WASHINGTON (JTA) — Sen. Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who is a stalwart of the mainstream pro-Israel lobby in the Senate, told Benjamin Netanyahu that his partnership with an extremist leader could shatter support for Israel in the United States.

Menendez raised what he said were “concerns” about Itamar Ben-Gvir with the former — and hopeful — Israeli prime minister during a visit to Israel in early September, Axios reported on Sunday. At the time, Netanyahu had just hosted Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, another right-wing party leader, at his Caesarea home.

The visit was part of Netanyahu’s effort to work with Ben-Gvir, an adherent of the racist beliefs of the late rabbi and politician, Meir Kahane, to unite far-right parties into a single bloc so they can maximize their clout in Israel’s Nov. 1 election. Ben-Gvir, who has also lionized Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish extremist who massacred 29 Palestinians at worship in 1994, would likely secure a cabinet position in a Netanyahu-led government.

According to the Axios report, Netanyahu was peeved at Menendez’s statement, but the senator pressed the matter further, saying Ben-Gvir’s inclusion would seriously erode bipartisan support for Israel.

Major pro-Israel groups made a similar warning three years ago when Netanyahu, then the prime minister, was contemplating a similar arrangement. In the end, Netanyahu did not need the extremists to form a government.

Menendez is one of Israel’s most outspoken supporters in the Senate, earning huge cheers when he attends pro-Israel events. He is also influential, chairing the Foreign Relations Committee. Earlier this year he warned the Biden administration that he would oppose reentry into the Iran nuclear deal — a key Biden priority and a move Israel opposes — if the terms turned out to be as they were reported at the time.

(New York Jewish Week) — A group of Jewish gun owners filed a lawsuit last Friday against Gov. Kathy Hochul’s gun laws, saying they infringe on their religious freedom as well as their right to bear arms.

The New York State Jewish Gun Club, a Rockland County-based firearms club, funded and put together the lawsuit, which was filed on Sept. 29 in the Southern District of New York. It specifically targets the section of the new gun laws that prohibits the carrying of concealed weapons in “sensitive locations,” including houses of worship.

“New York State has expressed that legal carry in New York is okay, but not for those who observe religious rituals and customs,” a NYS-JGC press release said. “This law specifically targets religious people, by threatening them with arrest and felony prosecution if they carry their firearm while engaging in religious observance.”

In July, Hochul signed the Concealed Carry Improvement Act into law in response to the June Supreme Court decision that struck down New York’s strict concealed carry laws. The CCIA law added multiple checks on gun ownership in New York State, including strengthening eligibility requirements and prohibiting concealed carry permit holders from bringing their firearms into bars, libraries, schools, government buildings, hospitals and houses of worship.

Tzvi Waldman, who is Orthodox and the founder of the gun club, told the New York Jewish Week that he is hoping for “immediate relief” with the lawsuit.

“I feel pretty confident in this case,” Waldman said. “People are concerned. This is a constitutional right and it’s extremely real to us.” 

We must treat gun violence as the public health crisis that it is, and our work starts at the community level.

The work we’re doing across the state — from getting weapons off the streets to supporting violence interrupters — will help return these streets to our communities. pic.twitter.com/IW0yQwv4Gx

— Governor Kathy Hochul (@GovKathyHochul) July 15, 2022

Steven Goldstein, president of the Orthodox Congregation Bnei Matisyahu in Brooklyn and Meir Ornstein, a Rockland County resident, are listed as the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.  

New York Attorney General Letitia James and New York City Police Department Commissioner Keechant Sewell are listed as defendants alongside Hochul.  

The lawsuit opens with a quote from Kings II in the Hebrew Bible.

“And the priest gave the officers of the hundreds, the spears and the shields that had belonged to King David, which were in the house of the Lord,” the passage reads. “And the couriers stood, each one with his weapons in his hand, from the right end of the house to the left end of the house, before the altar and the house, surrounding the king.”

The lawsuit also lists multiple instances of violence against Jews, including the 2019 stabbing in Rockland County’s Orthodox neighborhood of Monsey, which led to a rise in gun ownership within the area. It also references an Anti-Defamation League report showing that New York led the nation in total reported antisemitic incidents in 2021.  

Waldman said a judge denied the group’s request for a temporary restraining order to stop enforcement of the law, but scheduled a hearing for Oct. 28.  

“We are in it to win it,” Waldman said. “We’re not just going to roll over.”  

The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment. “New York is leading the way in the fight to reduce gun violence and save lives,” Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado said when Hochul announced the new concealed carry law. “We want to ensure that all members of our communities are safe, and these new conceal and carry laws will help prevent tragedies by ensuring that gun owners are properly trained, that safety measures are promoted and that firearms are not carried into sensitive locations.”  

The Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on whether state laws barring guns in sensitive locations, including houses of worship, are constitutional. “That’s going to be an important and interesting battlefield going forward for Second Amendment cases,” Joseph Blocher, a professor at Duke Law School, told CBS News.   

A Siena College poll in June found that New Yorkers support the new gun laws by an overwhelming margin. A national survey of Jewish voters released last month found that 77 percent believed gun laws in the United States are not restrictive enough.

(JTA) — In finally addressing the protests against the repression of women that have for two weeks roiled his country, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, blamed Israel and the United States for the unrest.

“I openly state that the recent riots and unrest in Iran were schemes designed by the U.S.; the usurping, fake Zionist regime; their mercenaries; and some treasonous Iranians abroad who helped them,” Khamenei said Monday in a speech to police cadets in Tehran, remarks which were later posted in English on his official Twitter account.

The protests that have engulfed the country since Sept. 17 were sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, who had been arrested for not properly wearing a headscarf. There have been hundreds of arrests and state TV has reported over 40 deaths of protesters and police.

Khamenei did not offer any evidence to back up his assertion on Monday, other than to claim that protests in other countries do not garner as much international attention and condemnation. Khamenei heads a regime that has for decades backed the dismantling of Israel and lends logistical support to terrorist groups and some of Israel’s most implacable enemies.

Simultaneous demonstrations in support of Iran’s protests took place across the world on Saturday. As in many other countries, Israeli women have recorded online videos in support of the Iranian protesters; at least one set was organized by Israel’s foreign ministry.

(JTA) — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has emphatically encouraged dialogue with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, despite his disagreements with the center-right pro-Israel lobby and calls among the pro-Palestinian community to disengage from the group.

In a recording of his meeting last month with Palestinian Americans on the sidelines of the United Nations’ General Assembly in New York City obtained by The Times of Israel, Abbas also faulted the current Biden administration for not doing enough to pressure Israel into reopening Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. 

“You must talk to everyone in order to arrive at your goal … You must not exclude anyone … including the Zionist lobby,” Abbas said. “There are many people who say that the Zionist lobby is the most dangerous. No! We must speak to the Zionist lobby.”

He added that George Mitchell, the former Maine senator who led negotiations with the Israelis and the Palestinians in the first Obama administration term, told Abbas not to meet with AIPAC. Mitchell denied that narrative in a statement to The Times of Israel.

“President Abbas’ recollection is incorrect as to me. I don’t know about his conversations with others, but I can state categorically that there never was any such conversation with me,” Mitchell wrote.

Abbas’ endorsement of engagement with AIPAC is significant as calls from the left and among pro-Palestinians to boycott and disengage from the group grow louder — in part because it is friendly with Republicans who are close to former President Donald Trump and in part because it was seen as an enabler of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who largely abandoned the Israeli-Palestinian peace process over the course of his tenure.

Abbas said J Street, the Jewish Middle East policy lobby set up as a dovish counterweight to AIPAC, was “nice,” but he emphasized that it was important to reach out to the predominant voices, noting that he prioritized meetings with Netanyahu’s Likud Party and has also maintained outreach to U.S. Republicans, who are among the Palestinian Authority’s fiercest critics.

Hussein al-Sheikh, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, an affiliate of the Palestinian Authority, as recently as Sept. 13 met with an AIPAC delegation and posted about it on Twitter.

The Trump administration cut off all funding to the Palestinians, shut down the PLO’s Washington office and closed the U.S. consulate in eastern Jerusalem that attended to the Palestinians. President Joe Biden has restored funding, reestablished dedicated diplomatic relations with the Palestinians and hopes to reopen the Washington office.

Abbas told the Palestinian Americans that these measures were not enough and that the Biden administration should pressure Israel. He said in his most recent conversation with Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, he derided Blinken for saying that Israel was not ready to resume talks and leaving it at that.

“I told Blinken, ‘You little boy, don’t do that,’” he said. A source familiar with the conversation told The Times of Israel that Abbas’ characterization of the Biden administration’s work on the issue was not accurate.

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid has until recently argued that his fragile right-to-left coalition of parties is not in a position to advance talks with the Palestinians. However, Lapid appeared to modify that position speaking to the U.N. General Assembly last month, when he embraced the two-state outcome for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That effectively reversed the policies of Netanyahu, who rejected Palestinian statehood, and aligned Israel with Biden’s policy, which the president emphasized in his own U.N. speech.

(JTA) — I am a sucker for extreme sports — or at least reading about them. My ideal Sunday afternoon involves a comfy chair and a thick book or Netflix documentary about mountain climbers trying to escape an avalanche, or an ultra-runner suffering during a 24-hour race.

Stories of people under extremis appeal to the 12-year-old boy in me, but I also read them hoping their authors’ suffering and triumphs will cough up some sort of wisdom about the human condition. What do they learn about themselves when they push their bodies to the limits? It’s the rare book by an adventurer or endurance athlete that doesn’t include a moment of satori, the Japanese Buddhist term for awakening or enlightenment — or at least a glimmer of self-knowledge. Writes the triathlete and mountain biker Terri Schneider: “Enduring is, in essence, a concentrated version of life placed under a bright microscope.”

I am not always glued to the comfy chair, but probably the most physically punishing thing I do all year is the Yom Kippur fast. The 25-hour fast and synagogue marathon is its own endurance event. I hear echoes of the endurance athlete when rabbis describe the day as a test of “our willingness to submit to discipline” or “whether we are made of that same tough stuff that allowed Judaism to survive for thousands of years.”

As Yom Kippur approaches Tuesday night, one of the books on my nightstand is “The 12-Hour Walk,” a self-help book by the endurance athlete and adventurer Colin O’Brady. (He has written about his own attempt to become the first person to ski alone across Antarctica.) He suggests that you set aside 12 hours to walk alone, unplugged, at your own pace and as far as you want to or can go. The physical test, the silence and the sense of accomplishment will leave you feeling you can overcome anything and “unlock your best life.”

“When I was crossing Antarctica alone in 2018 I was pulling my sled in silence for 12 hours per day. In the latter half of that crossing I felt deeply connected to mind, body, and spirit,”O’Brady told an interviewer. “Despite my body being worked, despite my ribs protruding, despite the frostbite on my face and limited food, I found this sort of flow state, this connection to purpose and fulfillment. I thought I could take that with me forever.”

A 12-hour silent walk sounds like the opposite of Yom Kippur, which involves hours of sitting in a crowd and facing a torrent of words. But the experience he describes has its similarities with the Day of Atonement. There is often, for example, the point in many adventurers’ memoirs when they talk about dying, or what they learned when they thought they were  going to die. That too is a theme of Yom Kippur — if not actually pushing ourselves to our physical limits, it is a day, as Lew once explained, to “rehearse your own death. You wear a shroud and, like a dead person, you neither eat nor drink nor fornicate. You summon the desperate strength of life’s last moments.”

Summoning that desperate strength is also the point of endurance sports. Joshua Kulp, a triathlete and the rosh yeshiva of the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem, has written about his running in the context of Judaism. “When I was exhausted running the marathon, when all I wanted to do was join all of those walkers, I was somehow able to reach deep into my kishkes and go to places I’d never been,” he writes.

Finally, the Yom Kippur fast, like many endurance tests, is about what happens when you separate yourself from ordinary pleasures. Yom Kippur, writes Sue Levi Elwell in “The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic,” “affords a unique opportunity for worshipers to stay for extended hours in synagogue and to distance themselves from socializing and food.” The 12-hour walk makes this “distancing” more than a metaphor, but similarly suggests enlightenment comes with the shock of separation.

In both cases, blessedly, such deprivation is temporary and voluntary. As Kulp points out, the suffering distance runners inflict on themselves is in some ways a luxury of the fit and the healthy. A grueling race offers “the opportunity to suffer without fear of loss,” he writes.

A 12-hour walk, even at a strolling pace, sounds hard enough. Doing it without listening to podcasts or an audiobook sounds like pure torture. But it won’t be fatal. I am curious what I might learn if I were to push myself past my comfort zone. Certainly, Yom Kippur does that. Sometimes it just leaves me head-achey and annoyed. And sometimes, I hear a prayer or come across a passage that touches me deeply and may just make a difference in how I treat others. And by sundown, and my first bite of bagel, I feel ready — for a little while anyway — to live my best life.

(JTA) — When Sarah Jemal was pregnant with her first child, she couldn’t keep any food or liquids down. Given her risk of dehydration and preterm labor, Jemal’s obstetrician recommended she use a concierge service to receive intravenous fluids at home.

“Otherwise I was going to basically have to be administered to the hospital, be on hospital rest until I gave birth,” Jemal said.

During her next pregnancy, she wasn’t as sick. But then it came time for Yom Kippur, when Jewish law requires a 25-hour fast from food and drink. Jemal didn’t want to risk dehydration again, so she reached out to IVDRIPS, the company that provided the IV concierge service she had used before and requested a few bags of the company’s Yom Kippur hydration cocktail.

Bracha Banayan, a nurse practitioner and the founder of IVDRIPS, said Jemal reflects a frequent customer profile: pregnant people who are concerned about dehydration. In fact, she said, she timed the launch of her company to Yom Kippur in 2018 precisely because of her experiences treating pregnant women who had fasted and run into trouble as a result.

“We’ve taken care of clients already for four years in a row where before us they were going to the hospital after Yom Kippur,” said Banayan, who herself is a Modern Orthodox Jew. “Even though they knew that, they still fasted. So it’s kind of like something that really gave people a way to still keep what the Torah’s asking and still be able to fast.”

Nearly half of all American Jews say they fast for all or part of Yom Kippur, according to a 2020 Pew survey, making the fast one of the most widely observed Jewish practices in the United States; the proportion of Orthodox Jews who fast is far higher. The day can be physically punishing, and those who fast annually know to drink ample water in the preceding days and, in the case of regular coffee drinkers, to wean caffeine consumption to ward off a withdrawal headache.

The rise of non-medical IV treatments, a trend in so-called “wellness” culture that celebrities including Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber have popularized, has created a new form of fast-hacking for the influencer set. IVDRIPS is one of several concierge infusion companies offering clients a chance to hook up to an IV either in a posh office, sometimes with a side of champagne, or in the comfort of their own home. Those who purchase the service — insurance rarely covers it — can pick among an assortment of vitamins, electrolytes and medications to infuse into their veins to ward off fatigue, hangovers, migraines and more.

Banayan said she expects to deliver as many as 500 pre-fast IV drips in the markets her company serves, which this year expanded from the New York City area to include the fast-growing Orthodox center of Boca Raton, Florida, as well as Baltimore and New Orleans.

Her company advertises on its Instagram for pre-fast day drips — which run about $300 in the New York area and $200 elsewhere — and Orthodox influencers have been posting for weeks about their plans to receive IV hydration before Yom Kippur.

Frumee Taubenfeld, who has nearly 36,000 followers on her Instagram account, where she typically posts about modest fashion and her family’s travels, posted on Sunday that she had booked an “Elite Hydration Drip” for Tuesday morning.

“Please be advised that due to high demand during this holiday season, all bookings are nonrefundable within 5 days of appointment date,” the email receipt she posted read. It concluded, “Thank you and have an easy fast!”

The Yom Kippur fast is the most stringent of the fast days in the Jewish calendar, and fasting is considered such an important obligation that it trumps going to services — one reason that the Bobov Hasidic sect has held an IV clinic inside its main synagogue in Brooklyn.

Jewish tradition also holds that people who are ill, elderly, pregnant or nursing and whose health would be jeopardized by fasting should not do so. In Orthodox communities, rabbis and doctors are bombarded with questions in the days leading up to Yom Kippur from people asking whether they fall into those categories.

But even though their rabbis and physicians may advise them to avoid the fast or at least drink small amounts of water throughout the day, some Jews, animated by feelings of guilt, anxiety or communal pressure, ignore those recommendations.

Banayan said the message is not always so clear.

“People are like, ‘Well, if you’re not healthy, then you shouldn’t fast.’ Tell that to half the world!” she said. “They’re still fasting. I mean, these rabbis are not saying, ‘OK, don’t fast.’ They’re going to say, ‘Try to fast. Do your best.’ This, to me, is doing your best.”

Many medical practitioners frown on discretionary IV use, noting that it has not been studied rigorously and pointing out that any efficacy may be chalked up to a placebo effect. “It’s the latest trend in functional or alternative medicine to kind of rip through the general community as a cure-all,” Dr. Joshua Septimus, a physician in Houston, told BuzzFeed News earlier this year. “It’s just one more way to fleece people for money.”

In rare instances, discretionary IVs can actually be dangerous. Supermodel Kendall Jenner was hospitalized in 2018 after complications related to an IV vitamin infusion.

“Every time you make a hole in the skin, there’s a risk of infection,” said Rivka Adelman, a nurse practitioner in the heavily Orthodox hamlet of Monsey, New York, one of the areas serviced by IVDRIPS.

Adelman said she could see a role for discretionary IVs nonetheless — but not for people who want to fast against medical advice.

“People who are not able to drink a lot, it would help them,” Adelman said. “IV fluids are really for people that are overall healthy and just have a hard time fasting. It’s not really for sick patients who shouldn’t be fasting anyway.

Dr. Aaron Glatt, the chair of medicine at Mount Sinai South Nassau and an associate rabbi at Young Israel of Woodmere on Long Island, says the use of pre-fast IVs is cut-and-dry.

“There is no reason to do so medically,” he said. “People should be able to take [water] orally. It will work just as well as the IV. So the medical point of view — it doesn’t make sense.”

“I want to make it clear that absolutely if somebody’s sick, they’re allowed to do that,” Glatt added. “But for somebody to do that to quote, ‘fast easier’ — so they should drink a lot before the holiday.”

That’s exactly how some influencers have been promoting their plans to hook up to a drip before Yom Kippur, which this year starts on Tuesday night. Last year, Jewish comedian Claudia Oshry received an IVDRIPS infusion during a taping of her podcast to cure her hangover. Last week, on her podcast, she said she was considering doing the same before Yom Kippur.

“Getting an IV like the week of fasting really, really helps. I don’t know if that’s cheating but I think I’m going to do it,” Oshry told her cohost, her sister Jackie Oshry.

“Do it! That’s not cheating,” Jackie replied.

“OK. I’m going to call IVDRIPS and schedule one for, like, two days before,” Oshry said.

The company shared a video clip of the conversation on its Instagram story, with some text of its own: “Totally NOT cheating!”

Adina Miles-Sash, an emergency medical technician with the Orthodox women’s ambulance corps Ezras Nashim, also known by her online activist persona FlatbushGirl, said she has personally used IVDRIPS ahead of Yom Kippur — not simply to ease the fast, but to strengthen her prayers.

“It’s supposed to be as joyous and festive as Purim, minus the food. It’s supposed to be a high, holy, optimistic day of yearning and connectivity and celebration,” Miles-Sash said about the holiday.

Miles-Sash said she sees a lot of interest, especially from women in her community, in reducing the suffering that has come to be a hallmark of the holiday. She pointed to the popular use of pre-fast delayed-release caffeine pills, which some people consume to reduce the effects of caffeine withdrawal, such as headache and irritability. (Caffeine suppositories were in vogue a decade ago.)

Instead of the usual lightheadedness and chapped lips that commonly accompany the fast, she said using IV hydration means she can physically stand for a longer time through the service, and bring more intentionality to her prayers.

“Any method that brings one the ability to more easily engage in a tradition that connects them to their ancestors and their religious heritage,” Miles-Sash said, “is something that should be embraced.”

(New York Jewish Week) — Student clubs at Yeshiva University will resume later this month after a judge approved an agreement between the university and an LGBTQ club pausing their dispute until all appeals are decided.

The Modern Orthodox university had suspended all club activity rather than comply with a previous court decision ordering it to support the YU Pride Alliance over the administration’s rigorous objections. 

The LGBTQ club had proposed the “stay” in the dispute, saying it did not want other clubs punished while Y.U. pursued its case in court.

The university announced the resumption of clubs following the Jewish holidays in a press release from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing Yeshiva University in its case against the YU Pride Alliance.

On Sept. 29, a New York State Supreme Court officially granted a permanent stay to Yeshiva University — hitting pause on a judge’s order from this past June that would have required the university to recognize YU Pride Alliance as a campus club. It will last throughout the entire appeals process, including any future appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The stay comes after weeks of strife within the university over Y.U.’s attempts to block the club, which it says represents values it cannot condone under its Orthodox interpretations of Jewish law concerning homosexuality.

The YU Commentator, the student newspaper, reported that although clubs will open again, campus events and activities will not resume for weeks afterward, as there is a lengthy approval process for club activity. Shemini Atzeret, the last holiday in the autumn High Holiday season, ends this year on the evening of Oct. 18. 

“Because no clubs have been approved, there is not even a live link to submit an event request for clubs,” Baruch Lerman, the president of the Yeshiva Student Union, told the Commentator. 

Meanwhile, Jewish Queer Youth, the organization that has been funding and housing the YU Pride Alliance over the last few years, had offered to provide funding for campus club events until they can resume on campus. The Commentator reported that the organization has already approved $1,160 to fund at least three events.

In a 5-4 decision to deny the university’s first stay application on Sept. 14, the U.S. Supreme Court said that once the university exhausted all of the appeals to the New York courts, it could bring its case back to the Supreme Court. 

The university has received pushback on its decision to block the YU Pride Alliance on campus, especially from students and faculty in its affiliated graduate programs. Lower courts have said that because the university is chartered as a public institution eligible for public funding, it cannot violate New York State’s human rights regulations regarding LGBTQ students.

The Wilf Family Foundations, a major philanthropy whose name appears on the university main undergraduate campus in Washington Heights, condemned the school’s decision last month.

(JTA) — Hasidic book publisher Dovid Zaklikowski was looking forward to getting his latest title — the memoir of a Jewish woman who immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States — printed and shipped off to customers. 

Everything seemed to be going according to plan. In mid-August, a Chinese printing company he regularly worked with told Zaklikowski that local government censors had approved the content of “The Queen of Cleveland” and that the job would likely be completed in less than a month. 

But a few days later, a representative of Hong Kong-headquartered 1010 Printing informed Zaklikowski that the book was being sent to China’s national censorship agency for further review, citing the war in Ukraine. 

“In view of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the book has to upgrade for further approval, which needs to take 15 days,” the 1010 Printing representative told Zaklikowski by email.

Almost a month later, China’s General Administration of Press and Publication handed down its final decision about “The Queen of Cleveland,” a memoir written by Shula Kazen, who died in 2019 at 96, about the challenges of living as a Jew under Soviet communist rule.

“Unfortunately this book is not approved to print in China as content involves anti-communist,” a 1010 Printing representative told Zaklikowski by email. “Now the only option is printing outside of China.”

The rejection offers a rare window into the collision of Western book production, Chinese limits on free speech, and geopolitics. All content printed or published in any medium in China has to secure the approval of the Chinese Community Party-controlled government, even if, as in this case, the book is in English and destined for distribution abroad. Russia’s war on Ukraine, with China acting as one of Russia’s only major supporters in the world, appears to have had cascading effects on a book intended for American Jewish readers. 

The rejection took Zaklikowski by surprise, but he said the move seemed only to bolster the truth behind the narrative of “The Queen of Cleveland.” 

“It seems that even after [Kazen’s] death in 2019, the communists are still fighting her message and the censor refuses to print her triumphant message,” Zaklikowski said.

“The Queen of Cleveland” details how Kazen’s father was arrested for helping with ritual circumcisions and died while being detained. The book also tells of how Kazen found religious freedom and material well-being when she left the Soviet Union and moved to Ohio, allowing her to help others. Her good works earned her a central place in the community and the moniker used for the title of the book. 

Perseverance in the face of Soviet persecution is a theme that Zaklikowski’s publishing house, Hasidic Archives, has often tackled because it resonates with his target audience in the Chabad community and the wider Jewish world. From 2021, there is “My Gulag Life: Stories of a Soviet Prisoner,” and earlier this year, Zaklikowski published “In the Trenches: Stories from the Front Lines of Jewish Life in Russia.” 

Printing books in China makes sense, Zaklikowski says, because the local printing industry delivers high-quality paper and binding at good prices. And he never had trouble with the government censors in the past.

It’s unclear exactly why this book was deemed “anti-communist” while others with similar themes weren’t, but the printer’s reference to recent geopolitical developments provides some context. After Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February, Russia found itself isolated from much of the world with many governments breaking off diplomatic and commercial relationships. 

The Chinese government provided an important exception, laying blame for the conflict on the West and offering to support the Russian economy through increased trade. 

“The current conflict makes those topics related to Russia more sensitive,” said Rose Luqiu, a journalism professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. “This has led local officials to avoid political mistakes by tightening scrutiny, preferring to relinquish their vetting authority and leave decisions to their superiors.” 

And while many Western publishers print in China, not all of them are, like Zaklikowski, willing to resist or speak up about censorship. 

Earlier this year, for example, the Financial Times reported that two British publishers altered the contents of books to appease Chinese censors. Passages about Taiwan, a country whose government China considers illegitimate, were removed and so was a reference to dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. 

And in 2017, two academic publishers, Springer Nature and Cambridge University Press, also submitted to Beijing’s limits on free speech, censoring thousands of articles related to sensitive topics such as Taiwan and Tiananmen Square. 

Zaklikowski now plans to use a company in Singapore to print the book. About the forces of communism, which prevented Kazen from living a Jewish life in the Soviet Union and now has blocked the publication of her memoir, he said, “They will never win.”

(JTA) — It is rare that one can say attending a funeral was an uplifting experience. Yet the funeral Thursday for Judah Samet — teacher of Torah at his Tree of Life synagogue, possessor of a unique and vigorous voice and sense of humor, veteran of the paratroop division of the Israeli army, lover of Golden Grahams, generous tipper and possessor of what he termed a “Bergen-Belsen stomach” — was exactly that, because remembering Judah can bring only positive feelings.

Samet, a longtime pillar of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community who spoke frequently about his experience during the Holocaust, vaulted onto the national stage on Oct. 27, 2018, when a gunman entered his synagogue and murdered 11 Jews during Shabbat services. Samet, whom I and others in the community knew as Judah, had arrived a few minutes late and was warned away, remaining in his car outside the synagogue as gunshots sounded. The following February, Judah was a guest of President Donald Trump during the State of the Union address.

“I’m going to say a Jewish blessing that you say only when you meet a head of state,” he told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review at the time. “I have permission to do it.”

The State of the Union was a far cry from Judah’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938. As a young child, he was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. His father died of typhus three days after liberation, but the rest of the family made their way to prestate Israel. He moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Tuesday, the second day of Rosh Hashanah.

At his funeral, Judah’s son-in-law, the playwright David Winitsky, spoke of a time they went out to the casual restaurant Eat N’Park together and his father in law praised the service the waitress gave the table. Yet, he wasn’t content just with complimenting her — he told her that he would let her manager know what a good job she was doing. He said to his son-in-law that it is important to make someone else’s day better whenever you can.

This simple message seems uncomplicated enough, but then one thinks about the occasions when Judah was on his own — the years he was in a labor camp and in Bergen Belsen, in the Israeli army, and the terrifying moments he spent in his car parked outside the door of the Tree of Life, the synagogue he attended for over 40 years while a police detective and the man who shot 11 Jews inside the building traded gunfire.

Judah’s drive to inspire others to better their lives and the lives of those around him was most evident in his tireless efforts to educate young people in Pittsburgh and beyond about the Holocaust. After not speaking about his experience for many years, he began sharing just over a decade ago, and he ultimately delivered hundreds of talks that reached the ears of tens of thousands of people, according to Lauren Bairnsfeather, executive director of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh.

Judah knew his words had an impact because of the countless letters he received from students over the years about what his story meant to them.

Judah’s sister Miriam Cohen, born in Israel when their mother remarried after the war,  recounted at the funeral that one time at the Pittsburgh community Yom Hahoah commemoration, a family arrived that looked out of place. At the end of the service, the teenaged daughter came up to Judah and gave him a big hug. She said she wanted her parents to meet him after he had spoken at her school.

Another eulogist talked about what Judah said to students, that he knew teen girls did not like their mothers but that their mothers were the only ones who would do anything and go through anything to care for them. As he said about his mother in a 2012 Holocaust Center interview, “She was a tower of strength….Her mind was dedicated 24 hours a day to saving her family.” After hearing how his own mother told him and his siblings to eat lice to sustain themselves in the camps and how she foraged food for them, many students did what he said and went home to hug their mothers.

It was Judah’s 81st birthday when the president of the United States led both houses of Congress in singing to him at the State of the Union address, watched by millions on national television. He was a guest of the first lady, sitting in her box; who knows how many Americans were educated about the Holocaust and antisemitism just by hearing a small snippet of the story of Judah’s life.

Elizabeth Samet said that when her father received his stomach cancer diagnosis in June he told her that if this was it, the end of his life, that was OK with him. That ability to accept what he had and not try to change what might not be possible to change, though he had defied the odds so many times before, is characteristic of great strength.

My personal favorite memory of Judah is from July 4, 2019, at the morning minyan at Beth Shalom, where Tree of Life and New Light, the congregation my husband leads, join together. After we prayed, Judah proudly showed all the attendees the photos he had received from the White House photographer of himself with the first lady and proclaimed what a wonderful country this is to live in. Though he had experienced America at its worst, he remembered it as its best — as a place that welcomes people like him, survivors and immigrants who can improve their own lives and so many others.

(JTA) — David Gottesman, who carried on a family tradition of Jewish philanthropy while also becoming one of the most successful investors in the United States, died at 96 on Wednesday.

Gottesman’s involvement in finance and Jewish causes began with his birth in Manhattan, to Benjamin and Esther Gottesman, in 1926. Benjamin Gottesman was a banker who had already become a trustee of Yeshiva University, home to the rabbinical school that his own father, Mendel, a paper manufacturer, had helped found; he served in that role until his death in 1979. Mendel Gottesman had started a family foundation devoted largely to supporting Yeshiva University and its library, which ultimately was named for him.

After a stint in the U.S. Army at the end of World War II, Gottesman, who was known as Sandy, went to college and then Harvard Business School before heading to Wall Street. There, he got connected with Warren Buffet, then an up-and-coming investor, and the two struck up a fast friendship.

Gottesman was an early investor in Berkshire Hathaway, the company that for a time made Buffett the richest man in the world. The return on his investment was massive: This year, more than half a century after making the investment, Forbes estimated his net worth at $3 billion and placed him at No. 358 on its list of 400 wealthiest Americans.

Gottesman sat on Berkshire Hathaway’s board, but his relationship with Buffett was far from transactional. “Absent Sandy doing anything financially for me, we would have been the best of friends,” Buffett told The New York Times for an obituary.

Gottesman opted to remain largely out of the limelight. But through a family foundation he launched with his wife Ruth in 1965, he continued the Jewish giving that had long characterized his family. In addition to his father’s giving, his mother Esther was largely responsible for securing the Dead Sea Scrolls for Israel and building the distinctive inverted-dome structure that houses them near the Israel Museum. She worked with Samuel Gottesman, Benjamin’s brother, to do so, and his descendants have carried on a philanthropic legacy of their own.

In 2019, the Gottesman Fund disbursed more than $26 million to dozens of groups and institutions, many of them Jewish, including Jewish day schools associated with multiple denominations. The fund also gave to New York City civic and arts groups; Planned Parenthood and other groups focused on reproductive rights; and organizations funding civic improvements in Israel. (The fund also supported the digitization of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s archive from 1923 to 2008.)

Gottesman’s giving in particular changed the landscape of Jerusalem, where he financed an aquarium, a bike path around the city and the new building being constructed for the National Library of Israel, across the street from the Knesset, or Israeli parliament.

“Sandy’s legacy will be felt in the landmark new Library building and I regret deeply that he will not see this magnificent project through to its completion,” Sallai Meridor, chairman of the library’s board, said in a statement. “The new building, and educational activities that will take place within, are testament to his generous commitment and true friendship to the National Library of Israel.”

Gottesman is survived by his wife of 72 years, Ruth; their three children; and six grandchildren.