A new artificial intelligence platform is transforming access to one of the largest and most important collections documenting Jewish life in Iraq. 

The Voices from the Archive project at judeoiraq.org uses AI to translate, categorize and help search the vast Iraqi Jewish Archive, opening a door to tens of thousands of records that had been largely inaccessible to the public. 

The platform was developed by Oakland chemical engineer David Breslauer, whose own family fled Baghdad in 1950 amid rising persecution. What began as a personal search for traces of his family history has evolved into a large-scale digital project, with Breslauer using AI to process thousands of archival documents into searchable text with English translations.

“I’ve put in thousands of hours and thousands of dollars into this because it’s just a pure passion project for me,” Breslauer told J. “This is an aging community, and that generation is not going to be around much longer, so I felt like it was sort of a personal race to get it published so that people could see it and tell their children about it.”

Historically, Iraq was home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, dating back over 2,500 years. Its Jewish population largely disappeared in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when most Iraqi Jews were stripped of their citizenship and fled the country. Five years ago, the AFP reported that Iraq’s Jewish population, estimated at 150,000 in the mid-1940s, had shrunk to four.

The Iraqi Jewish Archive, also known as the Iraqi Mukhabarat Archive, is a collection of more than 2,700 books and tens of thousands of historical documents that chronicle the life, culture and institutions of Iraq’s Jewish community before its mass displacement. 

The archive includes school records, religious texts, legal documents, personal letters, photographs and communal records spanning hundreds of years through the 1970s. The trove was discovered in 2003 by the U.S. Army in a flooded basement of an Iraqi intelligence building in Baghdad. The documents were preserved and digitized by the U.S. National Archives.

Among the materials are items like a handwritten 1902 haggadah with paragraph-by-paragraph translation of the Hebrew text to Judeo-Arabic, a 1962 letter between local basketball clubs requesting a friendly match against each other and a 1950 offer from a travel company about arranging transportation for the airlift of Iraq’s Jews to Israel via Iran as part of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.

For years, researchers manually sifted through thousands of pages without the ability to search by keyword or language, making meaningful access extraordinarily difficult.

“It was sort of an insurmountable challenge,” Breslauer said. “Imagine it was like a stack of 150,000 pages, kind of loosely organized into 3,000 different files, and you’re just online, scrolling through. Some are in Arabic, some are in Judeo-Arabic, a few are in English. Some are handwritten and some are typed.”

When Breslauer began the project two years ago, he ran into major challenges using AI to try to translate and organize the documents, as early models often produced inaccurate translations or “hallucinated” content that had nothing to do with the original text.

Standard Arabic, and particularly handwritten Arabic, is difficult for software to translate and transcribe, Breslauer said. Most AI models are trained in English, and Arabic is grammatically quite different and includes many regional dialects. 

Judeo-Arabic, the dialect used by the Iraqi Jewish community, is even more difficult for AI to understand. Not only is it a rare and regionally specific language, but it utilizes Arabic words written in Hebrew script, requiring models to handle multiple linguistic systems at once.

As AI tools started dramatically improving over the past year or so, Breslauer was able to train his model to run these linguistic systems and build a custom pipeline designed for the Iraqi Jewish Archive to process the images, ingest them, transcribe them, translate the text and make it searchable.

In addition to basic search functionality, the platform features an AI-powered Q&A interface that lets people ask questions in English and receive relevant documents, translations and contextual insights drawn directly from the archive. Because AI search is more flexible than simply looking for search terms, you can get unexpected answers. Breslauer asked the system to find something unusual, for example, and it surfaced a tongue twister once practiced by students in a Jewish elementary school.

For Breslauer, the work is deeply personal. While manually browsing the Iraqi Jewish Archive years ago, he stumbled upon a document mentioning his great uncle, which sparked his determination to make the entire collection searchable. With his AI platform, he has since uncovered additional family records, including school test scores and official documents tied to his relatives’ lives in Iraq.

S.F-based nonprofit JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa serves as the project’s fiscal sponsor and sees the platform as a major breakthrough in preserving and sharing Mizrahi Jewish heritage. (So far Breslauer has paid for the project himself, but he is looking for donors to upgrade the AI functionality.)

“For nearly 20 years, the Iraqi Jewish Archive has remained in physical limbo and locked inside archival platforms that few people could access or read,” JIMENA executive director Sarah Levin said in a statement. “This project represents a breakthrough in how we preserve and share the heritage of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa.”

In July 1941, in a small village in Nazi-occupied Poland, hundreds of Jews were burned to death in a barn — not by the Nazis, but by their own non-Jewish neighbors. 

The Jedwabne pogrom, whose true history was revealed only in 2000 with the publication of Jan T. Gross’ book “Neighbors,” is the focus of a play coming to San Francisco this month.

“Our Class” follows the lives of 10 Jedwabne residents — five Jews and five Catholics — from 1925 through the end of the 20th century. The classmates begin as schoolyard friends, then grow into adults who love, betray, murder and confront the repercussions of their actions over the years. The play is based on the experiences of real perpetrators and victims of the massacre. 

Written in 2008 by Polish playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek, “Our Class” has been staged around the world. It made its Off-Broadway debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January 2024 in a production staged by Arlekin!, a Massachusetts-based troupe composed largely of immigrant artists from the former Soviet Union. It received numerous accolades, including “best theater of 2024” from the Wall Street Journal, and four Lucille Lortel Awards for outstanding revival, ensemble, director and scenic design.

On March 27, Arlekin! brings that production to San Francisco’s Z Space for a week-long run.

The company’s director, Ukrainian-born Igor Golyak, told J. that while many plays have explored the Holocaust, “Our Class” stands out for showing how “regular” people could turn on their neighbors.

“The way that I’ve experienced coming to a Holocaust play is you kind of button yourself up emotionally, you know what you’re going to get hit with,” he said. “I wanted to make this different, because it’s not about the Nazis doing awful things, it’s people just like us, you and me. In what situation would I do this to you? Or would you do this to me?”

As a Ukrainian Jew, the play’s subject “hits close to home,” he said, referring to both the long history of antisemitic violence in Ukraine and the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war. 

Golyak said the cast first gathered in August 2023 to read the script and began discussing the implications of antisemitism and neighbor turning against neighbor. Six weeks later, the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 took place. 

“Jews have been persecuted for all of their existence,” he said. “We could say yes, we’ve learned our lessons. But obviously we haven’t. I don’t believe in teaching history lessons. The only thing I believe in is asking the questions and asking people to question themselves.”

The story of the Jedwabne pogrom has inspired several films, including the 2005 documentary “The Legacy of Jedwabne,” which contains testimony from Jewish and non-Jewish survivors of the pogrom, as well as from church authorities who claim that the entire operation was carried out by Germans rather than Polish citizens.

The full extent of the murders might never be known. In “Neighbors,” Polish historian Gross wrote that “one day, in July 1941, half of the population of a small East European town murdered the other half — some 1,600 men, women and children.” Later investigations claimed no more than 350 people could have fit in the barn.

But the numbers aren’t the point of “Our Class.” Eight of the 10 characters are based on real people, Golyak said. The barn-burning happens before the end of the first act, so most of the play is about how the characters deal with the tragedy for the rest of their lives.

The main protagonist, Rachelka, a Jewish woman, converts to Catholicism to marry her Polish lover, a choice that saves her life. How does she justify that decision to herself in the ensuing decades? Renowned Russian-language actress Chulpan Khamatova portrays Rachelka. As a member of the Tatar ethnic minority in the former Soviet Union, Khamatova said the Jewish girl’s story resonates with her.

“When I grew up in the Soviet Union, I didn’t want to tell people my name was Chulpan,” she said. “I always said my name is Masha, or Olga. Otherwise I’d get a lot of hate speech.”

Khamatova recalls watching the real Rachelka in a documentary. It showed her in her 80s spending time in a dark room watching TV. “She didn’t want to go for walks, or read letters, she just wanted to be in that unreal world of the TV screen,” Khamatova said. “She lost so much during her life, and was broken in such a brutal way.” 

In one scene in the play, taken from real life, Rachelka is asked by a judge after World War II to describe what her Polish neighbors did to her. 

“She says, ‘Nothing,’” Khamatova said. “That means she betrayed all her relatives who burned in that barn. Yet I can’t say she’s guilty or not guilty. I want to be very careful about judging. It’s so easy to lose your humanity, and so lose yourself. If audiences can get that from this play, great.”

Golyak said some descendants of Jewish survivors of the massacre have come to see the play. One was a woman whose grandmother was saved by the real-life Polish woman portrayed on stage by one of the actors. 

On the other hand, some of the perpetrators, whose stories are depicted in “Our Class,” have denied responsibility, Golyak said.

“These are real people, you can find them on YouTube in interviews saying this never happened,” he said. “It’s very scary. Again, it’s scary not because they’re them. It’s scary because they’re people just like us. And that is the questioning that I want the audience to leave with.”

IF YOU’RE GOING

“Our Class” runs March 27 to April 5 at Z Space in San Francisco. Post-performance discussions are scheduled on March 29 with descendants of Jedwabne survivors, and April 3 with Jewish theatermakers Carey Perloff and Igor Golyak. 

(JTA) — Passover may still be two months away, but PBS is seating a diverse set of Jews down for a seder this week — casting the communal storytelling meal as an ideal entry point for exploring the complicated history of Black-Jewish relations in the United States.

The meal can be seen in “Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History,” which began airing on Tuesday evening, and it features a diverse set of Jews — including many who are Black — discussing the role that the Exodus story plays in both Black and Jewish traditions.

The conversation does not avoid difficult topics that challenge the conventional wisdom that having gained freedom from slavery represents a clear parallel for Jews and Black Americans.

“Something that I often think about during Passover is every year we commemorate our freedom as Jews,” says Nate Looney, director of community safety and belonging at the Jewish Federations of North America, in a clip shared exclusively with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But as Black Americans, we’re often told to ‘get over slavery,’ and ‘forget about it.’”

The four-episode docuseries explores the historical rifts and alliances between Jewish and Black Americans and is hosted by Harvard University historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. It comes at the start of this year’s Black History Month — and as questions have simmered about whether the last several years have irreparably harmed the historic kinship between Jewish and Black Americans.

It argues that the relationship between Black and Jewish Americans wasn’t set in stone during the civil rights movement when Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched in Selma with Martin Luther King Jr., but was shaped by centuries of history, and continues to be shaped by oppression and white supremacy.

Among those at the table with Looney are Angela Buchdahl, senior rabbi of New York’s Central Synagogue; cookbook author and culinary historian Michael Twitty; writer Jamaica Kincaid; editor of The New Yorker David Remnick; and Rabbi Shais Rishon, also known as MaNishtana.

The series explores key moments in the histories of Black and Jewish Americans, and how those moments ran parallel and crossed paths over the past five centuries. It covers the transatlantic slave trade, the overlaps between the Great Migration and Jewish immigration from Europe, the lynching of Leo Frank, the Civil Rights Movement, the Crown Heights riots, the 2017 Unite the Right rally and post-Oct. 7 activism.

“A lot of previous conversations about [Black and Jewish relations] really just look at that golden era or just look at the divisions that have come in the last decades, but we’re trying to take a holistic view about how race and caste [were] established in America,” Sara Wolitzky, co-executive producer and director of the docuseries told eJewishPhilanthropy.

“Black and Jewish America” features a variety of academics, activists, writers, and celebrities, including Rev. Al Sharpton, Jewish studies professor Susannah Heschel (the rabbi’s daughter), actor Billy Crystal, activist and professor Cornel West and playwright Tony Kushner.

The episodes will run on Tuesday nights through Feb. 24.

“A little girl stands on a table. Oil lamps light the room. There is silence in the warm night. Around her, dimly, she sees bearded faces, the round, proud smiles of the women. She is very little, this child, but her voice is no pipe — rich, golden, it sings the happier songs of Israel’s exile, and the songs which belong to the exiles’ home.

“One old man, gray-bearded, wipes a tear from his eyes. He speaks, when she has finished, and around him rises a murmur of voices in agreement. ‘She is a great singer. She will make men and women cry with joy,’ he says. That all happened in a tiny Bessarabian village, many years ago, but the old man spoke truth.”

Or, rather, not exactly the truth — since that whole vignette was invented for a fawning fan fiction-like introduction to the singer Isa Kremer in our paper in 1934. But it was true that Kremer, a published poet and trained opera soprano, and a Russian-turned-American-turned-Argentine, was once known around the world as an innovator in bringing Yiddish and other folk music to the stage for large popular audiences.

Although she’s little known today, if you were going to the theater 100 years ago in San Francisco, you would have had many opportunities to see the world-famous diva.

As we wrote in 1925, “Of the many concert artists who have come to America in recent years, perhaps no one has eclipsed the popularity gained by Isa Kremer, the singer of folk songs and ballads.”

Kremer was born in Belz, Russia (now part of Ukraine), in 1887, in a comfortable Jewish family. She was a trained classical singer who worked professionally in Russian opera theaters.

But then politics caught up to her. Kremer had married the editor of the Odessa News, which published her poetry, and moved in the intellectual, modern Jewish circles of the city. When the revolution happened, Kremer was singing in Istanbul; her husband was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for being the wrong kind of progressive and later was smuggled out, along with the couple’s daughter.

Kremer came to the U.S. in the 1920s, first on tour, then to stay. (Her husband remained in Europe and was killed by the Nazis.)

“Isa Kremer has sung in almost every music center in Europe. The fact that ‘she took America by storm’ can be judged when it became known that she gave in her first season six concerts in Carnegie Hall, four in Chicago, and sang return dates in Boston, Detroit, Milwaukee, Toronto, Cleveland,” we wrote in 1925.

While she was classically trained, her passion was folk music. Not only Yiddish folk music, but Arabic, Russian, French and African American songs as well.

“She can sing an Italian folk song that will make every son of Sunny Italy stand up and shout ‘brava,’ we wrote in 1924. “The French numbers would cause a whole regiment of poilus [infantry] to applaud, while with the Russian(s), Jews and the other inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe, she could sing for hours and not one would leave the hall.”

From reviews of her concerts, it seems her voice wasn’t the only pull; Kremer was an extremely charismatic and animated performer. However, she was most lauded among Jewish audiences for her Yiddish songs, which were wildly popular.

After a career in which she sang in front of huge audiences, including Albert Einstein and Israel Zangwill, among other luminaries, Kremer died of cancer in 1956 in Argentina. She’d moved there to marry leftist thinker and psychiatrist Gregorio Bermann, and the couple fell afoul of the right-wing government there, but Kremer continued performing as long as she could.

In 1950, a few years before her death, she was again performing at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

“Her program listed songs in seven languages. She sang and mimed them with a gusto and human feeling that had her sizable audience guffawing and applauding happily.”

Kremer was unabashedly proud of her heritage; she did many benefits for groups like Hadassah, and was a supporter of Zionism. She truly believed in the power of Jewish music to reach people.

“Do you know that this revival of Jewish music is doing something that our Jewish leaders have been trying to do for years?” she told the paper in 1926 in an interview that ran across the front page. “Here it is bringing religion back to thousands upon thousands who for years have been what you would call passive about their Judaism. For what is a greater appeal to the heart and the soul of man but music?”

In the countryside of a quiet Lithuanian town, sounds of a vanished shtetl have returned to life. Voices chattering in Yiddish mingle with clucking chickens, crowing roosters and accordion music drifting through a bustling outdoor market. Children’s laughter cuts through the murmurs of synagogue prayers punctuated by an enthusiastic chorus of “amen.”  

The audio echoes through the new Lost Shtetl Museum, which uses immersive storytelling to recreate the rich heritage of Lithuania’s shtetls — small, predominantly Jewish towns of 19th- and early 20th-century Eastern Europe that functioned as vibrant centers of Jewish life and culture before being almost entirely obliterated during the Holocaust.

These closely knit, religiously observant communities occupy a powerful place in Jewish history and consciousness, both for their vitality and the tragic way they disappeared. On Tuesday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day will mark the liberation of the Nazi death camps Auschwitz-Birkenau on Jan. 27, 1945, and will remember the millions of victims of Nazi Germany.

The museum, which opened in September just before Lithuania’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, offers an intimate window into the kind of thriving town most famously memorialized in the movie “Fiddler on the Roof.” The Lost Shtetl Museum preserves shtetl life and loss by focusing on the small agricultural town of Seduva in the country’s north during the interwar years between 1918 and 1940.  

Central to recreating the Seduva shtetl experience are the custom-designed soundscapes that envelop visitors in daily rhythms of the past as they progress through the themed museum galleries. 

“It’s about trying to be honest and true to the location, but also give people a sense of the bedlam that was there,” Joel Beckerman, a composer, producer and founder of Made Music Studio, a New York-based sonic design firm that created the soundscapes for the museum, said in an interview. The thrum comes through clearly in the soundscape of the market, a cacophony of live animals, merchants, shoppers and roving musicians. 

Listen to the buzz of a shtetl marketplace

Immersiveness has become a hallmark of the modern museum experience, from interactive life-size digital versions of historical figures recounting their stories with the help of AI to high-resolution floor-to-ceiling video projections that steep viewers in the realities of climate change. 

To infuse the Lost Shtetl Museum with sounds rooted in historical and geographic accuracy, Beckerman’s team, which included composers and technologists, consulted historians affiliated with the museum. They learned which birds would have chirped in local parks, what produce was sold at markets and even the types of shoes shoppers would have worn. They investigated how wooden carts would have sounded as their wheels churned through muddy roads after rainfall and how haggling over prices in a shtetl market might have unfolded. 

They then gathered sounds — some preexisting, others original — and carefully blended them to suit various themed galleries.

For the open-air market, for example, the team sought auditory details that conveyed not only how central the market was to commerce, but how deeply it functioned as a hub of community life. “It really is just trying to find those little tiny moments that made the marketplace so lively,” Beckerman said.

While the soundscapes of the market and synagogue evoke nostalgia for everyday shtetl life, another captures the chilling fate of Seduva’s 600-plus Jews. This audio track, which museum visitors hear in the Holocaust gallery as they walk through a space called the Transport Corridor, blends the flapping of bird wings and buzzing flies on a warm summer day with heavy footsteps and the rumble of trucks arriving to transport Jewish residents to a barbed-wire ghetto. There, they were crammed in squalor before being shot to death and buried in mass graves in the Liaudiskiai forest with the help of local Nazi collaborators. 

Chilling sounds of residents facing dislocation

The result is a somber, unsettling experience that underscores how ordinary life gave way to annihilation across Europe. Nearly 200,000 Lithuanian Jews, 95 percent of the country’s prewar population, were murdered during World War II.

Beckerman and his colleagues have created original scores for over 50 television series and specials, including “CBS This Morning,” “Entertainment Tonight,” ESPN’s “30 for 30” and the Super Bowl on NBC. They have also worked on character development and select scoring for experiences such as Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disney theme parks.  

This project, however, stands apart, Beckerman said. For one thing, Made Music Studio consciously avoided the heart-pumping, attention-grabbing tropes of film soundtracks, opting instead for subtle auditory textures that complement the experience rather than distract from it. For another, the subject matter itself carried unusual weight.

“It really is a career highlight for us being able to work on something so meaningful and important,” Beckerman said.

That the museum aims to present a multifaceted picture of shtetl life — one that emphasizes piety, creativity and familial bonds alongside loss — is essential, said Steven Zipperstein, a Stanford University historian of Judaism and Jewish culture.

Hear a shtetl synagogue, recreated through sound

Despite the abject poverty and violent antisemitic attacks that led many Eastern European Jews to leave shtetls between the late 1880s and the 1920s, the term shtetl (Yiddish for little town) has become synonymous with “the town that I’ve come to sentimentalize,” Zipperstein said. “The ingredients that go into sentimentality are complex, because often you end up feeling affection for a place you’re actually glad to have fled, or at least left behind.”

“It’s valuable to be able to concretize that past to best understand it and see beyond the kind of popular constructions as reflected in ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’” the professor added. “It’s important for all the reasons that an accurate sense of the past is important.” 

The Lost Shtetl museum — designed by a team led by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamäki, with exhibition design by Ralph Appelbaum Associates — was conceived as a “ghost” of a shtetl that emerges in the Lithuanian landscape. It stands adjacent to a restored Jewish cemetery in Seduva and drew inspiration from the simple, saddle-roofed forms of traditional Lithuanian buildings. 

Inside the light-reflecting anodized aluminum facade, viewers will find historic images, video testimonials from descendants of the Seduva shtetl, cinematic reenactments and historical objects. Among them: a prescription label for eye drops from Goda Bordon’s Pharmacy; a book filled with farewell verses and drawings classmates left for Hinda Zarkey when she departed Lithuania for the United States in 1937; and coin-shaped amulets with blessings inscribed that parents hung around the necks of their firstborn sons. 

“The final design was fundamentally shaped by Seduva itself and by the personal memories connected to it,” Büke Kumyol, RAA creative director and associate, said in an interview. “Our decisions were guided by stories gathered from descendants of Seduva’s Jewish community, as well as surviving letters that reveal everyday life, dreams and struggles.”

Other museum sights include a glass wall displaying 588 handblown colored glass panels that represent Lithuanian’s erased communities. At the center of the marketplace gallery, an interactive 3D map of Seduva rises from the floor. Carved from white marble with a KUKA Robotics arm, the map’s interactive projected layer allows visitors to see how residents moved through the town and explore homes, shops and other spaces that shaped their lives. 

“These aren’t just media interfaces, but windows into lived experiences,” said Dan Cooper, director of Dot Crew, a museum partner that specializes in digital storytelling. “When technology becomes invisible and authentic human stories take center stage, we know we’ve honored these memories properly.”

This story originally appeared on Forbes.com. 

Many authors have unpacked the social history of specific foods, be it salt, coffee or potatoes. Others have focused on kashrut. But John Efron believes that he has set a unique table by serving up meat as a means of understanding the evolving relationship between Jews and non-Jews in a particular country. 

Efron, UC Berkeley’s Koret Professor of Jewish History, digests centuries of history in his 400-page book, “All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat.” Topics in the 2025 book range from medieval meat markets to the first Jewish cookbooks — written by German Jewish women eager to cement their rising social standing — to the Nazi era persecution of Jews through the banning of shechita, or kosher slaughter. 

J. spoke with Efron about this intersection of German and Jewish cultural history and identity formation. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you choose to focus on meat? 

Meat, for me, is the most visible and tangible object of difference between Jews and non-Jews. Also it intersects with so many things: It’s anthropological. It involves the history of science, the history of cooking. There’s a history of memory that’s involved. But at the bottom line, eating for all humans is elemental, and the very center of this edifice called the dietary laws, or kashrut, is meat. Without meat, there are no dietary laws. 

And why meat specifically in Germany? 

From the very beginning, the discussion about whether the Jews could ever be German citizens was tied to meat in a way it wasn’t in any other country.

German meat consumption tripled over the course of the 19th century. That tracks along with German industrialization. And, interestingly, 65% of all the meat consumed in Germany was pork. 

Germany became a country in 1871 [unifying the states and principalities]. That was also the year that the Jews were emancipated [receiving full legal and civil rights]. 

When emancipation was being discussed beginning in the late 18th century, the question was: Are there any of their customs and habits not compatible with us? It was the only country where diet was discussed — that they’ll never be German because of the meats that they refuse to eat, and the way that they won’t sit down at table with us. They won’t be able to serve in our armies because they won’t eat the rations. 

You write that Germany was the first place for several phenomena in Jewish history, including the creation of new Jewish streams of thought, all of which influenced how Jews and Germans looked at the laws of kosher meat production and consumption.

Germany is the home of Reform Judaism. There were Reform Jews who said: What do we do with kashrut? Do we still need it? Germany is the first place where we see Jews actually wrestle with this kind of thing.

Germany is also the first place where ethnographies were written about Jewish culture. They were written in the 16th century, about 75 of them, and they were written by [Jewish] converts [to Christianity]. They’re incredibly hate-filled texts. These are our first ethnographic descriptions of Jewish life in the 1500s and 1600s, and they focused a lot on food. They ridiculed the stupidity of the dietary laws, the unnecessary nature of the Jewish kitchen. And they were German Jews who wrote this.

You bring up a fascinating historical point that Jews and Germans, who lived separately in other ways, came into close contact in the medieval meat markets, and that was, ironically, because of the laws of kashrut. Jewish butchers sold the parts of the animal that Jews couldn’t eat, the hindquarters, to non-Jews. 

Jews can’t throw out a third of a cow [post-slaughter]. It’s just too expensive. So what they do is that they sell it. That’s to the advantage of the Christian customer and also to the advantage of the large Jewish community because if they couldn’t sell it, the price of kosher meat would have been astronomical. This cooperation that’s built into the whole structure of separating Jews from non-Jews allowed for affordability of kosher meat for the Jewish community.

I found that the treatment of Jews in the meat markets was fair. It was equitable. The laws were designed to allow for both Christian butchers and Jewish butchers to earn a living, and that’s in a time when there was considerable violence [against Jews] and Jews were totally marginal socially. 

The laws were fair, but this was also when negative stereotypes about Jewish butchers first arose in the popular imagination. We see such images much later in Nazi propaganda as well.

Yes, [Medeival-era antisemites] would describe the Jews as befouling the meat, having their children soil the meat, or urinate on the meat, defecate on the meat, and then sell it to non-Jews. 

But they didn’t accuse Jews of animal cruelty until much later, until the 19th century. It was all part of a larger movement of anti-vaccination, anti-vivisection, back to nature and vegetarianism. The movement was ecumenical. However, there was one strain which was implacably antisemitic. 

It blamed Jews, among other things, for their animal cruelty and their fixation on meat, which explained the difference between Jewish bodies and Aryan bodies, with preference going to the latter, of course. There’s a corruption that comes with meat eating, a bloodlust that, according to the philosopher [Arthur] Schopenhauer, began with Judaism and its mistreatment of animals during shechita. This idea gets picked up by [19th-century composer Richard] Wagner and the whole Wagner circle of vegetarians. Hitler says he became vegetarian under the influence of Wagner.

This leads to a very robust, almost relentless campaign to get rid of kosher slaughter in the 19th century. You can read it in records of the parliamentary debates, hours of an afternoon discussing shechita in the German Parliament. 

None of those attempts to ban shechita came to pass, except in the state of Saxony, where it existed for 18 years — until the rise of Nazism made the ban the law of the land.

Right. The goal was always a national ban, and that was passed on April 21, 1933, just 11 weeks after Hitler came to power. That’s a measure of how high it ranked, in terms of importance to him. You would think he had bigger fish to fry, even just in terms of Jewish persecution. But this was really up there. And when the war begins and they conquer one country after another, shechita is banned almost immediately in whichever country they go into.

Under the Nazis, we see a return to the medieval notion of Jewish butchers as barbarous, standing in for the entire Jewish people. It comes full circle.

Right. “We’re a land of animal lovers. We’re a cultured people. This sort of Oriental barbarism” — that’s the term they used — “it’s not German.” Julius Streicher, the editor of [antisemitic newspaper] Der Stürmer, ran story after story after story. He had a total fixation on Jewish butchers as being perpetrators of racial defilement, breaking the Nuremberg laws and sleeping with Aryan women. 

There was a lot more. [Propaganda Minister Joseph] Goebbels made a film called “The Eternal Jew,” one of the most horrid antisemitic films. There’s a full seven-minute scene of shechita, forcibly staged in the Lodz ghetto. And of course, everyone in the film was dispatched to their deaths.

“All Consuming: Germans, Jews and the Meaning of Meat” by John M. Efron (Stanford University Press, 400 pages) is available from Afikomen Judaica and other local bookshops. 

Nancy Sheftel-Gomes has happily led tours of San Francisco’s Congregation Sherith Israel across several decades.

“There’s a feeling in there,” she says of walking through the sanctuary and noticing the worn silk cushions on the backs of chairs, original from the synagogue’s earliest days on California Street.

“A lot of times I think about all of the people who have sat in that sanctuary,” Sheftel-Gomes, who retired in 2018 from her role as Sherith Israel’s longtime director of education, told J.

On Friday evening, the Reform congregation will begin a weekend-long celebration of its 175th anniversary with a Shabbat service, honoring its storied history since April 1851, just months after California became the 31st state.

“We’ve been here from the beginning,” Rabbi Jessica Zimmerman Graf told J. “There’s a real history of contribution to San Francisco and to California. Sherith Israel has always been a center of civic life.”

During services on Friday evening, elected officials including San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, State Controller Malia Cohen, State Sen. Scott Wiener and San Francisco Supervisors Rafael Mandelman and Stephen Sherrill will present proclamations and resolutions. 

Rabbi Graf will deliver a sermon about Sherith Israel’s legacy across the 175 years, noting that nine children who grew up at the synagogue went on to become rabbis. Graf, the synagogue’s first female senior rabbi and 10th senior rabbi in its history, is the sixth of those children to become a rabbi. Assistant Rabbi George Altshuler, who returned to Sherith Israel as a rabbinic intern in 2022, is the ninth.

The evening will include a champagne toast and special oneg.

Cantor Diego Rubinsztein of Buenos Aires will be on hand as a guest cantor during the weekend, including for a Havdalah ceremony, concert and dessert reception on Saturday.

The anniversary events are free with registration. 

Graf said the anniversary will focus on how Sherith Israel’s “nimble,” innovative spirit, is driving the synagogue toward a bright future.

“We’re a historic Gold Rush era congregation that now thinks of itself as a 175-year-old startup,” Graf said, quoting a congregant’s remark. 

Altshuler said he’s excited to think about what lies ahead.

“As someone who grew up going to Sherith Israel, I’ve seen how the synagogue has both remained true to what it has been, and evolved,” Altshuler said in an email to J.

On Jan. 15, the celebration will continue, with a panel led by San Francisco historians Judi Leff and Joseph Amster, highlighting pivotal moments in Sherith Israel’s history. 

Its domed building, constructed in 1904, served as a courthouse after the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake and hosted a meeting for the 1945 founding of the United Nations. The synagogue is also known for its 3,500-pipe Murray Harris organ, which Sherith purchased for $18,000 in 1904.

The synagogue’s rich past is evident on its very walls. There is a “hall of history” with photos and mementos, including portraits of past presidents, board members and confirmation classes.

On any given weekend, Sheftel-Gomes said, she’ll see someone lingering over a photo in the hall, often recognizing themselves or a dear relative.

“That makes me feel like it’s all worth it,” she said, “The time, the keeping. It means a lot to people.”

We covered Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s visit to the Bay Area earlier this month. As the first Asian American rabbi, she holds a special place in U.S. Jewish history. 

Of course we also carried news of Buchdahl when she became a cantor in 1999 and then after she became a rabbi in 2001, just as we reported the ordination of the first woman rabbi in the U.S., Sally Priesand, in 1972; the hiring of the first woman to head a U.S. congregation, Rabbi Michal Bernstein (now Michal Mendelsohn), at San Jose’s Temple Beth El Shalom in 1976; and research uncovering that the first woman rabbi, Regina Jonas, was ordained in Germany on the eve of the Holocaust. 

Depending on how you look at it, there was another “first” woman rabbi: Rachel “Ray” Frank, known as the “girl rabbi.” This San Francisco native was one of the first American women to preach from the bimah at a synagogue. A dynamic and beloved speaker and writer, she took on just enough elements of the rabbinic role to be considered a rabbi by some, although she never officially helmed a synagogue.

She was born in 1861 and lived and worked mostly in Oakland, where she became a Sunday school principal and a writer known for her eloquence on Jewish issues. She became a sought-after speaker, even a celebrity, and was featured often in our paper. (“Miss Ray Frank is, we are sorry to report, confined to her home with quite a severe cold,” we wrote in May 1896.)

“Miss Ray Frank is pursuing her noble work in the cause of Judaism, and winning golden opinions in the Press, at home and abroad,” we wrote a year earlier, in 1895, in our East Bay column, titled “Our Oakland Neighbors.”

Again in 1896, we described a talk she gave at Stanford on “The Moral Law in Nature” as offered with “eloquent and noble words.”

“She spoke of the underlying principle which unifies animate and inanimate nature; man, beast, bird and tree. That unless one looked deeply into nature, one could not discern the all-pervading obedience to a universal, guiding will,” we wrote.

Her first preaching experience came, according to the American Jewish Historical Society, almost by accident, in 1890, when she was in Spokane Falls, Washington, during the High Holidays. There was no synagogue, so she stepped in to lead the community in prayer with “A Lay Sermon by a Young Lady.”

“My position this evening is a novel one,” she said. “From time immemorial the Jewish woman has remained in the background of history, quite content to let the fathers and brothers be the principals in a picture wherein she shone only by a reflected light. And it is well that it has been so; for while she has let the stronger ones do battle for her throughout centuries of darkness and opposition, she has gathered strength and courage to come forward in an age of progressive enlightenment…”

“To think that perhaps I am to-night the one Jewish woman in the world, mayhap the first since the time of the prophets to be called on to speak to such an audience as I now see before me, is indeed a great honor, an event in my life which I can never forget.”

In 1893, the Modesto Bee ran a fulsome description of her.

“Ray Frank is a young California Jewess who will soon have attained a distinction beyond that of any Hebrew woman since the days of Deborah, the prophetess. She is to be regularly ordained as a rabbi or preacher to a synagogue, an office in which she has never had a woman predecessor,” the newspaper reported.

“Miss Frank is already quite well enough prepared, from an ordinary point of view, to undertake the duties of the ministry and has had a flattering offer from some wealthy Jews in Chicago who desire to form a congregation with her as their rabbi, but she feels the need of further study before she is willing to be ordained.”

“She is an excellent Hebrew and German scholar and has from childhood felt a strong inclination for Hebrew history and philosophy. Her name is Rachel, but she is much better known by the more familiar Ray,” the article noted.

The Chicago plan never came to fruition, and most sources say she was not, in fact, ordained. In 1901, she married Simon Litman, who taught at UC Berkeley and later at the University of Illinois, and withdrew from preaching. As she continued to lecture and write, the question of just how rabbinic she was became a point of contention.

Frank was the subject of a snarky aside by our editor in 1895, who complained about a Dutch news report that said Frank had officiated at Emanu-El in San Francisco for the High Holidays.

“Considering that Miss Frank officiated last Kippur in Victoria, B. C., in an Orthodox congregation, that, nominally at least, is under the spiritual supervision of Dr. Adler, her presence in San Francisco on that day is rather remarkable,” wrote Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger.

“The Dutch editor’s amiable commentary that female Rabbis are better than male hypocrites is insufficient to justify his ignorance of American Jewish conditions. Miss Frank is no Rabbi, nor has she ever aspired to be, and any sneer at our accomplished young townswoman in that connection is as unjust as it is in execrable taste.”

(To be fair to the Dutch reporter, Emanu-El was already at that point the home of the world’s first known female cantor, Madam Julie Rosewald.)

It’s not clear whether Frank ever had thoughts of officially becoming a rabbi, not that a path for that existed at the time.

Nevertheless, a woman interpreting and discussing Judaism from the bimah, standing in front of a group of men in the synagogue, was unusual enough to be noteworthy in her day. Moreover, what makes someone a rabbi has long been under discussion. Even if Frank didn’t consider herself one, historians and contemporary successors may take a different view in the long run. Again, there is no evidence that she was ordained, but her fame seems to have made that fact irrelevant.

In 1930, we wrote that “among the distinguished savants who will be immortalized in the Cyclopedia Judaica will be Ray Frank Litman, who is widely known as a scholar and lecturer upon Jewish thought and literature. Mrs. Litman has the honor of being the first woman to become an ordained Rabbi and her brilliancy as a pulpit orator has placed her in the front ranks as an exponent of Biblical history and Talmudic lore.”

In a 1934 social column that described the comings and goings of the Jewish world, we mentioned that “Mrs. Litman was the first woman to receive a degree at the Hebrew Union College. Her brilliant sermons were widely discussed wherever she preached. She will be remembered as Miss Ray Frank of Oakland and San Francisco.”

So was she a rabbi or not? Maybe that’s not the right question.

Perhaps the real question is how we should celebrate women like her, who were famous for their intellect, zeal and love for Judaism at a time when women’s roles were limited and their ability to gain the title of rabbi was nearly impossible. One way to celebrate them is, of course, by telling their stories.

A Bay Area–made film about postwar Jewish murders in a small Polish town is being denounced as “anti-Polish” by leading political figures in Poland, and an investigation has been launched into the Polish TV station that broadcast it. 

“I’m not terribly surprised,” Yoav Potash, the Berkeley filmmaker who directed “Among Neighbors,” told J. this week. “There’s a certain sector of Polish politicians that tend to react this kind of way anytime Polish complicity in the eradication of Jewish life comes up.

“They object to what they call the ‘pedagogy of shame,’ and what I and others call Poles reckoning with the complexity of their relationship to Jewish history,” he said. 

“Among Neighbors,” which opened in U.S. theaters this fall, is set in the village of Gniewoszów, the ancestral home of Anita Friedman, longtime executive director of S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services. It focuses on the recollections of former resident Pelagia Radecka, who witnessed local men murder five of their Jewish neighbors after the end of World War II, as well as the memories of another former resident, Israeli professor Yaacov Goldstein, believed to be the town’s last living Holocaust survivor.

After garnering a special award at its world premiere at the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival in late 2024, “Among Neighbors” continued to rack up festival awards before opening in U.S. theaters on Oct. 10. Polish Television, the country’s oldest and largest television network, broadcast the film on Nov. 10.

Immediately after the broadcast, senior government officials and the right-wing media in Poland lashed out. Presidential Undersecretary Agnieszka Jędrzak denounced the film on X, calling it “anti-Polish historical manipulation.” Her opposition was amplified by government-aligned media outlets, and Poland’s National Broadcasting Council has opened an inquiry into the station, supported by members of the far-right Law and Justice Party. The council is required to do so after any complaint concerning Polish media. 

The film’s critics are relying on the country’s Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, a “memory law” that governs narratives of historical events in Poland. The 1998 law criminalizes actions or statements, including works of art, that in the government’s opinion smear the good name of the Polish people — for example, referring to any Polish collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. The act has been wielded against writers and political opponents on many occasions.

One who ran afoul of the law was Polish exile Jan Grabowski, now a Holocaust historian at the University of Ottawa. As co-editor of a 2018 book that included an essay criticizing the wartime mayor of a Polish town for handing Jews over to the Nazis, Grabowski and his colleague were accused by a Warsaw district court of “defamation” and ordered to apologize in print. (The charges were later overturned on appeal.)

Grabowski told J. that it’s not unusual even for a foreign film like “Among Neighbors” to receive such treatment.

“There is a special outfit in Poland funded 100% by the state, the Institute of National Remembrance, and they are paid to hunt down and to expose thoughts and books and films which are perceived by the state as hostile to the national ethos,” Grabowski said. “So that’s what you have here. Yoav’s film is basically a victim of its own popularity because it was shown by Polish TV.” 

Although the Law and Justice Party is no longer in power (current prime minister Donald Tusk is part of a center-right coalition), Grabowski said there is still widespread consensus around the party’s support for “defense of the dignity of the nation,” as enshrined in the institute and its legal arms. 

Regarding the criticism of “Among Neighbors,” “I’d say 90% of Polish public opinion is strongly behind these condemnations, these knee jerk reactions,” he said. “This is something that consolidates Polish public opinion to an absolutely incredible degree.”

Meanwhile, Potash said he and the production team behind the film are not backing down. He pointed to the support he’s getting from numerous Jewish organizations, including the Claims Conference, which gave the film a grant, and the USC Shoah Foundation. Both have issued statements praising the film for its historical and artistic merit. 

Claims Conference president Gideon Taylor told J. that “Among Neighbors” explores a “difficult but important” history. “It tells the stories that need to be heard, told by witnesses who were there,” he wrote in an email. “To be effective, Holocaust education has to be honest and speak about what happened, even when that runs counter to established narratives, whether in Poland or elsewhere. We are proud to have supported the making of this film and encourage people to see it.”

The film is still showing in theaters in North America but is not yet available to stream in the U.S. 

Polish Television is also standing firm, Potash said. He has been in touch with the station by email, “and they basically said that solidarity is our approach,” he relayed. “We have to stick together.” 

“The film is streaming now on the [Polish] station, so people can watch it whenever they want to,” he said.

(JTA) — GALVESTON, Texas – More than a century ago, this busy Gulf Coast port and longtime vacation destination 50 miles southeast of Houston welcomed so many European immigrants – including some 10,000 Jews – it earned the moniker “The Ellis Island of the West.”

Today, the few remaining descendants of Jewish immigrants from that time period still living on the island are determined to preserve and nourish the story of the Galveston Movement, a mostly forgotten but pivotal chapter in Jewish-American history.

Galveston, an island-city of 53,000 residents, is the fourth-busiest cruise port in the country and the birthplace of the Juneteenth holiday, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. With 32 miles of brown-sand beaches, a charming historic district with numerous well-preserved Victorian-era homes, and some 80 festivals held year-round, the island annually attracts 8 million tourists.

It also offers visitors several sites related to the Galveston Movement and what was once a robust Jewish community that produced five mayors, prominent business leaders and two highly renowned rabbis.

The Galveston Movement, also called the Galveston Plan, was a humanitarian effort operated by several Jewish organizations that brought Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia and Eastern Europe through the port of Galveston between 1907 and 1914. Most arrived in Galveston on steamships from Bremen, Germany, a transatlantic trip that took two to three weeks.

A recent book by English historian and journalist Rachel Cockerell — “Melting Point” — has helped reignite interest in the Galveston Movement.  Cockerell, whose great-grandfather David Jochelmann played a key role in organizing the program in Europe, spoke this month at Galveston’s Temple B’nai Israel as part of a U.S. tour promoting the book.

“As soon as started reading about the Galveston Movement, I sort of went down a rabbit hole from which I didn’t emerge for three years,” Cockerell told a group of more than 100 Galvestonians, Jews and non-Jews alike. “I was totally transfixed by this amazing story of Jewish immigration in the early 20th century.”

“I love it,” says Shelley Nussenblatt Kessler, 74, of the heightened attention on the Galveston Movement. Kessler estimates she is one of 25 to 30 “BOIs” — shorthand for “Born on the Island”) — still living in Galveston who are descendants of the Jewish immigrants who came to America as part of the program. Her grandmother and grandfather immigrated from what is now western Ukraine to Galveston in 1910 and 1911.

“Not only am I very proud to be a descendant of two of these immigrants, but I can’t help but think of how lucky I am to be here,” she said. “I’m in awe of what my grandparents did and how they got here, and the sacrifices that they made.”

By the late 1880s, thousands of Jews began fleeing their homes in the Russian Empire to escape antisemitic policies and violent pogroms. Many immigrated to New York and other East Coast cities, resulting in overcrowding and poverty.

Jacob Schiff, a New York banker and philanthropist, financed the Galveston Movement as a way to blunt an anticipated wave of antisemitism on the Eastern seaboard, which might lead to immigration restrictions. Schiff sought to find suitable alternative destinations in the American South for the influx of Jewish immigrants.

Charleston, South Carolina, which had a long-established Jewish community, was considered but city leaders there only wanted Anglo-Saxon immigrants. New Orleans was also in the mix but there were concerns about periodic outbreaks of yellow fever.

Enter Galveston, a port that checked all of the boxes. It had a deep-water harbor that could accommodate large ships and an extensive railroad system available to transport immigrants to other cities and towns.

“Really the purpose of Galveston was to channel the immigrants into other parts of Texas and up the middle of the country west of the Mississippi,” said Dwayne Jones, a historian who is CEO of the Galveston Historical Foundation.

Jones says there was another key reason Galveston was selected: There already was a well established Jewish community that was thriving in the city’s business and political circles. In fact, Galveston had elected its first Jewish mayor — Dutch-born Michael Seeligson — as far back as 1853.

“It was a more tolerant community with a depth of diversity you didn’t see in other places,” Jones said. “It also had a long history of Jewish leadership and activities in Galveston.”

The first Reform congregation in Texas, Galveston’s Congregation B’nai Israel, was established in 1868. Twenty years later, London-born Henry Cohen, who was only 25 at the time, became the congregation’s rabbi. Cohen led B’nai Israel for a remarkable 64 years until his death in 1952. It’s believed to be the longest tenure of a rabbi at the same congregation in U.S. history.

In 1900 Galveston was decimated by a storm known as the Great Galveston Hurricane. It remains the deadliest natural disaster in American history, with an estimated 8,000 fatalities, about 20% of its population at the time. Two-thirds of the island’s buildings and homes were destroyed. Cohen and other Jewish leaders played a major role in the relief and reconstruction efforts that followed.

“Jewish leadership took a really powerful role in rebuilding the island,” says Jones. “Without that leadership, I don’t think Galveston would have come back as it did.”

Seven years after the hurricane, the first ship that was part of the Galveston Movement – the S.S. Cassel — arrived from Bremen with 86 Jewish passengers. Cohen – who was proficient in 10 languages — was the humanitarian face of the movement, meeting ships at the Galveston docks and helping guide the immigrants through the cumbersome arrival and distribution process.

The arrivals were processed at the Jewish Immigrants’ Information Bureau headquarters in Galveston, which gave the immigrants rations and railroad tickets to more than 150 towns in Texas and other places west of the Mississippi River.

Unlike a vast majority of the immigrants who had only a brief stopover in Galveston before settling in other communities, Kessler’s grandparents decided to remain on the island. Her grandfather was a painting contractor while her grandmother worked as a housekeeper.

Adjusting to life in Texas proved to be a struggle for many immigrants. Kessler’s grandparents decided they would be happier back in Europe, even buying passage on a ship so they could return to their homeland. But World War I broke out, canceling their trip.

“The harbormaster told my grandparents to hold their tickets until after the war, and if you want to go back, we’ll redeem them,” Kessler said. “Thank God, they didn’t go back.”

By 1914, declining economic conditions and a surge in nativism and xenophobia — a forerunner of today’s anti-immigration climate — brought an end to the Galveston Movement. Still, the program resulted in an estimated 10,000 persecuted Jews finding new homes in the American hinterland in places few had imagined.

The Galveston Historic Seaport Museum chronicles the immigrant experience in an interactive exhibit called “Ship to Shore.” The exhibit includes a prominent photo of Henry Cohen.  Computer terminals enable visitors to search for information taken from ships’ passenger manifests pertaining to their ancestors’ arrival in Texas. The Galveston County Museum, located inside the county courthouse, also features artifacts related to the Galveston Movement.

Kessler’s late husband Jimmy, who died in 2022, was another key figure in Galveston’s Jewish history. Jimmy Kessler served as B’nai Israel’s rabbi for 32 years until his retirement in 2014. He also was the founder and first president of the Texas Jewish Historical Society, which is now 45 years old and has more than 1,000 members.

Jimmy Kessler was devoted to telling the story of the Galveston Movement, writing three books about the area’s Jewish history, including a biography of Henry Cohen called “The Life of a Frontier Rabbi.” The street on which B’nai Israel is located was renamed Jimmy Kessler Drive in 2018, honoring his service to the congregation and the greater Galveston community.

“I’m married to a street,” joked Shelley Kessler, adding, “Jimmy, with what he did to preserve Texas Jewish history, kept all of this [the Galveston Movement] in the forefront.”

B’nai Israel, which now has a membership of 125 families, relocated to a new building in 1955, named the Henry Cohen Memorial Temple.

The congregation’s original synagogue – built in 1870 – was the spiritual launching point for the Jewish immigrants who were part of the Galveston Movement.  It still stands on Kempner Street (named after a prominent Jewish family that included Mayor Isaac Kempner) in downtown Galveston. The building is now a private residence. Galveston also has a small Conservative synagogue, Congregation Beth Jacob, that was founded in 1931.

Robert Goldhirsh, 75, former president of Congregation B’nai Israel and another descendant of immigrants from the Galveston Movement, has been the caretaker of the Hebrew Benevolent Society Cemetery for the past three decades. Several hundred Jews — some of whom came to America in the Galveston Movement — are buried in the cemetery. Henry Cohen also is interred there.

Both Goldhirsh and Kessler say that despite perceptions of deep-rooted intolerance in Texas, they’ve encountered little to no antisemitism in Galveston.

“Most of the people I know, it makes no difference that I’m Jewish,” Goldhirsh said. “We’re just Galvestonians.”

Indeed, Goldhirsh says the biggest threat to Jewish life on the island comes from Mother Nature.  With climate change a contributing factor, recent years have seen a significant rise in weather-related disasters in Texas. For instance, Hurricane Ike in 2008 led to widespread flooding on Galveston Island and caused water damage in both synagogues.

“During one of the High Holiday services, there was a hurricane headed this way and we had to cancel for fear that the congregants would be caught in a bad storm,” he recalled. “You have to listen to the weather reports. If they say ‘leave,’ you better leave.”

Given 3,000 years of slavery, exile, Crusades, ghettos, blood libel and the Holocaust, few chroniclers of history would consider the story of the Jews a laugh riot. Meet Rob Kutner, who does.

Kutner, an award-winning comedy writer for late-night TV, is the author of “The Jews: 5,000 Years and Counting,” a joke-a-minute romp through Jewish history. Kutner manages to find humor in every chapter of that history, even the parts that clearly aren’t funny.

The book came out in March, published by the Jewish imprint Wicked Son. As part of a national book tour, Kutner will appear Dec. 1 at Congregation Beth Israel in Berkeley and Dec. 2 at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto, on stage in conversation with the JCC’s CEO, Zack Bodner. During those events, he will no doubt recount how and why he wrote his latest book.

“For me it was a way to unload the Jewish history I’ve been learning all my life, to use my comic voice and skills,” Kutner, 53, said in an interview from his home in L.A. “It feels even more important now to present a factual and relatively balanced Jewish history.”

Like any proper history, Kutner begins in the beginning, recounting the Torah’s account of the origins of the Jewish people. Chief in his bag of rhetorical tricks, Kutner gives voice to the main characters, writing in the first person as the snake in the Garden of Eden, Noah’s wife Naamah (who dubs the ark “The Wooden Box of Stank”) and the dysfunctional clan of Abraham and Sarah, whom he imagines enduring a family therapy session.

“Putting them in the first person was to break up the format and keep it readable and engaging,” Kutner said. “Also, I had to figure out how to deal with the Bible. People know it pretty well.”

He goes on to portray King David as a “rock star,” the Maccabees struggling to market their new holiday of Hanukkah (“Our voices will also rise in glorious song — well, one or two songs that no one quite remembers every verse to”) and the sages of the Talmud, pictured in a series of trading cards.

“I find that appeals to young people,” Kutner said of his irreverent approach. “With kids you have to be a little dangerous. The other side of the argument is, I wanted a welcoming and warm tone, hoping this would be of interest to potential allies.”

As Kutner moves into more modern history, he wrestles with some darker episodes. His chapter about the pogroms of Russia is subtitled “It Takes a Village.” He includes a sequel to “Fiddler on the Roof,” in which the iconic song “Tradition” becomes “Expulsion.” He calls the Jews who steadily returned to the Holy Land starting in the 1800s “the worst colonizers ever.”

That last joke sprang from Kutner’s unapologetic Zionism, and an upbringing steeped in Jewish tradition.

He grew up in Atlanta in a Reform household. However, he attended a K-12 Christian school, an experience he said deepened his Jewish identity (he jokes that when the school published a list of the universities seniors were headed to, it said “Hell” next to his name). He was active with Hillel in college and later spent a year in Israel attending a yeshiva and the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies. Today, he describes himself as “Conservadox.”

As for his comedy education, Kutner said it started with his grandfather, “a nonstop jokester.”

“Both of my parents were very funny,” he said. “My dad was an ophthalmologist, often cracking inappropriate jokes. I grew up immersing myself in Monty Python, ‘Kids in the Hall,’ and after [Princeton University] I dabbled in stand-up.”

In time, he joined the writing staff of “The Daily Show” and “Conan,” scripted animated shows such as “Teen Titans Go!” “Ben 10” and “Angry Birds: Summer Madness,” and authored a series of humorous books, including “Apocalypse How” and “The Future According to Me.”

He also contributed material for the Oscars, the Emmys and two White House Correspondents’ Dinners. He himself is a winner of Emmy and Peabody awards.

In his latest book, Kutner brings Jewish history right up to the present moment, including the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel and the subsequent tsunami of anti-Jewish hate around the world. When he surmises which way that may go in the United States, Kutner is uncharacteristically uneasy, writing, “Who knows?”

“It’s a bit of a Rorschach test,” he said of that cryptic comment, “a way of saying I don’t know what’s coming, but it doesn’t seem great right now. It was an economical way of saying to American Jews, ‘Don’t get too comfortable.’”

Comedian and author Rob Kutner, 7:30 p.m. Monday, Dec. 1 at Congregation Beth Israel, 1630 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, and 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 2 in conversation with Zack Bodner at the Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto. $25 includes book; $20 admission without book. paloaltojcc.org/events 

Update on Nov. 18: Kutner’s city of residence and the name of publisher Wicked Son have been corrected.

It’s official. Israelis aren’t white — at least in California.

On Oct. 6, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 91 into law, creating a new racial or ethnic category to be used when California agencies collect demographic data.

Middle East and North African, or MENA, is a new demographic designation that explicitly includes those with “ancestry or ethnic origin” from Israel, as well as other countries in the Middle East. It is distinct from the “white” category, which until recently encompassed Middle Eastern ethnicities.

Of course, nothing about race is that simple. Nor, for Jews, is the issue of identity.

“The thing about these categories is the definitions of them matter, in a sense, far less than what the uses of them are meant to be,” said Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of Jewish history at New York University.

According to the text of the bill, MENA includes the “Middle Eastern group, including, but not limited to, Afghan, Bahraini, Emirati, Iranian, Iraqi, Israeli, Jordanian, Kuwaiti, Lebanese, Omani, Palestinian, Qatari, Saudi Arabian, Syrian, Turkish and Yemeni.”

North African countries are also included, as is what the law calls a “transnational” group of ethnicities like Kurdish and Armenian that span various countries.

In theory, that would mean that Israeli Jews, or American Jews with Israeli heritage, could mark “MENA,” while Jews with heritage from Poland could not, creating a white dividing line through American Jewish identity.

AB 91 is in line with a policy change at the U.S. Census Bureau that was proposed in 2023 and approved in March of this year. It’s the culmination of a long push by Arab, Armenian and Somali organizations to create a new category that is distinct from white. The bill was introduced by Assemblymember John Harabedian, a Democrat from Pasadena who is Armenian. He said he did so in an effort to ensure proper representation in demographic data. 

“Many people from the Middle East and North Africa don’t see their lived experiences reflected when they’re grouped as ‘white,’” he said in a statement provided to J. “This bill gives them the option to identify as they see fit, so state data and services can respond to their unique cultural and community needs. One of the many things that unites MENA communities is a history and identity rooted in a diverse region that has too often been overlooked in our data and policymaking.”

That’s an important consideration, said Paula Braveman, a professor at UCSF and founding director of the Center for Health Equity. She has studied how socioeconomic and ethnic disparities affect health for over 25 years.

She said there’s solid scientific evidence showing that discrimination can impact public health. (It’s been linked to risk factors for obesity, high blood pressure and substance use, as well as psychological stress and mental health issues.) While creating a new ethnic category doesn’t change whether a person experiences discrimination, it does allow public agencies to track it.

“If you don’t have a separate category, you can’t say what’s happening with it,” she said. “That’s the problem.” 

Once it’s clear what challenges a particular group is experiencing, policy and programming can be formulated to try to address them. Changing the way data is collected takes work, as forms have to be changed and personnel trained, she said, but it’s worth it.

“There’s a cost, but I think in this case the research showing a number of serious examples of discrimination-related health damages among people of Middle Eastern origin was striking enough and compelling enough,” she said.

Still, the new law opens up particular questions for Jews, especially non-Israeli Jews.

Berman, whose book “Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship” will be released in the spring from Princeton Press, said identity and politics always play a part in how Jews are defined.

It’s not the first time questions about Jews and whiteness have come up.

In the early 20^th century, white and Black people had a pathway to citizenship in the United States, while Asians did not. But that left a large gray area for Jews, Arabs, Armenians, Persians and others.

To increase the odds of getting citizenship, “a lot of Jewish organizations that came before Congress and provided testimony in the early 20th century were adamant that Jews simply be counted as the kind of nationality that they came from,” Berman explained. So a French Jew, for example, could be considered French, and thus white.

Back then, too, the arguments around citizenship for Jews were tangled up with the status of Arabs. If Jews could be citizens, did that mean other people from the Middle East could, too?

“One judge in one of these cases says, ‘Yes, of course, Jews can be citizens, but they get that because they’re European,’” Berman said. “And somebody says, ‘So, if a Jew were from Jerusalem, the cradle of Christianity, should they get citizenship?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely not.’”

Among jurists, legislators and the general public, views were divided, she said.

“They say it must be a real loophole that allowed Jews to gain citizenship, and maybe they shouldn’t,” Berman said. “And so Jewish lawyers start to get involved representing some of these Arab petitioners because they get scared, and they say, ‘We better make sure that those Arab petitioners get citizenship, because if they don’t, it’s going to reflect poorly on our citizenship story.”

There’s an argument to be made that Jews of all stripes fit into the “transnational” category along with Armenians and Kurds, according to Sarah Levin, executive director of JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa). She understands the need for underrepresented groups to be counted for demographic data, but said the law is “a positive step with a serious gap.”

“The bill acknowledges ‘transnational’ MENA groups such as Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Circassians, all Indigenous peoples with diasporic communities spanning multiple modern states,” she told J. “This is precisely the situation of the Jewish people. We are indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, dispersed across borders due to persecution and expulsion, and now maintaining diaspora communities worldwide.”

She said also she worried the law could create a split between “white” Ashkenazi Jews and “nonwhite” MENA Jews. It also lumps in, say, Egyptian Jews with all other Egyptians, without recognizing that they have different backgrounds and experiences. 

“The outcome risks reinforcing the invisibility of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews in broader Middle Eastern and North African initiatives and narratives,” she said.

Whether Jewish people tick “MENA” or “white” on a form may not make much practical difference in their everyday lives. But Berman said the whole issue of how race, nationality and ethnicity intersect is one that never goes away, especially for Jews.

“There’s nothing new about these debates,” she said, “but the answers are always shifting to respond to different moments and their political moments and their identity moments.” 

(JTA) — Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, says it has reached a major milestone in its efforts to uncover the identities of all of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, crossing the 5-million name threshold with the help of AI.

That leaves 1 million names still unknown from the tally of 6 million murdered Jews that is synonymous with the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II.

Two years ago, Yad Vashem inaugurated a 26.5 foot-long “Book of Names,” which included the names of 4,800,000 victims of the Shoah, at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

Since then, researchers deployed AI technology and machine learning to analyze hundreds of millions of archival documents that were previously too extensive to research manually, according to Yad Vashem. In addition to covering large amounts of material quickly, the algorithms were taught to look out for variations of victims’ names, leading to the new identification of hundreds of thousands of victims.

Yad Vashem estimates an additional 250,000 names could still be recovered using the technology.

“Reaching 5 million names is both a milestone and a reminder of our unfinished obligation,” said Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, in a statement. “Behind each name is a life that mattered — a child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice that was silenced forever. It is our moral duty to ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one will be left behind in the darkness of anonymity.”

Antisemitism is once again on the rise — through hate crimes, conspiracy theories and even open denial of the Holocaust. In such times, one question stands out: What are we teaching our children, and how?

Here in California, we’ve taken that question seriously. Holocaust education is now mandatory in public schools, and the state partners with Jewish organizations to ensure that teachers are well-trained and supported. In fact, California invests more public funds in Holocaust education than any other state in the nation.

This is not just another education initiative. It’s a moral commitment — to memory, to truth and to inclusion. It recognizes that education is not merely about facts and figures. It’s about shaping empathy, values and moral courage.

When it comes to fighting antisemitism, there is no substitute for deep, human-centered education about Jewish history — especially the Holocaust. The Shoah is not only a chapter in Jewish history; it’s a defining moment in human history. It exposes what happens when hatred, indifference and silence go unchallenged.

Yet across the country, fewer young people are learning about the Holocaust in any meaningful way. Surveys show alarming levels of ignorance — even in places where the atrocities occurred. Denial and distortion are spreading, fueled by misinformation and the fading of living memory.

California’s leadership offers hope, and a model. Studies show that students who learn about the Holocaust are more empathetic, less bigoted and more willing to stand up against discrimination. There’s a reason people say, “As California goes, so goes the nation.” If we lead with integrity here, we can set an example for the rest of the country.

But Holocaust education alone is not enough. To truly combat antisemitism, children must also learn about the richness, resilience and contributions of Jewish life throughout history. Too often, Jewish identity is framed solely through persecution. We must also teach the beauty of Jewish creativity, faith, humor and community — the ways Jewish people have shaped and been shaped by civilization itself.

When we teach Jewish history with pride and depth, we humanize a people too often reduced to caricature or myth. We build understanding instead of fear, connection instead of alienation.

Changing what we teach children means changing the future. If we want a world where antisemitism no longer festers — where Jewish children grow up proud, visible and unafraid — our classrooms must become places of truth, memory and belonging.

California has shown what’s possible. With continued investment, teacher training and community commitment, we can ensure the next generation grows up with both the knowledge and the moral clarity to build a more compassionate and unified society. 

The sacred task of our time is to preserve and pass on the lessons of the Holocaust, the greatest crime in human history. So what is required of us now?

Action is imperative. We must urge legislators to expand funding for Holocaust education so that every California teacher has the training and classroom resources they need. And we must rally our Jewish and civic communities behind the once-in-a-generation campaign to build Northern California’s first permanent Holocaust Center — a home that will anchor this vital educational work for decades to come. As we move into the post-survivor era, this living learning institution can represent the Jewish people and ensure that every student, in every school, learns the truth.

And our work must go beyond remembrance. It must build appreciation for what it means to be Jewish and actively counter the growing demonization of Jews and hatred of “the other.”

If we do this right, we will raise a generation of morally courageous young people and help shape a society that values every human life.

That future begins in our classrooms. It begins with what — and whom — we teach. 

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of J.

In 1190, Clifford’s Tower became York’s Masada. 

On March 16 of that year, some 150 largely French-speaking Jews took refuge there from an angry, violent mob incited by townspeople filled with anti-Jewish religious fervor and local gentry eager to avoid repaying Jewish moneylenders. The Jews, including liturgical poet Rabbi Yom Tov, eventually chose to die together and set the tower’s timbers on fire, rather than allow the mob to kill them or force them to renounce their faith. 

The annihilation in this community in northeast England also conveniently wiped out the monarchy’s debts to financiers who helped cover the costs of the Crusades.

The tragic story was largely forgotten until the 1950s, said Avi Rubinstein, a York University student who leads York Jewish Walking Tours through the city, where remnants still stand of walls constructed by Roman invaders 2,000 years ago. 

One aim of the tours is to “bring Jewish life back into York” — with its estimated 100 to 200 Jews — while also uncovering York’s “somewhat forgotten Jewish past,” according to the website.

I met Avi this summer during a trip to England to visit my son and his family. I happened upon his tour while I was researching York’s Jewish history online and decided that perhaps I could learn something new.

Carrying sketches illustrating the city’s history, including its Jewish past, Avi met us and our local relatives at the oddly named Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate in the city center. From there, we walked to the base of Clifford’s Tower for a history lesson. The ruins of the 13th century stone tower are themselves a remnant of an 11th century castle, built in the time of William the Conqueror.

My husband and I first visited York 18 years ago, after my son married a woman from the region. Touring York opened my eyes to history I’d never learned in a classroom. During a spooky evening ghost walk in 2007, the tour guide opined that the blood from the 1190 mass suicide may have resulted in the reddish stains on the walls of Clifford’s Tower. At the time, I shuddered. But Avi laughed at the story about the stains, which he said may have been due to oxidation.

Sitting under an awning at the base of the tower, where a memorial tablet was laid in 1978, Avi told other stories about York’s Jewish history. In 1990, Chief Rabbi Lord Immanuel Jacobovits and Archbishop Stuart Blanche held a ceremony where we stood to symbolically nullify the notion that Jews weren’t welcome in York. 

The tragedy in 1190, Avi said, was not the death knell of Jewish life in York. As we walked through town, he pointed out a blue plaque on Coney Street marking the site of both the home and synagogue of Rabbi Aaron of York. In 1237, Aaron became the chief rabbi of England. But calamity arrived before the century’s end.

By 1290, King Edward I had expelled all of England’s Jews, who did not return until Oliver Cromwell lifted the ban in 1656. 

York, with a total population of about 220,000 today, never became a thriving Jewish enclave. Geography and the Industrial Revolution, rather than antisemitism, played a role. York, which is not on the coast, was a river port when the Romans built a fortress in 71 CE and when Vikings captured the city in 866 CE. But over time, erosion and flooding made it impossible for large seagoing vessels to navigate the River Ouse or its tributaries. By the time the Industrial Revolution gained momentum in the 19th century, Manchester and cities with strong waterways quickly overtook York as manufacturing centers, and those are the places where Jews migrated.

Perversely, York’s decline as a major commercial center had at least one beneficial effect. By preserving its frozen-in-time past, York has become a major tourist center, drawing more than 9 million visitors a year and bringing in $2.7 billion annually, according to the city. Major attractions include cobbled streets like the narrow Shambles with its overhanging buildings, a magnificent Gothic cathedral and museums that display the heritage of Roman and Viking invaders. 

Self-guided Jewish tours of York have long been available. But Avi, who comes from a family of historians, saw the need for a tour led by Jews and recruited fellow York University senior Izzie Solomon to co-lead. They are now preparing younger students to continue their work. The tours for small groups are normally free, but tips are appreciated.

“Most of our customers are Jewish and are actually primarily from England (usually from London coming up to York for a weekend),” Avi said to me in an email. “We do also get a lot of foreign Jews, as well as some non-Jewish York locals who are interested in hearing a new perspective on York’s history.”

All walking tours of York inevitably include Clifford’s Tower, the Shambles, the cathedral and perhaps a walk along the Roman walls. Avi took us to one of the more obscure sites: a hidden courtyard revealing the two surviving walls of Norman House, York’s oldest home. Rediscovered in 1939, the building was the home of Jews in the 12th century, Avi said. 

Today York’s Jewish community may be experiencing a small revival, aided by the York University Jewish Society and by Rabbi Elisheva Salamo, a San Francisco native.

In 2023, the York Liberal Jewish Community hired Salamo as its first resident rabbi in more than 800 years. Salamo worked at synagogues and Jewish organizations across the Bay Area for decades, including as a J. Torah columnist.

“Small Jewish communities hold strength beyond their size, and that was what I saw as I interviewed for the post,” the rabbi told me in an email. “It’s a special privilege to be part of navigating the pulls of Jewish life and the secular world here, as I am sure my spiritual ancestors, Rabbi Yom Tov and Aaron of York felt. When I tread the streets they walked on, pass the sites of their synagogues, I feel a special connection to the land and to recreating a vibrant community in a culture with different values. We are proud Jews in York, we believe that hope rises from the ashes, that memory serves to shape but not define us.”

In an era when newspapers referred to most women by their husbands’ surnames, the name “Madam Julie Rosewald” leapt off our pages. That’s how this publication always referred to Rosewald, now widely recognized as the first woman cantor for her years of service at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. She was married to a renowned composer and musician, but her prominence in the community as “the Cantor Soprano” meant that even in the 19th century, she was a woman of her own name.

Rosewald was born Julie Eichberg in 1847 in Stuttgart, Germany, the daughter of a prominent synagogue cantor. According to a 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia article written by none other than Henrietta Szold, Rosewald attended the Stuttgart Conservatorium, before moving to Baltimore and marrying violinist and conductor Jacob Rosewald. She sang across Europe with a touring opera company, before moving to another opera company that employed both her and her husband.

In 1884, the Rosewalds settled in San Francisco, where she “became a popular teacher of singing, her success in preparing pupils for church choirs, the concert hall and the operatic stage being largely due to her thorough knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the throat,” the Jewish Encyclopedia tells us.

She began working at Emanu-El as lead soprano in the synagogue’s professional choir. But as the daughter of a leading German cantor, she had more to offer than singing her part. Almost immediately, she was thrust into the spotlight. Cantor Max Wolff died unexpectedly, and Emanu-El needed somebody to lead High Holidays services, writes the Jewish Museum of the American West. Rosewald turned out to be just the person.

Her leadership of those High Holidays services turned out to be a hit. “The singing was a feature of the service, Mrs. Rosewald at the Temple Emanu-El filling her arduous position with great credit,” wrote The Jewish Progress. 

Until 1893, Rosewald served, essentially, as cantor of Emanu-El.

“During all these years Madam Rosewald, often lovingly called the ‘Cantor Soprano,’ made her services a source of the greatest delight to all of her hearers,” read her 1906 obituary in our pages by Jacob Voorsanger, Emanu-El rabbi and founder of this paper. 

“She combined the highest degree of musical ability with a pious disposition and a fair understanding of Hebrew, having been trained in the school of her late father who was Cantor at Stuttgart, Germany,” Voorsanger wrote. “It was this remarkable combination that made the services of the Temple in her time attractive in the highest degree and gave pleasure as well as edification to the numerous attendants.”

It’s unclear whether people thought of her as a true cantor at the time, or what they made of her position, which remained officially “leading soprano.” But she led the cantorial parts of the service and worked with her husband and the synagogue organist to choose and arrange music for the congregation. Voorsanger, ever eager to prove the forward-thinking nature of the Jews of the West, wrote in Rosewald’s glowing obituary that “her position… was exceedingly unique.”

By 1926, 20 years after Rosewald died, we were referring to her straightforwardly as a cantor. “The first woman cantor was Mrs. Julie Rosewald, wife of the musician and composer, and herself a singer of note and remarkable gifts,” we wrote in an article about “women’s work” in Emanu-El’s early years. “She appreciated the needs of the service and greatly delighted the congregation with her musical numbers. Through her singing, she won the hearts and admiration of the entire congregation.”

Rosewald appeared in our pages often, frequently in small notes in the social column, where readers posted notices about when they would be out of town, when their visiting in-laws would be receiving guests, the date of an upcoming bar mitzvah, and so forth.

“Madam Julie Rosewald of San Francisco, accompanied by D. Oppenheimer, wife of Ernest H. Oppenheimer of Baltimore, Md., have gone to Del Monte after a week’s visit to San Jose,” one typical notice reads. 

After she left Emanu-El, Rosewald became a professor of singing at Mills College in Oakland and continued to be a prominent member of the community. She died in 1906 at age 56 during a visit to Germany. Her will, which we reported on in great detail, left money to Emanu-El and Mills College and established the Rosewald Memorial Fund to help disadvantaged students at UC Berkeley.

They’d snacked on the zakuskie and schmoozed for a bit. Now the 15 Russian-speaking Jews, most in their 40s,  were sitting in a circle at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto preparing to hear from Stanford history professor Amir Weiner. 

His topic for the next 2½ hours: Russian and Soviet Jewish history, from soup to nuts. 

At the end of the 19th century, he told the group, the 5.3 million Jews in the Russian Empire formed the largest Jewish community in the world. It continued to flourish in the early decades of Communist rule before falling prey to Stalinist purges and antisemitic restrictions, leading to today’s “sad” numbers of some 60,000 people. 

“Did it have to be that way? Could things have been different?” an audience member asked. Weiner shrugged, smiling sadly. “History is always hindsight,” he said. 

It was the fourth session of the Jewish Parent Academy, a Jewish learning and leadership course that began 10 years ago in Brooklyn and just launched in Palo Alto, its first satellite outside the New York area.

The people who came to hear Weiner were all born in the former Soviet Union. They came to the U.S. as children or young adults, attended top American universities and are now white-collar professionals. Why did they need an Israeli-born professor from Palo Alto to tell them about their own history?

“We never learned this in the Soviet Union,” explained Redwood City resident Alyona Doubrovina, who emigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia, in her early 20s and is now a partner in Freshwater Investments, a socially conscious real-estate investment company. Doubrovina  is also part of JPA Palo Alto’s newly formed steering committee. 

JPA was started in 2015 by seven Russian-speaking Jewish parents, all of them alumni of Jewish leadership programs. The course, which runs 10 to 12 sessions, gives participants more knowledge about Russian and Soviet Jewish history, Jewish traditions, Israel relations and the infrastructure of their local Jewish communities. The goal is to enable more of their ranks to take leadership roles, not just in their own Russian-speaking Jewish communities but also in mainstream American Jewish organizations.

Another major focus is to help participants give their children a stronger Jewish identity. “Even though we grew up here, we’re very much still products of post-Soviet parents,” said JPA national director Yelena Pogorelsky, a native of Samara, Russia, who immigrated to the New York area in 1996 when she was 15. “The Jewishness that most of us knew came from experiencing antisemitism. This is a way to build up our own identity and knowledge so we can be better educators for our children.”

Pogorelsky spearheaded the creation of the Palo Alto JPA at last year’s Z3 conference at the OFJCC. It is the 17th JPA cohort. The rest were all based in the Greater New York area. There are more than 400 program alumni in all, Pogorelsky said, and many fill board positions in JPA and participate in fundraising. Students pay $500 for the course, which is heavily subsidized, mainly by Eugene Fooksman, a Silicon Valley immigrant and entrepreneur (one reason the first satellite course is being held in Palo Alto). All lectures are in English and are given by professors, rabbis and Jewish communal leaders. 

“This is the way to talk to Russian-speaking Jews,” said Pogorelsky. “We come from different ends of the spectrum in terms of our previous knowledge and our Jewish engagement and our religiosity and observance. But if you put a great academic speaker in front of us, we can all sign up for that.”

Palo Alto JPA director Yana Rathman, who emigrated from Kiev in 1989 as a young adult and now works in instructional technology, explains that when the last great wave of Jewish immigrants came to the U.S. in the early 1990s, local organizations and synagogues launched educational programs designed to help the adults integrate into American life. 

JPA is designed for the in-between generation, Rathman said — Jews who might speak Russian with their now-aging parents, but English with their children. They are successful in their professions, they know America, and they do not want to be talked down to.

“They do not fit these Russian-speaking programs that target seniors,” Rathman said. “They want something of a different quality. They went to law schools, they went to Stanford Business School.” 

Despite their years in America, these Russian-speaking Jews still tend to stick together, those interviewed say. 

Sophie Goldberg is taking the new Palo Alto course. A native of Ekaterinoslav (now Dniepro), Ukraine, she moved with her parents to Israel when she was 12 and immigrated to California in 2006 to attend San Jose State University.

“All of my friends are Russian speakers, I don’t know why,” she said. “In Israel it was the same. It’s the imprint you get as a child, I think. I’m not quite Israeli, not quite Russian, not quite American. I feel the most sense of belonging here,” she added, gesturing around the room. 

A crucial difference between those earlier integration-focused programs and JPA, Pogorelsky and Rathman each said, is that JPA is created by Russian-speaking Jews for themselves and their peers. 

“Socioeconomically and in terms of our career status, we’re doing as well as our American Jewish peers,” Pogorelsky said. “So now is the time that we take responsibility for our own needs, that we create things for ourselves and stop waiting for some organization to guess what we need and bring it to us on a silver platter.”

At the same time, this so-called “1.5 generation,” as Rathman put it, still finds it difficult to break into the American Jewish leadership ranks. 

“[We] want to do something in the community, and if you’re not connected, it makes it much harder,” Rathman said. “These people, they don’t have the luxury of, you know, ‘My grandparents and great-grandparents belonged to Temple Emanu-El and so I just know this community.’ These people strive to find a connection.”

Ilya Vinogradsky is another participant in this first Palo Alto cohort. He was 14 when he arrived in San Francisco with his family from Odesa, Ukraine, in December 1989. He was already a San Francisco Giants fan, he said, pointing to a 1990 clipping from the Jewish Bulletin, J.’s predecessor, that shows him in a Giants baseball cap.

Vinogradsky graduated from Lowell High School and UC Davis before getting his master’s in computer science at Stanford. He lives in Hillsborough, is married to another FSU immigrant, runs his own high-tech company and has raised three children.

“I spent 20 years building my life,” he said. “I would have engaged earlier with the Jewish community if anyone had approached me. Russian-speaking Jews have very strong Jewish identities but don’t know much about the history and traditions, the why behind the what.”

Hebrew Free Loan gave him money to attend UC Davis, which is why last year he joined its board. “In the next phase of my life I want to give back to the Jewish community that helped us get here and supported us when we arrived.”   

If the Palo Alto pilot course is successful, Pogorelsky hopes to expand to San Francisco and Walnut Creek, and is looking for folks interested in funding that expansion.

“I don’t know if we’ll need JPA 20 years from now, but we need it now,” she said. “I know that for many in our community, if they don’t make this connection now, then chances are that their children won’t have the connection at all to Judaism and to the Jewish community.”

A comedy about an ultra-Orthodox man visiting Egypt, a documentary about Jews in space and a tongue-in-cheek look at Yiddish in Sweden.  

Moviegoers in the Monterey Bay area will have a chance to catch some choice Jewish films from Nov. 2 to 16 as part of the Carmel Jewish Film Festival run by Congregation Beth Israel, also in Carmel.

The fest kicks off with 2023’s “No Name Restaurant,” a road trip movie of sorts about accepting each other’s humanity in the face of differences. In it, a young haredi man from Brooklyn who is visiting Jerusalem travels to Egypt to complete a minyan for Passover. When his journey hits unexpected snags, a Bedouin looking for his camel steps in to help.

“No Name Restaurant” will screen Nov. 2 at Carmel-by-the-Sea’s Golden Bough Playhouse, followed by an optional dinner at Flaherty’s Restaurant in Carmel. 

“The Other,” a 2024 documentary, will screen Nov. 6 at Beth Israel. It tracks the lives of activists who pursue Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, both before and since the Hamas Oct. 7, 2023, massacre. “It is much easier to remain in your righteousness and root down into your own narrative, pain and suffering,” director Joy Sela said in a statement. “It is much harder to hold space for a truth that contradicts your own and acknowledge pain and suffering from ‘the other side’ while still experiencing your own.”

Another documentary, “Ain’t No Back to a Merry Go Round,” will screen Nov. 8. The film examines how a Jewish community supported Black students at Howard University in desegregating a Maryland amusement park in 1960. Directed by Ilana Trachtman, it tells an inspiring story of solidarity and received a 2022 completion grant from the Jewish Film Institute, which presents the annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. 

On Nov. 9, the Monterey Museum of Art will host 2024’s “The Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief.” In it, historian Jonathan Petropoulos meets Bruno Lohse, who served as an “art adviser” to high-ranking Nazi leader Hermann Göring and was responsible for looting Jewish-owned art. The event will include a reception, screening and post-film discussion attended by Petropoulos.

A series of short films will play on Nov. 13, including “Fiddler on the Moon,” which looks at Jews who’ve gone to space and even imagines what Judaism would look like somewhere other than Earth. It features a series of interviews, including with rabbis and the Jewish astronauts Jeffrey Hoffman and Jessica Meir.

On Nov. 15, the “Sabbath Queen” arrives. Filmed across two decades, it features Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, who is a drag queen and part of a line of 38 generations of rabbis. The documentary was the closing-night feature at last year’s S.F. Jewish Film Festival.

The Carmel film fest finishes up on Nov. 16 with “Swedishkayt: Yidlife Crisis in Stockholm.” Two Canadian comedians, Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, travel to Sweden to take a gander at Jewish life in the Scandinavian world. The film includes footage of them examining Swedish bagels and learning about Yiddish speakers interspersed with bits from their stand-up show. As Elman puts it: “There’s Yidn in Sweden? You must be kiddin’!”

Carmel Jewish Film Festival, Nov. 2-16. Tickets and times vary, check carmelbethisrael.org/cjff for details or call 831-624-2015.

Anita Friedman didn’t set out to make a murder mystery. 

When the longtime executive director of the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services first visited her father’s native village in Poland 20 years ago, she planned to document the story of her family and the other Jews who lived there before World War II, virtually all of whom were murdered in the Holocaust. She hoped to use what she came up with as part of Holocaust education in public schools, a major focus of the JFCS Holocaust Center.

“I wanted to use the story of my town as a lens through which to tell the story of the Jews of Poland,” she told J. “But things started to unfold.” 

“Among Neighbors,” directed by award-winning Berkeley filmmaker Yoav Potash, tells the brutal tale of the murder of a Jewish family in the village of Gniewoszów after the war — not by the Nazi occupiers but by their own Christian neighbors, a horrific event that was repeated in about a dozen post-war Polish towns, with more than 1,000 victims. 

This disturbing chapter in the town’s history has never been publicly acknowledged, and it took 10 years for Potash and his team to complete the film. Through interviews with elderly villagers still living in the town, as well as with rabbis and experts on Polish Jewish history — notably the testimony of one brave non-Jewish woman who witnessed the killings — Potash weaves a powerful and, at times, beautiful tale of human suffering, longing and resilience.  

 “Among Neighbors” has screened at film festivals and other venues in Israel, Poland and the U.S. since last fall. It opens this month in theaters across the country, including at San Francisco’s Vogue Theater, where it will run from Oct. 24 to 30 and at the Lark Theater in Larkspur on Oct. 29 and 30. After most screenings, there will be a Q&A that includes Potash and Friedman, who became the film’s executive producer.

This all began in 2005, when Friedman and her three sons first visited Gniewoszów. Friedman, whose parents both survived the Holocaust, grew up listening to her father’s stories of pre-war life in the village, which was, he told her, more than half Jewish. Not all his memories were positive, but in general he recalled that the Jews and non-Jews got along well, living side by side. He was on a business trip outside Gniewoszów in September 1939 when the Nazis invaded; the rest of his family was murdered in Treblinka. 

That first visit did not go well. Friedman and her sons were chased out of town by thugs who called them “Zhid,” Polish for “Jew.” But she returned several times, including in 2014 for a rededication of the town’s Jewish cemetery, which had been neglected and desecrated. This time, the whole village turned out to welcome her. 

By then she had contracted with Potash to make a documentary. After the rededication ceremony, he decided to stay on, poke around and see whether any of the locals would talk to him. That’s when the story of the post-war Jewish murders began to emerge and the film took a darker turn. 

A year later, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw contacted Potash and Friedman to say they’d received a handwritten letter from an elderly woman in Germany who claimed to be from Gniewoszów. She said she’d witnessed the murders and “wanted to set the record straight,” Potash recalled.  

Friedman paid to bring the woman, Pelagia Radecka, back to the town she had left decades earlier so she could be interviewed where it all happened. 

“She had a lot of fear about being in the town,” Potash said. “She would go there from time to time, and she would snoop around, but she would never tell people about the murders. She felt that it was too much, too close to touching the third rail.” 

But the killers were dead by 2015, and Radecka, no longer afraid of retribution, wanted a Jewish organization to help her find her lost love, the son of two of the people murdered after the war, the boy she’d spent her life searching for: Janek Weinberg.  

“So now, the town’s dark secret that had compelled me to decide to make a documentary suddenly got elevated and deepened by the woman who knew that story best and was most intimately connected to it because she knew the victims. She admired them. She had a huge ache in her heart about the fact that they had been killed,” Potash said. “She went through a trauma herself as someone who had witnessed it, and as someone who was threatened by the killers and carried for her whole life this tremendous heartache about what had happened.” 

Along the way, the film crew found another elderly person from Gniewoszów, a Jewish Holocaust survivor living in Israel named Yaacov Goldstein. In just one example of how stories are interwoven in this town’s history, Goldstein had attended the pre-war cheder (Jewish primary school) in Gniewoszów run by Friedman’s grandfather. 

Goldstein’s and Radecka’s memories of life in Gniewoszów before and just after the war are illustrated in this film by gorgeous hand-drawn animation created by two international teams. That creative flourish lifts the tale from straight documentary into the realm of magic realism, evoking a lost world with beautiful delicacy.

The film is full of questions. Does Radecka ever find her lost love? Are the murderers ever brought to justice? Do the villagers come to grips with what happened in their town, or do they continue to obfuscate and deny? 

The task of finding out what really happened is complicated by Poland’s own obsession with refusing to admit that any Poles collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. In 2018, in fact, a law was passed in Poland making it illegal to suggest such collaboration in public speech; criminal penalties were later removed, but the law remains in place. 

“It’s a controversial topic,” said Friedman. “Many people in Poland today want to tell the story. On the other hand, another element of society, the nationalist element, does not want to acknowledge there was collaboration with the enemy. Like every other society, Poland is grappling with how to address its difficult history.” 

Even before its theatrical release, Friedman said, the film has gotten “a lot of traction.” Through the State of California’s agreement with the JFCS Holocaust Center, it will be screened at every public high school in the state as part of mandated Holocaust education. Friedman hopes to replicate that nationally. 

In April of this year, the film had a national primetime broadcast in Israel to coincide with Yom HaShoah, and the film began streaming in Israel. Now a deal is in the works for a national broadcast in Poland, and the film is beginning its theatrical release in the United States, including a campaign for all the major film awards. Friedman is pleased. 

“When I brought Yoav in to make the film, I told him I wanted it to show the truth. I didn’t want to deify the Poles, or demonize them. I wanted [viewers] to understand it in all its complexity,” Friedman said.

“The truth is there is both tragedy and triumph in this story. That underlies why education is so important to understand the moral choices people make under difficult circumstances.”

“Among Neighbors”
Oct. 24-30 at Vogue Theater, 3290 Sacramento St., S.F. $12.50-$15. voguemovies.com and Oct. 29-30 at Lark Theater, 549 Magnolia Ave., Larkspur. $11-$14. larktheater.net

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

Updated on Oct. 9

In 1967, about 25,000 Jews lived in Poland, a sad remnant of the 3.5 million who resided there before the Second World War.

Over the next two years, from late 1967 through 1969, more than 11,000 of those Polish Jews were forced out of their jobs, their homes and eventually their country in a government-sanctioned anti-Zionist campaign. Poland’s leaders accused the Jews of acting as a “fifth column,” more loyal to Israel than the land of their birth. 

Menlo Park resident Sabina Baral was one of those Polish Jews. She was 20 years old and a second-year university student in December 1968 when she and her parents, like other Jews who were emigrating, were given three weeks to liquidate their assets and wrap up their lives. 

Like all Polish Jews of their generation, Baral’s parents were Holocaust survivors, whose lives were being upended for the second time. These forced emigrants were only allowed to take the equivalent of $5 per person out of the country. Their Polish citizenship was stripped from them, and they were not allowed back into the country until the fall of the communist regime two decades later.

It was, Baral said, the only post-war exile of a Jewish community from Europe. 

And it is a story virtually unknown in the West. The New York Times published an article in August 1968, a full five months after massive student protests devolved into a nationwide anti-Jewish campaign. The article ran only on page 12. 

“I am puzzled by this complete tabula rasa, this lack of knowledge about this story,” Baral told J. “I’ve tried to find a reason why the American Jews didn’t know, and maybe even more, maybe weren’t interested in knowing. The part that interests me is, to what extent are the American Jews interested even today?”

Baral chronicles this story and her family’s history, in “Notes From Exile,” published in English in March. (I will speak with Baral about her book at a Jewish Community Library event in San Francisco on Sunday, Oct. 19.) First published in Polish in 2015, the book became a surprise bestseller in Poland before it was adapted for the stage and then, in 2024, for Polish television. The theater adaptation won 13 awards.

No one was more surprised by that success than Baral. After all, her book, like the events of 1968-69, revealed the extent of the latent antisemitism that persisted in Poland for decades after the war. “Notes From Exile” is, she acknowledges, a harsh indictment of the Polish people who stood by while their Jewish neighbors, once again, were persecuted.

“I thought the Poles would get offended, and only three people would read the book and that would be the end of it,” Baral said. “Quite a different thing happened. The book became a sensation.”

Maybe, she conjectures, it’s because she wrote it as a memoir and it slipped under the radar. 

“Scholars have been rebuked for their work [on Polish antisemitism] — Jewish scholars, stellar Jewish scholars,” she said. “And my book, it’s as if it was a literary work rather than reflecting something that actually happened.” There were some negative reactions to the book, she said, “but they were individual, not systemic.”

Clocking in at just under 300 pages, “Notes From Exile” is rich in detail. Much of it describes her family’s journey, from a modest existence in Wrocław, a Polish city along the Czech border, through a hurried departure for Vienna, then months in temporary housing in Rome, before arriving at their final destination of Detroit.

Baral describes her upbringing in Poland as filled with Jewish content. She attended Jewish schools, went to Jewish summer camp and enjoyed many Jewish and Israeli-themed activities, all funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was allowed to operate within Poland after World War II.

That ended with the Six-Day War in June 1967 between Israel and the Arab coalition of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. 

Poland — a member of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact but not of the USSR itself —  responded to the war in lockstep with the Soviet Union by supporting the Arab countries. Poland then forbade the Joint from funding any more Jewish activities and began the persecutions. Jews were purged from communist party leadership and the military. Doctors, engineers and professors lost their jobs. Jewish students were no longer admitted to university. They were, the government said, welcome to leave for their true home: Israel. 

It was almost an inverse of the situation of the Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union. The Soviet refuseniks wanted to leave but were prevented from doing so by the state. Poland’s Jews, by contrast, didn’t want to leave until the officially sanctioned persecution made it “impossible for us to stay,” Baral said. In both instances, these Jews were hounded out of their jobs, forced to abandon their apartments and pensions and allowed to take almost nothing with them. 

Baral relates her parents’ mad dash in late 1968 to stock up on goods they could take with them, even though that was limited to items made in the Soviet bloc since 1948.

Her father bought new electric appliances, unaware that they couldn’t be plugged into American 110-v outlets. Her mother bought elegant damask bedding, which stayed packed away in their Detroit closet as the family switched to no-iron American sheets. 

“It wasn’t just my family. It was all the families who lived on the street,” Baral said, noting that her street was known as a “Jewish” street. “Everybody was going through the same thing. Every evening, my dad would come home after having met with Mr. Pearlstein and Mr. Zukerman and they were all saying: What to buy, what can we take? How to prepare for life in a place we didn’t know?” 

Regardless of the past, Baral does not consider herself a victim. She built a good life for herself here, founding an import company for Italian marble and granite, traveling the world and, with her second husband, raising five children.

Her parents were a different story. They’d spent their adult lives recovering from the Holocaust only to see their carefully hoarded savings depleted when they were once again kicked out of their homes. 

“I don’t speak about us — we conquered America,” she said, referring to the Polish Jewish friends of her generation, with whom she has stayed in touch. 

Her parents deserved better, she said. 

They never learned English and spoke only Yiddish. (Like the other Polish Jewish exiles Baral knew, she and her family stopped speaking Polish, the language of the country that betrayed them.) And they never quite got used to life in America; it was just too confusing. The image of her parents that sticks in her mind is a bittersweet one.

“To this day, I see my parents holding hands, walking in the dark to the bus stop in Detroit,” she said. 

Eventually Baral became an American citizen. It became possible for the exiles to reclaim their Polish passports after 1989. Baral declined to do so even though she has repeatedly returned to visit. 

“Every time I’m asked in Poland, am I Polish, or partly Polish, I say very clearly, I’m American,” she said. “I am American out of gratitude. I have American children. I have an American home. I’m an American.”

A conversation with the author of “Notes from Exile”
2:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 19, at Jewish Community Library, 1835 Ellis St., San Francisco. Free, with registration at jewishcommunitylibrary.org/events-listing/baral/.

Update on Oct. 9: Information about the book and the number of theatrical awards has been corrected.