The Jewish Light Passover 2022 Issue

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Passover 2022

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Singapore to Open Embassy In Israel After 57 Years of Ties, In Sign of Abraham Accords’ Spillover Effects

By Ron Kampeas

Singapore skyline at dawn, showing the Marina Bay Sands and the Flyer.

(Martin Puddy/Getty Images)

(JTA) — Singapore will upgrade its presence in Israel from consulate to embassy, in the latest move reflecting thawing relations between Israel and Muslim countries.

Israel and Singapore forged diplomatic ties in 1965 and have enjoyed friendly relations for decades. Israel sells Singapore defense equipment and has had an embassy in the country since 1968.

However, Singapore, mindful of

its huge Muslim-majority neighbors, Malaysia and Indonesia, has sought to keep the ties out of the public eye. The Times of Israel reported that Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz, visited the country last year but kept it quiet out of deference to Singapore.

Now, Singapore is openly boasting about its Israel relations. Vivian Balakrishnan, the Southeast Asian city-state’s foreign minister, made the embassy announcement Monday in Jerusalem where he was meeting with Israeli counterpart Yair Lapid.

The embassy will be in Tel Aviv.

The advent of the Abraham Accords normalizing ties between Israel and four Arab nations, brokered in 2020 by the Trump administration in its final months, has eased the stigma of open ties with Israel among nations sensitive to Muslim sensibilities.

Table of Contents Israel

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Global

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Holiday Features

11

Education

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Bookshelf

14

Arts & Culture

17

Sports

19

Entertainment

20

The Nosher

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Opinion

26

Political

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Best Wishes to my many Jewish Friends and constituents for a Happy Passover!

Kirk Talbot

State Senator District 10

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Since the launch of the Abraham Accords, not only has Israel normalized ties with the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Morocco and Bahrain, it has improved existing diplomatic relations with Egypt, Jordan and Turkey. The Biden administration is committed to expanding the Abraham Accords,

one of its few areas of agreement with the Trump administration.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett paid a surprise visit to Egypt on Monday where he conferred with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and UAE’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

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Israel To Convene Leaders From Abraham Accords Nations In A Historic Summit

By Ron Kampeas

Arab countries that normalized relations under the Abraham Accords, a sign that ties are getting closer.

Yair Lapid, Israel’s foreign minister will meet with his counterparts from the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Bahrain during a twoday summit early next week, according to a tweet posted Friday Tal Kelman, left, head of the Strategic

by Israel’s foreign ministry. U.S. Division of the IDF Planning Secretary of State Antony Blinken Directorate, meets with Belkhir El is also planning to attend.

Farouk, Inspector General of the Royal The announcement came the Moroccan Armed Forces in Rabat, March 25 2022. (IDF) same day that Israel announced a (JTA) — Israel is convening a memorandum of understanding summit of the top diplomats of the with Morocco on military cooperaUnited States and three of the four tion after top Israeli military officers visited their counterparts in

Morocco. The announcement, which the Israeli army posted in Arabic on Twitter, said that the sides discussed the possibility of joint military exercises.

The developments signaled the robustness of the Abraham Accords, brokered by the Trump administration in its last months and embraced by the Biden administration, one of the few areas of foreign policy agreement between the two presidencies.

Israel has over the years hosted individual leaders of Arab countries, often quietly, but never held a formal summit. The meeting comes at a time when at least three of the Middle East participants — Israel,

the UAE and Bahrain — are profoundly wary of the Biden administration’s efforts to reenter the Iran nuclear deal.

The three countries fear a renewed deal will remove sanctions on Iran and enable its adventurism in the region; the Biden administration sees the deal, which former President Donald Trump abrogated in 2018, as the best means to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

The fourth country that normalized ties with Israel under the Abraham Accords, Sudan, is undergoing political turmoil.

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(Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images) (JTA) — Israel is the ninth happiest country in the world, according to the World Happiness Report, a project of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Israel has moved slowly up the rankings in recent years, going from No. 14 in 2020 to No. 11 in 2021.

The report, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary, says it factors a country’s GDP, social support, life expectancy, “freedom to make life choices,” citizen generosity and perceptions of corruption into its ranking.

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critic of Israel, singling it out with continual condemnations and more critical resolutions than any other nation. Its Sustainable Development Solutions Network was founded in 2012 to advance U.N. sustainability, anti-poverty and industry goals around the world.

Each country’s response to COVID-19 was also a factor in the ranking, the report noted. Israel was one of the first countries to successfully vaccinate a large percentage of its population.

“Deaths from COVID-19 during 2020 and 2021 have been markedly lower in those countries with higher trust in public institutions and where inequality is lower,” the report reads.

As usual, the Nordic countries held their spots at the top of the list, with Finland ranking as the happiest country in the world for the fifth year in a row. Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland placed in the top four, with the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden and Norway the only others ahead of Israel.

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Growing Up In Iran, I Thought The Whole Country Celebrated Passover

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By Aylin Sedighi-Gabbaizadeh Growing up in Iran, I never truly appreciated the difference between spring cleaning, New Year’s and getting ready for Passover. The Jewish holiday takes place almost simultaneously with the Persian New Year, known as Nowruz, when the whole country engages in a frenzy of preparations.

Nowruz (A New Day), which marks the beginning of spring, is Iran’s most festive and colorful holiday. Persians, Jews, Muslims, Zoroastrians and even Bahais all purchase new clothes, make traditional cookies and engage in 12 days of celebrations.

These celebrations include setting a special table, known as a haft-seen, that consists of various items signifying renewal, luck and blessings The seven S’s, as they are

known, would take their ceremonial places on the same number of plates: sabzeh (a green plate of grown wheat); seeb (red apples); samanoo (a wheat-based dish); senjed (a fruit of the lotus tree); seer (garlic); serkeh (vinegar); and sekkeh (coins laid in water). No table would be complete without swimming goldfish, an elaborate mirror to reflect joy to the viewer, handpainted eggs and a holy book.

Where our Muslim neighbors placed a Quran on their haft-seen table, we placed a Torah or a siddur.

Where our Muslim neighbors sprouted wheat, we grew lentils, given the proximity of the secular holiday to Passover, when we removed wheat from our homes.

For years I believed Passover to be the beginning of the Jewish cal-

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endar because it was synonymous with all things new and a promise of starting afresh. Given the mild climate of the country, by the time the holiday came around, cherry blossoms were in bloom and the aroma of jasmine flowers filled our noses.

Just as the entire country went into full spring-cleaning mode for the national holiday, Jews scoured their homes of forbidden hametz, or leavened products. In our home, all the closets would be emptied and reorganized. All the rugs would be taken into the yard and washed in hot, soapy water in order to rid even

the tiniest morsel of hametz. I knew Passover was close when my grandmother dug out her larger-than-lifesize iron pot and started the process of kashering every item in her kitchen in boiling water.

My grandmother told me stories of stuffing her mattress and blankets with clean cotton — something I was thankful we no longer had to do. Nonetheless, the tasks were still endless, and everyone in the family was involved in the process.

Given that there were no kosherSee GROWING UP on Page

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Happy Passover to all my friends in the Jewish Community.

Thank you for your continued support!

Judge Paula Brown

Louisiana Court of Appeal, Fourth Circuit, Division C

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In Asia’s ‘Zero Covid’ Countries, Jews Try To Stay Optimistic As They Enter A Third Pandemic Year — And A New Wave

By Jordyn Haime

Scott Pollack is shown with his family on the Lunar New Year. He moved his parents, center, who are from California, to Shanghai in 2020 so the family could be closer to one another during the pandemic. (Courtesy of Scott Pollack)

TAIPEI, Taiwan (JTA) — Rabbi Martha Bergadine had been in a sort of limbo since January, when she decided to leave Hong Kong for the first time in two years to visit her son at college in the United States.

At first, the timing seemed right: Hong Kong — with a “dynamic COVID-19 policy” that had helped keep the spread of the virus under control — boasted one of the world’s lowest infection and death rates: For most of December, the seven-day new case average was less than 10 per day.

Enter the Omicron variant. In December, as COVID-19 cases

ramped up in the United States and around the world, Hong Kong banned flights from multiple countries, including the U.S., for 14 days in an abundance of caution.

But in early February, cases were appearing by the hundreds. In March, tens of thousands of cases have been reported per day and Hong Kong’s death rate has become one of the world’s highest.

Bergadine, who is a rabbi but serves primarily as the educational director of Hong Kong’s United Jewish Community (UJC), had planned to return to Hong Kong on Jan. 17 with a two-week hotel quarantine. But because of the ban on U.S. flights, she decided to try what Hong Kongers call a “washout” — spending two weeks in a third country to “wash out” any virus risk before flying back to Hong Kong.

So Bergadine landed in Finland.

Then direct flights from Finland were banned by Hong Kong. A lucky flight from Helsinki to Amsterdam to Hong Kong eventually reunited her with her husband and daughter. She got out of quarantine on March 4, more than a month later than she originally

Happy Passover to my friends and constituents in the Jewish Community!

planned.

A view of a Rosh Hashanah dinner in Shanghai, 2021. (Courtesy of Hannah Maia Frishberg

“I’m just relieved to have gotten back. The route that I took, that flight has now been banned for two weeks,” she said. “So I kind of feel like I got lucky and snuck in.”

As the two-year pandemic appears to be ebbing in North America, Jewish communities there that were hard-hit by COVID are now easing back into something that looks like normalcy. In Hong Kong and China, however, the virus is spreading with a vengeance that

has made March 2022 look like March 2020.

Bergadine’s UJC, one of several Jewish communities in Hong Kong, has fluctuated between in-person, online and hybrid events for the past two years. The city is now enduring its fifth — and worst — wave. The expectation of a two- to three-week quarantine in a hotel — which could set anyone back thousands — and pandemic policies that seemed to shift almost daily have discouraged community members, most of whom came to live in Hong Kong from other countries, from leaving their city for the past two years.

“I think anyone who pretends this is easy has the bravest face ever,” said Robin Roschke, president of the UJC. “One of the hardest things for congregants is to watch what’s going on in their See ZERO COVID on Page

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ZERO COVID Continued from Page 6 home countries and not be able to see their families and friends. We have made an effort to ensure that we have been a sounding board for many of our congregants.”

The story has been similar for communities in mainland China and Taiwan. Both countries have relied on “zero COVID” policies to maintain low case and death counts, though not always as successfully as their governments have hoped.

Relatively low vaccination rates among older people, among other reasons, have allowed the virus to jump high borders and cause major policy changes and lockdowns.

In response, some Jews have left these countries permanently. Some became stuck overseas when lockdowns were initially announced, separating families.

The former education coordinator of Kehilat Shanghai — one of Shanghai’s organized Jewish communities — was among those finding themselves stuck abroad. She had to host Hebrew school classes remotely from the United States, and didn’t end up coming back.

Although in-person events and programming were possible in China

by March of 2020, most activities other than holidays and Shabbat dinners had stopped.

But “it hasn’t been a major exodus,” said Scott Pollack, a longtime member of Kehilat Shanghai, who decided to move his 80-year-old parents to the city with him from their home in California shortly after the pandemic began. “Our last major gatherings were Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Numbers were fairly strong, but not record numbers.”

For Shanghai’s progressive Jews — mainly expats from around the world who have come to Shanghai for work — the pandemic has raised a challenge: Before 2020, the community relied on traveling rabbis to lead those large holiday events.

Leaders were in the middle of negotiations to bring in a part-time Shanghai-based rabbi to lead the community when the pandemic hit in 2020.

Now those plans are on hold as some speculate China and Hong Kong could remain mostly closed to the world until 2024, though China’s former chief epidemiolo-

gist has said that “in the near future, at an appropriate time, there will be a Chinese-style roadmap for living with the virus.”

The absence of professional clergy to lead the progressive community in Shanghai has encouraged more community involvement in services.

“It ended up being beautiful,” Pollack said, “the fact that members of the community stepped up and learned how to read part of the service that they never had to learn before.”

“It’s definitely interesting looking back at 2020 from 2022 to see how we moved on quite quickly, but also how now, we’re one of the last countries not able to have fully normal services and events,” said Hannah Maia Frishberg, Kehilat Shanghai’s current education coordinator. “We still have mask requirements, we still have this assumption that everyone is mostly vaccinated, that everyone has a green QR code.”

Last week, China saw the biggest uptick in domestically transmitted cases (those not detected by incoming travelers) since 2020 and is

implementing some of its strictest measures since the pandemic began, restricting an entire province for the first time in two years. In Shanghai, all in-person events and gatherings — including this week’s Purim events — were postponed.

This year, leaders have gotten savvier with technology, said Josh Lavin, communications chair and secretary of the UJC board. And that played out in the group’s remote online offering, which included “more video effects and editing it to make it a video-first production,” he said.

The UJC has adapted its format enough times to be prepared for any shift in policy and plans to continue with a hybrid option, even during non-COVID times. It’s just become part of life in Hong Kong.

“Jewish people have gotten through tough times. We really have. And comparatively, this is tough but not even close,” Roschke said. “I’m very confident that the community will grow again. It’s not an easy time, but it’s not something we can’t handle. And as Jews, we know this.”

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‘It’s God’s Work’: Christians Are Helping Hundreds Of Ukrainian Jews Escape The War To Israel

By Cnaan Liphshiz

Two Ukrainian-Jewish girls shown on a bus in Moldova arranged for their families by Christians for Israel, March 7, 2022. (Courtesy of Christians for Israel)

works in the Ukraine office of the Christians for Israel movement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a phone call.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that began on Feb. 24, the Christian Zionist organization has used connections and contingency plans they have spent years building to help hundreds of Ukrainian Jews leave the country — representing a significant portion of the thousands of Ukrainian Jews who have fled during the war so far.

(JTA) — She risks her life to get Jewish people out of bombed-out parts of Ukraine’s capital city, but Nataliya Krishanovski doesn’t exactly see her actions as humanitarian work.

Krishanovski, 60, is part of a 20-person team of Christians who for years have been helping Ukrainian Jews immigrate to Israel because they believe doing so helps Ukrainian Jews board buses arranged fulfill biblical prophecies and by Christians for Israel to take them to Moldova, March 7, 2022. (Courtesy of makes up for antisemitic persecuChristians for Israel) tion.

Krishanovski said she has been “It’s God’s work, not humanitardriving Jewish families in the Kyiv ian work,” Krishanovski, who region to rendezvous points from where other drivers take them to neighboring Moldova. She called the work meaningful on multiple levels, not least through “the look I see in the eyes of the families I bring,” she said in the interview, holding back tears. “Their eyes look like they have been delivered.”

Krishanovski believes what is happening in Ukraine is the realization of the prophecy spelled out in Jeremiah 1:14, in which the prophet tells of God’s warning that “from the north shall disaster break loose upon all the inhabitants of the land.”

Fear still creeps in when Krishanovski is on the road, especially Best Wishes when she passes a burned-out car or building. Thousands have lost their to my many lives in the war, including many Jewish Friends and civilians on the Ukrainian side.

Constituents for a To conquer the fear, Krishanovs-

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ki, a mother of one, recites Psalms 91 — “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust” — until she feels “steady enough to drive on,” she told JTA. The Jewish refugees — a tiny minority within the exodus of millions of Ukrainians — also need fortitude to leave.

Ludmilla Zibulka, a 77-year-old Jewish widow, left the eastern city of Kharkov this week along with thousands of other refugees. With the help of Christians for Israel, she was taken on a heated bus with warm food all the way from her home to Israeli officials in Moldova, where the officials were helping Jews like her and their relatives immigrate to Israel.

“I took my passport, looked at my house with tears in my eyes and said goodbye,” said Zibulka, who has a son living in Israel. She had 15 minutes to collect a few items as artillery was falling near her home.

“It was very scary and very painful.”

The fact that Christians helped get Zibulka and her son to Israel, she said, “is very special. It shows that God really is love.”

Christians for Israel belongs to a loose network, headquartered in the Netherlands, of Christian Zionist congregations in dozens of countries.

In Ukraine, Christians for Israel has helped thousands of Jews make aliyah, or immigrate to Israel, over the past 25 years, and it has been preparing for this moment since 2014, said the office’s director Koen Carlier, a Belgian citizen who has been living in Ukraine for years with his Ukraine-born wife, Ira. That year, when Russia annexed part of Ukraine, the Carliers directed the office to begin working on evacuation plans. In April, as Russia began to ratchet up pressure on Ukraine, they began stocking up on

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supplies and procured several minibuses.

But they needed Jewish allies to gain access to Jews interested in making aliyah. And that’s not always an easy task for a Christian organization in a country where the main engine of Jewish community life is Chabad, an Orthodox Jewish movement whose rabbis are vigilant against attempts by Christians to seek Jewish converts.

Christians for Israel turned to Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs, a chief rabbi of the Netherlands and a friend of Roger van Oordt, the former director of Christians for Israel and son of the movement’s founder.

“I’m the matchmaker of Christians for Israel,” said Jacobs, who is one of the founders of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe, a Chabadaffiliated group. “If they need contact with a rabbi in Ukraine who doesn’t know them, I can vouch that Christians for Israel is 100% kosher.”

Ludmilla Zibulka prepares to board a bus in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, arranged

by Christians for Israel to take her to Moldova, March 7, 2022. (Courtesy of Christians for Israel)

Carlier appears to be torn between two kinds of emotions as he helps bring Jews from the UkrainianMoldovan border to Chisinau, Moldova’s capital city, and into Romania in preparation of their immigration to Israel.

On the one hand, “it’s sad to see people, elderly people, having to leave everything behind and going away with pain in their eyes,” he said. On the other hand, their departure, in his view, “is a confirmation of the divine covenant, God’s promise. Sometimes the Bible is very clear when God mentions certain things about the times we are living through. This is one of those times.”

Zibulka said going to Israel fills her with hope.

“It’s a land promised to us. And I think it’s a land that will return our love,” Zibulka said. THE

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Thousands Of Middle East Scholars Sign Resolution Endorsing Boycott Of Israel

By Andrew Lapin

Students at Tel Aviv University on the first day of the new academic year, October 10, 2021. A new vote by the Middle East Studies Association plans to endorse a boycott of Israeli universities in accordance with the BDS movement, but not of individual Israeli scholars.

(Flash90)

(JTA) – An academic professional organization devoted to international study of the Arab world and Israel has voted to endorse boycotting Israel, in a resolution signed by thousands of professors and scholars worldwide.

Members of the Middle East Studies Association signed off on a resolution “endorsing the Palestinian call for solidarity in the form of boycotts, divestment and sanctions,” known as BDS.

The resolution also calls for an “academic boycott” of Israeli institutions, including universities — a term that BDS proponents typically define as severing all formal ties with the institutions. But the association says it will not target individual students or scholars, that Israeli scholars will still be eligible for membership, and that each individual member of the group has the right to refrain from participating in the boycott.

“Our members have cast a clear vote to answer the call for solidarity from Palestinian scholars and students experiencing violations of their right to education and other human rights,” the group’s president, Eve Troutt Powell, said in a statement.

“MESA’s Board will work to honor the will of its members and ensure that the call for an academic boycott is upheld without undermining our commitment to the free exchange of ideas and scholarship.”

Of those voting on the resolution, 80% backed it, according to the group.

Now, the group’s board of directors are tasked with finding ways to “give

effect to the spirit and intent of this resolution,” the resolution says.

Powell did not respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.

The vote makes MESA the latest group of academics to approve a BDS resolution, and likely the one whose membership is most knowledgeable about Israel and the Middle East. Other academic organizations that have also endorsed part or all of BDS include the American Anthropological Association, the Modern Languages Association and the American Studies Association.

Those resolutions have not led to widespread effects for Israeli scholars or universities. But the votes are symbolically significant amid debate over how Israel is discussed on college campuses.

Critics say such resolutions from academic groups encourage campus antisemitism, or are themselves antisemitic in nature because they single out Israel for censure. The AMCHA Initiative, a pro-Israel campus advocacy group, timed the

release of an in-house study to the vote, claiming that professors who supported BDS were more likely to foster antisemitic climates on campus. After the results of the vote were revealed, AMCHA issued a statement calling it “morally reprehensible and incredibly dangerous.”

The Anti-Defamation League said it was “appalled” at the vote, which it argued was “undermining academic principles of dialogue and obstructing Israeli-Palestinian engagement.” It called for the many universities that have some affiliation with MESA to disassociate themselves from the vote.

But MESA says its resolution is all about academic freedom and dialogue, including the freedom of Israeli academics to criticize their country without fear of reprisal.

Israeli academics who publish research or advocacy highly critical of their government have at times been met with fierce backlash, including effectively being blackSee THOUSANDS on Page

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Global

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Italian Jewish Communities Look To Digitize 35,000 Jewish Texts

Best Wishes for a Happy Passover!

By Giovanni Vigna

Lambert Boissiere

Public Service Commissioner, District 3

Best Wishes to my many Jewish Friends and constituents for a Happy Passover!

Monique G. Morial Judge, First City Court, New Orleans

985-445-1270

Happy Passover to all of my friends in the Jewish Community.

Thank You for your continued support.

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Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans

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35,000 Italian Jewish texts are to be digitized in new project. (Union of Italian Jewish Communities)

MANTUA, Italy (JTA) — A new initiative aims to digitize some 35,000 Jewish texts sitting in the hands of 14 different Jewish community organizations and 25 state institutions across Italy.

Around 10,000 volumes have already been digitized as part of the Italya Books project, an initiative of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, the National Central Library of Rome, the National Library of Israel and the Rothschild Hanadiv Europe Foundation.

Tens of thousands of uncatalogued printed Hebrew books dating back hundreds of years, are held in collections belonging to local Jewish com-

munities, as well as in libraries owned by the state, Italian church institutions and the Vatican. Many are of significant historical importance.

One of the most important books is the 1488 Hebrew Bible printed in Soncino, in the province of Cremona, by one of the most important Jewish families of printers, who took their name from the town.

Some of these collections have previously been partially cataloged, but there has never been one integrated and standardized listing of all of the holdings, making them often difficult if not impossible to find.

In addition to the main pages of the works, each entry contains photographs of the cover, the title page, the colophon and any records of censorship and marginal notes.

The goal is to finish all 35,000 reproductions in the next three years, said Union of Italian Jewish Communities project coordinator Gloria Arbib.

“Italya Books will allow us to discover, in the 40 libraries involved, volumes that represent important pieces of the history of Jewish culture in Italy,” she said.

THOUSANDS Continued from Page 9 listed from academic jobs, in Israeli society.

The group has more than 2,800 members from all over the world, including 33 in Israel, though the highest concentration are in the United States. It also has a long list of institutional members, including departments at universities such as Brandeis and Columbia.

Its mission statement includes Israel under a list of Middle East and North African countries its members’ studies are “primarily concerned with,” and also states that the group opposes antisemitism. Some members are Jewish studies or Israel studies professors.

Ian Lustick, founder and past president of the Association for Israel Studies, is one Jewish MESA member who voted for the BDS resolution. He wrote in an op-ed for Mondoweiss, a website highly critical of Israel, that he supported the resolution “because it is flexible and respects the moral posture and

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complex circumstances affecting those whose support is solicited,” adding that he himself has no intention of cutting ties with Israeli universities.

The Association for Israel Studies opposed the BDS resolution during MESA’s annual meeting in December when it was put to the full member vote. Though the Association for Israel Studies is currently an institutional member of MESA, it will likely debate its continued association with the group now that the resolution has passed, according to Lustick.

A rival academic group, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, was formed in 2007 due to what its founders said was persistent anti-Israel bias at MESA. Its president, Asaf Romirowsky, issued harsh criticism of MESA’s BDS vote ahead of the final results, saying that the group is “clearly a politicized advocacy organization.” THE

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Holiday Features

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How To Make Passover Cleaning Manageable

By My Jewish Learning

Tips for the overwhelmed, the lastminute and the lazy.

Passover, the annual celebration of the Exodus from Egypt, is one of Judaism’s most beloved holidays — and also the one that requires the most preparation. The Torah teaches that one should remove leaven or hametz (understood by Jewish tradition to mean food that is made from one of five forbidden grains and food that has been fermented) from one’s home — it should neither be seen nor found in one’s possession.

Traditionally, Jews attempt to clean all the leaven from their homes, chasing out the cracker crumbs and stray Cheerios wherever they lurk: behind the refrigerator, in the pockets of coats, under car seats. Larger leavened items, like boxes of pasta and crackers, are often sold to non-Jewish neighbors with the understanding that these will be purchased back at the end of the holiday.

Aside from the comprehensive nature of this kind of purge, because Passover cleaning often coincides with spring cleaning, many find the undertaking overwhelming and daunting. But obsession is not necessarily required to satisfy the traditional requirements of the holiday.

If it all seems too much, it may be that you are doing more than you need to. Here are our tips for keeping your Passover cleaning manageable: Hametz is not Dirt Yes, crumbs of food often lurk in the same places one finds dirt and grime, but there is no requirement that the home be clean, only that it be purged of leaven. You really don’t need to dust your fan blades.

Focus on the Kitchen You are not likely to eat in your bathroom, so skip that space when doing your Passover cleaning. Keep your focus on the places where you THE

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prepare and eat your food — dayenu!

Some Hametz Doesn’t Count Some authorities say that hametz is only a problem if it is the size of an olive or larger. So those tiny crumbs you’re desperately seeking out? Not so significant.

Some authorities say that hametz which is not edible also doesn’t count. What’s “inedible”? If a dog wouldn’t eat it you probably wouldn’t either.

Throw Your Hametz in a Cardboard Box or Just Tape Up the Cabinet Once you sell your leaven products they no longer belong to you.

The only other requirement is that you should not see them. So grab a cardboard box, a sheet or some masking tape and hide those cookies that now technically belongs to someone else from view. Done and done.

Nullification is Your Friend On the night before the first

seder, it is traditional to hide a few last crumbs of bread and then search for them by candlelight. The following morning, these are burned (biur) and then a blessing is recited that renders any unseen leaven no longer hametz (bittul): All hametz that is in my possession, which I have neither seen nor removed, and of which I am unaware, is nullified and ownerless like the dust of the earth.

Our sages understood that it is pretty much impossible to get everything. In fact, the Talmud implies that sometimes a person would accidentally forget about a cake in their cupboard on Passover!

So do your best, say this blessing and relax. Whatever you missed (and you surely missed something — everyone does!) has symbolically turned to dust.

Passover is the festival of freedom. If you can’t enjoy the cleaning, at least don’t let it enslave you.

Chag Kasher v’Sameach!

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Education

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Birthright Israel To Lower Its Age Limit Back To 26

By Andrew Lapin

Birthright Israel participants visit the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, Aug. 18, 2014. (Flash90)

(JTA) – Five years after raising the age limit for Israel tour participants, Birthright Israel is reverting to a policy of funding free trips only to young adults 26 and under.

This summer will be the last chance for Jews aged 27 to 32 to participate in Birthright, with the exception of anyone older who had registered for a trip that was canceled because of the pandemic, according to a spokesperson for the nonprofit organization.

The trips, designed to give young Jews (mostly Americans) a crash course in Israeli history and culture in the hopes of convincing them to remain involved in Jewish life and

pro-Israel causes, are offered to any Jewish young adult aged 18 and up who has never been to Israel, or whose previous trip to Israel had lasted less than three months.

Launched in 1999, Birthright trips attracted around 45,000 participants annually before the pandemic interrupted international travel; they have also drawn increasing criticism from liberal Jews and others that they present a view of Israel that obscures the experience of Palestinians within Israel and in the West Bank.

Birthright had raised its upper age limit for eligibility to 32 in 2017, to reflect what Gidi Mark, Taglit-Birthright’s international CEO, had said was a broader cultural shift of young adults delaying major life decisions like getting married and having children to later in life.

But that decision allowed Jewish young adults to put off their Israel engagement, too, the group concluded — a meaningful delay given what it characterized as a challenging climate on college campuses.

“Extending the age to 32 caused the 26-year-olds to postpone their trip,” the spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We believe that by creating a more structured timeframe to participate, young people will make a Birthright Israel trip a priority at a time when they can fully engage and benefit.”

Refocusing on college undergraduates and graduate students, the spokesperson said, also allows Birthright to respond to “rising instances of antisemitism and lack of understanding of Israel on college and university campuses across the globe.”

The shift comes shortly after Birthright announced it would be merging with Onward Israel, which organizes extended Israel programs for 19-to-27-year-olds. It also comes amid multiple pressures on Birthright’s sustainability and model.

While the group receives support from a wide array of donors — the organization says it runs a $150 million budget — its founder and

most prominent donor, Michael Steinhardt, has run into repeated trouble in recent years.

Steinhardt was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct in 2019 and, last year, struck a deal to avoid prosecution for plundering and illegally trading millennia-old Israeli antiquities; as part of his settlement, he surrendered $70 million worth of antiquities.

In addition, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major donor and influential voice in the direction of the program, died last year.

Birthright has also drawn support from the Genesis Philanthropy Group, which was founded by three Russian Jews who could now face sanctions because of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Birthright, which has also received major funding from the State of Israel itself, did not respond to questions about its involvement with Steinhardt or whether it is still funded by the Adelson family. Its website still publicizes Steinhardt’s See BIRTHRIGHT on Page

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Kimama Half Moon: A New Approach To Jewish Camping

Camp Kimama, which took over the operations of an old camp and invested significantly in infrastructure and a new curriculum, aims to be a world-class Jewish summer camp. (Courtesy of Camp Kimama)Images are not transferable.

Photo Credit: Shahar Azran

An exciting new summer camp is opening in the Berkshires. Led by an expert group of Jewish camping professionals, Kimama Half Moon will bring an Israeli spirit to Camp Half Moon, a century-old summer camp located on Lake Buel.

Half Moon has been a summer home for children from around the Northeast since it opened its doors in 1922. After Kimama took over operations at the camp last year, it resolved to turn it into a world-class Jewish summer camp. That involved a significant investment in the camp’s infrastructure and a brandnew curriculum.

Under the direction of Abby Levine, Kimama Half Moon will integrate Israeli culture with traditional camp activities like water sports and arts programming. Levine has more than two decades of experience working as a Jewish professional, including stints as director of Camp Young Judaea Midwest and head of school at a Jewish day school in Charleston, South Carolina.

“I’m excited to join the Kimama Half Moon family and create a brand new summer camp experience,” said Levine. “In addition to restoring the camp’s facilities, we’re crafting a cutting-edge curriculum that will inspire Jewish and non-Jewish campers alike.”

This is a particularly difficult moment for parents and Levine said she recognizes the need for meaningful in-person interaction. Children have spent most of the past two years stuck inside, making it difficult for parents to balance work and childcare. It’s something Levine, who is a mother to three camp-age sons, knows firsthand.

“In these challenging times, camp can be a break for parents and a THE

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place where kids find friends that last a lifetime,” Levine said.

When it opens in June for its inaugural summer, Kimama Half Moon will operate a day camp and overnight camp. The day camp is open to campers ages 4 and up, while children ages 7 to 17 can choose to stay overnight for one, two, or three weeks.

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Kimama recently took over Camp Half Moon, a century-old lakeside summer camp in the Berkshires. (Courtesy of Camp Kimama)

A world-class camping organization Campers at Kimama Half Moon will join Kimama’s international network of Jewish campers. For almost two decades, Kimama has strived to be at the forefront of Jewish camping.

Ronen Hoffman, Kimama’s founder and Israel’s current ambassador to Canada, launched the organization with the goal of bringing Americanstyle sleepaway camps to Israel. His approach was a huge success and Kimama has since expanded to several locations in Europe and the US. It also runs 3 different summer camps and 9 programs in Israel, all under the supervision of the country’s Ministry of Education.

Kimama offers campers the chance to try different programs each year or combine multiple programs to create a one-of-a-kind summer experience. A camper could choose to go to Kimama Half Moon one summer and Kimama Michmoret on the beach in Israel the next.

“We want our campers to have as much flexibility as possible,” says Avishay Nachon, Camp Kimama’s CEO. “If that means going to the Berkshires one summer and Europe the next, we want to support them.”

Want to experience Kimama’s exciting new approach to summer camp for yourself? Registration is open for Kimama Half Moon — sign up now!

This is a paid post. JTA’s editorial team had no role in its production.

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A New Book Examines The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire — Which A Contributor Worries His Father Might Have Started

By Susie Davidson

A deadly fire ripped through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village on March 25, 1911. The photo shows the gutted remains of the tenth floor, with only the floors and walls intact.

(Bettman/Getty Images)

BOSTON (JTA) – Martin Abramowitz sits in Brookline’s Caffe Nero wearing a “Jews in Baseball” hat. It’s a nod to his position as CEO and founder of the nonprofit Jewish Major Leaguers, which produces baseball cards featuring Jewish players.

I ask about his Durham Bulls T-shirt. “It’s a long story,” he answers.

The tale he wants to tell is much more significant and has nothing to do with sports. Rather, it has to do with the worst industrial fire in New York history and one of the most important events in the history of the American labor movement.

March 25 marked the 111th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 mostly Jewish and Italian immigrant garment workers, mainly women, in just 18 minutes.

Friday will also saw the release

of “Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire,” edited by Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti. The 19 contributors include writers, artists, activists, scholars and family members of the Triangle workers.

Among the contributors is Abramowitz, 81, who attributes his very existence, as well as those of his children and their descendants, to the fact that his father, a cutter in the doomed factory, escaped the fire.

And after devoting years of research to the tragedy, he has also come to grips with a painful possibility: that his father accidentally started the fire that, as the book describes it, “pierced the perpetual conscience of citizens everywhere.”

“I have never been able to conclusively determine that my father caused the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire,” said Abramowitz. Indeed, neither his father nor any other single figure has been implicated in dropping the burning ash into the scrap bin that may have caused the inferno.

Nonetheless, even the possibility has been a burden.

“Regardless of whether or not it was his ash, I’m haunted by the fact that he must have been haunted for his entire life,” Abramowitz said.

“He must have had a sense of, or a

question about his own responsibility.”

Five hundred workers were toiling on the eighth, ninth and 10th floors of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, cutting and stitching the fashionable cotton blouses known as “waists,” when the fire broke out. The owners of the factory had locked many of the stairwell and exit doors in an effort to monitor breaks and maintain order (and also, Abramowitz said, to prevent the “girls” from pilfering materials).

Many workers consequently jumped to their deaths while helpless firefighters and traumatized pedestrians looked on.

There was no doubt that poor safety conditions turned a small fire into a deathtrap. The factory’s Jewish owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were subsequently acquitted in December 1911 of first-and second-degree manslaughter charges, although ultimately found liable for wrongful death in a 1913 civil suit.

Labor unions, galvanized by the tragedy, demanded better working conditions and won recruits, and the city passed reforms to workplace safety that would eventually become federal law.

But how did the fire start?

According to David Von Drehle’s 2003 book, “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America,” the fire

began in a scrap bin belonging to a cloth “cutter” on the eighth floor.

The cutter tried to extinguish the flames, and, when he couldn’t, escaped.

Who was that cutter? Von Drehle names him as Isidore Abramowitz, the same name as Martin’s father.

Isidore Abramowitz, upper left in photo with his family, worked as a “cutter” at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory at the time of the deadly 1911 fire. (Courtesy Martin Abramowitz)

It’s impossible to determine whose ash it was, and Von Drehle acknowledges that “maybe it was another cutter.” But in search of answers, Martin Abamowitz has buried himself in the National Archives, U.S. Census records and family history.

In 1940s working-class Jewish Brooklyn, Abramowitz’s father, Isidore, cut patterns for women’s dresses and belonged to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Later, in the 1950s and ’60s, See NEW BOOK on Page

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itized by the Kheel Center for Labor Studies at Cornell University. He located the testimony online.

Martin’s mother, Rose, sewed labels Meanwhile, on Ancestry.com, he on men’s ties, and was a member of found 1910 Census records that the Amalgamated Clothing Work- listed Israel Abramowitz, born in ers Union of America.

Romania, as a “Cutter at Shirtwaist But prior to his marriage, Isidore, Factory.” at the age of 18, had been a cutter at “That was important because I the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. had wondered whether it was posMartin Abramowitz knew noth- sible for my father to become a cuting about his family’s connection to ter, which was a position of esteem the fire while his father, who died in in that field, at the young age of 1947, was still alive. “Sometime in 18,” Abramowitz recalled. my young adulthood, in the early “The Isidore Abramowitz in the 1960s, my mother casually men- book could have been another pertioned that he had been working at son by that name, but in the census, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in he was listed along with other fam1911, and was lucky enough to be ily members whose names I knew, out of the building making a deliv- strongly suggesting that it was ery when the fire hit,” he recalls in indeed my father.” his notes for his contribution to the Isidore, who was also called Isranew book. el and even Irving, and his brother, Von Drehle was the first to reveal David, did indeed become cutters. the fire started in the wastebasket of They lived on Orchard Street, a Isidore Abramowitz, a fact he was short distance from the Ashe Buildable to glean from the testimony in ing. By 1910, according to U.S. the owners’ trial.

Census Records, Isidore secured Abramowitz learned that the employment. transcript had been donated to a What is known about Isidore’s LAW_full Size_2019_print.pdf 1 11/11/19 AM Manhattan library by the estate of a11:38time in the factory and on the day defense attorney, and was later digof the fire is contained in the trial

NEW BOOK Continued from Page 14

testimony. In its 10 pages, Isidore Abramowitz answers 76 questions from the judge.

The answers were summarized

by Von Drehle. “Abramowitz was taking his coat and hat from a nearby peg when he noticed the fire in his scrap bin,” he wrote. “Perhaps the cutter had been sneaking a smoke … or maybe it was another cutter — they were a close-knit group and liked to stand around talking together. Or maybe it was a cutter’s assistant. At any rate, the fire marshal would later conclude that someone tossed a match or cigarette butt into Abramowitz’s scrap bin before it was completely extinguished.”

To the judge’s queries about the layout of the work floor, who the nearby workers were and where they were when the fire broke out, Isidore Abramowitz mainly answered “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir.”

He spoke clearly, and in English.

“What was the first thing you did when you saw the fire?” Abramowitz is asked. He responds, “I spilled a pail of water on it.”

It is impossible to confirm whether the Isidore Abramowitz in the testimony was Martin’s father.

“There could have been another Isidore Abramowitz at the Triangle, while my father was making deliveries,” Abramowitz said. “Since the

payroll records went up in the blaze, there was no way to know.” But if they were one and the same, the trial testimony was radically different from the version told by Martin’s mother.

Was his mother’s version of the story something he had told her during their courtship nearly 20 years later, or had he revealed all, and either she or they decided to alter the narrative?

A policeman observes corpses of workers and charred rubble following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, March 25, 1911. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“I hope that he did tell her the truth he carried with him, and it was my mother who had changed it,” said Abramowitz. He notes that his mother also hid from him the fact of his father’s death for two years.

Martin was only 7 when his father died.

“I also wonder whether my father might simply not have told my mother the truth,” Abramowitz conSee NEW BOOK on Page

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NEW BOOK Continued from Page 15 tinued to ponder. “Remember, the fire happened 18 years before they were married.”

Martin’s older brother Carl, who is in his early 90s and lives on Long Island, told him recently that their father had in fact told him that he had been at the factory, saw the fire erupt and fled.

Abramowitz’s brother has told him that in 1920, Isidore was arrested by the FBI in a roundup of perceived anarchists in what were later called the Palmer Raids. Did his father become more socially and politically active as a result of the Triangle fire?

Martin has filed inquiries with the National Archives and the FBI, but he hasn’t yet uncovered any information about his father’s political activity.

When Martin Abramowitz was growing up in the early 1940s, his father was back on his feet working as a cutter, and they had their own

one-bedroom apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Yet in family photos, he appears to be much older than his age. In 1946, pneumonia set in, followed by heart disease.

Abramowitz remembers visiting his father at Kings County Hospital twice, when he was only 6. “I remember seeing him from the nursing station, and one other time, I was told to look up from outside the building, where in a window up above, I could barely see a face waving at me.”

Isidore Abramowitz died of heart failure at Kings County Hospital at the age of 54.

Martin graduated from Brooklyn College in 1961 with a degree in English literature, and went on to earn a master’s degree in literature from NYU in 1962. He served as director of program development at the New York City Department of Welfare and went on to a career in Jewish communal service, retiring in 2006 as vice president for planning at Combined Jewish Philanthropies,

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served as a volunteer consultant to the board of the New England Jewish Labor Committee and participated in the RaiseUp Massachusetts Coalition’s successful 2018 “Fight for 15” campaign for a living wage for Massachusetts workers.

He is a board member of Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, a grassroots activist group that organizes an annual commemoration ceremony on the anniversary of the fire.

The coalition is planning a March 2023 dedication of a sculptural and educational memorial at the site, now known as the Brown Building at 29 Washington Pl., just east of Washington Square. (There is currently a small plaque on the building.)

The group has raised $2 million for the memorial, with $1 million to go. Major support has come from the State of New York following the personal intervention of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and from the labor movement. The coalition is hoping that donors in New York and from Jewish and Italian communities will step up to fill the gap.

Abramowitz is using his experience as a Jewish community professional — and his family story Martin Abramowitz, center, and his sons Jacob, left, and Yosef pose at the site — to support the effort. of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, “The reason I’m telling this story at 29 Washington Place in Greenwich about my father now,” he said, “is Village. Now known as the Brown that I’m hoping it will bring some Building, it is marked with a plaque.

(Courtesy Martin Abramowitz) attention to the plans for the memoIf his father did feel guilt about rial. I owe that to ‘the girls,’ in the his role in an infamous event, name of my father.” Abramowitz also wonders if he took any comfort in the workplace improvements following the tragedy. He cites Frances Perkins, who witnessed the fire as a social worker and went on to serve as the U.S. secretary of labor from 1933 to 1945, the first female presidential cabinet member.

“She famously said, ‘The New Deal began on March 25, 1911,'” Abramowitz said.

Martin Abramowitz himself

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Boston’s Jewish federation.

(His son Yosef Abramowitz is a former journalist who lives in Israel and heads Energiya Global Capital, an investment firm specializing in solar energy; Yosef’s wife is the rabbi and author Susan Silverman.)

Did his father carry a terrible secret alone, or was he at least able to share it with his wife or anyone else? Abramowitz has himself borne this inner struggle.

“Every day, I ask myself questions that are unknowable,” he said.

The absence of information and of his father, he said, had affected his psychological development as a child and, in turn, his family when he was an adult.

“Because no one would answer my questions, I learned not to pay attention to my feelings,” he said.

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Arts & Culture

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Jewish Stories Were Excluded From A New Movie Museum. Is Hollywood’s Push For Diversity Leaving Them Behind?

Guests take photos in the costume exhibit in the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, Sept. 30, 2021. (Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

(JTA) – A new museum about the history of Hollywood will have a permanent exhibition devoted to the contributions of Jews after early criticism that Jews were omitted.

The change was announced this week in the lead-up to this year’s Academy Awards, which features a slate of nominees more diverse than in the past. It caps a period of intense discussion about how Hollywood includes Jews — and how it does not.

Whether in their depictions on screen, the actors cast to play them or acknowledgement of their historic role building up the film

industry, Jews over the last few months have been vocal about their impressions of being left out of the current Hollywood conversation.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which opened last fall in Los Angeles, is exhibit A in this purported oversight. Overseen by the Oscars’ governing body, which described its mission as “radically inclusive,” the museum’s announcement of its new permanent exhibition focused on Jews came only after the academy admitted it had initially sidelined or ignored Hollywood’s prominent Jewish founders.

Jewish visitors to its unveiling, including prominent donors to the museum, such as Haim Saban, publicly voiced their concerns that Jewish stories were being overlooked in the industry’s historical narrative.

Among the figures who had little or no prominence in the museum’s storytelling were Jewish studio heads like Louis B. Mayer and the Warner brothers; prominent directors like Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch; stars like Hedy Lamarr; and screenwriters

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like Herman Mankiewicz (subject of the recent biopic “Mank,” which starred non-Jew Gary Oldman).

Figures such as these molded the early years of Hollywood, even while all but hiding their Jewishness from the general public, according to historians of the era such as Neal Gabler, whose book “An Empire Of Their Own” explores the central Jewish role in the creation of Hollywood.

Gary Oldman on the set of “Mank,” a 2021 biopic about Jewish screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. (Nikolai Loveikis/ Netflix)

These early Jews’ films rarely, if ever, dealt with Jewish characters and themes. “Gentleman’s Agreement,” a landmark 1947 film about antisemitism, neither starred nor was directed or produced by Jews (though co-writer Moss Hart and Laura Z. Hobson, whose novel the film was based on, were Jewish).

Some of these showbiz legends were refugees from Europe, and their backgrounds of escaping (and continuing to operate under) extreme antisemitism informed their desire to keep their Judaism under wraps.

The Academy’s initial omission of such Jewish figures, and their self-imposed cultural erasure, stood out in stark contrast to the museum’s emphasis on people of color and women in early Hollywood.

One anonymous insider told The Hollywood Reporter the exclusion was a symptom of “overcorrection due to wokeness.”

Criticism of the museum arrived in the middle of other ongoing con-

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versations about Jewish representation in modern Hollywood. Jewish actress Sarah Silverman recently popularized the controversial term “Jewface,” previously used by academics to describe secular Jews dressing up like Hasidic ones in Yiddish theater, to describe a different phenomenon: non-Jewish actors playing Jewish roles, in popular works such as “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic “On The Basis of Sex.” An upcoming biopic of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, scheduled for release this year, casts nonJew Helen Mirren in the role.

Just this week, an anonymous Oscar voter interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter questioned whether Rachel Zegler, the Colombian-Polish star of Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” remake, is diverse enough for the role she played, based solely on her name.

“I know they’re emphasizing that they cast Latino and Latina actors this time, but the actress who plays Maria is named Rachel Zegler, so I think that’s a little overstated,” the Academy member said, as their justification for not voting for the film — in what could be interpreted as an insinuation that Zegler is Jewish and therefore does not count as diverse.

Zegler is Latina and not Jewish.

Allison Josephs, a writer and activist who runs the Orthodox-focused media organization Jew In The City, says how Jews are portrayed onscreen has real implications for how they are treated in real life.

“Jews aren’t considered a minority in Hollywood. We’re considered white,” Josephs told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, adding that depictions of Orthodox Jews in particular are “two-dimensional.” Her writing on such negative portrayals has

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JEWISH STORIES Continued from Page 17 prompted apologies and episode retractions from major producers.

This week, Josephs announced that Jew in the City would be opening a “Hollywood bureau,” intended to be a Jewish parallel to the NAACP, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Allison Josephs, founder of the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Enter- Orthodox media organization Jew tainment — existing organizations In The City, at the launch event for that push for positive Black, Muslim her site’s new “Hollywood bureau” and awards show focusing on Jewish and Asian depictions onscreen. onscreen representation, March 21, The bureau would advocate for 2022. (Courtesy of Allison Josephs) Jews in Hollywood by helping through representation awards; a place observant Jews in entertain- “minority impact study” to determent production roles, as well as mine if negative depictions of Jews onscreen lead to more antisemitic Happy Passover! incidents in real life; and a media consultancy. Josephs is also at work on a documentary about Jewish representation in Hollywood.

With screenwriter Yael Levy, Serving Louisiana Since 1970 Josephs also coined what they call Sales • Service • Supplies the “Joseph’s test” for judging an Printers • Office Equipment Orthodox character’s onscreen porOffice Supplies • Toner Cartridges trayal, in the model of the Bechdel Test, a popular analysis tool for John Manzella onscreen depictions of women coined by comics artist Allison 504-833-1964 Bechdel. (There’s also the Kranjec 2609 Ridgelake Drive Test, to assess whether Torah study Metairie, LA 70002 includes women sources.) www.aominc.net The Bechdel Test’s criteria calls

for a film to feature two named female characters who have a conversation with each other about something other than a man. The Josephs test calls for a film or TV show to feature Orthodox characters who “are emotionally and psychologically stable” and can “selfactualize without leaving their Judaism behind” — in contrast to popular Netflix shows “Unorthodox” and “My Unorthodox Life,” both of which feature protagonists who exit Orthodox Judaism.

“Basically, every show and movie fails the Josephs test except for [Israeli movies and TV shows] ‘Shtisel,’ ‘Fill the Void,’ [and] ‘Ushpizin,’ because they all were made by or worked with actual Orthodox Jews,” Josephs said.

Only one film released this year had a positive enough depiction of Judaism, in Josephs’ eyes, to be eligible for a Jewish representation award: the music documentary “Rock Camp: The Movie,” whose central subject is an Orthodox music agent.

She’s not alone in wanting better onscreen depictions of Jews. In an op-ed last year, Malina Saval, Variety’s features editor and a former screenwriter, lamented what she saw as “the watering-down of Jewish representation in TV and film,” criticizing the so-called “self-loathing Jews” onscreen, like Woody Allen and Larry David, whom she

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believes help provide a safe psychological distance between the audience and a positive view of Judaism.

But the Academy is committed to a course correction around Jews, the museum’s director and president, Bill Kramer, wrote in a joint op-ed this week with Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.

“As a cultural institution that seeks to elevate underrepresented and untold stories of the film industry, the Academy Museum has a responsibility to examine and explore the experiences of oppressed and marginalized groups in cinema, including the Jewish community,” Kramer and Greenblatt wrote, adding that the museum and the ADL would be partnering on public programming to educate the public about the role of Jews in Hollywood and in combatting antisemitism.

The Academy museum’s new permanent exhibit focusing on Jews, with the working title “Hollywoodland,” will open next year.

In the meantime, Jewish Oscar viewers still have a few rooting interests this weekend: director Steven Spielberg, actor Andrew Garfield and screenwriter Maggie Gyllenhaal, among other Jews, are all up for awards.

Netflix To Produce A ‘Jewish Matchmaking’ Series

By Caleb Guedes-Reed

Netflix announced a new “Jewish Matchmaking” series on Thursday, modeled after its hit “Indian Matchmaking.” (Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images)

(JTA) — Matchmaker, matchmaker — are you going on Netflix?

The streaming giant announced a new “Jewish Matchmaking” series on Thursday, modeled after its hit “Indian Matchmaking.”

Details are scant, and there is no premiere date, but Netflix’s companion site Tudum says it will feature “singles in the US and Israel as they turn their dating life over to a 18

Passover 2022

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top Jewish matchmaker.”

“Will using the traditional practice of shidduch help them find their soulmate in today’s world?” the show asks.

“Indian Matchmaking” was nominated for an Emmy after premiering in July 2020, but was also criticized by many who said it promoted stereotypes and classism.

The show’s production group, Industrial Media’s The Intellectual Property Corporation, will also produce “Jewish Matchmaking.”

Netflix has also sustained criticism for some of its other shows such as “Unorthodox” and “My Unorthodox Life,” for their negative portrayals of Orthodox Jews.

Significant drama has also occurred within the Haart family, who is at the center of “My Unorthodox Life,” during filming of the show’s second season. THE

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Sports

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Sandy Koufax Statue To Be Unveiled At Dodger Stadium This Summer

By Jacob Gurvis

plaza in 2017. Artist Branly Cadet, who made the Robinson statue, also created Koufax’s sculpture.

The Los Angeles Dodgers had announced the Koufax statue in 2019, with its unveiling originally planned for the summer of 2020.

The new ceremony will be held June 18 prior to a game against the CleveSandy Koufax shown after striking out land Guardians. The first 40,000 14 batters in a game in 1955. (Bettmann/ ticketed fans in attendance will Getty Images) receive a replica of Koufax’s statue.

LOS ANGELES (JTA) — JewDodgers President and CEO Stan ish baseball legend Sandy Koufax Kasten announced the new date this will be immortalized with a statue week. He said fans entering the at Dodger Stadium this summer. centerfield gates would now be The Hall of Fame pitcher will “greeted” by Robinson and Koufax. join his trailblazing teammate Jack“Not only are both of these Hall ie Robinson, whose bronze statue of Famers part of our rich Dodger was unveiled in the centerfield history, they are also continuously

inspiring sports fans everywhere,” Kasten said in his statement.

Koufax, now 86, became the youngest player to enter baseball’s Hall of Fame when he was inducted in 1972 at the age of 36. That same year, the Dodgers retired Koufax’s jersey number, 32, alongside Robinson’s iconic 42, which is retired across the sport.

One of the best pitchers in baseball history, Koufax was a member of four World Series championship teams, winning two World Series Most Valuable Player awards. Koufax also won a National League MVP and three Cy Young awards during his 12-year career with the Dodgers.

Koufax posted a career record of 165-87 with a 2.76 earned run aver-

age, 2,396 strikeouts, 137 complete games and 40 shutouts. He was the first pitcher to throw four no-hitters.

Among Jewish fans, Koufax is best known for a game he did not pitch. Game 1 of the 1965 World Series fell on Yom Kippur, and Koufax famously declined to play.

Over time, our entire extended family fled to Israel and the United States. My immediate family was the last of our clan to finally pick up and leave, in September 1990.

The story of Iran’s ancient Jewish community unfolds over more than 2,700 years, back to when the Jews were exiled from Jerusalem through to today, after most members of the community have relocated throughout the world. Today there are fewer than 10,000 Jews left in Iran, the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel.

My Passover experience here is vastly different than the one I grew up with. Every year as I put away

one set of dishes and bring out my Passover ware, I feel a pang of guilt at how easy it is is to get ready for the holiday compared with what my mother and grandmother had to do in Iran. The shelves of the supermarkets here are filled with kosher-forPassover cookies, cakes, chocolates, sweets and dairy products. One could almost forget that we are experiencing a holiday that celebrates the Jews’ escape from slavery.

But I am forever grateful for the freedoms that I have been granted here, and to celebrate this most auspicious holiday alongside so many of our people.

Passover Happy

GROWING UP Continued from Page 5 for-Passover shops (or even kosher shops), every cake and cookie had to be made from scratch, a task that entailed the washing, drying and blending of all the needed nuts. The week before the holiday, the aroma of roasted nuts would fill the house, and the sweet smell of homemade cookies couldn’t summon the holiday fast enough. Given the lack of kosher products, we hardly consumed any dairy for the eight days, our diets consisting of eggs, meats and, according to Iranian Jewish custom, rice.

Our Muslim neighbors, too, were busy cleaning, readying themselves for the coming of spring. A Muslim family with whom we were particularly friendly would come over each Passover for a taste of matzah, saying how they looked forward to it all year. My father’s co-workers NSU knew it was an auspicious time of

the year for him and wished him especially well as he took a holiday for the Seders. In the market and in the streets, though, we kept quiet about our Passover preparations.

We did not discuss details with strangers and those with whom we did not feel a connection.

The Seder itself brought its own associations and customs. At the end of each ritual meal, as we bid farewell to yet another holiday and sang “Next Year in Jerusalem,” the words had a deep significance for us. Our Seder table became quieter with each passing year, with so many family and friends already gone to other promised lands. We each wondered out loud when our NSU would come to leave a country turn that treated us like second-class citizens, when we would find security and peace in other lands.

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An Israeli Director Does Battle With The Country’s Culture Ministry In A Provocative New Film

By Andrew Lapin

(JTA) — Before the hero of “Ahed’s Knee,” an Israeli filmmaker known only as “Y,” can screen one of his movies in a public library in an Arava desert town, he is told he must sign a document from Israel’s Ministry of Culture. The agreement states that, during his visit, he will only discuss with his audience a list of approved topics, including “Israeli history,” “the Holocaust,”” family,” “love” and “comrades in arms.”

Examples of unapproved topics: Palestinians,

the occupation and any suggestion that Israelis will tolerate dissent from their creative class.

This is a problem for Y (Avshalom Pollak).

Not only is he prone to monologues about the sorry state of Israeli culture today, but he is also in production on a new movie — this one about the real-life Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi.

Jailed after slapping an Israeli soldier in 2017 during a clash in the West Bank, the teenager became a symbol of Palestinian resistance. (The

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film takes its title from a comment by an Israeli politician who said that Tamimi “should have gotten a bullet, at least in the kneecap,” to keep her under house arrest for life.)

Winner of a special jury prize when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, “Ahed’s Knee” is a work of fiction, although its writer-director Nadav Lapid is obviously channeling his own frustrations with working as a filmmaker in Israel. Lapid’s movies, which are frequently critical of nationalism and Israeli identity, are widely celebrated in art houses and film festivals around the world. His film “The Kindergarten Teacher” was remade into an American movie starring Maggie Gyllenhaal.

But on the basis of his latest film, it seems that Lapid has struggled to connect with audiences in Israel itself.

In “Ahed’s Knee,” Lapid’s avatar, Y, wanders through the desert town of Sapir prior to his film screening. He sends frequent photos and text messages to his unseen mother and collaborator, who is dying of cancer. (Lapid’s own mother, Era Lapid, was the editor of all of his previous films until she died from cancer in 2018; his father, Haim Lapid, is credited as a screenplay consultant on “Ahed’s Knee.”) While despairing that all his work has been for naught, and flashing back to traumatic experiences in the military that he may or may not have made up, Y enters an uneasy flirtation with his young escort, Yahalom (Nur Fibak), who works for the culture minister and has to compel the director to sign the approved topics agreement.

Though the minister in the film is never named, Lapid is likely taking shots at Miri Regev, Israel’s previous culture minister, who during her tenure under former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that the country should not be funding artwork that she deemed “disloyal” to the state. When Lapid’s film “Synonyms,” about an Israeli expat in Paris attempting to erase his national identity, won the Golden Bear at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, Regev announced that no one in her ministry had seen the film.

Much of the events depicted in “Ahed’s Knee” are true, according to Lapid; in the film’s press notes, he says that he encountered a similar dilemma involving an “approved topics” form when he was invited to screen “The Kindergarten Teacher” in Sapir. Like his onscreen avatar, Lapid says he also encountered a young deputy culture minister who expressed serious misgivings about such forms even as she compelled him to sign one, and, as in the film, a journalist friend tried to get him to secretly record the civil servant making such comments. There’s a hint of self-deprecating humor in the way Lapid depicts Y as a blowhard and an egomaniac, while also making clear that the two are united See DIRECTOR on Page THE

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DIRECTOR Continued from Page 20 in their political principles.

The movie explores a central tension between the artist and the state, a tension that has heightened significance in Israel, which aspires to be a democracy despite a constant state of heightened security and ideological tension. As Y weighs whether to blow up his entire career just to make a point, his own wouldbe professional suicide contrasts with other images of grand-scale destruction, like Sapir’s wilting bell pepper harvest, which used to sustain the village until climate change ruined farmers’ livelihoods.

In the spirit of many other film directors who make movies about themselves (Federico Fellini, Woody Allen, Hong Sang-soo and others), Lapid also offers no separation between the personal and the political. When Y rants that the culture ministry’s “sole aim is to

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ALL TYPES OF ROOFING • CHECK OUR REPUTATION jharris5678@aol.com • LA State Lic. #56071 An Israeli filmmaker named Y (Avshalom Pollak) makes a series of radical decisions in the movie "Ahed's Knee," written and directed by Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid. (Kino Lorber)

504.834.5353 • 985.960.6090 • bandhroofing.com Best Wishes to my many Jewish friends and constituents for a happy Passover

reduce the soul … to impotence and incompetence so it collapses under the state’s oppression,” both directors, real and fictional, have boiled their frustrations down to only one message: the time for subtlety has passed.

“Ahed’s Knee” opens today in New York at Film at Lincoln Center, and expands across the country in the coming weeks.

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Henry Winkler To Star In Racy Israeli TV Series

By Caleb Guedes-Reed SG/JDF/1/6V

PLEASE CHECK YOUR AD CAREFULLY FOR SPELLING & GRAMMAR, AS WELL AS ACCURACY OF ADDRESSES, PHONE NUMBERS & OTHER VITAL INFORMATION.

Your ad will run AS-IS unless changes Actor Henry Winkler Visits Siriusxm made Studios are In New Yorkand City, Oct. 2, 2019. approved with yourImages) (Slaven Vlasic/Getty Account Executive by

(JTA) — Jewish actor Henry Winkler will star in a new show on Israeli television in Hebrew and NOON English that is being called a “U.S.9/7 series.

Israel crossover”

In “Chansi,” the man who brought us beloved characters like Fonzie from “Happy Days” will play the father of a haredi Orthodox woman who leaves her community in Brooklyn for Israel. Once there, according to one Israeli site’s description, she attempts to chart an adventurous new life — and to “sleep with as many Israeli soldiers as possible.”

The series stars and was created by Aleeza Chanowitz. It is being filmed in and around Jerusalem, Variety reported, and will air on the Israeli network HOT later this year.

After2012 this deadline, OCT the only changes that may be made are to correct

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(food)

Best Wishes for a Happy Passover!

Passover Stuffed Cabbage Rolls

By Chanie Apfelbaum

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Stuffed cabbage is popular in Ukraine and is known as holubtsi, which literally translates as "little pigeons". (Chanie Apfelbaum)

There’s nothing like Passover to remind us where we come from. In many Jewish homes, Passover traditions are carried down from father to son, establishing the family’s customs and setting the standards for their Passover pantry.

Growing up, my family’s standards were quite stringent. We did not eat any processed ingredients, and we only used produce that could be peeled. My mother prepared simple syrup in place of sugar, and we seasoned our dishes minimally with kosher salt, no spices allowed. Thankfully, I married into a family whose customs were slightly more lenient. My in-laws allow a variety of fruits and vegetables, including cabbage, as well as some minimally processed foods, like tomato sauce.

When I spent Passover with my in-laws last year, I decided to pay homage to my roots by adapting my grandmother’s stuffed cabbage recipe for the holiday. While my grandmother would never have made this recipe for Passover, to me, it signifies the union of my husband’s familial customs with my Eastern European heritage. And that is precisely how we celebrate Passover.

Stuffed cabbage is popular in Ukraine and is known as holubtsi, which literally translates as "little pigeons". Make some in solidarity with the Jews who were forced to flee their homes during this year's Russia-Ukraine war.

INGREDIENTS • 1 head of green cabbage • 1 lb ground beef • 1 heaping cup leftover mashed potatoes • 1 small onion, grated • 1 egg salt and pepper, to taste For the sauce: • 2 15 oz cans tomato sauce • 1 Granny Smith apple, peeled

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and grated 1 large tomato, finely chopped 1/3 cup sugar Juice of 1 lemon salt and pepper, to taste

DIRECTIONS 1. Place the cabbage in the freezer overnight (about 12 hours).

Remove and place in a colander in the sink to defrost. This makes the cabbage pliable for rolling and stuffing.

2. Remove the outer leaves of the cabbage and discard. Peel the remaining large leaves, taking care not to tear the cabbage as you go.

Set the whole leaves aside and chop up the remaining cabbage for later.

3. In a bowl, combine the ground beef, potatoes, onion, egg, salt and pepper. Set aside.

4. Set up a stuffing station with your whole cabbage leaves and ground beef mixture. With a paring knife, trim the thick part of the stem off the base of the leaves, taking care not to cut through the rest of the leaf Place the leaves upright so that they are curling upward like a bowl.

5. Place a small handful of filling towards the base of each leaf and fold over the leaf from the left side. Roll the cabbage leaf up and using your finger, stuff the loose end of the leaf inward, pushing it into the center. Rolling the cabbage this way ensures that they hold together nicely during cooking.

6. Continue with remaining leaves. If you have any leftover filling, simply roll them into meatballs to place in the pot alongside the cabbage rolls.

7. Place the stuffed cabbage rolls in a large pot and cover with sauce ingredients. If you had any leftover cabbage or meatballs, add them to the pot as well.

8. Bring the sauce to a gentle boil over medium heat and reduce to a simmer. Cover the pot, leaving it slightly open so that the steam does not force the cabbage rolls to open. Cook for approximately 2 – 2 1/2 hours, until cabbage is tender and sauce has thickened.

VARIATION: for unstuffed cabbage soup, shred the cabbage and roll the meat into balls. Place everything into a pot and continue as above. THE

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Almond Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

By Shannon Sarna

year. Your guests are sure to ask incredulously, “Are you sure these are kosher for Passover?” Truly the ultimate compliment.

Passover-friendly almond butter cookies are a super tasty, chewy cookie that is good enough to enjoy all year. (Shannon Sarna)

I love it when people taste my pareve desserts and say, “Wow— this is pareve!?”

It’s the same rule with Passover dishes and desserts. Which is why I am on a never-ending search for the perfect Passover desserts that are good enough to eat all year and just happen to also be Passover-friendly.

In one of my searches, I came across this recipe for Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies which I realized could easily be made Passoverfriendly just by swapping out the peanut butter for almond butter. I adjusted a few ingredients and the result is a super tasty, chewy cookie that is good enough to enjoy all

INGREDIENTS • 1 cup almond butter • 1 egg • 1 cup packed brown sugar • 1 tsp vanilla • 1 cup chocolate chips • 1/2 cup chopped walnuts • thick sea salt (optional) DIRECTIONS 1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Mix together almond butter, egg, brown sugar and vanilla.

3. Fold in chocolate chips and walnuts.

4. Spoon out tablespoon-sized mounds onto ungreased cookie sheet. Sprinkle with pinch of thick sea salt on top if desired.

5. Bake for 11 minutes, and then allow to cool for 5 minutes while cookies remain on the baking sheet. Transfer to baking rack to cool completely.

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These Passover Pancake Noodles Are Better Than Matzah Balls Everything you need to know about fladla (including a recipe).

By Liz Susman Karp and Natalie Gorlin

These Passover egg noodles are made from a thin crepe that’s coiled and cut into strips. (Getty Images)

Last April, as the pandemic raged in my area, I opened my front door to my dear friend Natalie, who literally threw at me from a distance a plastic sandwich bag containing her family’s cherished Passover tradition: flädla.

Less commonly known than the universally beloved matzah ball, these Passover egg noodles are made from a thin crepe that’s coiled and cut into strips, over which steaming broth is poured. Natalie’s family recipe was handed down from her mother’s tante Ilse, who

emigrated from Germany in 1939 post-Kristallnacht.

Ask around about flädla and, like the history of any good noodle, you’ll discover the topic covers a lot of ground. Flädla, also spelled flädle, didn’t start off as a Passover food, but evolved into a dish that reflects the ingenuity and frugality of Jewish Eastern European cooks, who repurposed leftover dough or pancakes into noodles.

Noodles were a significant part of the Ashkenazi diet. In medieval times, Europeans began boiling dough in water rather than baking or frying it. In the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, Gil Marks writes that noodles were predominantly used in soup and that some cooks cut up matzah meal blintzes into the liquid. No name was ascribed to that noodle or dish.

Recipes for Passover noodles are included in numerous Jewish cookbooks, notably June Feiss Hersh’s compilation of recipes from Holo-

caust survivors titled, Recipes Remembered: A Celebration of Survival, illustrating how deeply ingrained the dish was in people’s memories. Sometimes called lokshen, the Yiddish word for noodle, the recipes use matzah meal or potato starch, and always the same method of frying a thin crepe and cutting it into strips.

Pinpointing when, where, or who first adapted these noodle ribbons for the holiday is a challenge.

“What is most fascinating to me,” says Gaby Rossmer, coauthor with her daughter, Sonya Gropman, of The German-Jewish Cookbook, “is how these food traditions travel.

They do follow routes. You can see it, but you can’t tell exactly which one came first, which came second.”

Many Jews, like Natalie’s ancestors and Rossmer, lived in southern Germany; in the Swabian region, pancakes are known as flädle. The recipe has been handed down over

generations; tradition dictates the crepes be thin and crispy. Flädlesuppe was a popular dish, but “never for Passover,” says Rossmer. She was a year old when she came to America from Bavaria, but fondly remembers frequently frying flour crepes with her father; the goal was always to have enough left over to make flädlesuppe.

The noodles are a key component of a comparable, popular Austrian soup called frittatensuppe, or pancake soup, which is always made with beef broth, says Nino Shaye Weiss, a blogger at JewishVienneseFood.com and Jewish food guide in Vienna. There, the crepes are called palatschinken; cut up they’re referred to as frittaten.

“Jews do seemingly love them as they cannot live the eight days of Passover without them,” he comments, adding that frittaten for See PANCAKE NOODLES on Page

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PANCAKE NOODLES Continued from Page 24 Passover are simply known as Peisachdike lokshen (kosher for Passover noodles).

Legend has it that frittatensuppe may have originated in 19th century Austria to feed Austrian, French, and Italian diplomats secretly meeting during the Congress of Vienna.

One participant was Conte Romano de Frittata, whose coachman prepared the pancake. Frittata comes from the Italian word friggere, to fry; perhaps suggesting that the dish was named after the coachman’s employer. However, the only similar Italian-Jewish recipe I could find was for Minestra di Sfoglietti Per Pesach, a soup containing noodles of baked dough, in The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews

by Edda Servi Machlin. If the story is true, the dish did not make its way back to Italy.

Holocaust survivor Cecile Gruer, 86, is known as her family’s chef.

She movingly recalls eating flädla in 1946 at the first Passover she celebrated with her family in an Austrian displaced persons camp after they were reunited. Then a teen, she watched her mother pre-

pare the noodle as her mother had done in Hungary. Greuer makes flädla year-round, using potato starch, matzah meal, or quinoa or almond flour for gluten-free relatives. Sometimes she’ll just mix egg and water, essentially an omelette. Gruer suggests adding any herb, such as dill or cilantro, to heighten the soup’s flavor. She continues these traditions because, she says, “You do not want to break the chain.”

Gruer’s and Natalie’s families enjoy their flädla in chicken broth with matzah balls. The Lubavitch sect, who follow the custom of gebrokts and don’t eat any dish where matzah can touch liquid, have just the noodle in their soup, says Leah Koenig, author of The Jewish Cookbook. Gruer confides she doesn’t like chicken soup. How does she eat her flädla? She laughs.

“I would have it on the plate!”

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Opinion

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Is ‘Never Again’ Now? The Ukraine War Ignites A Recurring Debate

By Andrew Silow-Carroll

to draw attention to the slaughter of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis. Screenwriter Ben Hecht organized the spectacle and wrote the script; German refugee composer Kurt Weill wrote the score.

Two million Jews had already been killed. The performance included the lines, “No voice is heard to cry halt to the slaughter, no “We Will Never Die,” a memorial government speaks to bid the murpageant for the Jews murdered up to der of human millions end. But we that point by the Nazis, was held in here tonight have a voice. Let us Madison Square Garden on March 9 raise it.” and 10, 1943. Here, during the final scene, cantors sing the Kaddish for the In the self-congratulatory amnedead. (Bettmann/Getty Imges) sia called hindsight, American Jews (JTA) — Seventy-nine years ago often look back on “We Will Never this month, crowds twice filled Die” as a watershed in raising Madison Square Garden for a pag- awareness about the Holocaust — eant, “We Will Never Die,” meant and a condemnation of America’s

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failure at that point to stop the genocide. What’s often forgotten is that Hecht had trouble getting major Jewish organizations to sign on as sponsors. “A meeting of representatives of 32 Jewish groups, hosted

by Hecht, dissolved in shouting matches as ideological and personal rivalries left the Jewish organizations unable to cooperate,” according to the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.

This was 1943, mind you, so the debate over whether the United States should commit blood and treasure to the defense of its Allies was already settled. But the “ideological and personal rivalries” are reminders that Americans were never of one mind about entering World War II, and certainly not about whether and how to save the Jews.

America and its allies are embroiled in a similar debate now, and World War II and its lessons are being invoked by those urging a fierce Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Chief among these are Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has specifically cited the Holocaust in asking governments, and Jewish groups, to intervene.

“Nazism is born in silence. So, shout about killings of civilians.

Shout about the murders of Ukrainians,” Zelensky said in a call with American Jewish groups. He spoke about the Russian missile strike

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near the Babyn Yar memorial to slaughtered Jews, saying, “We all died again at Babyn Yar from the missile attack, even though the world pledges ‘Never again.’”

Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign minister of Ukraine, also invoked “never again” in a Washington Post oped. “For decades, world leaders bowed their heads at war memorials across Europe and solemnly proclaimed: ‘Never again.’ The time has come to prove those were not empty words,” he wrote.

The rhetoric may be soaring, but not everyone is convinced. “I’m seeing the term genocide & the phrase ‘never again’ used more in the context of Ukraine,” tweeted Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. “I understand why they’re being used — & the resonance they carry — but they’re not accurate ways to talk about a conventional war between states, even one with humanitarian casualties.”

Damon Linker, a columnist at The Week, made a similar point.

“What Russia’s doing is terrible, but it’s what happens in war. It isn’t genocide, and it certainly isn’t the Holocaust, which is what that phrase refers to,” he tweeted.

“Please stop the hype.”

In some ways the debate is semantic. ”Never Again” is a phrase popularized by a Jewish militant, adopted by mainstream Jewish groups and eventually absorbed into the global vocabulary as a shorthand for – for what, exactly?

Is it about intervention when a government targets a people or ethnic group for slaughter, as in Rwanda?

Does it include campaigns of terror meant to “ethnically cleanse” a region, as in Bosnia or Myanmar?

Is it about a system of “reeducation camps” meant to erase a people’s culture, as the Chinese are doing to the Uyghurs?

Or, as Kuleba defines it, does it mean “stopping the aggressor before it can cause more death and destruction”? According to that conception of “never again,” the Holocaust may have ended with the death of six million Jews, but it couldn’t have begun without See NEVER AGAIN on Page THE

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Political

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This Jewish Political Cartoonist’s Work From The ’30s Through The ’60s Is More Relevant Than Ever

By Sarah Rosen

U.S. State Department officials ignore reports of anti-Jewish atrocities by the Nazis in a cartoon by Eric Godal from from October 1943. (Image courtesy of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies)

(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — German-Jewish illustrator Eric Godal first rose to prominence for his anti-Nazi cartoons in 1930s Germany. In the decades that followed, he garnered attention for his political cartoons that forcefully opposed Hitler, fascist regimes, antisemitism and bigotry.

And yet many of his cartoons are so germane to today’s issues, they look like they could have been drawn yesterday.

More than 50 pieces by Godal, who died in 1969, are now on display at the Society of Illustrators on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The body of work on view — which includes political cartoons, posters and magazine illustrations — were created between the 1930s and the 1960s. They’re accompanied by descriptions of Godal’s remarkable life story, including of how he fled Nazi Germany.

“Cartoonists were an important editorial voice,” Rafael Medoff, one of the exhibit’s curators, told The New York Jewish Week.

“That’s one of the reasons for the exhibit: to bring attention to this extraordinary cartoonist who used his cartoons to fight for Jewish rights and all human rights.”

Medoff, a professor of Jewish history and the founding director of the Washington-based David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, co-curated the exhibit with Charlotte Bonelli, the director of the library and archives at the American Jewish Committee.

Godal was born in Berlin in 1899, and began his career as a daily political cartoonist for a leading German newspaper. In early 1933, after Hitler’s rise to power, THE

JEWISH LIGHT

the Gestapo came to arrest Godal, whose cartoons criticizing the Nazis had made him one of the first artists they targeted. Godal caught wind of the arrest and hailed a taxi that took him to Czechoslovakia. In Prague, Godal worked with many other German Jewish refugees to publish an anti-fascist satirical magazine.

He continued his cartoonist career after coming to New York City in 1935, eventually replacing Theodore Geisel — yes, Dr. Seuss — as the head political cartoonist for P.M., a New York daily. There, Godal published pro-democracy cartoons that advocated for a more tolerant society.

In the 1940s, Godal participated in an anti-racism project organized by the American Jewish Committee, a Jewish defense organization, that sought to combat new hate movements that they feared could develop in America during the tumultuous postwar years.

events that moved him to put pen to paper. He was drawing cartoons for the American press about the plight of Jewish refugees, while his elderly mother became one of those refugees.

A tragic aspect of the Godal story is that his widowed mother came from Germany in 1939 to join her son in New York, but she booked passage on the St. Louis [a ship filled with 937 mostly Jewish refugees who were denied entry by both Cuba and the United States].

She was sent back to Europe and was murdered when the Nazis overran Belgium. So here we have a man whose very life reflected this enormous tragedy that was overwhelming the Jewish people, which he was crying out against through his cartoons. He then lent his talents to the struggle to create the State of Israel.

At the same time, he was drawing cartoons not only about the Jewish cause. He also was part of a

very important, little-known campaign undertaken by the American Jewish Committee in the 1940s and 1950s to combat all racism and all bigotry through the work of political cartoonists. They were really ahead of their time in recognizing that political cartoons could be powerful educational vehicles.

It’s notable that his cartoons advocated for Jews as well as others who were discriminated against. Was that a unique approach at the time?

Godal was part of the political left. He believed fighting antisemitism was part and parcel of the struggle against all bigotry or racism. The American Jewish Committee’s goal was to fight all racism, not by ignoring antisemitism, but by drawing attention to the fact that that people who were prejudiced against African Americans and other minority groups also See CARTOONIST on Page

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Fifty works from the political cartoonist Eric Godal are on display at the Society of Illustrators on the Upper East Side.

(Courtesy of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies)

Among the highlights of the exhibit is one of his anti-fascist cartoons is from 1944 — meant to satirize America’s’ co-sponsorship of an exhibition with Franco’s Spain — which the exhibit describes as the first known cartoon depiction of the Nazis’gas chambers.

Medoff spoke to The New York Jewish Week about Godal’s extraordinary life, and the lessons we can glean from his work today.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What spoke to you about Eric Godal and his cartoons? What inspired this exhibition?

His life story is a remarkable journey. He was not merely a cartoonist commenting on events, he was living through many of the

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NEVER AGAIN Continued from Page 26 unchecked territorial expansion by a brutal regime.

The debate is also highly concrete. If Kuleba is right, history will judge America poorly if it doesn’t do more to stop Russia’s attacks on civilians and its razing of Ukrainian cities.

And yet, while the United States and its allies have committed arms and sanctions meant to cripple Russia’s economy, President Biden has ruled out sending ground troops to defend Ukraine, or enforcing a “no-fly zone” over the country that would make direct conflict with Russian jets inevitable.

The bloody Russian invasion, bound to get bloodier still, has not risen to what most people and official bodies would call a genocide.

And even if it were to, it would be surprising if the United States would commit troops to the battlefield. Most Americans have little stomach for a hot war with Russia.

The threat of nuclear escalation is terrifying.

A Cygnal poll taken last week found that 39% of U.S. respondents supported Washington “joining the military response” in Ukraine – a plurality but hardly a landslide. A broad majority still preferred non-military intervention.

The United States, like the rest of the world, has a checkered history in fulfilling the promise of “never again.” Bill Clinton was ashamed of America’s inaction in Rwanda. Barack Obama in 2012 launched a White House task force called the Atrocities Prevention Board, although it didn’t prevent the mass slaughter of Syrians by their own government and Russia on Obama’s watch.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a Center for the Prevention of Genocide.

And yet as Stalin purportedly said about the Vatican, “How big is its army?”

And yet, many refuse to allow realpolitik to deaden their response to the tragedy in Ukraine. “We can discuss and debate a no-fly zone, but there is one thing we can’t debate, and that is this should be a no-cry zone,” said Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, head of the New York Board of Rabbis, during a recent interfaith service for Ukraine. “We should never, ever see innocent people mercilessly murdered.”

Few could dispute that. But if nothing else, history reminds us that slogans are not policies, and that the very best intentions crash up against self-interest and selfpreservation. If nothing else, the debate over “never again” demands more humility and forgiveness in judging the failures of previous generations.

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL is editor in chief of The New York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

CARTOONIST Continued from Page 27 tended to be hostile to Jews. So for Godal and for the American Jewish Committee, it was part of a broader struggle.

Because of what’s happening in Ukraine, these cartoons feel even more relevant now than they were a few weeks ago.

Godal drew an interesting series of anti-Soviet cartoons in 1951.

They draw attention to various aspects of Soviet Communist society: the very troubling denial of civil rights, poverty and so on.

They take on an added poignancy today. Godal describes features of Soviet society that have eerie echoes to what we read in today’s papers about Putin suppressing the freedom of the press in Russia.

Then we have Godal’s cartoons from 1951 ridiculing the Soviet suppression of the media — some things have not changed. It’s a reminder of how Putin wants to drag Russia back to an earlier, darker, terrible era when the Russian people were brutally oppressed by their governments; when they were constantly fed lies through the ironically named newspaper Pravda, which means “truth.” Even though Godal was drawing these cartoons more than half a century ago, he touched on themes we’re seeing in the news every day.

Godal put issues that were not talked about widely into his cartoons. He drew the first known American cartoon depiction of the gas chambers in April of 1944.

Why is this important?

Details about the mass murders were not widely known. The news

that there was a mass murder of the Jews in Europe began reaching the United States in late 1942 and some of those reports did include references to the use of poison gas. But some segments of the press buried the news in their back pages. The Roosevelt administration played down news of the mass killings. So aspects of the mass murder, like the gas chambers, were not widely known until May 1944, when the Germans began the mass deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz. But this cartoon appeared several weeks before those articles had appeared in The New York Times.

The appearance of a cartoon like this is a reminder how much actually was known at the time. It’s important to remember that information about the mass murder was reaching the general press in the United States well before the Holocaust ended, when there was still See CARTOONIST on Page

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Education CARTOONIST Continued from Page 29 ample time to have interrupted it or have rescued some of those Jews.

Did his cartoons criticize the American government’s role in the war?

Godal came very close to doing so in a striking cartoon from October 1943. He drew State Department officials who have just received a report about the mass murder of a 100,000 Jews being massacred daily; they’re filing it away without taking any interest.

The cartoon is particularly striking because, as a general rule, American political cartoonists drawing cartoons about the plight of the Jews did not directly challenge the Roosevelt administration’s policies.

There was a wartime attitude that it would be unpatriotic to directly criticize the president in the middle of a World War. Support the New York Jewish Week Our nonprofit newsroom depends on readers like you. Make a donation now to support independent Jewish journalism in New York.

Godal takes direct aim at the Roosevelt administration for turning a deaf ear to the cries of the

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THE

Jews in Europe. It’s an unusual cartoon in its frankness. It really captures something about the broader problem of indifference to persecution. I’m referring not just to the Holocaust, but to many genocides. For example, there are similar cartoons in the American press during the genocide in Darfur.

Sadly, we still need cartoonists to draw our attention to the instinct to look away during times of terrible human rights violations.

What do you hope people take away from Godal’s work?

The fight against racism, the fight against antisemitism, the fight against genocide — these struggles continue. Every generation of Americans faces the same moral dilemma: to what extent should we as Americans take an interest in human rights violations around the world? Eric Godal teaches us that we all have an obligation to speak out when anybody is oppressed.

“Eric Godal: A Cartoonist’s Fight for Human Rights” is on view at the Society of Illustrators, 128 East 63rd Street, until April 30.

BIRTHRIGHT Continued from Page 12 role in its founding and lists him as an honorary board member.

According to a study of Birthright’s first decade released in 2020, Jews who participated in Birthright were more likely than their peers who applied but did not go on a trip to marry Jewish partners and to feel connected to Israel, two goals of the initiative. But the group is operating in a very different climate from when it launched. Recent data on American Jews from the Pew Research Center shows that a growing number of younger, less religiously observant Jews — Birthright’s target audience — feel disconnected from the modern state of Israel, and more than one in 10 support the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel.

Some of that sentiment has been directed squarely at Birthright. In 2018 and 2019, Jewish activists from the group IfNotNow, which seeks to get American Jews to act against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, waged an extensive campaign against Birthright; some trip participants walked out in protest, while others were arrested outside Birthright’s Manhattan office and interrupted a speech by

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then-President Donald Trump to Republican Jews.

Those protests may have contributed to Birthright increasingly becoming a flashpoint for progressive young Jews and others who say the trips whitewash Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. In one sign of the times, a novel about a Birthright-like trip drew fierce criticism well before it was released last month.

The trip was also parodied on multiple episodes of the Comedy Central show “Broad City,” which depicted its Jewish heroines signing up for a free “Birthmark” trip to Israel — during which they were pressured to secure suitable Jewish mates.

About 25,000 people are expected to go on Birthright trips this summer, according to the group’s spokesperson. The trips resumed last fall after a year and a half on hiatus, with a few exceptions, because of the pandemic.`

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