(JTA) — The fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has opened up a sea of uncertainty about Syria’s future — and about the treasures of its past, including the remnants of its Jewish history.

A 13-year civil war has cost the country more than 600,000 lives and saw some 100,000 people “forcibly disappeared” into prisons by the Assad regime. The war has also wreaked havoc on Syria’s most important cultural sites — from ancient monuments, castles and mosques to the vestiges of a rich Jewish culture.

Well before the war, Syria’s historical synagogues and other Jewish sites languished in neglect after Jews left the country en masse surrounding Israel’s establishment. Now, archaeologists are beginning to assess how much more was lost to bombardment and wartime looting.

Syria was home to well established Jewish communities for more than 2,000 years, dating back to the Roman period, including Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and European Jewish merchants. But the 20th-century rise of Arab nationalist movements, along with a set of anti-Jewish laws and violence surrounding the establishment of Israel, resulted in waves of Jewish emigration.

About 100,000 Jews lived in Syria at the start of the 20th century, dropping to 15,000 in 1947. An anti-Jewish riot that year, followed by the creation of Israel in 1948, spurred many of the remaining Jews to leave — though they were not legally permitted to do so in most cases despite facing persecution in Syria. The Aleppo Codex, a landmark 10th-century copy of the Hebrew Bible, was damaged and secreted out of the country to Israel around that time.

By 1992, when Assad’s father acceded to pressure to let the Jews emigrate, there were about 4,000 Jews remaining in Aleppo and smaller numbers in Damascus and Qamishli. Most left the country shortly afterwards.

In 2011, a now-infamous Vogue profile of Asma al-Assad, Bashar’s wife, quoted her as saying that Jews fit into her vision of religious diversity in Syria. “There is a very big Jewish quarter in old Damascus,” she told the interviewer, who noted that homes in the quarter had been boarded up since the 1992 exodus. (The article was removed from the internet after drawing criticism for sanitizing the wife of a dictator, and his regime, but remains accessible in an archived form.)

In 2022, an estimate of Syria’s Jews counted only four; this year, the widely circulating number is three. Many Jewish sites have had no caretakers for decades, said Emma Cunliffe, an archaeologist with the Cultural Property Protection and Peace team at Newcastle University.

“In a conflict situation, that neglect intensifies,” said Cunliffe. “Those few people who remained to look after them were then unable to reach them. But then as the war progressed, the damage increased significantly.”

By 2020, nearly half of Syria’s Jewish sites were destroyed, according to a report from the Foundation for Jewish Heritage. The Jobar Synagogue in Damascus, one of few Jewish places of worship still visited by a handful of elderly Jews before the war, was mostly turned into rubble in 2014. A host of ancient Torah scrolls, tapestries, chandeliers and other artifacts from the synagogue went missing, with some resurfacing in Turkey.

The al-Bandara Synagogue, one of the oldest synagogues in Aleppo, also suffered damage during heavy fighting in the region. The synagogue had been renovated in the 1990s but was damaged again during the civil war in 2016. Cunliffe, who conducted a study of the site in 2017, said some parts of the building were destroyed and its courtyard was littered with debris. (A recent virtual reality exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem allowed visitors to explore the famed synagogue as it stood in 1947, using photographs taken by a local woman who later emigrated.)

Tadef, a town east of Aleppo, was once a popular destination for Jews because of its shrine to the Jewish scribe and prophet Ezra, who was said to stop there on his way to Jerusalem. But after a long period of neglect, the shrine was illegally excavated and looted both by rebel groups and Syrian government forces between 2021 and 2022, according to the rights group Syrians for Truth and Justice.

Scholars also worry about the ruins of Roman-era synagogues in Syria’s ancient cities, such as Apamea and Dura-Europos. Satellite imaging has shown that Dura-Europos was heavily looted while being held by Islamic State forces, according to Adam Blitz, a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Remnants from the synagogue of Dura-Europos are treasured by museums, including the Yale University Art Gallery, which displays 40 tiles from the synagogue’s ceiling. But Blitz said other artifacts from the site are feared to have been pilfered by combatants.

“There has been tremendous fear about mosaics being looted,” he said.

The extent of the damage to Jewish sites is still difficult to assess, according to Cunliffe, who said the skills and training needed for forensic damage collection remain limited in the war-torn country. Investigations through satellite imagery will also take several months. It may take much longer to establish protection for these sites, as Syria’s cultural sector has been overlooked during the war and the Syrian Antiquities Authority has been consigned to a tiny budget.

As Syria hurtles into a new era, the fate of its heritage sites hangs in the balance. The country’s gems of Jewish history will only survive as far as its next regime allows, said Cunliffe.

The new regime has its roots in Islamic fundamentalist movements but in recent years has taken a pragmatic turn, leaving open questions about the fate of minorities and their interests under its governance.

“Support for the people who are in a position to access them and protect them is critical, and also the need for an inclusive society that will allow that to happen,” Cunliffe said about the historic Jewish sites. “We don’t know what the future of Syria looks like. Certainly, there’s a lot of fighting, and which group ultimately wins will dictate a lot of what is possible.”

Three single Jewish men sat next to each other onstage. One nursed a mostly-empty beer and scratched his graying stubble while another readjusted his kippah. To their right, separated by a blue divider, the bachelorette — wearing hot pink pants and sorting through a stack of cue cards — sat on her own.

Those in the audience at Caveat, a venue on the Lower East Side, knew what the contestants looked like, of course, but the bachelorette on stage did not. Nor did she know the men’s occupations or their names — nothing that could create any preconceptions. All they knew were each other’s voices, and their shame-free answers to some of life’s most personal questions.

From the men’s responses to probing questions — including “What Jewish icon was your role model growing up?” and “How many times have you been in love?” — the bachelorette would pick one man to have a dinner date with at a local Jewish restaurant. 

Welcome to The Jewish Dating Game, a monthly live show that’s inspired by the long-running 1960s game show “The Dating Game.” This live, Jewish version of the game was launched in July by actor and writer Linnea Sage. Sage’s goal is to help contestants — and audience members — find their beshert, or soul mate. 

What sets The Jewish Dating Game apart from a non-Jewish one? “I don’t think it would be as funny,” Sage told the New York Jewish Week. “At the end of the day, Jews have something special. We’ve got some pizzazz, you know, that I think is just endearing and entertaining to watch regardless.”  

At Caveat on a Monday evening last month, the night’s bachelorette, Dina Plotch, excitedly dove into her questions, which had been written by Sage. “Ooh, this [question] is super important —  do or die,” she said after flipping to the cue card of her liking. The audience of approximately 75 “Jews and allies,” as the event’s description reads, waited with bated breath. 

She leaned into her microphone: “Did we free Britney [Spears] too soon?” 

“I don’t totally know what you mean,” Contestant 1 responded, with unabashed honesty that earned the room’s loud applause. Contestant 3 chimed in, saying he’d seen the documentary about Spears’ conservatorship and that “it seemed like we did it at the right time.” 

Finally, Contestant 2 brought it all home: “To be honest with you, I go with bachelor number one’s answer. Because whatever is meant to be is meant to be, and you know what? God has a plan, and when she’s meant to be free, she’s meant to be free.” The audience went wild.

The idea for the Jewish Dating Game came to Sage while she was stuck in a creative rut this past spring. She and her husband, Paul Skye Lehrman, who co-produces the show, are both voice actors — and in May, the couple sued an A.I. company that cloned both of their voices without their permission. 

“I had this huge reckoning with like, ‘What am I doing now for the rest of my life?’” Sage said. “Because the industry is changing so drastically.” Hosting The Jewish Dating Game, she added, has allowed her to tap into her background in theater and improv comedy.

Sage said she was also inspired by a growing need for involvement in the city’s Jewish community after Oct. 7. “I so quickly felt like I needed to be around my people as often as possible, and in as loving ways as possible,” she said. 

She was already attending Jewish events organized by friends. “But I didn’t really think that that was going to be any part of my career,” Sage said. “I thought I was just sort of an attender.” 

At large Shabbats organized by SHIUR — a group that aims to take “the ancient Jewish practice of text based discourse integrated with space, ritual, and practice to the world of art, diplomacy, culture and more” — she’d befriend other women who, as soon as they learned Sage was married, would ask to be set up with someone. “I would literally spend the rest of the evening shuffling nice Jewish boys in front of these women,” she said. “And like a live Tinder swipe, they’re just like, ‘Left, left, no, forget it.’ And I’m like, ‘Can we give these people a chance?’ Like, so much of attraction is based on getting to know somebody.” 

Her Shabbat matchmaking attempts helped inspire The Jewish Dating Game — specifically, its focus on values and personalities rather than looks. But her “a-ha moment” happened when she literally woke up in the middle of the night with the idea. Sage, as she normally does when she dreams up an idea, went back to sleep. “If I wake up in the morning and I still remember it, then it was worth remembering,” she said.

Sage woke up still thinking about the idea — and she hasn’t stopped since. “I feel like the people on ‘Shark Tank,’ who are like, ‘This is my baby and this is all I do now,’” she said. “I literally don’t stop thinking about it.”

In July, Sage put on the first edition of The Jewish Dating Game, inspired by the matchmaking show that in 1978 infamously featured a contestant who later pleaded guilty to seven counts of murder. Said Sage, “I try to screen my contestants enough that I know they’re not serial killers.”

Other than refraining from murder, singles interested in a spot onstage must complete a submission form that asks for information like their line of work, level of religious observance and what they’re looking for in a partner. Then, after completing social media background checks and getting a feel for the candidates’ personalities, Sage uses her “yenta magic” to concoct a lineup with compatible pairings.

Plotch, the November bachelorette and full-time social worker who also acts, said she was excited to be featured. “I love being onstage and I date Jewish boys, so like, why not?” she said. 

Plotch said the answer to the Britney Spears question is what clinched her decision. “Obviously, as a lady of a certain age, [I] grew up with Britney as the be-all and end-all,” she said, adding that she took notice that one of the bachelors was not only aware of Spears, but had even seen her documentary. “I felt that that was a sign that this was my beshert — or at least beshert for the evening.” 

Earlier that night, the audience had been treated to a fun surprise. During Round 1 of the game, which featured a bachelor interviewing three bachelorettes, one of the contestants was Harmonie Krieger, a star of the Netflix series “Jewish Matchmaking.” Krieger, who’s since become a dating coach for the Lox Club, a Jewish dating app, said she had an “amazing” night — though she wasn’t kidding herself about her connection with the bachelor. 

“Listen, from the beginning, I knew that guy wasn’t my type,” she said in an interview after the show. “He said, ‘I’m not really an island [vacation] person,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh no. This is not gonna work.’”

While not ultimately a winning contestant, Krieger expressed the importance of an event that facilitated Jewish matchmaking in a time of rising antisemitism. “I’m Reform, I never grew up like I had to marry Jewish,” she said. But since Oct. 7, her view on the matter has shifted. “And now I feel such an inclination to, almost like, do my duty and carry it on.”

Beyond the matchmaking, Sage said her goal for the show is to provide “a night of Jewish joy” for all involved. Lehrman, Sage’s husband, said he’s seen that vision come to life. 

“It’s not the easiest time to be publicly Jewish,” Lehrman said. “And the foundational thing for this show is there’s always a moment in the evening where I look up and see the audience, and there’s this feeling where people have allowed their guard to go down.”

Following two rounds of matchmaking, the house lights came on and audience members roamed the theater to mingle. People lined up to introduce themselves to contestants as if they were newly anointed celebrities. The room was abuzz with not only singles looking for a date, but also couples who were just there to enjoy the show. 

Zach, 38, who attended with his wife, said he felt like “automatically, everyone’s already a friend you could talk to” because of their shared experiences: “We all had the same critical mother, we all had the same pressure to find a Jewish spouse — it’s like a fun way to kind of share that.” 

He added, “I don’t even talk to the person in the elevator who [lives] on my hall of like, four people. No way. But, you know, you bring a bunch of young Jews together with some libations, and everyone’s having a good time.”

The next Jewish Dating Game is Monday, Dec. 23 at Caveat (21A Clinton St.). Get tickets and info here.

TEL AVIV — A woman with a gaunt face and ripped pajama pants ambles into Cafe Otef, nestled in a up-and-coming yet still gritty corner of Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighborhood. She gestures to the water dispenser, and Ziv Hai, a worker at the cafe, obliges with a glass while owner Reut Karp offers her a cigarette.

“We don’t have them in our region,” Hai said about apparently unhoused people. “Learning how to navigate that has also been part of the journey.”

Hai was far from home because the cafe is no ordinary establishment. Founded by Tamir Barelko, a serial entrepreneur in the culinary world, it is the second in the Cafe Otef chain — “Otef” referring to the “envelope” region of Israel bordering Gaza that Hamas terrorists invaded on Oct. 7, 2023. The first branch opened as a pop-up in Tel Aviv’s glitzy Sarona complex, staffed by residents of Netiv Haasara, one of the communities targeted in the massacre. This branch, named Cafe Otef-Re’im, honors the kibbutz of the same name, where 80 terrorists invaded, killing seven residents and kidnapping four. The kibbutz was also next to where the Nova music festival massacre took place.

Staffed entirely by displaced residents from the battered communities in the south, the cafe offers a wide range of goods from that region: cheeses from Be’eri, honey from Kibbutz Erez, jams, spreads, granola and specialty cakes, alongside branded items such T-shirts, water bottles, and aprons — all sourced from small producers affected by the massacre.

But the piece de resistance is the chocolate, crafted from recipes by Dvir Karp, the owner’s late ex-husband, who was murdered on Oct. 7 in front of their children, then ages 10 and 8.

Reut Karp said that during the pandemic, “when we all thought we were going to die,” she had urged her ex-husband to write down his chocolate recipes. Despite his initial resistance — insisting he had them all in his head — he eventually complied. After his murder, Karp felt a profound responsibility to preserve his legacy. She believes Dvir would have been proud of her posthumous rebranding of his chocolates, including a new logo inspired by the luxury brand Cartier, though she joked he would “probably say I went overboard.”

Most of Re’im’s residents were evacuated to nearby apartment buildings in Florentin, while Hai, who is from a different kibbutz close to Egypt, was initially relocated with his family to Ofakim, a small city near Beersheba. In April, he moved to Tel Aviv, where he said he experienced an intense culture shock.

“At first, I was like, what the hell am I doing here, and I just wanted to move back,” he said. Over time, however, he adjusted to city life, finding a sense of belonging through his work at the cafe, which opened in the summer.

“I feel like I left a piece of myself behind in Sufa, and here in Tel Aviv, I’m trying to rebuild myself anew. The cafe gives me a place where I can feel comfortable,” he said. “I can tell a dark joke, and everyone here — because they’re also from the south — gets it.”

Karp, who co-owns another cafe featuring Dvir’s chocolates in Israel’s south, was approached by Barelko to manage the Re’im branch. She declined, citing her responsibilities to her three children who are still coping with the trauma of the attack (Karp herself was away for the weekend of Oct. 7). Determined to involve her, Barelko appointed managers to handle daily operations, allowing Karp to serve as the owner and hostess.

The role proved a perfect fit for Karp, who expressed gratitude for having a reason to get up each day.

“So many times over the past six months, I’ve said, thank God I have this place that forces me out of bed. And all the workers say the same thing,” she shared, highlighting one employee who had lost his entire family in the attack.

The cafe has become a gathering place for those directly impacted by the events of Oct. 7 — survivors of the Nova music festival, bereaved parents and others — while also offering a space for those not directly affected to engage with their stories and find meaning. “They want to feel a sense of connection and to know it’s not just a gimmick,” Karp said.

“People always say Tel Avivians are living in a bubble — sitting in coffee shops while soldiers are fighting and hostages are trapped in Hamas tunnels,” she added. “But here, people let themselves enjoy coffee without the guilt.”

The cafe’s location in the center of the country has also made it a natural meeting point for evacuees from both Israel’s north and south who have been relocated to the city. Karp noted the unique camaraderie that has formed between the two groups, describing it as a shared understanding of what it means to be displaced within their own country.

As if on cue, an older woman from Kibbutz Manara in the north approached and chatted with Karp about her recent visit to her kibbutz — the first since the ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah in late November. Their laughter seemed out of place given the context of the conversation, with the older woman remarking that it would take “at least a decade” to rebuild the kibbutz. Over 70% of the homes in Manara have been damaged, with rocket fragments still scattered across the area, prompting some residents to compare it to Chernobyl.

The two hug before the older woman walks away — a scene that plays out repeatedly throughout the afternoon.

“Some people recognize me from TV but hesitate to ask questions or offer a hug,” Karp said. “But that contact is like a human charger for me.”

Around 100 of Re’im’s 450 residents have returned home. Yet, according to Karp, many of their temporary neighbors in Tel Aviv feel conflicted about their departure. “On the one hand, they’re happy for us to go back home, but on the other, they want us to stay because our presence here has put a face to Oct. 7,” she said.

The red anemone, or kalanit – Israel’s national flower, ubiquitous in the region of Re’im — is equally ubiquitous at the cafe, embroidered on staff uniforms, printed on takeaway cups, and displayed on ceramic items for sale. But otherwise, there are few overt signs of the cafe’s deeper purpose. One less obvious sign comes in an innocuous poster on the wall, its tiny spiral text easy to miss.

Created by Adi Drimer, an art teacher from Re’im, the artwork contains the haunting text messages sent in the kibbutz WhatsApp group on Oct. 7. Karp points out her own chilling plea from that day, begging other kibbutz members to rescue her children: “Urgent! Urgent! Daria and Lavi are alone,” read her text. “Dvir was murdered.”

Karp said the decision to avoid making the cafe overtly about the massacre was deliberate, respecting those who prefer to keep their coffee and grief separate.

“We also don’t want to sink into the sadness of it all,” she said. “This is a place for renewal, and when people see us moving forward, it inspires them.”

Barelko has big plans for the chain. Two new branches are set to open in the coming weeks: one in Rehovot, called Cafe Otef–Sderot, for residents of the southern town, and a misnomered Cafe Otef–Kiryat Shmona, paying tribute to those evacuated from the northern town for 14 months.

He also plans to introduce food trucks at various locations across the country and expand the initiative to include employment for soldiers disabled in the war, whose numbers are estimated in the thousands.

“In the end, we realized this is the best approach to rehabilitation. It builds both hope and resilience,” he said.

This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.

Spending a semester in Israel in 2023 was life-changing for Leora Schonbrun. At Tichon Ramah Yerushalayim, a high school program run by the Ramah organization, her feelings about Israel were transformed. It quickly became one of the most cherished places she had ever been to.

“My desire to learn more about Israel grew everyday there and is still growing,” the 16-year-old from Deal, New Jersey said. 

It was an experience she would have missed if not for her seven years at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires, one of more than a dozen overnight and day camps in the Ramah network, which is affiliated with the Conservative movement.

“Being run by the same organization, my camp introduced me to my Israel program and provided me Jewish values and lessons that influenced me to be a part of something that has changed my life,” said Schonbrun.

For Schonbrun, and many teens like her, camp does more than create memories. It helps create decisions that have lasting impact. From Israel programs to gap years, some teens are inspired to make life choices based on their summer experiences. They say these decisions help them develop their personal agency and lifelong connections. From starting or reinforcing their religious experiences at Jewish camps, campers go on to new experiences that connect them with their Jewish identity in even broader ways.

Schonbrun’s mother, Jane Rachel Schonbrun, the director of Camp Yavneh, a nondenominational camp in New Hampshire, has guided many teenagers to make these important decisions.

“At its best, Jewish overnight camp can give teens a strong Jewish community and solid Jewish values, both things that will likely have a big impact on their decision making, especially about their futures,” said Jane Rachel. “The unique immersive Jewish community at overnight camps gives teens a taste of living 24-7 in a community of people with shared values, interests, and religious commitments.” 

Many of the camps also integrate Israeli culture and Israeli staff, hoping to immerse campers in an environment that will connect them even further with Israel — a priority of many Jewish camps with Israel at war and facing harsh international criticism.

Haley Berger, of Westfield, New Jersey, took part in a semester abroad at the Alexander Muss High School in Israel after attending Camp Perlman in Pennsylvania for 10 years. Berger first heard about this program through people at her camp. “Camp connects me to my love for Israel because Israeli culture is ingrained into the camp,” said Berger.

“Everything that I got out of this semester [in Israel] was exceptional, and I am sure I will always carry the memories, learnings, and culture with me my whole life,” said Berger. 

She became more connected with her Judaism through learning extensively about her religion and living in the place where many of her Jewish ancestors lived before her. “Ever since this program I feel way more connected to my Judaism, and I’m sure that connection will keep getting stronger and stronger,” said Berger.

Camping professionals say that what happens after camp can be as important as what happens during it.

“All of our research shows that if you are someone who is involved in Jewish camp and has Jewish experiences as a young person that you are more likely to be involved and do those things once you become older,” said Julie Finkelstein, senior director of program strategy and innovation at the Foundation for Jewish Camp. “The most important variable in these cases is building that strong Jewish community early on.”

Teenagers are very impressionable, and spending those teenage years at a camp can have a huge impact, she says. Camp allows students to learn about themselves away from the pressures of school and home. “We grow up and become the people we are away from the pressures of the achievement-driven world,” Finkelstein said.

Jolie Waitman, a 16-year-old from White Plains, New York would not be considering a gap year at a pluralistic program in Israel if it weren’t for her seven years at Camp Yavneh, which calls itself “a place where all Jews are encouraged to engage in our traditions and practices.” She said most teens at SAR, the Modern Orthodox school she attends in Riverdale, New York are considering gap-year programs at places like Bar Ilan University, which are also Orthodox. 

Instead, she is going to look at programs similar to Hevruta and Year Course because she appreciates the pluralistic environment she was immersed in at camp. The atmosphere gave her a chance to explore and practice her own style of Jewish identity.

“I have always felt so welcome in the pluralistic camp environment, and I want to be able to recreate this type of environment in other experiences I have,” said Waitman.

Tyler Levan, 17, from Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, was inspired to take a summer trip in Israel after spending summers at Camp Eisner in Massachusetts since 2015. As well as giving him a place to connect more with his Judaism, the Reform movement camp allowed him to connect with Israel and really understand it on a personal level. 

Camp also helped him make other important decisions. “Camp really influenced me as a person and shaped who I am which in some ways has influenced me with my college process,” said Levan.

For Schonbrun, who spent a semester in Israel, camp led her to something she didn’t know she needed. “Because of my program Tichon Ramah Yerushalayim, my connection to Israel is one of the most important and meaningful things in my life,” said Schonbrun. “My love for Israel could not be stronger.”

WASHINGTON — There are 34 Jews in the incoming Congress, with a 35th likely to join in April.

Should that candidate, Florida State Sen. Randy Fine, win his special election in Florida, that would mean no change in numbers overall between the outgoing Congress and the incoming one: The House Jewish delegation will drop from 26 to 25, but the number of Jewish senators will increase from nine to a minyan.

Dig a little deeper, though, and there are some changes — both in terms of new challenges and new opportunities for the Jewish class of the 119th Congress. Here’s a look at what to expect.

Jewish Republicans (likely) double their caucus

Ohio Rep. Max Miller and Tennessee Rep. David Kustoff will be joined by Craig Goldman of Texas, increasing the Republican caucus by 50% as of Jan. 3. 

Fine, an outspoken right-winger who has made defending Jewish interests a centerpiece of his campaigning despite the small Jewish population in his district, Florida’s 6th, would double the representation to four.

That’s the largest number of Jewish Republicans in the House — and in Congress overall — since the 1990s. It reflects a newly assertive Jewish movement in the GOP, which portrays their party as a stronger advocate of Israel and Jewish interests, and points to gains, albeit small ones, in the Jewish vote for president.

Trump urged Fine to run after picking Michael Waltz, who currently represents the district, to lead the National Security Council. It was quite a shift for Fine, who claims he had been prepared to move his family to Israel had Vice President Kamala Harris won the presidency.

Goldman, a realtor, is a more traditional Republican. In pledging to maintain the internationalist policies of his predecessor, Kay Granger, who is retiring, he also represents where most Jews in the party have been historically. That differentiates him from Trump and his acolytes, including Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, who favor a more insular United States.

Two new Jewish Democrats in the House

Laura Friedman is stepping into Adam Schiff’s Los Angeles area 30th District seat as he moves to the Senate. 

Friedman, an assemblywoman who was a leading member of the robust Jewish caucus in California’s legislature told Jewish Insider in March that she will hew to Schiff’s mainstream pro-Israel outlook. Both she and Schiff came under fire from pro-Palestinian progressives during their campaigns.

Eugene Vindman, the incoming freshman from Virginia’s 7th District, stretching from the Washington, D.C. suburbs down toward Richmond, is one of a pair of twin brothers who helped expose the telephone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s first impeachment in early 2020. Before winning his race, Vindman had served in the military and on the National Security Council.  

First-term congressmen don’t usually  get a lot of attention, but that may not be the case for Vindman. Trump has vowed retribution against the Democrats who impeached him and exposed his role in the violent pro-Trump Jan. 6, 2021, riot in the U.S. Capitol — a list that could include the freshman rep. 

Adam Schiff — upholding the law, Jewishly

Speaking of Trump and retribution, the president-elect has named the freshman California senator as a target — and said he wants to see him in jail. Schiff not only led Trump’s first impeachment, he co-chaired the inquiry into the Jan. 6 events.

Schiff has said his focus will be first and foremost on California, but he has no illusions that he will avoid the crosshairs of the president-elect and his allies. He recently told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he fears for the fragility of U.S. democracy.

Schiff, who began his career as a prosecutor, casts his concerns for democracy and the place of Jews in America as part of the same mission. Not for nothing, he chose to be sworn in this week on the Mishneh Torah, the monumental code of Jewish law by the medieval sage Maimonides.

A changing of the guard at the House Judiciary Committee

New York’s Jerry Nadler got the message this month when someone leaked to the New York Times that Maryland’s Jamie Raskin was seeking to displace him as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee: He volunteered to step down, reportedly reluctantly.

The two have plenty in common, aside from being Jewish: Nadler was Schiff’s second-in-command at Trump’s first impeachment hearings and Raskin helped lead the second impeachment, over Trump’s role in spurring the Jan. 6 riot. They both have deep Jewish communal roots, with Raskin for years championing Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, and Nadler a product of a yeshiva education.

They also are among the pro-Israel Democrats who are still more most trenchantly critical of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They joined a letter last month calling on the lame-duck Biden administration to sanction two far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s government, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

When Netanyahu addressed Congress in July, Nadler walked in carrying a hypercritical biography of the prime minister, and read it while waiting for him to speak.

But Nadler, at 77, is also well over a decade older than Raskin, 61, reportedly one of the driving factors behind the switch. Nadler is the longest serving Jewish member in Congress.

Two Senate leaders in the minority

Bernie Sanders was handily reelected in this year’s Vermont Senate contest, even though he will be 89 when he completes his term. The unofficial leader of congressional progressives, Sanders has said he is still ready to work with the Trump administration on nuts-and-bolts economic issues like credit card debt reform.

He also is spearheading efforts to cut defense assistance to Israel. That quest likely will go nowhere with a Republican sweep of the White House and both chambers of Congress, but it is a sign of how entrenched skepticism of Israel funding has become among progressives.

And as of Jan. 3, New York’s Chuck Schumer will continue to lead Democrats in the chamber — but will relinquish the title that made him the most senior Jewish elected official in American history. South Dakota’s John Thune, a Republican, is replacing Schumer as majority leader.

Schumer may have also missed his chance to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would codify into law a popular but controversial definition of antisemitism. Supporters say the definition, commonly known as the IHRA definition, provides a guide to how antisemitism manifests today. Critics say it is overly broad in how it is applied to criticism of Israel, and could chill legitimate political speech. Schumer wanted to attach the act to a must-pass defense budget bill, but House Speaker Mike Johnson declined.

Here are the Jews incoming to the new Congress, minus Randy Fine, whose April 1 election appears all but guaranteed.

U.S. House of Representatives

Laura Friedman, D, California 30

Brad Sherman, D, California 32

Mike Levin, D, California 49

Sara Jacobs, D, California 51

Lois Frankel, D, Florida 22

Jared Moskowitz, D, Florida 23

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D, Florida 25

Jan Schakowsky, D, Illinois 9

Brad Schneider, D, Illinois 10

Jamie Raskin, D, Maryland 8

Jake Auchincloss, D, Massachusetts 4

Josh Gottheimer, D, New Jersey 5

Dan Goldman, D, New York 10

Jerry Nadler, D, New York 12

Greg Landsman, D,  Ohio 1

Max Miller, R, Ohio 7

Suzanne Bonamici, D, Oregon 1

Seth Magaziner, D, Rhode Island 2

David Kustoff, R, Tennessee 8

Steve Cohen, D, Tennessee 9

Craig Goldman, R, Texas 12

Becca Balint, D, Vermont at large

Eugene Vindman, D, Virginia 7

Kin Schrier, D, Washington 8

U.S. Senate

(Elected this cycle)

Adam Schiff, D, California

Elissa Slotkin, D, Michigan

Jacky Rosen, D, Nevada

Bernie Sanders, Independent, caucuses with Democrats, Vermont

(Elected previous cycles)

Michael Bennet, D, Colorado

Richard Blumenthal, D, Connecticut

Jon Ossoff, D, Georgia

Brian Schatz, D, Hawaii

Chuck Schumer, D, New York

Ron Wyden, D, Oregon

 

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that could bring the country’s premiere Jewish history museum under the Smithsonian umbrella,  a measure that may help ensure the survival of an institution that faced bankruptcy just a few years ago.

Biden on Wednesday announced the enactment of the “Commission to Study the Potential Transfer of the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History to the Smithsonian Institution Act.” The act establishes a body that will examine whether the Philadelphia museum, known as the Weitzman, can join the Smithsonian Institution.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved the bill, authored by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Jewish Democrat, in September and the Senate followed suit on Dec. 4. Both votes were unanimous. The bill had the support of 36 Jewish groups.

If the commission created by the bill transfers the museum to the control of the Smithsonian trust, it would join a collection of Smithsonian museums dedicated to other minority groups including African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans and Latinos.

In floor speeches lawmakers cited the spike in antisemitism since Hamas launched its war against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as a spur. But the effort to bring the museum under the umbrella of a system that includes federal government support predated the attacks.

The museum was on the cusp of closure four years ago. In early March 2020, right as COVID-19 hit, the museum filed for bankruptcy protection in the face of a $30 million construction debt. It was rescued the following year by a donation from footwear entrepreneur Stuart Weitzman, giving the museum its current name, and was in good financial health when the bill was first proposed earlier this year.

The museum last month named as its new CEO Dan Tadmor, an Israeli who oversaw the $100 million transformation of a Tel Aviv museum called Beit Hatfutsot, which reopened in 2021 as ANU-Museum of the Jewish People. The Weitzman regained its financial footing under Tadmor’s predecessor, Misha Galperin.

The Smithsonian, a trust, runs its museums with a combination of fundraising and federal appropriations, with percentages varying among its many institutions. Most Smithsonian museums are in Washington D.C. and have free admission, although several are further afield, including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan. The Weitzman already offers free admission through philanthropic support.

The commission of eight people studying the feasibility of the move will include eight voting members appointed by leaders of both chambers of Congress. Their report to Congress on the feasibility of the museum joining the Smithsonian would come within two years of the commission’s launch.

Rachel Dallet was at soccer practice when the sirens sounded.

It was Oct. 1, and Iran was barraging Israel with around 200 ballistic missiles.

It was the second such attack this year, but a first for Dallet, 22, who had moved to Israel in July to join the Hapoel Jerusalem soccer club, currently leading Israel’s top-tier women’s Premier League.

“There were two shelters in our facility, so we all — cleats and everything on, sweaty — sprint inside,” Dallet recalled. “We were there for about an hour, I think, because there were multiple sirens. Actually a missile got shot, in the air, with the counter missile, like, right above our field.”

Basketball player Nikki Bick, 27, had a similar experience: She had arrived in Israel only two weeks earlier, and was at practice with the second-tier Ironi Ness Ziona, a professional women’s team. “That was scary, because it was the first time I was actually hearing booms,” she said. “It was constant booms, booms, booms. And sirens were going off like every five minutes.”

The experience was one obvious way in which the athletes’ experience has changed since they opted to pursue athletic careers in Israel rather than the United States: American practices, generally speaking, aren’t interrupted by missile sirens. But for both, and for former NBA G League player Ryan Turell, Israel was an inviting place to play professionally despite the country’s multi-front war.

All three moved to Israel after Oct. 7, 2023. They said they were drawn by the lure of living in Israel, as well as the country’s European-style sports ecosystem, which could afford them a more reliable career path than the hypercompetitive American pro leagues.

“It’s always been a dream of mine to play basketball in Israel professionally, ever since I was in high school and I was thinking maybe playing professionally can happen,” said Turell, 25, the former Yeshiva University basketball star. He moved to Israel in September after two seasons in the G League, the NBA’s developmental system. “I always wanted to do it.”

Turell signed with Ness Ziona’s men’s team, which plays in the Israeli Basketball Premier League. The Los Angeles native, who was the top scorer in the NCAA in his senior year at Division III Y.U., made history in 2022 by becoming the first Orthodox Jewish player to appear in the G League.

But his prospects of moving up to the NBA were slim. In 54 career games with the Motor City Cruise, the G League affiliate of the Detroit Pistons, Turell averaged only 13.3 minutes and 4.4 points per game. He said he was seeking a one-year contract with a team that would enable him to “really get exposure, but also experience playing a European style of basketball.”

Dallet, who played Division I soccer at the University of Wisconsin, said her soccer career may have been over had she stayed in the U.S.

“I honestly wasn’t planning on playing soccer past college, as most female athletes don’t, as it’s very hard in the United States to go professional,” she said. “I was already planning on moving to Israel and making aliyah, so it was a perfect opportunity to not be done playing soccer yet.”

And Bick, a New Jersey native who played basketball at Y.U.’s Stern College, said the ability to pursue a professional career also drew her to Israel.

“I’m like, wow, if I move there, maybe I can also play basketball there and have the opportunity to play at a professional level,” Bick said. “Because in America, if you don’t play for the WNBA, you’re just playing for fun, and playing basketball professionally [in Israel] is something that I always wanted to do.”

Making the move during a war was less of a slam dunk, but all three said they had wanted to try the country out for reasons beyond their careers. (Like all North American Jews who immigrate to Israel, these athletes made aliyah via Nefesh B’Nefesh, which facilitates aliyah from the United States and Canada.)

Despite the violence, Turell said he still views Israel as a safe haven for Jews. “As a Jew, if you’re not safe in Israel, you’re safe nowhere around the world. That’s how I feel,” he said. He added that he’s received antisemitic threats on social media.

“You hear your grandparents talk about it and your parents talk about it, and you’re like, ‘Yeah, that can’t happen to us. That doesn’t exist today,’” he said, regarding antisemitism. “And then all of a sudden, Oct. 7 happens, and it exists, and it’s pretty apparent.”

Dallet also said the rise of antisemitism played a part in her decision. She recalled one time when she and some of her friends were walking home from a pro-Israel vigil on Nov. 7, 2023, carrying an Israeli flag, and a group of men threw a rock at them from a roof and shouted “Free Palestine” and called them “F—ing fascists.” Dallet and her friends reported the episode to police.

Dallet grew up attending Milwaukee Jewish Day School and the Reform movement’s OSRUI summer camp. She competed in three international tournaments with the Maccabiah sports organization and had been to Israel three times before making aliyah. She first made contact with Hapoel Jerusalem when she was in Israel for the 2022 Maccabiah Games, and the club followed the final part of her collegiate career and started discussing a contract as she neared graduation.

“Ever since the Maccabiah Games, honestly, I was like, I want to live here,” Dallet said shortly after her move. “I had the time of my life. The people here, the food, everything is just so fun. I love being around everyone who’s Jewish. It’s just a different feeling coming from Wisconsin, where you’re a minority as Jew.”

She said she’s been surprised by how normal daily life has felt despite the ongoing war.

“Everybody just lives their lives, which is the craziest part,” Dallet said. “Because there’s this crazy war going on, but everyone goes to work, has fun, hangs out with friends. It’s like normal life here, everyone’s just continuing to live.”

Bick, who’s also a licensed physical therapist, arrived in Israel Sept. 19 from New York City. She said she knew she had wanted to leave New York and had always thought Tel Aviv would be a great place to live. Her lease in New York was ending, so she decided to make the leap.

Bick said that when she had decided to begin the aliyah process, she reached out to a number of basketball teams. Ness Ziona was the only team that was willing to sign her without an in-person tryout.

Now she’s juggling her full-time job as a physical therapist with her basketball obligations. Three nights a week, she gets home from an eight-and-a-half hour workday, grabs a bite and heads to practice. She said the social dynamics in Israel are noticeably different, recalling a time recently when she was carrying furniture and a stranger came over, unprompted, to help her.

“In America, you don’t feel that,” she said. “You don’t feel like you have people around you that support you always. Here it feels like there’s always people to help you, and bring you up. I don’t feel alone.”

Dallet said that feeling of camaraderie extends to her team. Much of the team lives in the same apartment building in Jerusalem, and they spend a lot of time together outside of practice.

“When it comes to soccer, we all pretty much speak the same language,” she said. “We all want to win. Everyone has the same goal in mind — win the league. So when it comes to the locker room, it’s pretty normal, standard, same as it would be at college or in club.”

Actually speaking the same language has been more of a challenge. While many Israelis speak English, professional sports teams operate in Hebrew. Dallet said she got a part-time job at a cafe, in part to work on her Hebrew.

“The language barrier is hard to connect sometimes on a deeper level,” she said. But she added, “When it comes to soccer, we’re definitely all on the same page.”

All three athletes said they had to adjust to a different style of play than they were used to in the U.S.

“They have a lot of set plays and places where you’ve got to be on offense, like every time down the court, it’s a set play,” Bick explained. “In America, it’s more like a free play, more motion-y. You kind of just feel out the game. Here it just feels more structured.”

Turell also said he noticed an immediate difference in the style, which he said is more strategic and less athletic than in the states.

“You’re really thinking the game more than just playing it,” Turell said. “There’s a lot of strategy that goes into it, a lot more strategy that goes into it than in NBA-style play.”

The stakes are also different for Turell. He said that in the G League, which exists to be a stepping stone to the NBA, the focus was more on personal improvement. In Israel, where he’s playing in the top-tier league, it’s all about winning.

“In the G League, there’s 52 games, you can drop a few,” Turell said. “They really care about player development… Here it’s about, let’s win, let’s try to get the organization to improve.”

Dallet, too, said she has had to adjust her approach to match the style of soccer that’s played in Israel and across Europe. But her takeaway was the opposite of the basketball players: The Israeli game, she feels, is less strategic.

“It’s so much more of a physical game here and less tactics,” she said. “We’re coming from college, where it’s all tactics and I’d say prettier soccer. Here it’s more physical and aggressive, so that was a big challenge in the beginning.”

As far as the future goes, all three athletes said they’re taking it one year at a time.

Bick said that given her history of injuries, “the fact that I’m still able to play at this level is amazing.” Dallet said she plans to go to graduate school eventually.

For Turell, the goal is “reach my ceiling as a basketball player” — wherever that may be.

“If you would tell me in high school I was going to be a G League player, I’d be like, ‘Yeah, what are you talking about? You don’t know what you’re talking about,’” Turell said. “In college, if you told me NBA teams were going to start coming to my games, I’d be like, ‘Dude, what are you talking about?’”

He added, “So it’s just one day at a time, putting in the work and letting the work take me to wherever it’s going to take me.”

Could a pro career in Israel be a pathway to the NBA, where Turell would become the league’s first-ever Orthodox player? He wouldn’t be the first to make that jump: Omri Casspi, the first Israeli to play in the NBA, and Deni Avdija, currently the NBA’s lone Israeli, both joined the NBA after playing professionally in Israel. Others, like Amar’e Stoudemire and Patrick Beverley, played in Israel after successful NBA careers.

“I mean, yeah, it’d be a dream,” Turell said. “That’d be amazing.”

On an April Saturday in 1945, a Jewish teen living in East New York named Charlotte Buchsbaum washed her hair with lemon. “It looked nice,” she wrote in her diary.

The following day, the 15-year-old Brooklynite went to a bar mitzvah at The Rainbow Room, where there was an “effective ceremony” followed by dinner and dancing.

Two weeks later, she was at school when a loudspeaker announced that “hostilities have ceased in Germany and all Europe.”

These musings by a Jewish high schooler, which reflect happenings both highly personal and historically significant, have recently found a contemporary audience of millions. This unlikely turn of events is thanks to a viral TikTok video posted by Helaina Ferraioli, the social media manager for her family’s vintage store in Carroll Gardens.

Ferraioli had found Buchsbaum’s diary in 2019, but she read just a few pages of the journal before putting it away on her bookshelf. Last month, however, while recovering from a running injury, Ferraioli rediscovered Buchsbaum’s journal, and realized the historical significance of her documented experience of the end of World War II. And so, Ferraioli posted her first TikTok about Buchsbaum’s diary — one of six — on Nov. 21. It has since been viewed more than 3 million times.

Ferraioli attributes the interest in the diary to a combination of Buchsbaum’s youth and her matter-of-factness about major historical events. “The time of the journal is quite literally on the hinge of the world changing,” she said.

“It straddles right before World War II ended and right after World War II ended,” Ferraioli added. “And just that moment in time is so historically significant. And just to sort of see it processed through someone’s — we always say, ‘oh, we normalize these crazy times, like with COVID, everyone kind of got used to COVID really quick’ — it’s the same idea, really hearing it from the sort of neutral perspective is fascinating.”

Ferraoili has shared other vintage finds from her family’s store on social media, like copies of Time Magazine from 1912 and a menu from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. But Buchsbaum’s diary gives rare, personal insight into the life of a mid-century American Jewish teenager: Buchsbaum goes to her last day of school in the morning and celebrates the Passover seder later that evening. She organizes dances for her synagogue, and plays ping pong with her girlfriends while the boys finish their AZA meeting — referring to the B’nai Brith Youth Organization’s boys’ chapter, which is still in existence today.

“All these women who are saying they love her,” Eric Kaplan, Buchsbaum’s son and a television writer, told the Washington Post. “It brings tears to my eyes and breaks my heart in a good way.”

Thanks to the video’s virality, the diary is being reunited with Buchsbaum’s family.

Buchsbaum’s other son, Philip, a playwright, said, “I think Mom would have been quite happy to have people be interested in her life.”

According to a 2013 interview with Kaplan in The New York Times and a podcast interview last year with Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Buchsbaum grew up Orthodox in East New York, the daughter of a father from the Eastern European region of Galicia.

Buchsbaum, who was born in 1930, became a high school biology teacher at age 20 at Erasmus Hall in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and raised her family in what is today Ditmas Park. She married attorney Benjamin Kaplan in 1952. Benjamin Kaplan died in 2014. In addition to Eric and Philip, the couple also had a son Andy, who passed away as a child. Buchsbaum died in 2017.

Buchsbaum’s diary begins in March 1945, though it was printed for the year 1916, and originally belonged to her grandfather, Mechel Guzik. Buchsbaum scratched out the year 1916 and replaced it with 1945.

Over the course of her entries from March to August 1945, Buchsbaum describes who came to Passover seder, notes which days she washed and set her hair, and studies Russian. She also documents her outfits of the day (“my pink pencil skirt and new drawstring blouse. Pearls and pearl earrings. My hair was in waves — loose”), co-hosts a dance at her synagogue, plays tennis, takes the Long Island Railroad for the first time, sees classic films in the theater starring Gregory Peck and Judy Garland, starts and quits a job, and goes on dates.

In her diary, Buchsbaum also refers to a local synagogue, Temple Sinai. TikTok sleuths have since noted that she’s likely referring to a former synagogue on Arlington Avenue East New York, which was sold to a Spanish Pentecostal church in the 1980s.

“The thing that I think resonated was [her] age,” Ferraoili said about the popularity of her videos about Buchsbaum’s diary. “I think she comes off very young. And I think we are so used to right now, every teenager has a voice, and they document every emotion, every dance. We’re very comfortable and familiar with the teenage voice now — that is the most popular voice on the internet, the adolescent influencer. But it’s rare to get a glimpse at that same sort of demographic 80 years ago. And just, I think the contrast is really just fascinating.”

Of course, when Buchsbaum was a teenager, she also experienced world-changing events: President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, the Allies were victorious in Europe, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, and the war ended. She weaves these events into her diary entries, sometimes even inserting herself into history. The diary does not mention the Holocaust, whose scope and enormity was still in the process of becoming widely known.

Take, for example, Buchsbaum’s entry on August 14, 1945, when she described heading to Times Square for Victory over Japan Day.

“This morning at 2:30 I was awoken by the noise. News had come that we had received Japan’s answer. And that unofficially there was peace,” Buchsbaum wrote. “All morning long until 6 we traipsed around the streets in pyjamas and housecoats. Everyone was celebrating. About 5:30 we came in and ate breakfast. I didn’t go to sleep again just got dressed and went to work. When I came home from work we heard it was official. I ate very quickly and Ann / Rita / Ruth / Felicia and I went to Times Square. We picked up two Canadian Merchant Navy men who were with us all night. The crowd was wild and soldiers & sailors kissing everyone they could catch. The fellow Morty & Fred who were very sweet protected us from them. Newsreel men and photographers were everywhere. At 10:30 about we left.”

The scene Buchsbaum described is similar to one pictured in the iconic photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life Magazine that shows an American Navy soldier kissing a dental assistant dressed in white. (The woman in the photo, Greta Zimmer Friedman, later said the kiss was nonconsensual.)

“Mom was very smart, and she went to Brooklyn College, studied science, became a biology teacher,” Philip Kaplan said. “I think if she had been born maybe 10, maybe 20 years later, she would have been a scientist, not a biology teacher, but I don’t think that options were really open to women at the time. And she certainly never mentioned that thing about V-J Day! That was a total surprise to me.”

Ferraoili said she is happy that the video series took off the way it did.

“I think it sparked so many interesting conversations about historic perspective,” she said. “A lot of people were like, ‘Oh, I want to start journaling.’ A lot of people were just inspired by her existence.”

As 350 Jews with roots in the former Soviet Union gathered recently for a weekend conference at a Canadian Niagara Falls resort, Montreal was experiencing one of the worst outbreaks of antisemitic violence in Canada in this century.

Hundreds of protesters smashed shop windows, attacked police officers, set fire to cars, and waved Hamas and Hezbollah flags. The violence sent chills through Canada’s Jewish community—at over 330,000, the Diaspora’s third-largest after the United States and France.

“This is a clear warning sign that demands a decisive response from all who uphold democratic values,” Raheli Baratz, head of the World Zionist Organization’s Department for Combating Antisemitism and Enhancing Resilience, said of the Niagara Falls conference organized by Limmud FSU Canada. “We must unite in the fight against hate and protect the safety of all Canadian citizens.”

Several speakers at the event focused on the problem of antisemitism. The conference was hosted by Limmud FSU, the nonprofit organization that caters to the 60,000 or so Canadian Jews with roots in countries like Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and others that once comprised the Soviet Union. Since the first conference in 2005, at least 90 events across the globe have been hosted by 13 volunteer teams with over 80,000 participants.

The Nov. 22-24 gathering at Ontario’s White Oaks Resort & Spa also coincided with a sharp escalation of the Russian war in Ukraine, now in its third year. Shelly Pisarenko, 32, has roots in both countries. In 1989 her parents moved to Israel, where she was born. Now married, Pisarenko attends Toronto’s York University, where she says antisemitism is pervasive.

“I don’t feel physically threatened, but it’s dangerous to disclose who you are,” said Pisarenko, a psychology major also studying for her Ontario teaching license. “You have to be very careful with whom you share your Jewish identity. Really, I try to avoid any sort of protests on campus.”

Pisarenko leads Limmud FSU Canada’s Young Professionals committee, whose focus this year was on responding to Jew hatred and verbal abuse, whether on campus or at the workplace.

The festival’s theme was “We Will Dance Again,” a tribute to the 364 people massacred by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023 at the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel.  

Workshops in English and Russian covered weighty topics such as “God and the Holocaust: Can They Coexist?” and “Wars in Ukraine and Israel: Against a Common Enemy.” Lighter fare was on the agenda too, such as a lecture on the history of Jamaica’s Jews, a halachic analysis of artificial intelligence, and a debate on the relative health benefits and risks of drinking coffee.

Pro-Israel social influencer Rudy Rochman offered a seminar on understanding and combating antisemitism. Mayor Jeremy Levi of Hampstead, a heavily Jewish upscale suburb of Montreal, spoke on what it’s like to be a politician and a Jew in Canada post-Oct. 7. Uzi Dayan, former head of the Israeli National Security Council, spoke on “What happened on Oct. 7: First 24 hours and beyond.”

Melissa Lantsman, 40, the first Jewish woman ever to serve as a Conservative Party lawmaker in Canada’s House of Commons, also spoke. Elected three years ago, she represents the Toronto suburb of Thornhill, home to more than 10,000 Jews of ex-Soviet origin.

One of the most powerful presentations came from Maya Regev, 22, and her brother Itay, 18, who were kidnapped from the Nova festival, dragged to Gaza and held hostage there by Hamas. The siblings were released in a hostage deal and returned home 59 days later.

Vicky Sirkovich, 19, a Canadian-born business technology student whose mother is from Russia and father is from Moldova, said, “It was difficult for me to listen to them, but everyone should have been at that lecture.”

This was Sirkovich’s first Limmud FSU event; she had planned to volunteer at last year’s conference, but it was cancelled after the Oct. 7 attack. 

“It was so nice to see everybody together,” Sirkovich said. “I don’t attend conferences very often, but everyone there had the same background: Jewish and Russian-speaking. And any event where I can be among Jewish people is a great event for me.”

Participants came not just from Canadian cities like Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa but also from Atlanta, New York and Boston.

“Despite the challenges facing Israel and the Jewish world, we see a real enthusiasm for Jewish learning, for community and for being together,” said Limmud FSU founder Chaim Chesler. “It’s an incredible thing to witness.” 

Co-founder Sandra Cahn added, “Our amazing Canadian team continues to inspire and impress with its dedication and impact.” 

Key supporters of Limmud FSU in Canada include the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, the Jewish National Fund (KKL), World Zionist Organization, UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, the Canadian Forum of Russian-Speaking Jews, and philanthropists Harry Rosenbaum, Diane Wohl, Shoel Silver, Warren Kimel, Henry Koschitzky, Mickey Blayvas, Alex Shtein and Bill Hess, among others. Besides Chesler and Cahn, the organization’s leaders include Matthew Bronfman and Malcolm Hoenlein. 

Sergey Petrenko, president of Limmud FSU Canada, learned about Limmud FSU from his son Dan, who attended his first Limmud conference in 2015 along with friends from the Jewish summer camp where he’d worked. Petrenko and his wife Ella, both from Odessa, immigrated to Israel at a young age and moved to Canada 18 years ago for business reasons.  

“A huge part of the Russian-speaking Jewish community was robbed of its Jewish roots while living in the Soviet Union,” Petrenko said. “The main goal of Limmud FSU is to gain it back.”

Limmud FSU festivals generally feature kosher food, klezmer music, Russian-language comedy shows and a cheerful atmosphere. 

“But this year it was different,” Petrenko observed. “We gathered under the very heavy shadow of the events of Oct. 7. The whole community is heartbroken over the hostages.”

Petrenko said Oct. 7 was a turning point for his family. His son Dan, 26, and his daughter Michal, 24, found themselves blocked on social media by non-Jewish friends in the weeks following.

“Our daughter said she didn’t feel safe in Canada anymore and started to look for a job in Israel, which she eventually found,” he said. “Hate has increased enormously in all countries where Jews live, and Canada is no exception.”

Amid these challenges, Natasha Chechik, the executive director of Limmud FSU, expressed a sense of hope and trust in the strength of the community. 

“Canada has rapidly become one of our flagship events, with so much potential for growth,” she said. “Despite the antisemitism on the rise, this incredible team and community continue to shine as a beacon of resilience, and we cannot wait to see what 2025 has in store for them.”

Like Dave and Benji, the oddly matched cousins in Jesse Eisenberg’s new feature film, “A Real Pain,” I recently embarked with five of my American Jewish cousins on an unusual family heritage journey to Poland. We had never traveled together, but we were inspired by a powerful idea: bringing back to Poland a beautiful family heirloom — a Jewish prayer shawl, or tallis, that one of our ancestors brought to the United States nearly a century ago. 

That ancestor was Max Lang, my great-grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. My older cousins had known Max as their grandfather. But like my younger cousins, I had never met him, as he had died before I was born in 1957. Even so, Max’s life story is a thread that binds us together as a family, because it was his initiative that created the basis for our family life in the United States.

Max was born in 1884 into a Hasidic family of bakers in Nowy Zmigrod, a small town now located in southeast Poland. At the age of 17, he emigrated to the United States and settled on the Lower East Side. When he first arrived in New York, he worked for two full years as a beker yingl, an apprentice baker, earning no pay. Instead, he was fed by the baker’s wife and allowed to sleep on a large sack of flour, using empty burlap bags for bedding. 

In due time, Max found work that paid $4 a month and then went into business for himself. From the 1910s through the 1950s, he established successful bakeries across New York City, including one on Brooke Avenue in the Bronx and another on West 117th Street, just off Lenox Avenue in Harlem. 

Prosperous by the late 1920s, Max could afford to travel to his hometown in Poland to visit his large religious family. By that time, Max was no longer an observant Jew. In a photo from that trip, he appears clean-shaven and dressed like a “Yankee” in a fashionable suit and hat. 

Max’s non-religiosity aside, during that visit his observant brother Pinkhas presented him with a gift — a magnificent tallis, which boasted a neckband, or atarah, embroidered with silver thread. Max returned to New York with the tallis, where it was seldom used, as synagogue worship was not part of his or his children’s lives. 

When Max returned to New York, with the tallis in his luggage, he had no idea that he would never see his family again. In 1939, German forces occupied Nowy Zmigrod. On July 7, 1942, they murdered nearly all the town’s Jews, including Max’s cousins, in a nearby forest. After this terrible massacre, almost every physical remnant of Jewish life in Nowy Zmigrod was pillaged or destroyed. Max’s tallis, stowed safely in a dresser drawer in New York, suddenly became one of the few surviving relics from centuries of Jewish life in this town.

In 2023, I “friended” on Facebook some young Poles from Nowy Zmigrod who were interested in their town’s Jewish history. They helped me research my family history and encouraged me to visit the town in July, when local Christians hold an annual ceremony honoring the memory of the town’s Jews, gathering in the forest where the massacre had taken place. When I decided to attend, I remembered that my cousins had Max’s tallis, and I asked them if I could bring it with me to Nowy Zmigrod.

Even though I am not religious, I wore the tallis while speaking at the memorial, so that its beauty could represent the members of our large family who had been killed in the forest where we stood, including Jozef Lang and Raizele Lang. I also read from a description of the massacre, taken from testimony given to the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem by one of Max’s cousins, Szymon Lang, who had survived this atrocity and the Holocaust. 

Upon my return from Poland, I organized a family Zoom to share the details of my visit. My cousins were moved by my renewed connection to our family history, especially after they read Szymon’s Yad Vashem testimony. I told them that the director of the local museum in Nowy Zmigrod had asked me to donate Max’s tallis to the town museum. My cousins found the idea intriguing, but, as I had seen how poorly this modest, under-resourced museum cared for its collection, we decided it was too risky to donate it there. 

Still, the idea of returning Max’s tallis to Poland inspired us, and we decided to offer it to the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Located in Warsaw, the museum is dedicated to telling the 1,000-year-history of the Jews of Poland in all its complexity. For centuries, Jews had thrived there, but they also faced brutal pogroms, blood libels, annual antisemitic pageants and, finally, mass murder.

Given this mixed history, we decided that donating Max’s tallis to POLIN made all the more sense, as the museum believes that sharing the history of Polish Jews makes Poland a more inclusive, multicultural society. Despite intolerant voices in Poland speaking against Jews, gay people, Roma, Muslims and Ukrainians, a significant and growing number of Poles have, for decades, taken a powerful interest in understanding their country’s Jewish past, which they view as a key to Poland’s future as an inclusive, multiethnic democracy. Given our family’s deeply felt commitment to Jewish dignity, to human rights for all people and to multiethnic democracies, my cousins and I concluded that POLIN was the perfect home for Max’s tallis. 

Understandably, historians, journalists and a broad swath of American Jews have focused on Poles’ complicity in the Holocaust and their postwar antisemitism. However, we understand that these Poles’ anti-Jewish attitudes and actions are not the full story. That’s why we decided that, rather than leave Max’s tallis sitting in a drawer in the United States, we should make it available to the Poles who are curious about the millions of Jews who had once been their neighbors. 

We are delighted that Max’s tallis will connect our family history with a new surge of interest in Jewish history among Poles. By sharing this tallis, we are playing a small role in healing some of the harsh history experienced by Polish Jews over the centuries and bridging the divide with contemporary Poles of good will, who are drawn to understanding this complex history.