR VALUES.
Our contribution to the Zionist enterprise has come from planning, building, organizing and advocating. Hadassah is an integral part of Israel’s landscape, its vocabulary and its popular culture.
Hand in hand with building our institutions in Israel, generations of Hadassah women built themselves, studying and training for activism and leadership. One lesson we have learned is that crises often bring opportunities. Since the October 7 Hamas attacks, we have seen a surge in engagement and membership, prompting the birth of new Hadassah chapters. Faced with the threat to Israel and rising antisemitism in America and around the world, more women need what we have to offer.
As in Henrietta Szold’s day, adversity creates a demand for solidarity, sisterhood and promoting our values. Our newest members are attracted not only by our defense of Israel, our humanitarian projects and our efforts to advance a positive image of Zionism, but also by our advocacy on behalf of women’s health, reproductive rights and leadership training.
We are endlessly adapting to challenges. The difficulty of traveling to Israel amid frequent flight cancellations has impacted programs for our Hadassah Evolve Fellows. But it coincides with underutilized space at our New York City headquarters because of staff working more days remotely since the Covid pandemic. As a result, we are bringing Fellows from across America to Hadassah’s national office for a group experience and a virtual Israel trip.
For much of the past 113 years, Hadassah has planned for the future without the luxury of considering what “normal” times are like. We inaugurated our Ein Kerem campus in the tumultuous 1960s, and its iconic Round Building—the original flagship—is now up to 2025 standards. We constantly ask ourselves what we need to add to campuses that will be serving Israel’s population into the 2090s, by which time, no doubt, there will be more towers and renovations.
Between now and then, we pray there will be no more wars, and that one day, generals and admirals will visit only to welcome children or grandchildren into the world. But whatever happens, Hadassah will be ready.
B’yachad Nerapeh.
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and war ensued, Hadassah responded immediately. The threat to Israel has escalated to include aggression from Hezbollah and Iran. Hadassah’s hospitals must now expand capacity to treat mass casualties and serve as a strong wartime asset to the people of Israel. Hadassah’s Youth Aliyah villages must continue to provide safe haven to students. We cannot do this without you. Together we will heal. B’yachad Nerapeh.
HOW YOU CAN HELP HEAL THE WORLD
GANDEL REHABILITATION CENTER
Help us complete and fully equip the Gandel Rehabilitation Center to provide physical, occupational and speech therapies, as well as psychological services, for the wounded and other patients who will need long-term rehabilitation.
NEW OPERATING ROOMS AND ICU
Help outfit six new underground Operating Rooms, safe from conventional, chemical and biological attacks, and a crucial new Intensive Care Unit at Hadassah Ein Kerem.
YOUTH ALIYAH VILLAGES
Support our Meir Shfeyah and Hadassah Neurim Youth Aliyah villages, so they can provide critical psychological support and shelter for students and faculty. FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE VISIT: hadassah.org/togetherwewillheal TO DONATE, PLEASE VISIT: go.hadassah.org/givetogether
CHAIR Ellen Hershkin
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Lisa Hostein
DEPUTY EDITOR Libby Barnea
SENIOR EDITOR Leah Finkelshteyn
DIGITAL EDITOR Arielle Kaplan
EDITOR EMERITUS Alan M. Tigay
DESIGN/PRODUCTION Samantha Marsh
EDITORIAL BOARD
Roselyn Bell
Ruth G. Cole
Nancy Falchuk
Gloria Goldreich
Blu Greenberg
Dara Horn
Ruth B Hurwitz
Francine Klagsbrun
Anne Lapidus Lerner
Curt Leviant
Joy Levitt
Bonnie Lipton
Marcie Natan
Nessa Rapoport
Sima Schuster
Susan S. Smirnoff
Barbara Topol
HADASSAH NATIONAL PRESIDENT Carol Ann Schwartz
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Connecting the Past and Present
May we continue to honor those who came before us
By Lisa Hostein
The jewish calendar is often full of surprises. Just as Hanukkah crossed into 2025 this year—the last time that happened was two decades ago—the end of January and beginning of February presents us with the incongruent pairing of International Holocaust Remembrance Day and Tu B’Shevat.
Tu B’Shevat, the new year for trees that begins on February 12, represents renewal and hope for the future. In contrast, of course, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on January 27—this year marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz—bears a much heavier meaning. The day designated by the United Nations in 2005 as a global way to remember the Shoah comes this time as much of the world seems to have forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust and what virulent antisemitism can bring.
Few can make that connection between past and present as well as the dwindling population of Holocaust survivors who, beyond all comprehension, are being forced to witness in their twilight years the recurring manifestations of intense Jew-hatred. It is these last living survivors and their descendants to whom we devote much of this issue.
In “The Last Generation,” Hilary Danailova profiles five women, all of whom were still children when they became victims of Nazi atrocities and who share their harrowing stories along with their resilience (page 14).
For author Melisa CahnmannTaylor, reclaiming German citizenship has helped her come to terms with her family’s past, as she writes in “I Forgive a Country” (page 20). Anne Frank, of course, did not survive the Nazi reign of terror but her legacy looms large, as Ruth Franklin writes in “The Enduring Mythology of Anne Frank” (page 24).
While many Jews and Jewishthemed literature are finding obstacles in the publishing world these days, Holocaust-related stories continue to find a market. Such is the case of The Politzer Saga, whose author discovered as an adult that her father was Jewish and her mother had saved him during the war (page 40).
And Sandee Brawarsky shares new and noteworthy Holocaust titles in “On Your Shelf” (page 47).
Meanwhile, when we think of Tu B’Shevat, we often think of the Land of Israel. For Israeli Avigail Kuperman, who co-founded an organization to help farmers amid the post-October 7 agricultural crisis, the holiday takes on new meaning, as she writes in “Equality and the Land” (page 12).
Rahel Musleah also found new meaning in Israel last year as she engaged in several volunteer opportunities, which she shares in “Passport Zionism” (page 32).
Finally, Adeena Sussman introduces us to Jeremy Salamon, a Brooklyn-based restaurateur who inherited his culinary curiosity from his grandmothers (page 36).
May we continue to honor those who came before us, their tragedies and triumphs alike.
Tu B’Shevat
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
ISRAEL’S RESCUE OF MIZRACHI JEWS
I have no objection to Jewish students hearing “a Palestinian account of the Nakba,” as mentioned in the cover story “Ramping Up—and Rethinking —Israel Education” (November/ December 2024). But I hope they also hear the story of Mizrachi Jews who were driven out of their homes in the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa, largely due to Arab shame at their armies’ having failed to prevent the emergence of the State of Israel in the Jews’ ancestral homeland.
In the first three decades following the establishment of Israel in 1948, the tiny new country absorbed more than 650,000 Mizrachi refugees, many of whom arrived with barely more than the shirts on their backs. Yet they were welcomed as Israel also rehabilitated survivors of the Shoah, recovered from war damages inflicted by Arab armies and dealt with terrorist invasions from lands occupied by Jordan and Egypt until 1967.
In contrast, most Arab countries with vast land holdings refused to take in the Arabs who fled Mandate Palestine after their leaders rejected the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine.
Toby F. Block Atlanta, Ga.
NURSING AS PROFESSION
Nursing and teaching are referred to as vocations, not professions, in the November/December article “Blazing New Trails,” about the rise of Bedouin women seeking higher education and diverse careers. Most people don’t fully understand the scope and breadth of nurses’ work and the roles they play in the delivery of health care. Nurses utilize scientific
principles, mathematical concepts and cutting-edge technology to conduct assessments, make diagnoses and plan the care of patients.
Israel has been experiencing a nursing shortage for over a decade. When the nursing profession is referred to as a vocation rather than a highly skilled profession, it does not contribute to the recruitment of more women (and men) from the Bedouin or other communities throughout Israel to consider nursing as a career choice.
Barbara Glickstein, MPH, MS, RN, FAAN New York, N.Y.
prevented from practicing their profession simply because they were Jewish. What Jewish health care workers are experiencing today is a wake-up call—and a frightening and dangerous slippery slope.
Beryl
Rosenstein, M.D. Pikesville, Md.
AN ALTERNATE READING OF THANKSGIVING
A WAKE-UP CALL IN HEALTH CARE
I was dismayed but not surprised to read “A Medical Emergency” in the November/December issue, a disturbing article that documents the alarming rise in antisemitic harassment of Jewish health care workers and need for Jewish medical organizations. We must recall Nazi Germany in 1933, when the concept of “racial hygiene” was introduced, and Jewish physicians were harassed and
I am deeply troubled by the author’s description and photo of a friend dressed up like a pilgrim for Thanksgiving in the article “Thanksgiving in Jerusalem” in the November/ December issue. While I appreciate the author’s focus on the blessing of thankfulness even in dark times, the photo of a woman dressed like a pilgrim celebrating Thanksgiving (and the description of this as “pretty hilarious”) is extremely insensitive given what we now know about the history of the holiday.
No matter what actually occurred at the “feast” in 1621 (the Wampanoag tell a different story than the one told in our traditional history books), we now know that the arrival of European settlers to these shores marked the beginning of oppression and destruction for Native Americans.
In fact, since 1970, many Native Americans have commemorated the fourth Thursday in November as a day of mourning during which they try to raise awareness around historical and ongoing struggles of Native Americans.
It is possible to celebrate Thanksgiving with family, friends, gratitude and traditions while also taking a moment to reflect on the rest of the story and what we might do to work toward a better future for Native Americans in this country. This is what I choose to do.
Jewish day schools tackle the complexities
In this time of deep concern about rising antisemitism, it feels ironic to publish an article with a depiction of Thanksgiving that is insensitive toward Native Americans.
Robin Abeshaus Missoula, Mont.
UNITED FOR ISRAEL
My husband and I have been Hadassah members and associates for over 60 years, and so I felt it was time to write and tell you how much the magazine has meant to us. It has become so important as Canadian Jews to stay connected to Jewish communities all around the world, especially since October 7. Hadassah Magazine, with its wonderful articles,
has helped us to stay linked and united in our love of Israel.
Estelle Grader Toronto, Ontario, Canada
IN PRAISE OF ‘NOSH’
Jewish cooking is traditionally centered around meat, and the holidays especially have been challenging since I switched to being mostly vegan a couple of years ago. I’ve been looking for a cookbook like Micah Siva’s Nosh: Plant-Forward Recipes Celebrating Modern Jewish Cuisine, featured in “Vegetables Take Center Stage” (September/October 2024). Before purchasing it on Amazon, I checked my local library.
I live in a suburb of Columbus,
Ohio, with a small Jewish population, but lo and behold, my library had Siva’s cookbook. I’ve perused the pages and now I know—it is worth it to purchase. Nosh has beautiful pictures and recipes that are complex, but not overwhelmingly so, and many use only one pot and simple ingredients, like canned beans.
Bethany Kinstlinger Westerville, Ohio
email letters to the editor to letters@hadassah.org . To read more letters, visit us online at hadassahmagazine.org .
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Grandchildren ‘3Gs’ Become Family Storytellers
Mollie Bowman’s grandmother spoke often about how, after surviving Auschwitz, she met her future husband, an American soldier, at a displaced persons camp. When he proposed, he gifted her parachute fabric to make a wedding dress and vowed to meet her in pre-state Israel, where she was headed. Because she could only travel to the Holy Land with the clothes on her back, she sewed the
fabric into her coat’s lining.
Today, Bowman, a third-generation Holocaust survivor, or 3G, is managing director of Living Links, an organization aimed at promoting advocacy and identity among grandchildren. In her new role, Bowman works to ensure that the experience of her grandmother, Penina Bowman, as well as the stories passed down to the one million other 3Gs in the United
States are shared and preserved.
“Her voice is living through me,” Bowman said of her grandmother, who was a Hadassah life member in the Atlanta area until her death in 2018.
Created in 2023, Living Links helps trains 3Gs to honor their family’s history, counter antisemitism and safeguard Holocaust history through storytelling. Now, the group is partnering with the USC
An Immersive October 7 Experience
Not only did Nimrod Palmach live to tell the story of how he confronted Hamas terrorists on October 7, now he is bringing his experience to others using virtual reality (VR) technology.
Palmach, the CEO of ISRAEL-is, an organization that advances dialogue between young Israelis and their peers worldwide, was an
Students experiencing the Be the Witness VR technology
Israel Defense Forces reserve officer who, after being called up on October 7, defied the orders of his commander by going south to where he felt he was most needed that fateful day.
“I let go of life on that morning,” said Palmach, a father of two young children who, armed only with a pistol, drove to Kibbutz Alumim near the border with Gaza. He and other soldiers he randomly met up with spent three hours fighting the terrorists there, and “we killed all of them.” He then drove to hard-hit Kibbutz Be’eri to help its residents.
Palmach would certainly be forgiven if he decided he wanted to
Penina Bowman smiles on her wedding day (right), stands beside her wedding dress in its display case at the Breman Museum in Atlanta (left) and poses with her granddaughter Mollie Bowman, now the managing director of Living Links.
Shoah Foundation to expand its mission. With a lead gift of $1 million, Living Links will expand its speaker-training program, which teaches 3Gs how to present their
put the experience behind him, but he chose a different tack. “I thought the story needs to go so much more viral,” he said. Knowing people around the world would dispute Hamas’s barbarism, “I promised myself I’d do everything in my power” to tell the story.
Through the Survived to Tell initiative launched by ISRAEL-is, the Be the Witness VR experience—produced by Stephen D. Smith, former executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation—brings the stories of Palmach and four survivors of the Nova music festival to life. The immersive platform puts the viewer, wearing a headset and headphones, in the middle of actual events from that day and the ensuing weeks, and provides access to neverbefore-seen footage, text messages and live discussions powered by AI technology.
Since its debut in May, Palmach and his team have brought the series to over 15,000 viewers at American university campuses, in world parliaments and in Israel itself.
Through the VR experience, “you can be in
grandparent’s Holocaust experiences to classrooms and community groups.
“Nothing sticks like a story,” said Jennifer Loew Mendelson, Living Links co-founder and co-president. “This partnership will help us empower 3Gs to tell their stories in meaningful and compelling ways.”
The partnership comes as antisemitism continues to skyrocket and as knowledge of the Holocaust fades. Sixty-three percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 don’t know that six million Jews were murdered during World War II, according to a 2020 Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany survey.
Mendelson, a second-generation survivor, remembers when, as a 7-year-old, she asked her father why he had no siblings.
“We were walking under the apple trees in our yard. He let go of my hand, turned around and cried,” she said, noting that he was his family’s sole survivor.
“We are walking vessels of history,” Mendelson said. “Our parents’ and grandparents’ stories shaped who we are. The effects of what happened in the 1930s and 40s live through us.”
—Cathryn J. Prince
Atlanta, Ga., and actually ‘be’ in Be’eri a week after the massacre” to see what happened there, Palmach said. “It’s not just hearing my story; it’s being with me at the same location” where it happened. —Lori Silberman Brauner
Palmach
DNA Testing Adds Branches to Survivors’ Family Trees
The concept of l’dor v’do r—“from generation to generation”—is central to Judaism, but what happens when generational lines were severed by the Holocaust? Thanks to the Holocaust Reunion Project, uprooted family trees can be rebuilt and long-lost relatives can be reunited or meet for the first time.
Originally co-founded by leading genealogists Jennifer Mendelsohn and Adina Newman in 2022 as the DNA Reunion Project, the pair relaunched it as an independent nonprofit last August. According to Mendelsohn, the relaunch has “allowed us to scale up,” taking what had been a pilot program with very limited resources to full scale. Funded entirely through the support of private donors, the co-founders hope to receive foundation grants to expand its mission of harnessing the power of commercial DNA testing with expert genealogical research. Their aim is to reunite Holocaust survivors and their children with living relatives and to illuminate the family histories that have been lost to genocide.
To date, the project has sent over 1,400 free DNA kits to Holocaust survivors and their children around the world, thanks to an in-kind donation from Ancestry.com, the largest genealogy testing company in the world. Mendelsohn and Newman also provide three hours of genealogical consultations at no cost to program participants. Newman, whose grandmother was a Hadassah life member, called it “the biggest mitzvah I can be doing right now.” She added that the project always uncovers something interesting in a subject’s ancestry.
Most often, that takes the form of reconstructing and restoring what were thought to
be lost records and branches on family trees or, for example, introducing third cousins who didn’t know of each other’s existence. And sometimes they hit the genealogical jackpot.
They cite as one of their biggest successes the case of two Polish Catholic women—Halina Michalowska and Krystyna Leszczynska—who were adopted as infants by separate families only to discover, with Mendelsohn and Newman’s help, that they were not only sisters but also Jews. The women had submitted their DNA at the urging of their grandchildren to learn more about how they had become orphans in 1941.
“We can’t promise a spectacular result for everyone,” Mendelsohn said, “but there is always something to be learned.”
In words of thanks to Mendelsohn and Newman, Audrey Sher, a daughter of survivors, puts it this way: “Every time I learn of the existence of a family member lost—learn their name, see a record related to them—I feel their spark, their soul, come into the present.”
Avi Dresner
Nimrod
Adina Newman (left) and Jennifer Mendelsohn
Halina Michalowska (left) and Krystyna Leszczynska
Equality and the Land
Lessons for Tu B’Shevat and every day
By Avigail Kuperman
The hamas attacks of october 7 have led to countless fissures in Israeli society, but also to new ways of doing business and helping others. It is through that lens that I am approaching Tu B’Shevat, the midwinter holiday traditionally known as the new year of the trees that has also become a symbol of Jewish connection to and stewardship of the land. I usually mark the holiday by eating fresh fruits, but this year I am expanding my understanding of its agricultural focus—by redefining equality to include equal access to fresh fruits and vegetables.
A commitment to sharing the land and fresh produce for all are core values of Adama LeAdam (Land for Person), the organization I created with agronomist Ayala Noy Meir and chef Yaniv Gur Arye after October 7 to help Israeli farmers whose fields lay largely unharvested when many foreign workers returned to their native countries. As teams of our volunteers began to work in the fields, we discovered much more than best practices for picking citrus fruits and digging up cucumbers. We learned that it is standard in the agricultural industry for most farmers to reject a considerable amount of their crops— leaving them unharvested—if the quantities aren’t sufficient to warrant the investment in time, or if the pro-
duce is somehow blemished and not attractive enough for market.
At the same time, as some of Israel’s top restaurant chefs were cooking for soldiers, evacuees and hostage families, they began asking us for produce. So, we gathered the abundantly fresh and delicious but not aesthetically perfect or profitable produce and sent it to them, helping these chefs with the ingredients to prepare thousands of meals.
With that new mission, Adama LeAdam now collects close to one ton of surplus produce a week. That food reaches multiple populations through a variety of communitybased initiatives, including Holocaust survivors, participants in mental health day facilities, visitors to soup kitchens, students at pre-army preparatory schools, soldiers and impoverished families. Meanwhile, chefs such as Yuval Ben Neriah of Taizu and Shirel Berger of Opa continue to cook with our food in their Tel Aviv restaurant kitchens to highlight our social justice efforts.
Every partner of Adama LeAdam receives the same fruits and vegetables. While most food-rescuing initiatives in Israel operate under a hierarchy, where impeccable produce is sold at market and the irregular crops go to those needing some form of assistance, Adama LeAdam does not.
Such a hierarchy ignores the lessons of shmita imparted in the Torah, when God commands that fields should lie fallow every seven years. During a shmita year, land is not cultivated, and its produce is offered to anyone who is hungry, regardless of their status: “But you may eat whatever the land during its sabbath will produce—you, your male and female slaves, the hired and bound laborers who live with you, and your cattle and the beasts in your land may eat all its yield.” (Leviticus 25:6-7).
Sometimes, equality extends beyond feeding people in need to educating those who lack knowledge of certain fruits and vegetables. I have met teens in pre-army programs whose lower-income fami-
Adama LeAdam volunteers (above and in photo below) collect almost one ton of produce a week.
lies had immigrated to Israel in the previous generation, and who had never eaten mangoes or plums because those fruits didn’t exist in their parents’ home countries. Through Adama LeAdam’s outreach, these young adults have now tasted these fruits— and developed a liking for them.
Other times, Adama LeAdam strives for increased access to produce by helping farmers promote a crop that isn’t well known or popular—yet. For example, Israelis love Maya mangoes, a varietal cultivated in the 1950s, but there are other mangoes grown domestically that are equally delicious and deserve a wider market share, such as the Keitt mango, which is unusual because it’s eaten when its skin is green.
In another example, Adama LeAdam volunteers have been collecting the leaves left behind after yams are picked—leaves that can be prepared like more popular greens such as spinach or Swiss chard. Some of our partnering chefs have incorporated yam leaves into their menus, and there are a growing number of farms who have begun selling the leaves to customers.
Last year on Tu B’Shevat, as scores of Israelis took to the land to help farmers rescue their crops, the spotlight shone on local produce, especially those crops that are unique to the climate and soil.
When Tu B’Shevat begins this year on February 12, let’s expand its focus to encompass equality. If we disregard the blemishes and all eat the same delectable fruits and vegetables grown in the Land of Israel, then on some level, we are all the same. By accepting differences in produce, we accept differences among ourselves, too.
Avigail Kuperman is a culinary tour guide in Israel and co-founder of Adama LeAdam.
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The Last Generation
Young witnesses to the Holocaust share their stories—and fears
By Hilary Danailova
In the late 1990s, writing for a New York City Jewish newspaper, I spent many afternoons on plasticcovered sofas while interviewing Holocaust survivors over cake and coffee. My European-born subjects, then in their 70s and 80s, had largely been adults with families during the war. They had made wrenching decisions in order to save their children and had witnessed the unthinkable in concentration camps.
Their survival stories had the quality of action thrillers: Nazi chases, forest hideouts, daring escapes from moving trains.
Today, virtually all the survivors of that generation are gone—including such high-profile figures as Ruth Westheimer, the German-born sex therapist known as Dr. Ruth who died last July, and the Hungarianborn British memoirist Lily Ebert, who had two million followers on
TikTok and passed away in October. Those still alive who bore witness to the Holocaust were, for the most part, children during the war, with the diffuse and impressionistic memories of youth. While their parents were forced to make agonizing choices for them, as children they lacked agency, living out those decisions amid a dystopia of lost families, ruptured friendships, seized homes and untimely lessons in human cruelty.
As I got to know some of these “younger” female survivors in the United States—octogenarians and nonagenarians speaking 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz—I noticed common threads. Their families, not especially religious, had been well integrated into their European communities. Many, likely due to the disruption and instability of war, had no siblings. As adults, they seemed
more American than their parents’ generation, perhaps because they had moved to the United States while still quite young.
Their wartime experiences were shaped by displacement and hiding, rather than camps like Auschwitz, which few young children survived. Over and over, I heard about the cruelty of strangers: The classmates who beat up Jews, the neighbors who attacked without provocation and even the Russians who treated the Jews they liberated with callous dehumanization.
These women see echoes of that cruelty today, as antisemitism flares up in the country of their refuge and around the world. And to a one, they emphasized the vital importance of Israel to Jewish survival. Here are the stories of five women who survived the Shoah—and their reflections on life as American Jews today.
Ronnie Breslow aboard the St. Louis with her mother; the duo’s German passport
RONNIE BRESLOW
‘In 1938, we didn’t have an Israel to go to.’
At a kristallnacht commemoration at Or Hadash Synagogue in suburban Philadelphia, Ronnie Breslow tells the congregation of her first, heartbreaking voyage to the Americas at age 9. It was aboard the infamous St. Louis, a ship carrying 1,000 refugees, most of them Jewish, that was refused dockage first by the Cuban authorities, then by the United States government, before being turned back to Nazi Europe in 1939.
“We saw the shimmering lights of Miami Beach; that’s how close we came to America,” Breslow, now 94, tells her audience. Just days after the world was shaken by an Amsterdam pogrom last November targeting visiting Israeli soccer fans, Breslow speaks of how impressed she was that Israel chartered planes to rescue its stranded countrymen. “In 1938, we didn’t have an Israel to go to,” she says. “We were stuck.”
It is a lesson, more than any other, that the Stuttgart-born Breslow impresses on her audiences. She has done so ever since the 1970s, when she began speaking about her experiences.
In her appearances, now arranged through the Holocaust Awareness
Museum and Education Center in suburban Philadelphia, she relates how her family—with roots going back five centuries in southern Germany—saw its comfortable world disintegrate after Hitler passed the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws. Her first-grade teacher told her not to come back to school, her best friend was beaten for associating with a Jew, and Nazi guards discouraged shoppers outside the family’s dry goods store.
When her father had the opportunity to escape Germany solo, her mother insisted he go, arguing the family had better odds with one person abroad. She was right. He made it to the safety of Cuba, and although their planned reunion on the island was foiled, the family eventually reconvened in New York City in 1949 thanks to her father, who had migrated from Cuba to America and sponsored the family. In between, Breslow—then Renate Reutlinger— and her mother survived thanks to the brave decision of the captain of the St. Louis to defy German orders to return home, landing instead at Antwerp.
The ship’s plight—they were stranded in international waters for more than a month—garnered
international attention, and Dutch onlookers clapped for the refugees from the shore. Still, their fortuitous survival involved months of isolation and deprivation in a Dutch detention camp.
Breslow still has the thoughtful dark eyes of the bob-haired girl pictured on both her German passport and her American immigration card. While her family’s arrival seemed like a happy ending, the survivor recalls a difficult new beginning when the family settled in Philadelphia. Poorly dressed, unable to speak English and with chronic eye infections, Breslow struggled in school while her parents struggled to earn a living.
At 19, she married a fellow German refugee, Paul Breslow, though they never discussed their past. There were happy years, as they both worked in medical laboratories, but also tragedy: Of Breslow’s five children, only three survive.
With antisemitism rising globally, she has a warning. “I see history repeating itself,” Breslow tells the crowd. Addressing a row of children, the grandmother of nine and great-grandmother of five adds: “I, too, had a normal childhood…. The big difference between then and now is we have the State of Israel.
“I caution all of you here today to be careful,” she continues. “Don’t lose this very precious gift, freedom. God bless America and God bless Israel.”
Breslow has been sharing her story of survival to local school groups (above) and other audiences since the 1970s.
GABRIELLA KARIN
‘Hitler will never get my body, my soul. Be happy.’
In her los angeles studio, Gabriella Karin shapes copper and clay into wrenching images of suffering. The contorted figures and outstretched hands evoke a childhood warped by Nazi terror in her native Bratislava, where Lubitsa Gabrielle Foldes, as she was called then, enjoyed a carefree childhood until 1938.
That was when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia—and seized the Foldes family’s apart ment. After unsuccessfully trying to send their daughter to safety abroad, her parents obtained false papers and placed her, then 8, in a convent boarding school.
“I cried myself to sleep every night,” recalls Karin, 94, who in America adopted her middle name.
“A year later, my mother came to visit, and when she saw my cried-out eyes, she decided to take me.”
After moving from one hiding place to
another, the extended family—eight people—was taken in by a non-Jewish lawyer. Somehow, the Nazis never suspected their presence in the district’s only residential house built, according to Karin, under a 1935 law that prohibited Jews from occupancy,
“The lawyer brought us food, but he couldn’t bring too much,” in order to evade suspicion, explains Karin.
“We were hungry all the time. And he brought me books to keep me quiet, but they weren’t books for young girls.” Instead of going to school, young Lubitsa made do with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy until the Russian liberation, when the family reclaimed their store, a delicatessen. After studying fashion in Bratislava, at 19, Karin and her husband, Ofer Karin,
a fellow survivor, decided to move to Israel; reluctantly, her parents followed their only child. As a dressmaker in Netanya, “I had a good social life,” Karin says. “We were all survivors, and we never knew each other’s stories. We never talked about it.”
In 1960, after her mother visited the United States and declared it “a much easier life” than Israel, Karin and her family, including her parents, resettled in Southern California, where they found yet another community of European refugees. There, Karin worked as a fashion designer for department stores and raised a son.
Years later, Karin began to speak out; she now shares her story of surviving the Holocaust regularly with local audiences through Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance and other organizations. In retirement, she says, she took up sculpture, which she exhibits locally, “so people can see visually something, not only the written word. It brings them closer” to the Holocaust experience.
And she marvels that as a Jew in America, she has felt that she is an equal citizen—unlike her father in Bratislava who, though a proud Czech, was rejected from the army for being Jewish. Lately, though, Karin worries about authoritarian rhetoric from some of the country’s new top leaders.
But Karin, who has two living grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, says she is determined “to not dwell on things.”
Repeating the vow she had made after witnessing her unrecognizably skeletal neighbors returning to Czechoslovakia in 1945, Karin stresses, “Hitler will never get my body, my soul. Be happy; don’t be a sad person. Otherwise, he has won.”
Gabriella Karin (far left) with friends in Israel
JANET APPLEFIELD
‘I had a crazy life, but I survived.’
For a long time, janet applefield declined to share with the world her story of how she survived the Holocaust—of fleeing to Ukraine on a wagon as the Nazis invaded her native Poland, seeing cousins sent to the Siberian gulag, hiding from German soldiers in a potato field, losing a baby sister to diphtheria.
And that was only the first chapter, before Gustawa Singer, as she was then named, went into hiding at age 7, spending three years alone and on the run before ending up in a Jewish orphanage. “I didn’t think that my story was valuable because I never considered myself a survivor—I’d never been in a camp,” says Applefield, 89. But when other hidden children began speaking out in the 1980s, the Boston-area social worker decided it was her responsibility to speak up about what she’d witnessed.
Applefield now shares her story with 4,000 people annually, mostly through the Boston-based nonprofit Facing History & Ourselves, whose grade-school curricula teach racial and ethnic understanding. In 2021, she spoke before the Massachusetts State Legislature to champion mandatory public school genocide education. And in 2024, Cypress Books published her memoir, Becoming Janet, based on postwar notes her father wrote of her experiences. (After setting it down on paper, they never spoke of it again.)
“I’m very upset about what’s happening in the world and how much hatred there is toward Jews,” Applefield explains of her continued
motivation to speak out. “This Middle East situation and the Ukrainian war—it really triggers me and frightens me terribly.”
Having started out as the “pampered and spoiled first grandchild” of a well-to-do Krakow-area Jewish family, Applefield knows how quickly things can change. She remembers cooking for Jewish holidays alongside her mother and grandmother, and riding an uncle’s sidecar to the candy store. That life ended when the family was awakened on September 1, 1939, by sounds of the Nazi invasion.
Taking the identity of a dead Polish girl, she was handed over to a family friend. Applefield’s father was eventually arrested and selected for slave labor. Her mother and grandmother, unable to outrun the Gestapo, perished in a death camp.
Applefield sought shelter with var ious non-Jews, enduring beatings and Gestapo raids until she was able to escape to Ukraine. She was finally liberated back into a postwar Poland aflame with antisemitism, where hospitals wouldn’t treat Jews—she was crip pled by rickets—and her orphanage was repeatedly attacked by torch-bearing Polish horsemen.
Applefield was lucky to be reunited with her father by the resourceful orphanage director. But she shrank at first from the skel-
etal stranger and was reluctant to leave her fellow orphans. Father and daughter returned to their war-ravaged hometown, but it “had lost its life and color,” she recalls. And it remained unsafe: After several Jewish friends were murdered and her family was threatened, Applefield’s father began sleeping with a gun.
Two years later, her father secured a medical visa to the United States and hastily married a Jewish American acquaintance to gain permanent residency. While he started a hardware business in Newark, N.J., Applefield, then a teenager going by Janet, struggled to learn English and catch up on years of missed school.
She married while still in college, her abusive husband out of fear that family separation she was determined not
had a crazy life,” reflects Applefield,
“But you know, I
Janet Applefield with her father
MARION KREITH
‘Very scared for what may happen to us here.’
Born in weimar-era hamburg, Marion Kreith was a wartime refugee in Brussels, worked for several years as a teenager in Cuba’s diamond-polishing industry and came of age in Los Angeles. She has seen enough war, hatred and displacement to be “very scared for what may happen to us here,” says Kreith, referring to the rise of both antisemitism and populism in this country.
“But I’m more scared about what’s happening to Israel, because it was the creation of the State of Israel that gave Jews in the world a bit of standing for all those years. Now that feeling of safety is being fractured,” she says, referring to the recent wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Kreith, 97, was born to a secular German-speaking family, the Finkels, who owned a dry goods store. Her childhood was “physically very comfortable, but emotionally very scary,” Kreith recalls. By 1933, Jewish children were banned from public school and no longer allowed to play with non-Jewish friends. Walking outside, “you never knew if you were going to get stoned at or jeered at by German kids.”
Worried about supporting his family during the Depression, Kreith’s father opted against immigration to America. But after Kristallnacht in 1938, the family decamped to an uncle’s house in Brussels, where Kreith learned French in school. When the Nazis invaded in 1940—
“in the mornings, you heard them goose-stepping”—her father was taken away.
After discovering that her husband was in a camp in southern France, Kreith’s mother took Kreith and her sister to Antwerp and arranged covert passage to Marseille, where they survived for months on the only food available—tomatoes and onions—cooked on a hotel-room hot plate. Somehow, Kreith’s mother negotiated French exit visas, transit visas through civil war-ravaged Spain and Portugal and passage from Lisbon to Cuba for the whole family, including her father. They landed in Havana in 1941.
What the family anticipated as a brief stay in Cuba turned into a fiveyear wait after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor halted immigration into America. The burgeoning dia mond industry in Cuba sustained Kreith’s family as well as a gen eration of European refugees, who communicated in a mix of English, Flemish, Spanish, French, German and Yiddish.
After another uncle sponsored their pas sage to Atlantic City, N.J, in 1946, yet a third uncle offered them an apartment in Hollywood, Calif., where they settled.
At the age
of 24, Kreith married a fellow survivor, Frank Kreith—a Viennese Jew who had survived thanks to the Kindertransport children’s refugee program—and started a happy life together in Boulder, Colo. There, her husband became a college professor of mechanical engineering while she taught grade-school French. They had three children, to whom Kreith regretfully admits she didn’t speak enough about the Holocaust. In fact, she only recently started speaking about it at all—sharing her story with Boulder audiences after her daughter, Judy Kreith, made a documentary film about Jewish participation in Cuba’s diamond industry called Cuba’s Forgotten Jewels: A Haven in Havana.
Her reticence perhaps comes from a childhood “living with an awareness of otherness,” says Kreith, who has three grandchildren. “Jewishness is not really a part of our life. It is very strongly a part of my heart. But I suppose my German experience keeps me lying low at all times.”
Marion Kreith smiles next to her husband (far left); with friends at a diamond polishing factory in Cuba (bottom, right); and as a young girl in Hamburg, Germany.
MIRIAM SCHUPACHEVECI
‘History is repeating itself.’
The happiest years of Miriam Schupacheveci’s life were as a young wife and mother in Israel, rebuilding her life after the war. “Everybody was newcomers. We had nothing,” says Schupacheveci, recalling how she and other Holocaust refugees would pop in and out of each other’s Haifa apartments, their kids mingling while the adults drank coffee. “But it was a happy life.”
Israel, where one of her three children and four of her nine grandchildren still live, remains a touchstone for the 89-year-old Schupacheveci. The Jewish state felt like an extended fam ily, a balm after the Holocaust. Her suburban life in Philadelphia, where she has lived in the same house since resettling in the 1980s, “is very different,” she reflects. “But America was my husband’s dream from the day I married him.”
Born Marieta Markovic in Romania,
Miriam Schupacheveci (clockwise from bottom) holds her great-granddaughter, Kinsley; poses with her three children; with her husband on their wedding day; and with her mother.
Schupacheveci grew up in a small town near the Russian border, the only child of a shoe leather tanner and a mother whose pharmacist ambitions were derailed by antisemitism. One of Schupacheveci’s earliest memories, from January 1941, was the Nazi evacuation of local Jews to the nearby city of Iasi.
“The trains arrived full of people; they were suffocating,” she says. “My mother offered water at the station and got beaten by the Germans.”
Soon enough, Schupacheveci’s own family was part of that transport, living on bread and tea in a makeshift Iasi ghetto while her father was put to work at a factory making boots for German soldiers.
In 1944, her beloved father was killed while protecting Schupacheveci during an air raid. While still in Romania, “I used to say to my mother to take me to his grave every day,” she recalls.
Thirty years later, when she returned to her native country, “I
went straight to the grave.”
Though she doesn’t remember all the details, Schupacheveci says she and her mother survived the war moving between relatives’ houses, then marked time in Bucharest until securing passage to Haifa in 1950. In Israel, they reunited with her mother’s six siblings. She finished high school, married at 18—to a Polish Jew, Mordhai Schupacheveci, his family’s sole survivor—and became a knitwear designer.
It was a career she continued in Philadelphia, where she opened a yarn shop. Her husband became a shoe repairman, a kind of homage to the father-in-law he never knew.
Schupacheveci still volunteers at the kitchen of her local Jewish community center, serving patrons who are mostly refugees from the Soviet Union. Close by in New Jersey are two grown children and their families.
“I don’t leave a nice world for them. That’s my big problem,” reflects Schupacheveci, as the conversation turns to the wars Israel has been fighting and rising antisemitism. “History is repeating itself.”
At least “we have Israel behind us,” she adds. “As a Jew, if you don’t have Israel behind you, you cannot exist anywhere.”
Hilary Danailova writes about travel, culture, politics and lifestyle for numerous publications.
I Forgive a Country
German citizenship as an exercise in repair
By Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
The representative from the German consulate in Atlanta handed me a pen. As I held it over the documents that would restore German citizenship to my American family, I glanced at the black, red and yellow German flag a few feet away. For a moment, I imagined my Grandpa Fred as a 21year-old looking at the black, red and white Nazi flag as a young man in Munich—and deciding to run away from his homeland.
I signed with big, bold strokes, an act of defiance, yes, but also of forgiveness. This moment in January 2024 had begun seven months earlier, after I learned that Germany was offering
citizenship to descendants of German men and women who had relinquished their citizenship “voluntarily” —like my grandfather did in 1936 when he became a United States citizen. Prior to this opportunity, first offered in 2021, only Jews whose citizenship had been revoked by the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and their patrilineal descendants could apply.
Many friends have wondered why I would want German citizenship for myself and my two teenage children. Some guess that it is for the benefits that we stand to gain for school, work or international travel. Others assume I am seeking an escape hatch from political changes and/or rising antisemitism in the United States. While there may be numerous benefits from having dual citizenship, for me and others like me, the greatest gains may be internal.
Restoring German citizenship, I believe, offers Holocaust survivors and their descendants an opportunity to try to recover from past trauma and encourage spiritual growth. I see it as an act of reunion that might help return us, more healed, to the world.
Over two decades after it was recorded, I listened for the first time to an interview my Grandpa Fred— my father’s father—gave to the USC Shoah Foundation in 1997 in which he recounted a particularly cruel story. Just 20 years old in the spring of 1933, not long after Hitler was appointed chancellor, my grandfather had taken his watch to a Munich repair shop. As he was paying for the service, he realized the time piece was still broken. When my grandfather complained, he said that the owner “slapped me in the face and called me a dirty name.”
Grandpa Fred sought council from his father’s attorney, who simply shook his head and said, “There’s nothing you can do.”
Troubles mounted, and Grandpa Fred was forced to leave law school once Hitler rose to power. After losing ownership of what is now Löwenbraü brewery, my Great-GreatUncle Schülein, a man who had been a friend to a former king of Bavaria, said to my grandfather, “If I had to shovel coal in Hawaii, I would go!” Soon after, my grandfather and
The memorial plaque for the author’s great-grandparents, Sigwart and Hedwig Cahnmann
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor speaking at a ceremony at the Munich police station, the onetime home of her Krämer ancestors
his five siblings secured visas and split up, immigrating either to the United States, the United Kingdom or pre-state Israel. But the older generations did not leave. The Cahnmann, Schülein and Krämer elders died in ghettos, on trains or in camps. None who remained in Germany survived.
As a girl in des plaines, Ill., just outside of Chicago in the 1980s, I didn’t hear a lot from Grandpa Fred about his past. In fact, he didn’t talk to me much about anything when we visited his South Side home other than to call us to the Shabbat dinner table. Humming Hebrew prayers, he would wash his hands with a metal cup and bowl and bless wine in a silver cup— Judaica pieces that he’d brought from Germany that looked tarnished beyond normal wear, as if they’d been carried through torrential rains from a past I would never understand.
My Grandmother Harriet, the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants who was raised for many years in an American orphanage, spent most of her time in her kosher kitchen. From chicken soup to bundt cakes, we ate classic Ashkenazi foods, recited traditional prayers and rarely spoke about either grandparent’s griefs or fears.
My grandparents were the most Jewish people I knew, and they seemed proudest of my faraway cousins who lived in Israel and those who practiced Orthodox Judaism in New Jersey. When visiting Grandpa Fred, my greatest worry was that I would never be Jewish enough because I didn’t like attending my Reform synagogue’s Hebrew school and preferred to hang out with my Colombian, Persian, Irish, Greek, Italian and African-American friends rather than only other Jewish kids.
Instead of learning Hebrew, I stud-
ied the language that was available to me in public school: Spanish. Instead of studying abroad in Israel, I went to Mexico and Spain. I wanted to become fluent in America’s newest language of exile because it felt useful and relevant. It wasn’t lost on me that my immigrant grandfather arrived in the United States at age 21 with little English. And that when I was that same age, I was training to become an English-language teacher to Spanish speakers newly arrived in this country.
Could I ever be Jewish enough? That question burdened me throughout my childhood and, to some extent, even today in my interfaith marriage. It was something I was still wrestling with when Katharina Bergmann, a German doctoral student at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, emailed me in 2020 as she prepared to defend her dissertation. Bergmann’s academic focus concerned Jewish emigration narratives during the Third Reich and whether any Jew “freely chose” to leave Germany after 1932. She had been researching Munich Jewish families during the 1930s, including the Cahnmanns.
Around the same time, Munich had begun installing memorial
plaques at the homes of Germans killed during the Holocaust. The installations feature names and images of the victims engraved on gold-plated stainless steel and placed on an exterior wall of their lastknown residence, or on nearby sign posts with a gold-plated sleeve. Bergmann knew where the homes of my great-grandparents and great-aunt and great-uncle had stood and knew we qualified to have them commemorated. She offered to help me apply.
Idon’t think my grandfather, who passed away in 2001, could ever have imagined that, in June 2023, a dozen Cahnmann heirs would stand outside of his Aunt Clementine and Uncle Max Krämer’s home, which had been seized by the Gestapo for their own use, or that we’d hear a local police commissioner acknowledge wrongdoing: Ninety years ago, the SS leader Heinrich Himmler took over the Munich police—the darkest day in the history of the department. In only five weeks, as chief of police, he crippled the Munich police into a willing tool of the Nazi terror regime. The Munich police is aware of its responsibility to the past.
Cahnmann-Taylor (center) stands with cousin Sigal Sidorovich (left) and Aunt Helen Rovner.
After the first ceremony at my great-aunt and great-uncle’s home, we went to a second dedication in my great-grandparents’ Sophie-StehleStrasse neighborhood. A modern structure has replaced the home that stood at this address when my grandfather was a child.
Having bicycled there, I arrived at the cobblestone block thirsty and in need of a bathroom. Several neighbors clamored to attend to my needs. One quickly escorted me to his apartment and apologized for the tiny size of his water closet and the archaic pull chain used to flush the toilet. When I came back outside, another neighbor ushered me to a banquet table laden with food. She poured me a drink and urged me to fill a plate with treats prepared by residents.
A few neighbors had brought folding chairs for the ceremony, but there weren’t enough to go around. Surrounded by elders, I didn’t expect a chair, but a woman in her 70s insisted I take hers. I felt embarrassed and declined. Please, she said with her hands. Take it. I felt what she
AFTER MY FAMILY’S WARM RECEPTION IN MUNICH, AND
UPON BECOMING
A GERMAN CITIZEN, I EXPERIENCED A SENSE OF PEACE THAT COMES WHEN ONE FULLY ACCEPTS AN APOLOGY.
was really saying was, I am so very, very sorry.
How could I not forgive? Forgiveness is a little death or like anger losing its tarnish and restoring some of a good metal’s shine.
The plaques bearing the names and faces of my great-grandparents, Sigwart and Hedwig Cahnmann, will stand, I hope, for a very long time near the address where my grandfather spent his first two decades. The bright gold metal will surely fade, but on that June day it was new, and my relatives and I sparkled with pride next to it.
Daniel amman, an austrian journalist who has written a proposal for a book about my family titled The Cahnmann Saga: The Epic and Almost Lost Story of Jews in Germany, attended the ceremonies. He spoke about his research and shared his draft of a family tree of Cahnmanns who were and are German citizens. At the bottom were two of my cousins and their children whom he had added because, in 2022, they had received German renaturalization papers.
I became determined to add my name and my children’s names to that
The author’s grandparents, Fred and Harriet Cahnmann
The six Cahnmann siblings before Hitler’s rise to power
tree. Not long after my return from Munich, I applied for citizenship for myself and my children, Oren and Liya. (Spouses who are not also Holocaust descendants cannot apply.)
I also joined a Facebook group of “new German” Holocaust descendants that includes hundreds of the nearly 30,000 Jews who have successfully obtained German citizenship in recent years. I have learned how unusual it is that my application was processed in less than one year, which I suspect is because I used German on the application, rather than expecting my information to be translated. Presumably it helped that my cousins had previously gone through the process and that our family’s history was well documented. It is also remarkable to have my ancestors’ homes be among the first 200 recognized by the municipality in Munich, which is no doubt due to Bergmann’s efforts.
After my family’s warm reception in Munich, and upon becoming a German citizen, I experienced a sense of peace that comes when one fully accepts an apology. Seeking and giving forgiveness is built into Jewish religious practice. Every year at the High Holidays, we are commanded to seek teshuvah, which is often trans-
lated as “repentance” but also means “return.” Judaism commands us to both apologize and forgive so that the soul can scrub itself free, repair its brokenness and return to its original, unblemished self.
I sensed that in becoming a citizen of Germany, I was seeking this kind of return, one that would connect me to my grandfather, who during my childhood refused to speak German or even mention the country to me. In a small way, I wanted to forgive my grandfather for not sharing much about his life while he was alive. In a larger way, I wanted to forgive a country.
My husband, a descendant of Scottish immigrants to North Carolina, understands what a gift this new citizenship is to our family. We store the three “Bundesrepublik Deutschland” mossy green papers alongside our three newly acquired red European passports and four dark blue United States passports in our family safe.
I expect every year or so to take out these papers and marvel at them. I know the limits of such documents, yet I also know how meaningful this process has been to get them. As with many objects, the value is not in the thing itself but in the ways in which
we endow the papers, the heirlooms, the cemetery stones and the engraved posts with meaning.
After the dedication in front of my grandfather’s childhood home in Munich, my family visited the Jewish cemetery where my great-great-grandparents, who passed away before World War II, are buried. The Cahnmann name is still visible on their headstones, but several of the neighboring burial markers haven’t held up so well.
I was immediately moved to recite the Kaddish prayer. After so many years without mourners, my cousins, aunts, uncles, husband and I stood by the giant headstone of my grandfather’s grandmother and posed for a picture, resolute in the respect for our German Jewish heritage and in the determination to hold onto that part of us that Nazi atrocities—and Grandpa Fred’s reticence—could not erase.
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor is the Meigs professor at the University of Georgia and the author of six books, including, most recently, The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook. She lives in Athens, Ga., with her husband and two teenage children.
Cahnmann-Taylor (back right) joins her extended family on a visit to their ancestors’ graves in the Munich Jewish cemetery.
Anne Frank
She persists as both inspirational icon and lightning rod
By Ruth Franklin
The Enduring Mythology of M
ore than any other work of literature, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl helped the world comprehend the tragedy of the Holocaust. But in recent years, Anne’s name seems to be invoked more often in reference to forms of prejudice other than antisemitism. “Anne Frank today is a Syrian girl,” a New York Times columnist wrote during the refugee crisis of 2016. After the separation of families migrating to the United States made headlines during the first Trump administration, a director staged a version of the Broadway adaptation of the Diary using Latino actors.
Anne’s writing powerfully reminds us of the dangers inherent in any kind of ethnic, religious or racial hatred. But overgeneralizing this lesson risks implying that antisemitism is no longer a matter of concern, diminishing the special message her story bears about antisemitism’s enduringly destructive powers.
In the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, Jews glob-
ally have experienced the effects of anti-Jewish hatred in a way that many believed was not possible in the post-Holocaust world. The violence in November against Jewish soccer fans in Amsterdam, the city where Anne spent almost all of her life, was a particularly acute reminder of the relevance of her story.
In The Many Lives of Anne Frank, I argue that Anne’s transformation into an icon has obscured our view of who she really was—a German Jewish girl growing up in the Netherlands who became a victim of Nazi persecution. As we mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz this January, Anne’s diary merits revisiting—not just as an inspiring tale of a girl coming of age under unimaginable circumstances, but as a siren alerting us to the malevolent potential of antisemitism anywhere.
T hey congregaT e on T he plaza outside the entrance to Prinsengracht 263, beside a kiosk selling tickets for tours of Amsterdam and another offering traditional Dutch pancakes:
children with school groups, teenagers sulking beside their parents, college students on a backpacking adventure, older couples who have saved up for a long-awaited European vacation. They come to the Anne Frank House from just about everywhere: the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico; England, Wales, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine; Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Argentina; the Philippines, South Korea, Israel, Tunisia, Sierra Leone; Germany, so many from Germany.
Some take photos by the front door, striking a sexy or silly pose, and post the results on Instagram. If they happen to be there at the top of the hour, when the bells on the Westertoren clock, above the plaza, play their melancholy tune, they may look up in recognition, remembering how Anne wrote about that sound.
Many of them have come because of the Diary. They read it in school or on their own. They tried to picture Anne’s hiding place: the swinging
A mural of Anne Frank on Amsterdam’s Street Art Museum
bookcase, the steep stairs, the darkened rooms where she and her parents—together with the Van Pels family and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer— cooked and slept and studied and used the toilet and argued and listened to the radio and did everything that people do, never stepping outdoors, never seeing the sun.
The experience of visiting this space can be profoundly emotional. Many people comment on how much smaller it is than they expected. I first visited at age 8, after reading the Diary for the first time; little as I was, I found it impossibly cramped. Returning 40 years later, my body registered how rickety and steep the staircases were, set at such a narrow angle that I banged my knee while climbing up.
In 1952, after the Diary became a surprise best seller in the United States, Otto Frank, Anne’s father, found that tourists spontaneously appeared at Prinsengracht 263, which then still housed his business, wanting to see Anne’s “Secret Annex.” Otto used the proceeds from the enormously successful Broadway adaptation of the Diary and the movie version that followed to purchase and
restore the building. In 1960, the year it opened, 6,000 people came. Within 30 years, that number had climbed to 300,000 per year.
Along with London’s Madame Tussauds and the Louvre in Paris, the Anne Frank House is one of the most popular museums in Europe, admitting some 70 tourists every 15 minutes, from 9 in the morning until 10 at night every day, including Christmas and New Year’s. At least as much as her diary, this building represents Anne to the world—a living monument in her name. But in the decades since her death, Anne Frank herself has become not just a person, but a symbol: a secret door that opens into a kaleidoscope of meanings, most of which her legions of fans understand incompletely, if at all.
Anne’s chronicle of the period she spent in hiding, now with more than 30 million copies in print in 70 languages, is the most famous work of literature to arise from the Holocaust. Since it first appeared in the Netherlands more than 75 years ago, Anne has become an icon. Time magazine included her on a list of the most important people of the 20th century. An asteroid discovered in
1942, the year she went into hiding, has been named after her. The horse chestnut tree in the courtyard behind the building, which Anne loved to gaze at through the attic window, died in 2010, but its saplings live on at museums and memorials around the world, including Manhattan’s Ground Zero.
Her name is synonymous with courage, with resistance to persecution, with optimism. In Japan, it has also been used as a euphemism for a woman’s period. (Translated into Japanese in 1952, the Diary was one of the first books in that language explicitly to address menstruation.)
Anne’s face, smiling enigmatically from billboards worldwide and often accompanied by the most famous line from the Diary—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—has been compared to the Mona Lisa. Like that painting, her image evokes endless interpretations. Some see her as a little girl who dreamed of becoming a movie star and whose scribbled diary radiates goodness and hope. Others, including myself, have come to understand her as an accomplished and sophisticated writer—a self-conscious, literary witness to Nazi
The Voices Foundation Children’s Choir performing a choral work in London in 2001 commemorating the young diarist
persecution who revised the rough draft of her writings into a polished work of testimony after hearing a Dutch government minister’s radio address calling for documents of the war years.
At the same time, Anne has often been a lightning rod for controversy. Some contemporary Holocaust educators believe that by virtue of its extreme popularity as a text—often the only text—from which children learn about the Holocaust, the Diary has crowded out other, more representative stories.
Critics have attacked the Broadway play and the movie based on it for downplaying Anne’s Jewishness and emphasiz ing the humanism in her writing. The play implies that the Diary concludes with her reflections on people being “good at heart.” But Anne wrote the famous line in July 1944, setting it just before a bleak passage that imagines the world gradually being turned into a wilderness: “I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too.”
Athey are accessing a Holocaust story without forcing them to confront its brutal reality. Instead, Anne has become a “symbol of moral and intellectual convenience,” with her affirmation of humanity’s goodness allowing her to be seen as
for everyone. “Just like Anne wrote, we don’t have to wait, we can start to gradually change the world now, to fight for marginalized people and against the climate crisis,” a note from a visitor from Alaska reads.
Some address her directly: “Thank you for writing about things that are painful but must be remembered so it does not happen again.” Visitors from Israel often write the phrase Am Yisrael Chai—“the people of Israel live.” Someone else has written, in Arabic, “I truly feel sorry for what happened to Anne Frank and her family, but what the Jews (Zionists) are doing to the Palestinians is much worse.” Another puts it simply, if crassly: “Great experience RIP Anne Frank.”
nne’s name has been invoked in service of a bewildering range of political causes in the intervening decades, from the United States civil rights movement to the boycott campaign against Israel. Some have argued that all these interpretations and reinterpretations constitute a betrayal of Anne, crowding out the essential aspect of her identity, namely that of a Jew persecuted by Hitler. As the Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld has pointed out, the Diary—which, of course, does not chronicle Anne’s miserable death from typhus at Bergen-Belsen—allows readers to feel
an emblem of forgiveness and consolation rather than a tragic figure. It is precisely this chameleon-like quality that has made Anne’s story uniquely enduring. As demonstrated by the comments that visitors to the Anne Frank House leave in the guest books, there is truly something in it
If anne, as the journalist and historian Ian Buruma has written, has become “a ready-made icon for those who have turned the Holocaust into a kind of secular religion,” then her diary is akin to a saint’s relic: a text almost holy, not to be tampered with. This special aura around the Diary conflicts with the messiness of its reality as a text that exists in mul-
One of the many stamps from around the world that feature Anne
Tourists posing for photos in front of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam
tiple versions and was edited by Anne herself as well as by her father.
It’s simpler to imagine it as a child’s “found object,” as the Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch called it—“a work of art made by life itself”—than to grapple with what the published version of Anne’s diary really is: a carefully conceived work of testimony to the persecution of the Dutch Jews. Recognizing and respecting Anne’s intentions as an author is a crucial first step in reclaiming her as a human being rather than a symbol.
In The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, the critic and scholar Maria Tatar brilliantly rewrites Joseph Campbell’s myth of the hero’s journey by asking how that framework might change if the archetypes it was based on were female instead of male. She notes that women, historically deprived of the weapons that gave men power, sought strength in storytelling.
Tatar considers Anne Frank as an example of the war heroine rede fined, emphasizing Anne’s use of “words and stories not just as a therapeutic outlet for her self but also as a public platform for securing justice.” She insight fully notices the number of times Anne’s entries refer to acts of heroism in preserving “decency, integrity and hope” and credits her as a literary prodigy, putting her in the company of Mary Shelley, who wrote in her late teens.
But I’m also struck by the way Anne’s story re-enacts another myth ological archetype: the woman who defies silencing. Its roots are found in the Greek myth of Philomela, a princess who is raped by her sister’s hus
band, Tereus. As Ovid recounts in the Metamorphoses, Tereus cut out Philomela’s tongue to prevent her from telling anyone what he did to her; she then took revenge by weaving a tapestry that revealed his crimes.
Anne might have been silenced by the Gestapo officers who invaded the annex, arrested her and the other residents and scattered her papers on the floor. But her story was preserved—first by two of the “helpers” who supported the family in hiding and found her papers after the raid, and then by her father— and disseminated far and wide, almost miraculously, as an account of trauma and persecution.
This powerful mythological resonance helps to explain the indelible imprint of Anne’s diary. But it also contributes to the difficulty in seeing Anne as the agent of her story rather than the object, the actor rather than the
Anne Frank was not a helpless princess hidden away in an attic begging for rescue, but a brilliant young woman who seized control of her own narrative. Reimagining her that
way requires a willingness to reconsider not just the facts of her life but also the way we understand heroism, both in her time and in ours.
Join us on Thursday, February 20 at 7 PM ET as Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein hosts a discussion on the legacy of Anne Frank and her best-selling diary, which has been published in more than 70 languages. Panelists include author and biographer Ruth Franklin and Professor Doyle Stevick, executive director of the Anne Frank Center at the University of South Carolina and educational adviser to “Anne Frank: The Exhibition,” which opens in January at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan and recreates the annex where Anne and her family hid in Amsterdam. This program is free and open to all. To register, use this QR code or go to hadassahmagazine.org
A statue of Anne stands near the house where she and her family hid.
The queue to the Anne Frank House (right) often stretches down the block.
‘Sacred Work’
A
Hadassah forensic dentist identifies terrorists and their victims
|
By Wendy Elliman
Dr. esi sharon-sagie looked down at her beeping phone. Photographs focusing on the gaping mouth of a gray face had appeared, along with the question: “What do you think?”
“I didn’t have to think,” the dental expert recalled. “I knew. I knew the teeth in those photos as well as I know my own. I knew I was looking at Yahya Sinwar.”
That text from the Israel Police was sent on October 17, 2024, the first day of Sukkot, and there was, at that point, no DNA analysis of the man who had been confronted and shot by Israel Defense Forces soldiers. But Dr. Sharon-Sagie’s unequivocal identification of Sinwar, the Hamas terror leader, was sufficient for Israel to tell the world that a body found in the rubble of a Gaza building was likely that of the man who had planned and perpetrated the October 7 massacre a year earlier.
Dr. Sharon-Sagie, 50, recognized last summer by Forbes Israel magazine as one of the country’s leading medical practitioners, is an oral and facial reconstruction specialist at the Hadassah Medical Organization. In parallel, she has volunteered for the past 15 years with the Israel National
Police Division of Identification and Forensic Science. Today, she heads its dental section—26 of whose 62 members work at Hadassah’s Faculty of Dental Medicine
“Our core job is identifying victims and hostages, not terrorists,” she said. “But I felt very strongly that, one day, we may need to identify Sinwar. This [past] summer, I discussed this with the police, they agreed, and I began assembling a dental profile.”
She started with information from the Israel Prison Service, which had held Sinwar for the 22 years of the four life sentences that he had served for his abduction and murder of two IDF soldiers. “But it didn’t include dental records,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie recalled. “So I asked a dental specialist in my forensic unit, Ila Grosswald Meiri—like me, she works and teaches at Hadassah—to try and build those records. She did it that same day, finetoothcombing the records we had and collecting internet pictures of Sinwar.”
Reminded that Sinwar had undergone life-saving brain surgery at Israel’s Soroka Medical Center during his imprisonment, Dr. Sharon-Sagie obtained his 26-year-old medical records, including CT scans of his head, with the help of another Israel
Police forensic dental team colleague, Dr. Anna Pikovsky, who is on staff at Soroka.
While X-rays are usually necessary to show dental morphology in sufficient detail—the size, shape and distinguishing features of each tooth that are unique to each individual— Sinwar’s dentition was unusual. He showed his teeth when he spoke or smiled, which allowed Dr. Sharon-Sagie and her colleagues to pick out several distinguishing features: a gap between his two upper front teeth, one of which was slightly chipped; a lower left molar tilted away from its neighbor; and a lower right front tooth that grew above the level of his bite. As one irreverent online commentator put it, “Sinwar stole billions of dollars, but didn’t spend a penny of it on dental hygiene.”
“His face, dental and jaw structure were all fixed in my mind,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie said. “When the image arrived on my phone, I knew immediately what the soldiers in the field had known. Without hesitation, I confirmed Sinwar’s identity, signing off on it with forensic anthropologist Prof. Tzipi Kahana and Dr. Revital Hivert of Hadassah’s Faculty of Dental Medicine.”
If the doctor felt any sense of justice or gratification at seeing Sinwar dead, it lasted no more than seconds, crowded out by the omnipresent fear for Israel’s hostages and soldiers. “What I knew was that a monster was dead,” she said. “I’d seen for myself what he’d done. I’d worked days and nights to identify the men, women and children whose bodies had been so severely mutilated and burned on October 7 that only their teeth could tell us who they were.”
A forensic dentistry lecture when she was in her 30s had prompted Dr. Sharon-Sagie to train in this grim,
Dr. Esi Sharon-Sagie taking a break from her work at the identification center at the Shura military base near Ramle, in 2023
Dr. Sharon-Sagie (seated at the table, at left), an oral and facial reconstruction specialist, has volunteered with the Israel National Police Division of Identification and Forensic Science for the past 15 years. emotionally taxing field. Forensic dentists are consulted when teeth are the only way to identify a body.
One of Dr. Sharon-Sagie’s first challenges in the field was helping identify 44 people who burned to death in the Mount Carmel forest fire in December 2010. With her daughters Yael and Adi, then only 9 and 5 years old respectively, when she started out in forensic dentistry, Dr. Sharon-Sagie chose not to examine the bodies of children. Today, with Yael in dental school, Adi in military intelligence and her third child, Noa, in seventh grade, she has removed that self-imposed restriction.
The atrocities of october 7 and the months that followed have taken her and her colleagues into a different dimension. She and her husband, Tomer, had been about to take a morning run when the Hamas attacks began. The next day, she was called to an identification center hurriedly set up at the IDF’s Shura military base near Ramle in central Israel. Shura, which serves as the home of the IDF’s rabbinate, was until then one of the country’s quietest military outposts. She arrived to find trucks streaming in, filled with bodies from Gaza border communities, and anguished families overflowing a vast tent while they waited for news.
Inside, hundreds of body bags lay on trestles—“the sheer number was overwhelming,” she recalled—with volunteers checking that each contained both head and body. Quickly donning protective clothing, Dr. Sharon-Sagie emptied her mind of
everything but the work ahead.
That job was nonstop for the next three months, during which she took a temporary leave from her position at HMO.
“Identifying civilians, so mutilated that neither face nor gender is recognizable, can be very challenging,” she said. “Unlike soldiers, for whom the IDF keeps DNA, fingerprint and dental records, those of civilians are with private and public dentists and clinics countrywide. We worked around the clock to give heartbroken families answers, ensuring we made no errors. As of now, we’ve identified 166 people who were murdered either on October 7 or in captivity.”
Today, she is back at Hadassah, going to Shura only when called by the IDF or Israel Police for help identifying those killed in the conflict or bodies recovered in Gaza. Dr. SharonSagie’s team keeps complete files for each of the hostages still in captivity—“their smiles, their dental records, their CT scans,” she said.
One great support through this horrific year, she explained, has been her team. “I work with wonderful people who give not only their time and their skills, but their very lives to this work,” she said.
Another is HMO. Dr. Sharon-Sagie was born at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem, earned all her academic degrees there, including her Doctor of Medicine in Dentistry, and it is where she did her postgraduate study in prosthodontics and specialization in maxillofacial rehabilitation. She now heads the Hadassah dental faculty’s postgraduate prosthodontics program.
“Because my team and I are attached to the police, not the army, we weren’t officially reservists when the war began,” she said. “Even though we were at Shura 24/7, we were classed as ‘volunteers’ and not, therefore, entitled to our civilian salaries”—a situation that has since been redressed. “But Hadassah decided that, for them, we were reservists and kept us on full pay without pressuring us to return to work until we could.” She is indelibly marked by what she has seen and experienced since October 7. “What sustains me,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie said, “is my family, my colleagues, the support provided by the police, and the privilege of being qualified to do this sacred work.”
Wendy Elliman is a British-born science writer who has lived in Israel for more than five decades.
HADASSAH ON CALL
Decode today’s developments in health and medicine, from new treatments to tips on staying healthy, with the Hadassah On Call: New Frontiers in Medicine podcast. In each episode, journalist Maayan Hoffman, a third-generation Hadassah member, interviews one of the Hadassah Medical Organization’s top doctors, nurses or medical innovators. Catch up on recent episodes, including conversations with infectious disease expert Dr. Jacob Strahilevitz on the changing landscape of infectious diseases, and with Dr. Hovav Nechushtan, head of the Genomic Oncology Service, about the signs and risks of lung cancer. Subscribe and share your comments at hadassah. org/hadassahoncall or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Pride in Our Commitments
Awareness, education and a celebration of the land
Hadassah Brings Israeli Teens to Poland
Sobs, hugs and pledges of “Never Again” dominated the talk among the 150 students who took part in a Hadassah-sponsored mission to Poland in November. The 11th and 12th graders came from Hadassah Neurim and Meir Shfeyah Youth Aliyah Villages, both supported by Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, as
well as three additional youth villages and a Jerusalem high school.
This was the first Hadassah-sponsored youth mission to Poland in five years. On the weeklong trip, students visited, among other sights, the Majdanek and Treblinka concentration camps as well as cities and towns with storied Jewish pasts, such as Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin.
A MEANINGFUL MOMENT AT MEIR SHFEYAH
Mazal tov to hadassah Magazine Chair Ellen Hershkin! In November, the former Hadassah national president was in Israel for the dedication of the renovated Ellen Hershkin Therapeutic Center at the Meir Shfeyah Youth Aliyah Village—a welcoming environment where students can meet with social workers and therapists. Accompanying Hershkin to the event was her daughter, Lisa Hershkin Roth (above right, with her mom), who herself is a social worker. The honor was in recognition of Hershkin’s decades of service and advocacy for Hadassah.
Hadassah Neurim students and staff at Treblinka (top) and at Rakowicki cemetery
A Certified, Creative Hadassah Superstar
Harriet binder’s leadership in Hadassah Needham is a 60-plusyear story of devoted service during which the 99-year-old held the positions of treasurer, vice president and president, among others. It has been in her role as chair of cards and certificates, however, that Binder has made her most significant contribution to the suburban Boston chapter. Ten years ago, she launched a Mother’s Day initiative that has raised approximately $500,000 through the annual sale of artistic, elegant paper certificates for the May holiday. Originally supported in her efforts by her late husband, Milton, Binder now enlists her daughter, Karen, and
RESULTS OF HADASSAH’S ANTISEMITISM SURVEY
“When I go to shul I don’t sit by the door. I sit away from it and have a plan of escape.”
“I was physically attacked at a rally, and my Israeli flag was stolen and burnt in front of me.”
Those harrowing accounts are taken from Hadassah’s new report, From Fear to Resilience: Women Facing Antisemitism , which shares these and other stories of how Jewish women are experiencing antisemitism in their everyday lives. Women have been isolated
ZIONISM…DID YOU KNOW
and excluded by so-called friends. Customers have abandoned their businesses. Their children are being harassed at school. Many feel reluctant to show symbols of their faith publicly. A reported 62 percent feel unsafe; 52 percent hide being Jewish; 33 percent have experienced hate speech; and 22 percent have been excluded from groups or events. At the same time, respondents say they are resolved to fight back against hatred.
Read the Hadassah report (available at go.hadassah.org/womensstories ) to learn how this rising hate is impacting Jewish women every day.
Tu B’Shevat, often referred to as the new year for trees and which begins this year on January 24, is a minor agricultural holiday that today encompasses a focus on ecology and environmentalism for many Jews. In honor of Tu B’Shevat, here’s a list of natural symbols that have become synonymous with the State of Israel and its people.
• Seven species are mentioned in the Torah and eaten at the Tu B’Shevat seder, which is based on kabbalistic tradition. They are wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates.
• The official seal of Israel features olive branches flanking a seven-armed menorah. The design was chosen in a 1948 competition by graphic design ers who also designed stamps and currency notes. In 2021, the olive tree was elected the national tree.
• In 2013, the anemone coronaria, or the red poppy anemone, was elected the national flower. Known as calanit in Hebrew, the red flower blankets fields in southern Israel, including near the border with Gaza, and has become a memorial symbol of the October 7 Hamas attacks.
• In the Negev and Sinai deserts, the most common tree is the acacia.
• Almond trees are among the first tress to bloom each year in Israel, and their nuts are tradi tionally eaten at a Tu B’Shevat seder.
• The Jaffa orange was the best-known export crop in the early days of the State of Israel, reaching its peak in the 1970s. But it is the sabra, or prickly pear, that is the national fruit— and of course the beloved moniker of native-born Israelis.
• Rosemary, a fragrant, drought-tolerant herb native to the region, is planted at the gravesite of Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold on the Mount of Olives. If you visit, you can take a sprig home with you.
NOW YOU KNOW…MORE ABOUT THE NATURAL SYMBOLS OF ISRAEL
Harriet Binder
Passport Zionism
‘Voluntours’ bring devoted travelers to Israel
By Rahel Musleah
At the site of the nova music festival in southern Israel, where Hamas murdered 401 people and abducted 44, I met an Israel Defense Forces reserve soldier named Tzvi, who was on a brief leave from serving in Gaza.
“Each time before I go in and when I go out, I try to come here,” he said. “This is a holy site for me. I come here to remind myself why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
My encounter with Tzvi was one of countless profound experiences during a five-day Melton Travel solidarity mission in June 2024, followed by a week on my own in Jerusalem. I hadn’t been to Israel in 10 years—I have been busy with my own Jewish India tour company—but after October 7, I felt an intense yearning to return.
During that first week, I listened to the harrowing testimony of survivors, visited memorials and volunteered with my hands and heart. I prepared salad and barbecue at Shuva Achim, a refreshment stop for soldiers near the Gaza border; helped build upcy-
cled furniture for displaced families; and volunteered at a vineyard and a hydroponic lettuce farm whose foreign and Israeli workers had left.
This type of tourism—dubbed “voluntourism”—has brought visitors to Israel during this crisis, when typically jam-packed tourist sights
before the pandemic slowed tourism for several years. Most international airlines have suspended flights to Israel, so even getting there has become much harder.
For my week in jerusalem, where I had lived for a year from 1979 to 1980 and visited numerous times since, I booked an Airbnb situated on the edge of the Mahane Yehuda shuk. On Friday, the market was crowded, but on my daily visits, the aisles were easy to negotiate. I delighted in the irre-
Mahane Yehuda in Jerusalem
The author met with soldiers at Shuva Achim, near the Gaza border.
TOURISTS ON A MISSION
wafting from Marzipan, the legendary bakery. At other stalls, merchants proffered slivers cut from tall domes of flavored halvah and sips of teas with floral, herbal and spice infusions.
The Kotel, lit up so that it glowed against the dark night, still thronged with visitors, but only a handful of tourists walked up and down an eerily quiet Ben Yehuda Street. None of the usually rollicking entertainers were present; instead, an enthusiastic Korean singing group made up of students from Hebrew University serenaded the few passersby.
Jerusalem’s whimsical doors, windows and gates had enticed me to wander its alleys many years ago, photographing relentlessly. My obsession continued on this trip. In the Nachlaot and Yemin Moshe neighborhoods, every corner revealed entrances and shutters painted in brilliant teal and turquoise, vivid indigo, forest green and unexpected lavender.
I visited three new cultural institutions. The Tower of David Museum, reopened in June 2023 with a permanent exhibition spanning 10 galleries, provided an archeological perspective on the history of the city, a 360-degree view of Jerusalem and plenty of opportunities for exploring the citadel’s ramparts. Just down
A number of travel operators and organizations have pivoted since October 7 to run trips to Israel that offer volunteer agricultural experiences, visits to memorial sites in the Gaza border region such as the Nova festival grounds, hands-on construction work and interactions with prominent Israelis, locals and soldiers, among other activities. Some of those operators are Melton Travel, Livnot U’Lehibanot: To Build and Be Built, the Jewish National Fund, Authentic Israel and Taglit Birthright through its Israel Onward Volunteer Program. Other distinct experiences include:
• Hadassah has sent multiple delegations to Israel since October 7 and plans to do so again in February with its “Israel in Full Bloom Tu B’Shevat & Darom Adom” itinerary. Hadassah trips include visits to Hadassah Medical Organization facilities.
• The Emergency Volunteer Project (EVP) in conjunction with the Israel Defense Forces arranges six- or 11-day programs providing IDF front-line units with fresh food, including falafel, burgers, schnitzel and salads. Volunteers train in EVP food preparation, receive dog tags and uniforms and meet with soldiers.
• Leket Israel gives volunteers the chance to pick fruits and vegetables to help Israeli farmers who were drafted into the reserves or lost their workers after October 7.
• Second Line is a program for mental health professionals formed in the aftermath of October 7 in collaboration with the Israel Ministry of Health and the Israel Trauma Coalition and supported by the Jewish Federations of North America and Birthright. In the Direct Care program, volunteers spend six weeks to three months working with Israelis suffering from anxiety or trauma. Remote-care and longer-term programs are also available.
• Sar-El: The National Program for Volunteering in Israel organizes volunteers to help on IDF bases, including through its special tracks for parents of Lone Soldiers and its new first aid-focused partnership with Magen David Adom.
• Ruach Tova pairs volunteers looking for one-time experiences as well as longer-term commitments with organizations dedicated to helping the needy, children or the elderly, or working on behalf of the environment or animals in need.
• Skilled Volunteers for Israel , a longtime group that connects retirees with volunteer opportunities, maintains an online listing of Israeli organizations actively recruiting help (skillvolunteerisrael.org/israel-volunteerdirectory) .
• Join the Sword of Iron-Israel Volunteer Opportunities group on Facebook to search up-to-the-minute postings of businesses and groups throughout Israel in need of volunteers.
Farmhands Rahel Musleah volunteered at a hydroponic lettuce farm (above); Hadassah mission-goers helped out and enjoyed a meal at Shvil HaSalat Farm.
the road, I was the solitary visitor to the Edward and Helen Mardigian Museum of Armenian Art and Culture. I was horrified to learn how little I knew about the Armenian genocide of 1915.
And at the new home of the National Library of Israel, I pored over priceless manuscripts, including the only surviving copy of the first Haggadah ever printed—in Spain in 1482—and Naomi Shemer’s handwritten notes for her classic song, “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav.”
Brief conversations with Israelis that might otherwise have felt mundane or perfunctory moved me deeply. Everyone answered my questions openly and honestly, inviting me to their homes—if not on this visit, then the next one—and expressing gratitude that I was there.
The pre-Shabbat Israeli dancing I remembered in the city center no longer took place, but arriving in the afternoon for a Shabbat dinner at a cousin’s apartment, I suddenly heard music outside. I ran downstairs to check out what I thought was a children’s birthday party in a play area. It turned out to be a neighborhood Kabbalat Shabbat for young families, with a guitarist singing popular Israeli songs, a potluck meal and dancing. I joined in the singing, entranced by the normalization of Shabbat.
Speaking Hebrew again filled my
heart with love for this language unparalleled in its spiritual power, biblical resonance and contemporary inventiveness. Months later, I have left Waze programmed to talk to me in Hebrew, guiding me to turn yamina, right, or smolah, left.
On my last day in israel, i tucked a box of cookies and a container of cut-up veggies into my bag and took a bus to the new Gandel Rehabilitation Center at Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus to visit wounded soldiers. I knocked gingerly on open doors, worried about what I would find, but the soldiers welcomed me.
Dvir was wounded in Gaza while covering the windows of a house in
which his unit was preparing to rest. Sniper fire penetrated his stomach and colon. “How are your spirits?” I asked in Hebrew. He responded with a simple, “O.K. Much better than before.”
These were different windows and doors than the vibrant ones I had sought out. I thought back to a simple wooden door I had photographed, enhanced with a verse from the Book of Samuel that has become a blessing for the home: “V’ata shalom, u’vetcha shalom, v’chol asher l’cha shalom.”
You are peace, your home is peace and everything you have is peace.
Rahel Musleah leads in-person and virtual tours of Jewish India and other cultural events. To learn more, visit ExploreJewishIndia.com
Hadassah mission participants surveyed the destruction in Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
The Kotel, still lively at night
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Jeremy Salamon’s Hungarian Mashups
Culinary curiosity inherited from grandmothers | By Adeena Sussman
Growing up in florida, Jeremy Salamon was never far from a good meal or great conversation thanks to his two Jewish grandmothers, Agi Salamon and Arlene Ackerman.
“Both of my grandmothers are ladies who lunch, ladies who entertain and ladies who fill up a freezer,” he writes in the introduction to Second Generation: Hungarian and Jewish Classics Reimagined for the Modern Table, his
Jeremy Salamon and his semolina soup dumplings (above) and chicken paprikash (opposite page)
Radish Soup & Semolina Dumplings
Serves 4
FOR THE DUMPLINGS
1 cup semolina flour
2 tablespoons u nsalted butter
1 large egg
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 quart vegetable stock FOR THE SOUP
1 tablespoon canola oil
5 celery stalks, finely diced
1 medium yellow onion, finely diced Kosher salt
mashup cookbook released in September.
Living in Boca Raton near his grandmothers meant that Salamon spent Friday nights at Grandma Agi’s or Nana Arlene’s with their extended circles of family and friends. Though Nana Arlene’s roots are Sephardi, she more often would serve traditional Ashkenazi dishes like brisket and chopped liver, and Grandma Agi clung to Hungarian classics, including chicken paprikash, goulash and dumplings known as nokedli.
“We would sit around, the grandmas would share gossip, and to me that was the Jewish experience—a room with family, eating and talking for hours and hours,” Salamon, 30, said in an interview from his home in Brooklyn, where he had a rare day off from Agi’s Counter, the Hungarian-inspired restaurant he owns and
operates in the same New York City borough.
So formative was his grandmothers’ influence that without their maneuvering, Salamon’s parents never would have met. Arlene and Howie Ackerman, Salamon’s maternal grandparents, ran a family pharmacy in a strip mall in Florida. Nana Arlene befriended Grandma Agi, who, along with her husband, Salamon’s grandfather Papa Steve, ran the dry cleaners next door. The two women set up Salamon’s parents, who are now divorced.
“I probably knew they were Holocaust survivors before I knew they were Jewish,” Salamon said about Grandma Agi, who survived the war in the Budapest ghetto, and Papa Steve, a Czech Holocaust survivor. “Though Agi didn’t talk much about
12 radishes, le aves and radish separated TO PLATE
Flak y sea salt and freshly ground pepper
Extra-virgin olive oil
MAKE THE DUMPLINGS
Bring 2 cups water to a boil in a small saucepan over medium heat. Slowly whisk in the semolina flour. It should become thick very quickly. Continue to cook for 2 minutes and use a wooden spoon to stir constantly. Remove from the heat and whisk in the butter, egg and salt until fully incorporated. Once the semolina mixture is cool enough to handle, use a 3-tablespoon cookie scoop
to scoop dumplings. Don’t worry about rolling them smooth; the jagged texture is ideal. Set on a rimmed baking sheet and continue scooping until you’ve used up all the dough, about 16 dumplings.
Meanwhile, bring the stock to a simmer in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat. Working in two batches, carefully lower the dumplings into the stock and let simmer for about 6 minutes, until they float to the surface. Use a wide slotted spoon or spider strainer to divide the dumplings among shallow bowls. Save the stock for the next step.
MAKE THE SOUP
Heat the canola oil in a medium
skillet over medium heat. When the oil shimmers, add the celery, onion and a big pinch of kosher salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the veggies are translucent but not taking on any color, about 5 minutes. Scrape the veggies into the stock and bring to a boil over medium heat. Meanwhile, use a mandoline or sharp knife to thinly slice the radishes into small rounds. Add the radish greens to the soup and stir until they just start to wilt. Stir the radish rounds into the soup.
TO PLATE
Remove the pot from the heat and ladle the soup over the dumplings. Garnish with flaky salt and plenty of pepper, followed by a drizzle of olive oil.
her childhood enduring the horrors of war, Papa Steve did. He wanted us to know about it.”
Grandma Agi’s story remained a mystery to Salamon until he began exploring his roots in his teens, inspired by his growing interest in all things cooking. He started asking questions, and many of his grandmother’s answers—about being forced into the ghetto as a child, and in 1956, escaping to Austria during the violent 12-day Hungarian revolution—came out over plates of fresh palascinta, Hungarian crepes that she would make and top with everything from farmer’s cheese and apricot jam to raspberries and hot fudge.
Salamon’s curiosity about the culinary industry led him to work in restaurant kitchens at an early age. His first job, at a local country club at age 12, involved scooping ice cream into hundreds of goblets for banquets. Eventually, he worked his way up to line cook before departing for the Culinary Institute of America in New York.
After graduation, he worked at well-known New York City restaurants, including Locanda Verde
Good Ol’-Fashioned Chicken Paprikash
Serves 4
3 to 4 pounds bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 1/4 cup canola oil
2 medium yellow onions, halved and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 tabl espoon smoked paprika
and Prune, before becoming executive chef at The Eddy at age 24. A brief, unfulfilling foray to Los Angeles in 2020 drove him back to New York City, where he became increasingly convinced that there was room for a modern Hungarian-influ enced restaurant.
“When people think about Hun garian food, they’re right, it can sometimes be heavy and brown,” Salomon said. “But there is a whole other side to it that is colorful and driven by nostalgia and history.”
He opened Agi’s Counter in Brooklyn in 2021. There, Nana Arlene’s chopped liver and Grandma Agi’s palascinta feature frequently on the menu alongside modern interpretations of nokedli dumplings, now slathered in Italian cacio e pepe sauce or made from semolina and added to warming bowls of brothy radish soup.
grandson finds time to visit his grandmothers (his grandfathers have passed away). Grandma Agi still resides in Florida and is sadly living with dementia. Nana Arlene moved to Georgia to be closer to family.
Praise followed, with The New Yorker lauding Salamon’s “impeccable pastries and exceptionally thoughtful dishes.” Bon Appetit added Agi’s Counter to its Best New Restaurants list in 2022 and this year, Salamon was nominated for a prestigious James Beard Award.
1 tablespoon hot paprika
2 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup dairy-free sour cream
1. Spread out the thighs on a large plate or tray and pat dry with paper towels. Season on both sides with 1 tablespoon salt.
2. Heat the canola oil in a large skillet over medium heat. When the oil shimmers, add the chicken and cook for 4 minutes on each side until golden brown. You’re
“Both of these women and their food helped me get closer to my history,” Salamon said, “and understand my own story.”
Adeena Sussman lives in Tel Aviv. She is the author of Shabbat: Recipes and Rituals from My Kitchen to Yours and Sababa: Fresh, Sunny Flavors from My Israeli Kitchen. Sign up for her newsletter at adeenasussman. substack.com
not looking to fully cook the chicken here, just getting some color on it. Transfer the chicken back to the plate.
3. Add the onions to the skillet and cook for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring frequently, until soft and starting to caramelize. Add the tomato paste and stir until the onions are fully coated and the paste begins to stick to the skillet, about 2 minutes. Stir in both paprikas and toast for 5 seconds, until very fragrant. Immediately pour in the stock and stir to scrape
up any browned bits on the bottom of the pot. Nestle the chicken back in the skillet. Bring the liquid to a boil, then reduce to a low simmer. Cook for 30 to 45 minutes, until the chicken is tender and cooked through. Remove from the heat. Taste for seasoning and adjust if needed.
4. Vigorously whisk the sour cream in a small bowl until it’s light and airy. Dollop over the chicken or serve on the side. Serve the chicken paprikash directly from the skillet
Threads of a Life
A fabric artist on her ‘patchwork’ career and new exhibit
By Louise Silk
Twice each week, i make my way from my loft in Pittsburgh’s Southside to the Heinz History Center in the Strip District. I show the guard my ID badge with the words “Exhibiting Artist,” walk to the fourth floor and sit at my worktable set inside “Louise Silk: A Patchwork Life.” The show is a retrospective of my long career as a quiltmaker and fabric artist.
The exhibition includes archival images, videos and my worktable, which is situated in a scaled-down replica of my studio and surrounded by pieces from my decades of work.
To my left is a section on the SilkDenim fashion label, a collaboration with my daughter, Sarah, that uses recycled materials in objects, artwork and clothing. On display there is a figure made entirely out of denim zippers that represents the Archangel Michael, who, according to midrash,
was an angelic advocate for the Jewish people. Directly ahead of me is the brightly colored Yesh quilt, made of T-shirt remnants. To my right is the growing The Witness Quilt, an interactive part of the exhibition that includes over 1,000 patches embroidered with “wisdoms”—folk sayings, Jewish phrases and feminist thoughts—set on a large, curving 8-by-14-foot frame. At my right is also the exhibition entrance, where I can observe visitors’ first reactions.
Behind me, completing my 360degree perspective, is a wall-sized 20-minute looping video of me working in my home studio.
The seed of this retrospective began during the Covid-19 pandemic. Acknowledging my age and fearful for my own future,
Bubbe Wisdoms Patches with sayings and phrases (left) become part of an interactive art project at the exhibition; Silk’s ‘Self Portrait’ (center) and ‘Through the Generations’ were created through intricate French knot embroidery.
produce work that would bring my career to a purposeful conclusion on my 80th birthday, six years from now.
I began by embroidering 14 flags, designing a kimono and a quilt and writing a book, titled A Patchwork Life. All the projects were connected to the idea of tying significant events during my lifetime to my needlework—and to the phrase, “a patchwork life.” Each of the flags, for example, includes one of the 14 letters in the phrase as well as a theme and an associated Hebrew word.
The flag with a “P,” a raised red fist and the Hebrew word gevurah, for strength, references the power of sisterhood and the feminist movement as well as my own trajectory, which began in the 1970s with a women’s consciousness-raising group.
As part of my 10-year plan, I contacted Eric Lidji, director of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz Center and proposed the possibility of using my quilts in some kind of exhibition.
We ended up writing a formal proposal and, after two-plus years, the exhibition opened this past September, the first at the center to be curated by the Rauh archives.
The vision for how to
The artist and ‘The Witness Quilt’
stage the exhibition came together during a studio tour of my loft, when the group from the Heinz center realized they could reproduce my process by piecing together an exhibition as if it itself were a patchwork quilt.
The Witness Quilt, the centerpiece of the exhibition, embodies the major themes of my life—exploring the fluid boundaries between craft and art, highlighting quilting’s interactive aspects and integrating elements of Jewish cultural expression into the broader fabric of American life. It is meant to demonstrate the ben efits of community engagement, creating rituals and making memories using cloth. And the numerical value of the Hebrew word for witness, eid, adds up to 74, my current age.
For the project, I initially produced 1,152 patches made from recycled fabric, each with sayings I had collected and heard over my lifetime—“do a mitz vah,” “now and again slow down” and many others. Throughout the run of the exhibition, volunteers from the Patchwork Life Stitching Circle work with me to add patches to the quilt. Visitors to the exhibit also participate, bringing their own swatches of fabric or joining the stitching circle. As of now, The Witness Quilt features over 1,300 patches.
but the white fab ric underlayer upon which the patches were hung.
Engaging with visitors is the most rewarding aspect of the retro spective for me. I have met former students, distant relatives, old mentors, long-lost friends, dedicated quilters, want-to-be quilters, historians, sports fans and tourists—each of them sharing life encounters relevant to quilting and fabric art. In a conversation with art students, I had the opportunity to explain why one of my pieces on display, The Home Coming, a miniature appliqué diptych created in the 1980s, was pivotal to my life’s story.
Beginning in February, we will dismantle the quilt patch by patch, giving away some 25 a day to visitors. By the close of the exhibition in early April, nothing will remain
On the left side of the diptych, Russians dressed in drab browns and grays stand in a bread line. On the right, colorfully dressed Jews dance the hora. In all my previous pieces, I had kept my Judaism and my quilting separate, but since I was involved at the time as an activist with the Soviet Jewry movement, I began wondering about the possibilities of using Jewish content in my quilts.
This piece was my first attempt, transforming all my work since.
Some visiting stitchers expressed amazement at the complexity of my
French knot embroidery portraits, including Through the Generations, which depicts 16 members of my extended family. I explained that I use these tiny knots as a meditation and an entry point to explore my family’s history and heritage. Experiencing each knot as a part of a meditative practice, valuing the long process over the actual product, gives me the time and space to form deep ancestral bonds.
A group of older women, seeing my book BubbeWisdom on display, wanted to understand how and why I came up with the title. I explained that I took the name “bubbe” after my first grandchild was born, wanting to transform the old-fashioned image of the stay-at-home bubbe into that of a modern, accomplished older woman. The book itself is a selection of writings about quilting in connection to my 2015 exhibition of the same name at the American Jewish Museum at the Jewish Community Center of Pittsburgh and posts from my ongoing BubbeWisdom blog. This proactive reframing of the term “bubbe meises,” which means old wives’ tales or superstitions in Yiddish, encourages family members to follow the wisdom of their elders.
As a Heinz center staff member pointed out to me, what the viewer sees and relates to in the exhibition is the emphasis on process over product—the importance of being flexible in the flow of life and navigating its challenges and milestones to achieve an enlightened whole.
Louise Silk is an artist living and working on Pittsburgh’s South Side (silkquilt.com).
The brightly colored ‘Yesh’ quilt
The Archangel Michael, depicted through denim zippers
A Family Saga in Several Spaces
A book, an exhibit, a mural and a mysterious box
By Alexandra Lapkin Schwank
When linda ambrus
Broenniman opened the battered cardboard box she had received from her sister, it started her years-long research into her Jewish roots. The box, filled with black-and-white photographs, letters and documents in Hungarian and German, was one of the few items that survived a devastating 2011 fire that had claimed their mother’s life, injured their father and damaged their parents’ home in Buffalo, N.Y.
“My quest for the truth about my family began at that moment,” Broenniman writes in The Politzer Saga, her 2023 book chronicling her family history.
The book wasn’t the only creative pursuit begun at that moment. Broenniman’s research has also led to a permanent exhibition at a magnificent restored synagogue in Budapest. And last May, a mural with an image of her mother was unveiled in Buffalo, pointing to another aspect of her family’s story.
The box had been hidden in her parents’ attic for decades. In addition to records of her father and other relatives, it contained a composition book with the words “Our Family
Tree” on the cover—a handwritten account by Broenniman’s paternal great-great-uncle, Hungarian journalist Zsigmond Politzer.
It also held answers to questions, Broenniman explained in an interview, that she had been asking her parents, Drs. Julian and Clara Ambrus, for years. She and her six siblings were raised Catholic. Growing up, they knew little of their Hungarian-born parents’ pasts, other than their immigration to the United States in 1949.
Through a chance remark by her sister’s godmother in the late 1980s, when Broenniman was 27, she found out that her father was born Jewish. Though Broenniman sought more details, her father deflected her questions, maintaining a web of silence around his life in Hungary.
Among the information her parents had kept from her: Julian was a descendant of a storied Jewish Hungarian family; he had escaped from a Nazi labor camp; and Clara
had hidden him during World War II.
“Discovering my Jewish heritage has been a profound gift, and I feel deeply honored and proud to be a part of this rich lineage,” she said, adding, “While I hold immense respect for Judaism and its traditions, I’ve realized that my spiritual path lies outside of organized religion.”
Her parents were young medical school students in Budapest and engaged to be married when the Nazis occupied Hungary. Through research, Broenniman found out that her father, who already had converted to Catholicism, was taken to a forced labor camp in the spring of 1944. After his escape, he returned to Budapest and reunited with Clara. Then only 19, she helped hide a group of around 20 Jews, including Julian and his mother, in an abandoned factory, where they spent the remaining months of the war.
Broenniman only discovered her mother’s heroism in 2006 when Clara was honored as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. One of the women she had saved from the Nazis had recommended her for the distinction.
Her father gave the acceptance speech at the ceremony at Yad Vashem for his wife, who by that time was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Even in his speech, he omitted that he had been one of those with Jewish heritage whom she had saved.
After the ceremony, Broenniman recalled, she once again approached her parents with questions about their past. Her
Linda Ambrus Broenniman
A mural with Dr. Clara Ambrus (right) and two other Buffalo residents who saved Jews during the Holocaust is at the city’s Roswell Park hospital complex.
father still refused to answer, and her mother could no longer respond. In a moment of clarity, however, she told her daughter that there had been a box with documents that held answers.
Using the information found in the box and with the help of Andras Gyekiczki, a Hungarian sociologist and genealogist, Broenniman traced her Hungarian Jewish lineage through the Politzers, back eight generations to the 1700s. They learned of her accomplished ancestors, including physician Adam Politzer, who was considered a trailblazer in the field of otology and had treated Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and King Leopold II of Belgium, and celebrated lawyer Ignacz Misner, founder of the Budapest Bar Association, who had tried to save his family from the Nazis but died in the Budapest ghetto.
“When I began learning not only about my ancestors, but what my father had gone through, I started to understand him,” Broenniman said. “I think he faced such trauma and never really dealt with it,” she added of her father, who passed away in 2020. “I think I can forgive him for that.”
Before Gyekiczki also passed away in 2020, he connected Broenniman with the Rumbach Street Synagogue,
located in Budapest’s historic old town. Her ancestor journalist Zsigmond Politzer was a member and had purchased permanent seats at the synagogue. Built in 1872 in the Moorish Revival style, the building was damaged during World War II but later restored and reopened in 2021 as a cultural and religious center.
As part of its reopening, the synagogue had sought a family story that could reflect the complex history of Hungarian Jewry for a multimedia exhibition space on the third floor— and Gyekiczki had wondered if the Politzers might be a good fit.
“The Politzer Saga,” the institution’s new permanent exhibit, features 10 short films—featuring archival clips, animation and contemporary interviews—and other displays that explore Hungarian Jewish life beginning in the 18th century through the life of the Politzers. One of the films tells the story of Eisik, the earliest ancestor to whom Broenniman was able to trace her Jewish lineage, a violinist from a village called Politz who had to flee religious persecu-
tion. Eisik’s son, Moishe, became a doctor to Hungarian aristocrats and had 10 children.
“Here were the people who were so incredible and had such traumatic experiences,” Broenniman said. “And I felt they had died twice. In their natural lives and because their names were hidden.”
Meanwhile, with the May 2024 unveiling of the mural in Buffalo, public recognition of her mother’s heroism is on display, thanks to the Righteous Among the Nations Global Mural Project
under the aegis of Artists4Israel. The mural, painted by Hungarian street artist TakerOne, adorns a building in the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center hospital complex and features black-and-white portraits of Clara and two other Hungarian non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust. All three had immigrated to the United States and made their home in Buffalo.
“We believe that by celebrating the heroism of those who stood up against antisemitism, we not only honor those heroes but create a model for behavior in the face of Jew hatred,” Craig Dershowitz, CEO of Artists4Israel, said. “We were proud to partner with the community in Buffalo to bring this project to their wonderful city and to share with hundreds of people a day a story about how we can protect Jewish lives even in the face of danger.”
Alexandra Lapkin Schwank is a freelance writer for several Jewish publications. She lives with her family in the Boston area.
STEP INTO THE ANNEX
“Anne Frank: The Exhibition,” opening on January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, will showcase for the first time outside Amsterdam a full-scale recreation of the annex. Visitors will journey through Anne’s story, from her early childhood in Frankfurt to her family’s relocation to Amsterdam and the events leading to her tragic death. Learn more at hadassahmagazine.org/arts.
The restored Rumbach Street Synagogue includes a display on the Politzers.
SUPPORTING IDF SOLDIERS AND FAMILIES IN TIMES OF NEED
Since the outbreak of war in Israel, Yad Sarah volunteers have been working tirelessly to support over one million individuals in Israel – both soldiers and civilians – impacted by the conflict.
20-year-old IDF soldier, Noam Bert, was shot in the left leg – the bullet missing his bone by a centimeter – and doctors told him that he would eventually be able to walk again, with time and rehabilitation.
Shortly after his injury, Noam wanted to join his fellow soldiers for the traditional IDF training graduation ceremony at Masada, and Yad Sarah helped to make it possible. Rather than taking the cable car, Noam – with the assistance of his fellow soldiers and Yad Sarah crutches – did the traditional hike up the mountain to receive his unit beret and recite the IDF oath.
With more than 7,000 volunteers and 127 branches throughout Israel, Yad Sarah is here to support IDF soldiers and all the people of Israel. JOIN US – SUPPORT
Noam Bert IDF soldier, Yad Sarah client
Photo: Dror Farkash
Across Florida's "Horse Capital of World"
Heed These Words
Heed These Words
By Jonathan Schmalzbach
ACROSS
The Beresheet Hotel in Mizpe Ramon has a luxury one these
Alpine transport
1. Florida’s “Horse Capital of the World”
80s-'90s Mets pitcher nicknamed "Dr. K"
Party animal?
6. The Beresheet Hotel in Mitzpe Ramon has a luxury one of these
42. Aegean region
44. Haim Saban’s Rgrs, briefly
46. Widows in a card game
49. Sutra
9. Alpine transport
"That used to be something __" ("Guys and Dolls" lyric)
Marriage, for one
13. ‘80s-’90s Mets pitcher nicknamed “Dr. K”
Back up again
14. Party animal?
Blockhead
A valley in Wales
Like some candles
15. “That used to be something of ” (“Guys and Dolls” lyric)
It contains the quote "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart"
17. Marriage, for one
19. Back up again
20. Blockhead
Height: prefix
21. A valley in Wales
Tail: prefix ___ v. Wade
22. Like some candles
___ Kopelman, former Chanel president and father of "Odd Mom Out" Jill Kargman
Quote from 77-across, Part
23. It contains the quote “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart”
27. Height: prefix
French possessive
29. Tail: prefix
Wipe out, in skateboard
30. ___ v. Wade
slang
Wee bit
Mouth, in slang
Aegean region
Haim Saban's ___ Rgrs,
briefly
31. Kopelman, former Chanel president and father of “Odd Mom Out” Jill Kargman
Widows in a card game
32. Quote from 77-across, Part I
___ Sutra
37. French possessive
Half a laugh
38. Wipe out, in skateboard slang
Ceremonial citron for Sukkot
39. Wee bit
40. Mouth, in slang
___ Hulka ("Stripes" role)
Quote Part 2
Rhydderch __ (Britannic
51. Half a laugh
53. Ceremonial citron for Sukkot
55. Hulka (“Stripes” role)
58. Quote Part 2
61. Rhydderch (Britannic king of the seventh century)
63. 1936 candidate Landon
64. Stop dime
65. Big tub
65. Big tub
66. End of quote
66. End of quote
71. Inhuman
71. Inhuman
72. Clock standard: abbr.
72. Clock standard: abbr.
DOWN
1. Haunted house sound
6. Like some lingerie
18. “Yeah, right!”
22. shooting
7. Ballpoint, e.g.
2. Stack up against
8. Army member
3. Don Draper and Roger Sterling
52. Huge, to Hugo
45. ___ gestae
54. Acquire
24. Like some vows
25. A dry puff or breath
47. Crosses rough terrain
55. Name of a well dug by Isaac
48. NYU's Tisch school, briefly 50. Be of use
26. “As if!”
56. “The Hell” (Rodin sculpture)
73. Incarcerated '60s Black Power advocate ___ Brown
73. Incarcerated ‘60s Black Power advocate Brown
76. "Envy: ___ Deadly Sins Story" (2021 film)
76. “Envy: Deadly Sins Story” (2021 film)
77. Holocaust survivor, chronicler and author of the quote
80. "Ars Poetica" poet
81. White wine aperitif
77. Holocaust survivor, chronicler and author of the quote
82. Mean and nasty
80. “Ars Poetica” poet
83. Bogus
81. White wine aperitif
82. Mean and nasty
84. Moray, e.g.
83. Bogus
85. An unsuccessful streaming comedy venture from Comcast
84. Moray, e.g.
85. An unsuccessful streaming venture from Comcast
1. Haunted house sound 2. Stack up against 3. Don Draper and Roger
4. “Fantasy Island” prop
9. In a corner 10. Sarajevo setting
27. Absorbed, as a cost
11. Online gaming images
5. Diamond center of Europe
12. Dreamy state
28. tea
33. Farm call
13. 7, for 14 and 35: abbr.
6. Like some lingerie
15. Parentheses, e.g.
7. Ballpoint, e.g.
8. Army member
52. Huge, to Hugo 54. Acquire
57. Mosaic piece
59. “The Lord of the Rings” figure
34. Spring runner
55. Name of a well dug by Isaac
35. Surgery sites, for short
16. Adds a new layer of henna
9. In a corner
18. "Yeah, right!"
10. Sarajevo setting
22. ___ shooting
11. Online gaming images
24. Like some vows
60. Boxing combos
56. 'The ___ Hell' (Rodin sculpture)
36. Bronze that’s not winning an award for authenticity?
41. Flight
43. “Yo te ”
25. A dry puff or breath
12. Dreamy state
26. "As if!"
13. 7, for 14 and 35: abbr.
15. Parentheses, e.g.
45. gestae
27. Absorbed, as a cost 28. ___ tea
. Farm call
16. Adds a new layer of henna
62. Lithuanian Jew
57. Mosaic piece
67. Bridget Fonda, to Jane
68. Hamlet, e.g.
59. "The Lord of the Rings" figure
60. Boxing combos
69. Emo-inspired Gen Z aesthetic
70. Oak: Fr.
62. Lithuanian Jew
74. Sleek, for short
67. Bridget Fonda, to Jane
47. Crosses rough terrain
75. Paper towel word
68. Hamlet, e.g.
48. NYU’s Tisch school, briefly
50. Be of use
. Spring runner 35. Surgery sites, for short
that's not winning
69. Emo-inspired Gen Z
77. Barely get, with “out”
78. Fib
70. Oak: Fr.
79. Wrath
74. Sleek, for short 75. Paper towel word
Unraveling Anti-Zionism
Something has shifted in America and around the world
By Bryan Schwartzman
Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist,” bellowed a man whose face was almost entirely covered by a mask on a packed New York City subway car as it pulled into the 14th Street-Union Square station. A menacing group, almost all hiding beneath masks and interspersed among crowded passengers, repeated the chant, as if under some demonic spell. “O.K., no Zionists,” the apparent leader continued. “We’re good.”
I grew up in Queens and had the good fortune to attend school with kids born in, or whose parents were from, countries such as Ecuador, Pakistan, China, the Philippines and Nigeria. I was never excluded because I was a Jew, never asked by classmates about anything related to Israel. And riding the subway is practically a New Yorker’s birthright (though I once had my wallet picked from my pocket). Of all the incidents of Jews being targeted over the past decade, and especially since October 7, none got me shaking my head in disbelief quite like this story, reported widely last June.
Something fundamental has shifted in America and around the world. It’s less comfortable and safe for Jews—and certainly any Jew who affirms Israel’s right to exist.
How did it get this bad? Why do people hate Israel? How can they
accuse Jews of supporting genocide and colonialism? Is anti-Zionism automatically antisemitism, and does it matter? What happened to the world we thought we knew and what can we possibly do about it?
Even prior to October 7, explaining antisemitism had, sadly, become something of a book subgenre, with notable works including Deborah E. Lipstadt’s Antisemitism Here and Now, Bari Weiss’s How to Fight Antisemitism and Dara Horn’s provocatively titled wake-up call, People Love Dead Jews.
Add to this mix a slew of new works, including On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (W.W. Norton) by Adam Kirsch, literary editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Old Hatred and What to Do About It (Constable) by Jake Wallis Simmons, editor of The Jewish Chronicle.
What these two books have in common is a focus on irrational hatred of Israel and its role in antisemitism’s resurgence. Though the white nationalist far right is mentioned and correctly identified as a menace, both set their sights on the progressive left, with very different results.
Kirsch, formerly of The New Republic, has written with erudition
and clarity on a range of subjects, including the Talmud and the future of artificial intelligence. With On Settler Colonialism,
Kirsch has given us a work we didn’t know we needed, making a compelling case that understanding the ideology of settler colonialism is key to unpacking the antipathy toward Israel and Jews. In a little more than 150 pages, he guides the reader through a college course’s worth of material on African postcolonial history, Australian politics and American campus culture.
As Kirsch explains, settler colonialism started out in the 1960s as a somewhat obscure academic theory to help predict the fate of newly independent nations around the world. Yet over time it has become less an academic theory to explain the past and more a political ideology. Colonialism wasn’t just something tragic that happened in the past, resulting in the eradication of countless native peoples, it is ongoing, argues the theory. In this view, America and Australia remain settler colonial states and all non-native peoples are settler colonialists to this day.
“What is distinctive about the ideology of settler colonialism is that it proposes a new syllogism: If settlement is a genocidal invasion and invasion is an ongoing structure, not a completed event, then everything (and perhaps everyone) that sustains a settler colonial society today is also genocidal,” Kirsch writes.
As Kirsch describes it, the true aim of those who subscribe to the settler colonialism ideology is the unattainable goal of dismantling long-established countries like the United States and Australia and
returning those lands to native peoples. While banishing hundreds of millions of non-indigenous Americans might be science fiction, evicting eight million Jewish Israelis from the Holy Land seems much more feasible.
Kirsch makes a clear and convincing argument that Israel, faults and all, is neither a colonial nor genocidal nation.
Among his arguments against the accusation of colonialism is rather than expanding to fill a continent and displacing the native population, as in North America, the Jewish immigrants remained within a relatively small geographic area. “The language, culture, and religion of the Arab peoples remain overwhelmingly dominant in the region,” he writes.
Indeed, for Israel to fit the worldview of settler colonialist ideology, the definitions of colonialism and genocide have to be altered, he explains. Thus, Israel can be accused of committing both.
Those who might dismiss this as the argument of a right-leaning ideologue might be surprised to encounter an impassioned and compelling plea for a two-state solution. Perfect justice, Kirsch writes, would allow both Israelis and Palestinians full control of the land. Since that’s impossible, the two-state solution represents imperfect justice. “The tragedy of Israel-Palestine is that it is harder to imagine the humane futures than the cruel ones,” he writes.
The book manages to stay on track because it adheres to a narrow focus—explaining the harm caused by a particular worldview. The reader won’t find much on how current settler colonialist philosophy connects to traditional antisemitism or critical race theory—which has been an obsessive focus of the right. And what to do about it, other than think
more clearly. This isn’t the book for mapping out a strategy.
As convincing as his argument is, I still have trouble with the idea that every expression of de-colonialism is inherently pernicious. We’ve seen examples of writers, artists, even chefs taking inspiration from the concept of de-colonialism. For example, chef and author Sean Sherman, who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, has turned his restaurant Owamni into a Minneapolis hot spot, making dishes without any ingredients introduced to North America by Europeans, including dairy, sugar cane and black pepper.
Kirsch also finds Native American land acknowledgement—public statements recognizing that an event or institution might be transpiring or sit on land once inhabited by indigenous people who once lived in an area— troubling. He writes that, at best, they are disingenuous and, at worst, a mock call for the destruction of the United States. But there must be some way different groups can negotiate this terrain from a place of understanding, as opposed to a zerosum game.
Israelophobia is a very different book, more explicitly partisan in tone, less aimed to convince than fortify. Simmons’s central thesis is nothing we haven’t read before but remains important to restate: Israel is uniquely demonized among all nations; such demonization is rooted, consciously or unconsciously, in antisemitism; and Jews in the Diaspora are targeted as a result. He sets out to prove this by piling on example after example.
There’s certainly value in reading the details of incidents that many in the United States might not have known before, especially in Simmons’s
native Britain. Simmons offers the most detailed account I’ve read about Soviet propaganda efforts to discredit Israel and Zionism, which began in the 1940s and continued through the 1990s, and how much the former Soviet Union’s talking points are used today by opponents of Israel.
Here’s how Simmons describes his title, no doubt a riff on Islamophobia: “Israelophobia is a form of antisemitism that fixates on the Jewish state, rather than the Jewish race or religion. It cloaks old bigoted tropes in the new language of anti-racism and presents hatred as virtue. It rests on propaganda that was invented by the Nazis and Soviets; and as a political rather than racial phenomenon, it can more easily recruit small numbers of like-minded Jews.”
ONE BOOK, ONE HADASSAH
Join us on Sunday, January 26 at 3:30 PM ET for a special in-person and Zoom
One Book, One Hadassah event in West Palm Beach, Fla., as acclaimed author and journalist Margalit Fox talks with Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein about Fox’s book The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss (see review, page 46). To register, use the QR code here or go to hadassahmagazine.org.
The Oxford dictionary defines phobia as “an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.”
Does this match what Simmons describes? An aversion, maybe, but a fear? Simmons spends little time explaining Israelophobia, a term that seems more designed to stoke outrage than clarify reality.
Readers looking for an alternative term would be better served reading Jonathan Karp’s “Anti-Israelism” essay in the winter 2024 issue of the Jewish Review of Books. Karp writes that anti-Israelism “is a sweeping judgment of an entire people, country, state, and culture that we would not tolerate if it were directed at anyone else.”
“What to do about it” is right in Simmons’s title, and here is where the book falls short. Instead of focusing on strengthening Jewish identity, building alliances with other groups or behind-the-scenes political advocacy, he offers rhetorical comebacks to criticisms of Israel in verbal conversations or online encounters.
At the end of reading both books, I found myself torn between wanting to consult more books in search of solutions and feeling like fighting hatred is such an uphill climb I might as well read about more uplifting subjects.
When I first explored Israel and Zionism in my early 20s, I didn’t see myself as retreating from my multicultural New York experience. Rather, perhaps naively, I thought that with a stronger connection to the world’s lone Jewish state, I’d have a deeper identity to share with my neighbors of other backgrounds. Today, that feels like a distant, impossible dream, as renouncing Zionism is now the only possible ticket into many cultural spaces.
Yet, as Theodor Herzl, someone with more than a passing connection
to Zionism, once said, “If you will it, it is no dream.”
Bryan Schwartzman is a writer living outside Philadelphia.
NONFICTION
The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American OrganizedCrime Boss By Margalit Fox (Random House)
No, the “talented” Fredericka Mandelbaum was not a performer or entertainer. Rather, this imposing (6-foot, 300-pound) owner of a storefront on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the post-Civil War years was the doyenne of a multifaceted, sharply diversified criminal enterprise that has never quite been duplicated.
In the hands of Margalit Fox, a former editor and reporter at The New York Times, “Marm” Mandelbaum, as she was known by all, emerges larger than life as a polished businesswoman—New York’s first female crime figure—plying an illegal retail business selling stolen merchandise at bargain prices. In other words, a fence.
In her extensively researched book, Fox examines Marm’s career in great detail, from her early forays as a seller of contraband to congenial neighbors to her generous philanthropy and devotion to her synagogue. She was a member of the upper echelons of New York City society in the Gilded Age, when rogues, power brokers and Tammany Hall fixers actively pursued careers in questionable activities.
She befriended—and bribed— elected officials as well as many police officers. She taught her coteries of shoplifters how to dress to blend in with a crowd, whether impersonating a janitor or pretending to shop at a jewelry store.
In addition to providing shelter in
her house for members of her gang, she had warehouses all over the country to contain the silks, diamonds, engravings and government securities and bonds that came through her hands.
Over a 30-year career, this German-born Jewish woman enjoyed a career in Manhattan’s Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) neighborhood, bringing a level of professionalism to her moneymaking efforts and carefully evading the clutches of the police and those who sought to subvert her efforts.
Her life in the United States started as a rather typical immigrant story. In 1850, as an impoverished 24-year-old, she traveled to New York via steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of the Lower East Side. So did her husband, the father of their four children. Just 30 years later, as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods ($300 million in today’s money) had passed through Marm’s “modest” dry goods store. She prevailed, Fox writes, despite being “marginalized three times over: immigrant, woman and Jew.”
To function among the hoi polloi, Marm gave elaborate, legendary picnics and dinner parties. Invitations to her soirées were highly prized by criminals and law enforcement alike. Although she lived above the dry goods store, she often wore voluminous silk gowns and festooned herself with diamonds—earrings, necklaces, brooches, bracelets and rings. It was estimated that she sometimes wore $40,000 worth of jewels a day— about $1.3 million now.
Her crime enterprise came to a sto-
‘Marm’ Mandelbaum
ried end when she was arrested at the behest of a zealous district attorney.
At her funeral, there was, perhaps, an appropriate homage to her extraordinary life. “It was reported afterward,” Fox writes, that “some mourners picked the pockets of others. Whether they did so in tribute to their fallen leader or simply from occupational reflex is unrecorded.”
—Stewart Kampel
Stewart Kampel was a longtime editor at The New York Times.
Not From Here: The Song of America
By Leah Lax (Pegasus Books)
Houston author and librettist Leah Lax was commissioned to write a libretto of immigrant stories for The Refuge, an opera that debuted with the Houston Grand Opera in November 2007. As part of her research, Lax spent a year interviewing 123 immigrants—both documented and undocumented—living in greater Houston. Now, she presents six of those stories in Not From Here: The Song of America, accounts that humanize and illuminate the various immigrant experiences in the United States.
The newcomers profiled range from those who escaped violence in their home countries to those who came to the United States for economic or social opportunities. Yet all of them share a common hope: to start fresh and achieve their versions of the American dream. Woven into these narratives are stories from Lax’s personal and family histories, creating a unique hybrid memoir.
Lax skillfully distills the complex narratives of her interviewees’ journeys to the United States. She instructed them to begin their stories with these direct words: “I was born…”
ON YOUR SHELF: NEW STORIES OF THE HOLOCAUST EVEN AFTER 80 YEARS, AN OUTPOURING OF TITLES
By Sandee Brawarsky
Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz By Menachem Z. Rosensaft (Ben Yehuda Press)
Menachem Rosensaft’s 150 soulful poems, set in the style of the Book of Psalms, reflect on events of the Holocaust and the possibility of belief in its wake. The son of survivors, Rosensaft imagines in some of the poems the voice of his older brother, who was murdered by the Nazis. Burning Psalms doesn’t offer comfort, but rather questions and rebukes. In the book’s coda, Rosensaft, a lawyer who teaches about genocide, includes poems addressing contemporary tragedies, including the 1995 genocide of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica and the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.
Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis By Debórah Dwork (W.W. Norton)
These are five courageous, inspiring stories of Americans—including Quakers, Unitarians and Jews, several of them women—who worked behind the scenes in Europe and China to save lives, often acting clandestinely and taking great risks to achieve their goals. Historian Debórah Dwork raises timely questions about current policy toward refugees and asylum seekers. She is the author of several noted books on the Holocaust and director of CUNY’s Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity.
The Survivor: How I Made It Through Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter By Josef Lewkowicz with Michael Calvin (Harper Horizon)
The memoirist is a 97-year-old survivor of the Shoah. Josef Lewkowicz, born in Dzialoszyce, Poland, was sent to six different concentration camps over three years; his entire extended family was murdered by the Nazis. Surviving against all odds, he later served as a United States Army intelligence officer searching postwar for Nazis in hiding. His harrowing
memories are layered with the positive outlook and resilience he achieved in later years. “Choose life. Choose goodness,” he writes.
Paris Undercover: A Wartime Story of Courage, Friendship, and Betrayal By Matthew Goodman (Ballantine Books)
Matthew Goodman uncovers the complete story behind Paris-Underground , a 1943 best seller and film full of untruths about two unlikely heroes, Etta Shiber and Kate Bonnefous—the first an American Jew and the other an Englishwoman, both in their 50s—who did pioneering work for the French Resistance in Paris. Among their accomplishments was establishing a network of routes and safe houses to help escapees. Both were caught by the Gestapo and jailed, but survived—and never spoke to each other again. The corrected true story is one of courage and a painful legacy.
Two Sisters: Betrayal, Love, and Resistance in Wartime France
By Rosie Whitehouse (Union Square & Co.)
Rosie Whitehouse’s mother-in-law, Huguette Müller, and Müller’s sister, Marion, managed to survive in Vichy France with the help of a non-Jewish doctor, Frédéric Pétri, in a small village in the French Alps. In winter 1943, after their mother was taken to Auschwitz, where she was murdered, one of the sisters broke her leg as they were escaping. The doctor risked his life and that of his family to heal and help them. Whitehouse, a London journalist, learned details of the sisters’ dangerous journey as well as facts about complicity in the village, and ultimately succeeded in having the doctor recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations.
Sandee Brawarsky is a longtime columnist in the Jewish book world as well as an award-winning journalist, editor and author of several books, most recently of 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.
The resulting chapters are their own chrysalises, featuring tales that transform the teller, writer and reader.
Known for her previous book, Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home, a memoir about living for three decades in the Lubavitch community in Brooklyn while a closeted lesbian, Lax is a magnificent storyteller. She infuses her narrative with empathy as she intersperses the stories of these immigrants with her own family’s story of immigration as well as her immersion in Hasidic life as a teenager.
Lax opens Not From Here with Luisa’s story—a young woman who fled sexual violence and death threats in El Salvador. Luisa (a pseudonym) and a friend had reached Mexico, but the latter was too ill to continue the
journey. Two frightening scenarios played out in Luisa’s mind: She could turn back or put her fate in the hands of a greedy trafficker to enter Texas.
After a harrowing journey, Luisa eventually reached Houston and since then has played a nerve-wracking game of hide-and-seek with the “migra,” Spanish slang for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Lax informs readers that she ended Luisa’s section of the libretto “on the great rising assertion of her words: ‘If they send me back, I will start again, because now I know how.’ ”
Lax documents Soviet Jewish immigration by returning to the ultraOrthodox Brooklyn community she once called home to interview Manya, a refugee from what is now Ukraine. In sharing Manya’s story,
Lax spotlights the early years of the Soviet Jewry movement, noting that when the Soviet oppression of Jews ended in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the result was historic Jewish migrations to Israel and the United States.
Lax learns that Manya had to intuit as a child that she was Jewish. Indeed, Manya shares that she was sternly instructed never to mention her father using Yiddish words or that her grandmother baked matzah, since the Soviet government explicitly forbade holding a Passover seder.
Manya’s description of persecution brings Lax to utter a quiet prayer, her first in years: “Oh, let this work, this opera, this book, be a seder—a
sumptuous meal shaped by memory, celebrating American freedom. Let our freedom be bright.”
Long after finishing Not From Here, readers will ponder Lax’s observation: “What are we without our stories?” Lax has written a beautiful book that offers complicated yet resonant answers to one of the most prominent issues in the United States today. And as the singers in the opera’s plaintive finale proclaim, “We are you. Our stories are your stories.”
—Judy Bolton-Fasman
Judy Bolton-Fasman is the author of Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets.
Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses
By Jennifer Lang (Vine Leaves Press)
In Landed, Jennifer Lang, a less-thanenthusiastic participant in her own aliyah in 2011, takes readers on a heartfelt journey to embrace her adopted home and navigate her cross-cultural marriage.
During a brief trip to Israel in 1989, Lang met the love of her life, an Orthodox Frenchman whose dream was to live in Israel. Lang, a secular American Jew, had no such intention. Over two decades, they move back and forth—between Israel, France, the United States and, finally, back to Israel—a total of eight times. Lang also explores her struggles to feel rooted while maintaining her sanity and her marriage in her previous book, Places We Left Behind.
Landed is the continuation of her story, covering not only her seven years back in the Jewish state but earlier parts of her life as well. The memoir, a finalist for a 2024 American Writing Award, is structured in grammatically experimental mini-chapters that merge prose and poetry with occasional illustrations.
“It's a mesmerizing tale of love, female friendship, and heroism.”
—LISA SCOTTOLINE, #1 bestselling author
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To preserve the privacy of her family members, Lang does not refer to any by name. Mari stands in for her husband, and she uses Son, Daughter 1 and Daughter 2 for her children, while her brother, who is ultra-Orthodox, is represented by a black box.
Lang also intersperses her narrative with insights drawn from her yoga practice.
In one instance, she recalls that Rob—her first yoga instructor—said that, when balanced, our relationship with our surroundings is serene and we experience a sense of calmness and peace with the world around us. When imbalanced, however, we strive for control and authority, obsess over minute details and see life through a pro/con lens, thereby losing sight of the whole picture.
A key theme in Landed is Lang’s exploration of her Jewish identity within Israeli culture. While she describes her struggles with traditions, she occasionally surprises
herself. In one chapter, she regrets her decision to spend Rosh Hashanah in Jerusalem, but nevertheless during services she feels “a surprising rush of connection…to my roots: Reform movement, Camp Swig, …Eyes closed, I listen.
Not because I relate to the hymn or comprehend its words but because I feel something…. Something lost, aching to be found.”
Eventually, Lang begins to find the peace she’s been seeking. On a trip to Haifa, she realizes that she’s been trapped by overfocusing on her own story and has created a personal “prison cell.” Only by breaking free of these patterns can she thrive in Israel. And thrive she does—becoming a yoga and writing teacher and supporting her children as they become young adults and join the Israel
Defense Forces. On the last day of one of her daughter’s army service, Lang overhears her daughter being showered with praise by her commanding officer and friends, which to Lang reinforces the decision to return to Israel.
Occasionally, the need to completely break free resurfaces. She describes spending a seder night with a French friend at an Indonesian restaurant in Amsterdam, and in the process feeling liberated from the restrictions of marriage, Israel and Judaism.
Lang’s prose is both candid and engaging. Landed shows that the journey to belonging is not just about finding a place, but also about discovering and accepting one’s true self.
—Julie Zuckerman
Julie Zuckerman, an American Israeli writer, is the author of The Book of Jeremiah and the founder of Literary Modiin, a monthly author series connecting readers and writers of Jewish fiction, memoir and poetry.
FICTION
We Would Never By Tova Mirvis (Avid Reader Press)
“I watch the video in the middle of the night,” begins Tova Mirvis’s new novel, as Hailey Marcus Gelman watches online coverage of a woman being interrogated about the murder of her husband. When the woman admits that they had been in the middle of a contentious divorce, the police officer questions her alibi. The officer then asks if she knows anyone who might have tried to help her harm him. “No one I know would ever do something so awful,” she insists.
Hailey closes her laptop, thinking, “It’s impossible to believe that the
woman on the screen is me.”
Nevertheless, it is her husband, Jonah Gelman, a novelist and professor, who has been shot in his upstate New York home. Five months later, Hailey is revisiting the crime from Bangor, Maine, where she and her young daughter, Maya, shelter with her brother Adam, the Marcus family outcast.
The novel shifts between the story of Hailey and Jonah’s deteriorating marriage and the months since the murder. In alternating chapters, Mirvis explores members of Hailey’s close-knit family: her mother, Sherry— is she domineering or just loving?; her father, Solomon—the family patriarch and a successful dermatologist now sidelined with Parkinson’s;
and her protective oldest brother, Nate—a dermatologist in business with his father who still yearns to be appreciated.
Hailey’s family hovers over her bitter and drawn-out divorce negotiations. She wants to move to Florida with Maya to be near her family, but Jonah refuses, threatening to dredge up the mysterious scandal that caused Adam’s estrangement. Sherry, meanwhile, is desperate to protect her family’s privacy and free her daughter from the grasp of a man she sees as hateful.
Mirvis drops enough hints to keep readers guessing. When Sherry bemoans that Jonah will torment Hailey forever, Nate says, “You should kill him.” Is he joking? And why does Hailey feel a need to confess? Then there are the sketchy characters connected to Nate and Solomon’s dermatology practice, including office manager Tara, her boyfriend, Kevin, and his brother Sam. Would any of them be willing to kill for money?
Yet the book is more than a whodunnit. Mirvis’s characters are multidimensional, wrestling with doubts and guilt, not just about murder, but also about a lifetime of questionable choices.
According to an interview in Pub-
After years of archaeological research and biblical studies, award-winning author Maggie Anton has created a historical novel filled with adventure, warfare, and romance, true to both Torah and to history.
Just in time for Passover and Women’s History month, Maggie Anton, the award-winning author of Rashi’s Daughters, will release THE MIDWIVES' ESCAPE: From Egypt to Jericho (Paperback Original; $17.95; ISBN 978-0976305088; pub date March 4, 2025), a tour de force centered around two strong female characters. It’s about mothers and daughters, love and loss, and the true meaning of freedom.
“It takes creativity, imagination, and originality — not to mention skill — to fashion a story set in between the lines of the Bible’s story. Maggie Anton possesses all of these and has produced an inviting tale.” —Richard Elliott Friedman, author of Who Wrote the Bible? and The Exodus
“A fascinating fictional account of the journey from Egypt to the promised land from the perspective of two Egyptian midwives. Anton envisions vividly the daily life, crafts, and skills required for survival in the wilderness.”
Rachel Adler, author of Engendering Judaism
Guide to Jewish Literature
Also available online with purchasing links. Go to hadassahmagazine.org and click on Guide to Jewish Literature.
Clara’s seCret
Stephan R. Frenkel
This critically acclaimed bestseller presents the captivating story of Clara Prinz, a remarkable woman forced to leave her native Berlin in 1939. As Clara traveled alone on a voyage into the unknown, she turned to memories of her adolescence during La Belle Époque –the Beautiful Era filled with optimism and cultural transformation at the dawn of the twentieth century. Through Clara’s chance encounters with notable personalities of the period, Clara’s Secret weaves an unforgettable tapestry of personal and historic events. Clara’s Secret is ultimately a compelling story of the advancement of humankind and the survival of its decline.
Available on Amazon and www.laevnotes.com.
the G irls of J erusalem and other stories
Marsha Lee Berkman
From the opening vignette in which a photograph is a silent witness to history to the powerful coda “Miracles,” a novella set against the vibrant panorama of the Yiddish theater in America, the fifteen memorable narratives in The Girls of Jerusalem and Other Stories span continents and eras as they chronicle love and loss, piety and heresy, mysticism and rationality to reinterpret ancient tropes of exile, dislocation, and profound change, revealing a new understanding of Jewish history and memory. “Luminous tales of exile and loss that bequeath new life” Kirkus Reviews (starred review). A best book of the year selection.
Available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
the Kiddush l adies
Susan Sofayov
Life-long friends Naomi, Miriam, and Becky are approaching middle-age gracefully—despite occasional hot flashes —until life tosses each woman a crisis. Becky rallies against her only son marrying a non-Jew. Naomi sleeps alone in a bed made for two after her husband leaves. Miriam’s heart aches over lack of family and her belief that siblings connect the past, the present, and the future. Then a dusty discovery delivers a potentially lethal blow to their friendship. While two of the women fight to save the relationship, one desires nothing more than its demise.
Available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.
the luCK y o ne : a m emoir of life , loss and survival in e astern e urope
Sherry V. Ostroff
Ita was born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The place was the Pale of Settlement; the year 1918. Caught in the political and social upheaval during the Russian Revolution, Ita’s family were attacked by anti-Jewish riots: pogroms. Escape was the only way out. But Americans ceased to welcome Jewish refugees. The Ukrainian pogroms, 1918-1921, have taken on new scrutiny. Because pogroms created willing murderers and normalized the killing of Jews, historians now believe this time period the true start of the Holocaust.
Author programs available for organizations and book clubs. svostroff528@gmail.com. Bookshop.org and Amazon.com: paperback, Kindle, audiobook formats.
from h ere : lessons i n love & loss from 9/11
Felice Zaslow
Felice and Ira Zaslow’s love story spanned almost four decades, from the beaches of Far Rockaway to a comfortable suburban existence on the south shore of Long Island. Then came the morning of September 11, 2001. Through the days, weeks, and months that followed, Felice had to find her way through unfathomable trauma, on a path she had to forge herself, seeking guidance and role models along the way. This remarkable and inspiring memoir puts a very personal face on a national tragedy, facing down the darkness by looking for the light that is always present.
Available on Amazon and Bookshop.org.
and always o ne more time
Margaret Mandell
Kirkus Reviews calls it “a moving, insightful, and beautifully crafted story.” Losing a life partner strikes one million women every year. At 65, Margaret Mandell loses her husband of 45 years to a fast-moving disease, and she cannot conjure a future without him. Chased by memory, Mandell begins to write letters to the man she loved. But when a tenderhearted college professor steps quietly into her life, listening attentively, as Mandell reads her accumulating stack of letters out loud, she is forced to recalibrate her vision of life—what is still possible, how much love one heart can hold.
Available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.
aliyah: a J ewish family saGa
Harold Emanuel
Sixteen-year-old Lazar Hermanski and fourteenyear-old Daria Solov survive the 1881 Warsaw pogrom, endure a perilous journey in steerage, and arrive in New York. They marry, have a family, and navigate the conflict of adjusting to their new country and culture while attempting to follow their Jewish traditions. Throughout the story, family members participate in historical events, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the women’s suffrage movement, and interact with historical figures such as Lillian Wald, Fanny Brice, and Fiorello LaGuardia.
Available on Bookshop.org.
BaG els & salsa
Lara Reznik
Summer 1977–As the Son of Sam terrorizes NYC, Laila Levin, a Jewish sociologist from Long Island, meets the dashing Dr. Eduardo Quintana at her post-doc presentation on America’s teenage pregnancy epidemic. They share strong family values and a mutual passion that stuns them both. After a brief courtship, Eduardo persuades Laila to accompany him to his family ranch near Española, New Mexico, the teenage U.S. pregnancy capital. Their love is tested by his controlling mother, drop-dead gorgeous ex-girlfriend, and cultural differences. As tensions run high, Eduardo’s cousin reveals a life-changing family secret.
Available on Bookshop.org.
the many lives of anne fran K
Ruth Franklin
“This tour de force sets the standard for anyone thinking about Anne Frank for years to come.” – Dara Horn. Ruth Franklin explores the transformation of Anne Frank (1929–1945) from ordinary teenager to icon, shedding new light on the young woman whose diary is the most widely read work of literature to arise from the Holocaust. With antisemitism on the rise, The Many Lives of Anne Frank takes a fresh and timely look at the debates around how Anne Frank has been understood and misunderstood, and opens up new avenues for interpreting her life and writing in today’s hyperpolarized world.
Available now at JewishLives.org.
lishers Weekly, Mirvis’s novel was inspired by the true story of the murder of a professor in Florida that Mirvis had read about when she herself was going through a divorce and leaving Orthodox Judaism— likely the murder of law professor Dan Markel, though Mirvis does not name the case in the interview.
While her earlier novels, including the best seller The Ladies Auxiliary, were set in the Orthodox world of her youth, the Marcus family of We Would Never is secular. Nevertheless, Judaism remains an underlying thread in the novel: At Yom Kippur services, Sherry searches the liturgy for answers. Can a good person commit murder? Can a murderer ever be forgiven by man or by God?
J erusalem stone
Susan Sofayov
Julie is devastated when, hours after she loses her job, her twin brother dies in a car crash. She returns to Pittsburgh to live with her grief-stricken father. But facing empty weeks before her new job begins, Julie decides to honor her late brother by travelling to the place he dreamed of visiting with his Israeli girlfriend. It’s a trip that will change Julie’s life in more ways than one, after she meets her own Israeli prince charming. “Lovers of romance and travel will enjoy this story of a woman discovering new beginnings while facing grief.” —Booklife Reviews. Available on Amazon.
naviGator down! a
J ewish p.o.w. in nazi
G ermany
Rick Lockenbach
Lt. David Stein was a navigator on a B-17 bomber during WWII when his plane was shot down over Germany during a bombing mission. He spent the last nine months of the war in Europe in Stalag Luft I in Barth Germany. Learn what it was like for him and other Jewish-American P.O.Ws. held captive in Nazi Germany, at a time when these Jews knew that Europe’s Jews were being exterminated by the Nazis. What you learn may surprise you. Available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.
The combination of murder mystery and character-driven literary fiction makes the perfect read for a winter snowstorm or beach vacation. Long after finishing the book, you’ll be left pondering if the mere contemplation of murder reveals something significant about a person’s morality.
—Elizabeth Edelglass
Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer, poet and book reviewer living in Connecticut.
Olive Days By Jessica Elisheva Emerson (Counterpoint)
This debut novel from Jessica Elisheva Emerson will likely elicit a wide range of reactions. This is fitting, as that’s exactly what the book’s
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Klara’s truth
Susan Weissbach Friedman
It is May 2014, and Professor Klara Lieberman receives a letter from her estranged mother. Her long-agodisappeared father, she learns, is buried in Warsaw. As the Polish government is giving financial reparations for land it stole from its Jewish citizens during WWII, Klara’s mother wants her to go to Poland to collect it, while Klara is determined to go find answers about her father. Available from Bookshop.org.
farewell to south shore
Charlene Wexler
In Farewell To South Shore, readers are introduced to 15-year-old Sherrie, who grew up in a close-knit Jewish family in the 50s and 60s. Her relatives are loud, argumentative, and quirky, but they are also loving and solve problems with love and great food. Sherrie breaks out of the mold and tackles the real world. She goes to law school and becomes involved in feminine issues like abortion, women’s pay, abuse, the Gay movement, and single mothers. Farewell to South Shore is a metaphor for a place and time we can never return to.
Available at Speaking Volumes, Amazon, Barnes and Noble.
protagonist, Rina Kirsch, a harried young mother with two children, experiences—a range of strong emotions.
A Modern Orthodox Jew living in Los Angeles, Rina is caught off guard when her husband, David, suggests participating in a one-night wife swap with other couples in their community. His goal, he claims, is to help breathe new life into their marriage. But afterward, nothing is the same.
Despite Rina’s reticence about David’s prurient scheme, she has secrets of her own. She lives a religious life, but deep down, she is an atheist. She is also having an affair with a local haredi rabbi. After the wife swap, David encourages her to go back to painting. She signs up
the sun follower
Margaret Greene
The Sun Follower is more than a powerful immigrant story, it is a fascinating personal narrative about three generations of strong, resilient, sometimes audacious Jewish women, their loves, heartaches, victories, and their struggles for survival and success. The book is set against Russian Revolution, Second World War and latest world events. It is a captivating read and the affirmation of the strength of the human spirit. Available on Amazon. Paperback $9.99 or on Kindle free with membership.
for Kosher
Wesley Seidner
Seidner, a high schooler who is from a long line of Hadassah members, wrote this book about great Jewish athletes after getting Koufax and Greenberg autographs for his bar mitzvah. His quest to learn and collect helped him find his Jewish identity and strength as he experienced antisemitism. The book contains original interviews with players, history of every Jewish Major Leaguer and many of their autographs.
Available on Amazon.
To advertise here, please call Randi O’Connor at (212) 451-6221, or email roconnor@hadassah.org. Space is limited.
for a local art class—only to begin yet another affair with her married, non-Jewish art teacher.
Emerson deftly captures how stultifying the early years of motherhood can feel, and her depiction of Rina’s dissatisfaction with her life
can be uncomfortable to read. Rina does everything that is demanded of her from her young children, her husband and from the Jewish community. How she prepares for a Purim feast is but one example, making “lentil-and-tomato
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All decisions regarding the use of funds for any purpose, or the transfer of funds to or for the benefit of any other entity or organization, shall be subject to the approval of the Board or other governing body of Hadassah. The Hadassah Foundation, Inc. is a supporting organization of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. September 2023
soup, stuffed turkey breast, butternut-squash-and-mushroom pot pie, green beans with pistachios and date syrup, and three varieties of triangle-shaped hamantaschen pastries” on top of her equally elaborate handmade mishloach manot. Her affairs offer her the freedom to meet her own needs.
But that freedom comes at a price, irrevocably changing two families and multiple relationships.
Through it all, it’s not clear whether Rina feels remorse or takes responsibility for those she has hurt or gets closer to what she’s looking for. While Emerson has crafted fascinating characters set in a fully realized and detailed Jewish world, Rina’s lack of self-reflection and persistent unhappiness threaten to overshadow the story. Even when she finds someone who understands her, she remains unhappy: “She’d been known, fully known…and she would keep it there like a secret, and it would have to be enough.”
Of course, this is what also happens in life. Events don’t always have neat endings, and there is no guarantee of fulfillment in life. It is in depicting this realism that the book shines.
This is a story about sacrifices and how the choices we make impact others. Olive Days may not be a happy story, but it is one that will have you thinking about it long after you finish reading.
—Jaime Herndon
Jaime Herndon is a writer and avid reader. Her work can be found at Book Riot, Kveller and other places.
Seize the Word
A root too often used today | By
Joseph Lowin
To meet the needs of every generation, a language must be supple—malleable enough to document the tone of both everyday life and times of crisis. The Hebrew root פ-ט-ח (het, tet, feh), to snatch, provides a glaring example of this—from ףָטח (hataf), an arcane punctuation mark that looks like a colon and shortens, or snatches, the sound of a vowel, to םיִפוּטֲח (hatufim), hostages, a word sadly and commonly heard on the streets of Israel today.
The root is found in Scripture twice in Psalms 10:9: First, calling on God not to stand aloof when a metaphorical evil beast crouches like a lion in a lair
(lahatof ani), “to grab hold of a poor man,” followed by ףֹטחי
(yahtof ani be-mashkho), “he grabs hold of the poor man as he pulls his net shut.” The Book of Judges 21:21 uses our root to tell the story of brutal warriors who are told to go out among the daughters of Shiloh
(va-hataftem lahem ish ishto), “Let each of you seize a wife.” The Talmudic sages, in Pesahim 109b, advise that, to keep children awake during the seder, הָצַָּמָ ןיִפטוֹח (hotfin matsa), one should “snatch a matzah” for them to munch on. During the Yom Kippur service, Yoma 19b:15 suggests the High Priest should be made to hear loud nighttime city noises so that וֹתְּפטוֹח
אִלַ (lo teheh sheinah hotafto), “sleep should not seize hold of him.” A rabbinic legend imagines that when King Solomon sat in judgment, ןיִפטח ןיִבְּוּדּ (dubin hotifin), inanimate wolf statues would lunge at false witnesses, tearing them to pieces.
European history applies the root to םיִנִָפטח (hatfanim), kidnappers, who, under Russian Czar Nicholas I, would seize Jewish boys to serve in his army. A slang phrase from the 1930s, לַכאִוַ ףטֲח (hatof ve-ekhol), literally, “snatch and eat,” refers to the plight of German Jewish professors in exile who, unable to find academic positions in Israel, were reduced to selling hot dogs from a cart.
Today, after negotiations for a raise go sour, an Israeli may grumble, יִתְִפטח שְקְלַ (hatafti loksh), “All I got was a [Yiddish] noodle.” In 1965, food and beverage company Osem coined the word ףיִטח (hatif), snack, to market what became a line of very popular Israeli munchies.
The root resounds dramatically in a stirring October 7 story. There, the derivation הָפוּטֲח (hatufa), abducted, is the Hebrew title of Taken, a 2008 Liam Neeson movie that was a sensation in Israel. On social media, the movie has now been compared to the true story of an Israeli grandfather, retired Maj. Gen. Noam Tibon, who, in spectacular fashion—like Neeson’s ex-CIA agent— rescued family members. In Tibon’s case, he rescued his granddaughters, son and daughter-in-law, who were in their Kibbutz Nahal Oz safe room, hiding from Hamas terrorists. Watch the movie, and you’ll see how real life in Israel is stranger than fiction. And more uplifting.
Joseph Lowin’s columns for Hadassah Magazine are collected in HebrewSpeak, Hebrew Talk and his most recent book, Hebrew Matters, available at gcrr.org/gcrr-press/hebrew-matters
Sharren Haskel
A champion in Israel’s fight for truth and justice |
By Maayan Hoffman
Just days after the october 7 massacre, member of Knesset Sharren Haskel, of the National Unity Party, visited the devastated kibbutzim in southern Israel attacked by Hamas terrorists. The air was thick with the mingling scents of fresh blood and burned homes.
“I was shocked to my core,” Haskel said. From that day forward, she committed herself to sharing with the world what had happened—and how.
Since then, the 40-year-old has traveled extensively, visiting parliaments around the globe to expose the ties between Hamas terrorism and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, known as UNRWA. For nearly a decade, Haskel’s
What are your goals as deputy foreign minister?
Israel is fighting its second War of Independence. This war is being fought on the battlefield and on the diplomatic and public opinion fronts. I see my role as being of great importance, working alongside Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar to push back against the Islamist narrative being spread across social media and mainstream media. This narrative is promoted by those who are enemies of democracy and liberty. Our mission is to confront and correct the lies and blood libels they are spreading that incite hatred and violence against Israel, Jewish communities and everyone who dares to challenge them.
How should Israel advocate for itself around the world?
The most powerful weapon we have is the simple truth. I speak about the common threat faced by democratic nations that uphold Western values from radical Islam and the
work as head of the UNRWA Knesset Caucus focused on uncovering corruption and terrorist activities connected to the organization. Her efforts laid the groundwork for two landmark Knesset bills, passed at the end of 2024, that effectively banned UNRWA from operating in Israel and potentially in Gaza and the West Bank.
Now, amid a government reshuffle, Haskel, a veterinarian by profession who was born in Toronto and raised in Israel, has been appointed deputy foreign minister. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
groups and countries that support these ideologies. I have seen that opinions can change once the facts are presented and evidence is shown. Regarding UNRWA, we must make our case now at the United Nations. We need to explain why the Knesset voted to pass this new legislation. We must trust that the truth, combined with the support of our allies, will prevail in this new diplomatic challenge.
What
motivated you to join politics?
Friends encouraged me to run for office over a decade ago. It became clear that if we, the younger generation, don’t fight for leadership positions, no one will represent us— and no one can represent us better than we can ourselves. This sense of mission has driven me; even 10 years later, it still burns within me.
I urge many young people to join this cause. It’s crucial that more young people in Israel and Jews in the Diaspora take on political and
community leadership roles.
You have three young children under the age of four. How do you balance it all?
It’s always a struggle. As a woman, you’re never entirely at peace, constantly feeling like you’re missing out or failing to balance your career and family. I think, as women, we tend to be more efficient with our time because we want to achieve everything.
At the same time, women should be equally represented with men in government, high-level management and leadership roles at every level in Israel and in every country. While we still have a long way to go, I am confident that this will become a reality in the future, and I will do everything in my power to help make it happen.
Maayan Hoffman is executive editor of ILTV, an Israeli daily English-language news program. She is also the host of the podcast Hadassah On Call: New Frontiers in Medicine.
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Family, Israel and Charity
“Israel has always been a part of me, and the Hadassah hospitals in Jerusalem help so many people. My charitable gift annuities are a win-win. I receive payments for life, and Hadassah receives the support it needs to help ensure its future.”
— Barbara Lefton Sarasota, Florida
Family, Israel and charity have always been deeply important to Barbara Lefton. Growing up in the World War II era, Barbara knew that money was scarce, but that didn’t keep her parents from giving to charities.
Their example stuck with Barbara, who has spent her life giving back and teaching her four children,
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