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A chance discovery connected US soccer star Matt Turner to his Jewish roots
(JTA) — Unexpected events converged not only to forge Matt Turner’s career as a professional soccer player. They enabled him to find Jewish roots he never knew he had.
Turner, 29, the starting goalkeeper for the U.S. men’s national team and Nottingham Forest in England’s Premier League, discovered those roots in finding his paternal great-grandmother’s emigration papers. Those papers allowed her to leave Lithuania and escape the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of over 150,000 Lithuanian Jews.
“Once I found the documents, I was certainly very, very excited,” Turner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “America, in general, it’s a melting pot, and everybody has those roots elsewhere. So to understand your story, your history a little bit is really nice.”
Before finding those documents, Turner’s curiosity about his roots went unfulfilled while growing up in Park Ridge, New Jersey.
“Growing up in northern New Jersey, you’re around everyone who has a bit of identity about their family life,” he said. “There’s a lot of Italian-Americans, a lot of Irish-Americans. We know families that are like, ‘Yeah, my great-grandmother came here from Italy and she’s been cooking for us for 30 years.’
“Naturally, when you’re around a pack of people, you just gravitate towards what everybody else does. Everybody celebrates Christmas and the holidays, and you want to do all those things.”
Though Turner met his great-grandparents “when I was really little,” he said, “we never had those talks, or they never talked to my parents about that stuff.”
As a result, Turner’s Jewish father, Stuart, and his Catholic mother, Cindy, had no specific answers to his questions.
“Whenever I asked my parents, ‘Where’s our family from?’ I never got a clear, clear answer,” he said. “My mom was pretty unsure and same with my dad, to be fair.”
But when Matt and Stuart were cleaning the house of Matt’s late grandfather in 2015, they found the great-grandmother’s emigration papers. Taube Sobel left Lithuania in 1921 and arrived at Ellis Island in New York.
“My great-grandmother had a Lithuanian foreign passport issued on Aug. 25, 1920, in Kaunas that was issued in two languages, Lithuanian and German,” Turner said. “On the page in the Lithuanian language, it says that her name is Taube Sabelaite, and on the page in German language, Taube Schabel.”
But to get her emigration papers, she had to go to Riga, Latvia, where the United States had its diplomatic representative to Lithuania until 1930.
“When my great-grandmother applied for the immigration papers at the U.S. consulate in Riga, the U.S. consulate ‘simplified’ her last name into ‘Sobel,’” Turner said. “That became her last name until she got married.”
Two years later, the man who would become her husband, Polish-born Chakiel Turnovski, arrived from Paris. They married in 1927, with his name changed to Charles Turner. The family owned a multi-family home in Brooklyn, where Charles worked as a printer.
“We didn’t even know we were Lithuanian to begin with,” Turner said. “My initial feeling was, ‘Wow, this is cool.’ I finally have a little piece of me that I can look into and understand a little bit more. I was very intrigued about the history. And the more my father and I dug, the more we learned, the more connected I felt to my Jewish side, the Jewish culture of my family. It really changed a lot of me because I understood different values.”
Turner brought those values into his marriage with Ashley, whom he married in 2022. The couple has a 15-month-old son, Easton, and a daughter, Everley, born on Sept. 14. Ashley is Catholic, like Turner’s mother, and they are letting their children decide what religion they want to adopt, if any.
“The general foundations of both religions are the same, and the values of marriage would be the same,” said Turner, who identifies as Jewish. “I think it’s really great to have religion as a guideline because having faith and values and seeing the bigger picture are what we believe.
“But at the same time, we want our kids to be able to choose for themselves or connect with things for themselves. We want to open their eyes to the world and have them experience different religions in different ways and different rites of passage, have a really open mind and find things in the values that they might connect with more.”
That approach comes directly from Turner’s own experience in a household with a Jewish father and a Catholic mother.
“A lot of times, people would say that those two groups of people might not get along,” Turner said. “But I saw them love and go through conflict together and work together and be great partners, even to this day. Over time, I was able to connect with both sides in different ways at different moments in my life. I think it made me really well rounded as a person and more accepting. It was amazing to have that experience, to be honest. I’m really grateful.”
The papers also enabled Turner to consider playing professional soccer in Europe. He found them after completing his career at Fairfield University in Connecticut, where he made the All-Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference’s second team as a senior. But none of Major League Soccer’s clubs chose him in the 2016 draft, so Turner looked to Europe as an option. For that, he needed a European Union passport. Since Lithuania joined the EU in 2004, Turner applied for a Lithuanian passport.
But in the end, the New England Revolution invited Turner to camp in 2016. He made the club, became a starter in 2018 and a standout star soon after. In 2021, he was named the MLS Goalkeeper of the Year and the MLS All-Star Game’s most valuable player.
Turner received his passport in 2020 after “a three- or four-year process,” he said, but would not need it to make his biggest career move. In February 2022, two years after Great Britain left the EU (and its soccer passport rules), the Revolution sold him to Arsenal, a club in London and one of the Premier League’s perennial contenders.
Such a move might seem impossible for a goalkeeper whose career also started accidentally. Turner played baseball and basketball in high school but watching the 2010 World Cup transformed him.
The turning point came one day before Turner’s 16th birthday, when Landon Donovan scored a late goal to give the United States a 1-0 win against Algeria, helping them move on to the round of 16.
“I watched so many games, so many sports, and nothing made me feel quite like I felt in that moment,” he said. “I was jumping up and down, screaming and cheering. I’d never done that for any other sport. I just realized right then and there that there’s something different about this sport, the way it makes me feel and the way it brings people together.”
Donovan’s goal motivated Turner to join his first youth soccer club and get a goalkeeper coach at 16. Despite that late start, Turner developed enough to receive his first invitation to the national team’s training camp in 2019.
But the young goalkeeper made an inauspicious impression in that camp, as coach Gregg Berhalter recalled.
“We’re doing a training exercise,” Berhalter said. “He receives the ball and he goes to throw it and then he second guesses himself and throws into his own goal.”
From that discouraging start, however, Turner blossomed. After making his international debut in 2021, Turner started all four of the U.S. national team’s matches in the 2022 World Cup, keeping England and Iran to 0 goals. Since joining the national team, Turner won awards as the best goalkeeper in the 2021 CONCACAF Gold Cup and 2022-23 CONCACAF Nations League tournaments.
By now, he has amassed 20 career victories and 20 career clean sheets in just 33 games, a quicker rate than any other goalkeeper in the national team’s history. Berhalter called Turner’s development “abnormal,” he said.
“You don’t have a guy go to Fairfield and then start in the World Cup for the national team,” Berhalter said. “It all has to do with his work ethic. His learning curve is steep but he learns really quickly and applies it.”
With Arsenal, Turner played only five games last season, so the club sold him in August to Nottingham Forest, where he started the club’s first six games and earned his first Premier League clean sheet Sept. 2, a 1-0 win against powerhouse Chelsea.
“I’m forged in fire, as I like to say,” Turner said at his first press conference with Nottingham Forest.
So were his Lithuanian Jewish great-grandparents, a fact Turner chooses not to take for granted.
“I’m sure a lot of families from either side have gone through Hell to give their families a better life,” he said. “It lit a fire inside of me to repay my great-grandparents for taking the risks that they did to make it over to the United States, and provide us with the opportunities that we might not have had elsewhere in the world.”
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The post A chance discovery connected US soccer star Matt Turner to his Jewish roots appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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UNRWA Meets the Spanish Inquisition
View of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90.
JNS.org – The collaboration between UNRWA, the U.N. agency solely dedicated to Palestinian refugees and their descendants, and the Hamas rulers of Gaza continues unabated.
Two episodes over the last week underscore that claim. On May 14, Israeli jets carried out a precision strike against a Hamas war room and weapons depot that was concealed beneath an UNRWA school in Nuseirat. Fifteen terrorists—10 of them members of Hamas’s elite Nukhba Force—were killed in the strike. Meanwhile, three days earlier, the Israelis released aerial surveillance footage of armed Palestinians in an UNRWA compound in the southern city of Rafah, where the IDF is facing off against four Hamas battalions. The video showed the gun-toting Palestinians milling inside the compound, from where they launched attacks on the gathering Israeli forces.
The intermingling of UNRWA facilities and personnel with Hamas and its nefarious aims has been a constant theme of Israeli messaging throughout the current war in the Gaza Strip. At the beginning of this year, it seemed as if other Western countries shared Israel’s concerns, with 18 of them, among them the United States, suspending funding to UNRWA. However, as the NGO UN Watch has documented, in the intervening period, nine of them have quietly restored their fiscal support. One of these countries was Germany, whose foreign ministry declared in an April 24 statement that UNRWA’s verbal willingness to implement the recommendations of an independent commission headed by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna was enough to turn the money faucet back on. Israel’s vociferous objections—pointing out that Colonna had elided Jerusalem’s claim that more than 2,000 UNRWA staff members retain ties with Hamas—made no difference to the Germans, nor to the Japanese, or the Canadians or the other six nations who resumed financial assistance to the agency.
In the midst of all this, UNRWA received an award from the government of Spain—one of the countries that has maintained its funding throughout the conflict triggered by the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on Oct. 7. The spectacle of a U.N. agency that indulges a terrorist group, whose tactics include the mass murder and rape of civilians for the crime of being Jews, being feted like this is, of course, deeply regrettable. But looked at from another angle, it is highly appropriate.
The award presented to UNRWA director general Philippe Lazzarini by Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares during his visit to New York on April 19 inducted him into the “Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic.” The “Isabella” referred to here is Queen Isabella I of Castile, who ruled Spain alongside her husband, King Ferdinand II, from 1474 until her death 30 years later. In 1492, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, Isabella and Ferdinand issued an order for the ejection of Spain’s Jewish population, estimated to have been 300,000-strong.
The king and queen’s announcement of the expulsion—known as the Alhambra Decree—is on display, fittingly, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Spanish Jews were given four months to pack up their belongings and settle their affairs, a chaotic and painful process that left Spain as a country economically and culturally impoverished. Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire, who offered shelter to some of these Jews (among them my own family, who lived for centuries under Turkish rule in the Balkans), poked fun at the Spanish monarchs, questioning the judgment of those who would degrade their own kingdom only to “enrich ours.” In making that observation, Bayezid inadvertently grasped one of the more curious aspects of Jew-hatred—that its advocates will push for it relentlessly, even when it doesn’t suit their own interests to do so.
One of the more curious aspects of Jew-hatred is that its advocates will push for it relentlessly, even when it doesn’t suit their own interests.
Few institutions would be as receptive as UNRWA when it comes to Spain expressing pride in a monarch who deservedly has the reputation as one of the worst persecutors of Jews in their history. The history of antisemitism has been captured in a simple formula: You have no right to live among us as Jews; you have no right to live among us; you have no right to live. Queen Isabella’s place on this spectrum is evident and unarguable. Equally, Hamas belongs there no less. The Iranian-backed organization doesn’t like Jews, doesn’t like Jews living among Muslims and doesn’t like Jews being alive at all. They may be separated by seven centuries, but Isabella and UNRWA, which has actively promoted Hamas-style antisemitism in its schools, have a huge amount in common when it comes to the Jewish people.
Were Hamas to succeed in its goal of eliminating Israel as a sovereign state, we might well expect an announcement to that end not dissimilar to the Alhambra Declaration. Those Jews who survived the destruction of their only state would, if they were lucky, be given four months to liquidate their assets, hand over their properties to “returning” Palestinian refugees and make their way out of the country. No doubt some would figure out a way to stay—probably by hiding their Jewish identities and attempting to integrate with the rest of the population, as those Jews who remained in Spain after the expulsion did. UNRWA, by a twist of historical irony, might even offer to shepherd their exit within parameters set by Hamas that would prevent forever any possibility of returning. While such a scenario may seem improbable today, if history has taught us anything, it’s that it’s not improbable tomorrow.
The history of antisemitism has been captured in a simple formula: You have no right to live among us as Jews; you have no right to live among us; you have no right to live.
Fundamentally, the problem here is that too many states—not just Turkey, Iran, Russia, North Korea, China and other citadels of authoritarian rule, but democracies as well—believe that the way to convince the Palestinians to accept peace is by kowtowing to their jealously guarded victimhood status.
By the end of this month, it’s likely that several European Union member states, including Spain and also Ireland, Malta, Slovenia and Belgium, will have unilaterally recognized an independent Palestinian state. Albares is one of the foreign ministers actively promoting the fiction that such a move will bolster, rather than undermine, the prospects for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel that will coexist peacefully.
Deep down, you have to believe that Albares knows that’s simply not true—that most Palestinians, as successive opinion polls since Oct. 7 have borne out, regard a state alongside Israel not as a final settlement but a step towards conquering the entire land “from the river to the sea.” These are the stakes that Israel has to contend with when it deals with diplomats and other foreign officials quietly sympathetic to the idea that the Jewish state shouldn’t be there in the first place.
Isabella the Catholic would be proud.
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The UN’s World of the Absurd
Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, delivers a speech remotely at the UN General Assembly 76th session General Debate in UN General Assembly Hall at the United Nations Headquarters on Friday, September 24, 2021 in New York City. Photo by John Angelillo/UPI Pool via REUTERS
JNS.org – Only in the world of the absurd can a despicable purveyor of terror, Hamas, carry out a brutal massacre, killing over a thousand innocent people, torturing, murdering and carrying out sadistic mass rape, over a space of just a few hours, and then run home to Gaza taking with them hundreds of hostages.
Only in the world of the absurd can the Palestinian representative organization that encourages, finances, supports and represents such murderers be feted and upgraded by the majority of member states in the international community.
Only in the world of the absurd can a group of non-democratic, terror-supporting states oblige the United Nations General Assembly by proposing a resolution that indulges in pampering a terror-supporting entity in a misguided and surreal demonstration of naïveté, skewed political correctness and acute hypocrisy.
Only in the same world of the absurd can 143 states parrot their support for what they blindly proclaim to be a “two-state solution” without really understanding what they are talking about out of ignorance and stupidity.
Only in the world of the absurd can the majority of the international community deliberately ignore the openly declared genocidal intentions of Iran, Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in their efforts to eliminate the Jewish state and kill all Jews. And this, while at the same time upgrading the Palestinian representation in the United Nations.
Lastly, only in the world of the absurd can all this happen at the same time as incited and handsomely financed and organized groups of violent, hysterical, antisemitic demonstrators occupy campuses and town centers in U.S. and European cities, calling for the elimination of the only Jewish state.
Shooting blanks for statehood
Despite the artificial hype surrounding this resolution, the bottom line is that this upgrade does not grant the Palestinians the status of statehood or U.N. membership that they wished to receive. The U.N. General Assembly has neither authority nor jurisdiction to establish states and grant membership status without Security Council sanction.
The sad naïveté and hypocrisy of those states that proposed and voted in favor of this abnormal new General Assembly resolution are evident in their stated determination in the body of the resolution to the effect that “the State of Palestine is qualified for membership in the U.N. in accordance with article 4 of the U.N. Charter.”
But the U.N. Charter article 4 requires that United Nations membership be open to “all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter.”
One may legitimately ask if the self-respecting states voting in favor of this resolution, including Russia, China, Norway, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, and E.U. member states Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain, genuinely believe that the Palestinians are, or could be a “peace-loving state,” or is this just self-delusion, artificial political correctness or naive wishful thinking?
International law requires the fulfillment of universally accepted criteria for statehood, including control of a defined population and territory and enforcement of the rule of law, none of which the Palestinian Authority has ever fulfilled. This is in addition to the Charter requirement of being a peace-loving state, assuming responsible governance and the capability of respecting international obligations. Therefore, it is clear that this resolution is nothing more than a sad and miserable fiction, a sham.
Clearly, no element of the Palestinian political existence—neither the infamous and brutal terror organization Hamas nor the terror-supporting PLO and its Palestinian Authority—can seriously claim to fulfill such criteria.
Like all General Assembly resolutions, the resolution is not binding, only recommendatory. It does not represent international law and only reflects the political views of those states that proposed and supported it.
The various modalities listed in the resolution for improving the seating, establishing a speaking order of the Palestinian delegates in the General Assembly’s chamber and other U.N. bodies, and upgrading their participation in meetings and conferences are cosmetic, symbolic lip-service.
Despite its call for full Palestinian membership, the resolution distinctly denies and negates any notion of full membership in the United Nations. As such, the Palestinian delegation remains nothing more than an observer delegation, wherever and however they may be seated.
The resolution stresses that they have no entitlement to vote and have no right to membership in U.N. organs, including the Security Council.
The violations inherent in the resolutions
However, in the context of the Palestinian obligations set out in the Oslo Accords, this attempted change of status constitutes a serious and fundamental violation of the agreed obligation not to change the status of the territories pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.
The Palestinian leadership and Israel agreed that all outstanding issues, including the permanent status of the territories, must be resolved through negotiations and cannot be determined by unilateral action, whether in the United Nations or anywhere else.
Even the United Nations itself, in several resolutions, has given its endorsement to the Oslo Accords as the only agreed-upon means to resolve the Israel-Palestinian dispute.
Similarly, the European Union, Russia, Egypt and Norway, together with the United States, are signatories to the Oslo Accords as witnesses. A vote in favor of this new resolution by these witnesses undermines the Oslo Accords and is contrary to the accepted obligations of states and organizations that witness international agreements.
Indeed, by supporting this new resolution, they seek to bypass the requirements in the Oslo Accords for the negotiation of the permanent status of the territories and attempt to prejudge the outcome of any such negotiations unilaterally.
Despite this resolution’s artificial and ineffectual symbolic and cosmetic aspects, the overall result of the exercise is nevertheless grave and unfortunate. It will be seen by Hamas and the Palestinian leadership as a green light from the international community for them to continue to support and conduct terrorism.
The regrettable message emanating from this resolution is that the international community is not just ignoring Palestinian terror against a fellow U.N. member state; it is encouraging it.
Originally published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
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Is God Protecting Us?
Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (1659), by Rembrandt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – It’s been a tumultuous, emotional roller coaster of a week in Israel and around the Jewish world: Memorials, moments of silence and then celebrations, albeit muted and rather subdued under our current difficult circumstances.
In this week’s parsha, Emor, we read about the required standards of behavior of the Kohanim, the Priestly tribe. They are not permitted to come into contact with the dead and their marriage choices are more limited than the average Israelite.
We also find the commandment of Kiddush Hashem. Every Jew, not only a Kohen, is expected to sanctify the name of God. Sometimes, this means actually giving up one’s life for the faith, as millions of our brethren have done throughout the ages. For most of us, however, it means behaving in a way that will bring praise to the God of Israel. When we act morally, ethically and righteously, people generally respect us, and this brings credit to our God and our faith.
Way back at this very first revelation at the Burning Bush, Moses was told by God that we were expected to become a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” When we have lived up to that calling, we have indeed been a “light unto the nations.”
Today, Israel is confronted with a world in which hypocrisy has reached proportions unheard of in the annals of history. The whole planet seems to have lost its moral bearings, and frankly, its senses. Even our friends are pressuring us, and now threatening and extorting us, too.
Yet we must do what we must do. Will all the hundreds of precious, young lives snuffed out be in vain if we don’t finish the job in Gaza?
Things seem very confusing. On the one hand, we recently witnessed the incredibly miraculous hand of God protecting us from a 300-plus missile and drone attack by Iran. The 99.9% success rate of our defenses simply cannot be explained militarily or scientifically. On the other hand, we have lost hundreds of our best brave defenders. Where was God there? Is there a contradiction here?
This is shaping up to be nothing less than an existential war for our very survival. The question is: Are we safe or not? Is God protecting us or not?
My mind goes back to 1991 and the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein of unblessed memory was threatening Israel with his lethal Scud missiles and even chemical weapons. Israel was distributing gas masks to every citizen in case of a chemical attack by the vicious dictator.
Iraq had invaded Kuwait. The United States warned Iraq to get out and gave it a deadline. It was not our battle. Israel has no border with Iraq and the war had nothing to do with Israel. Yet Saddam was threatening us and America provided Israel with the Patriot missile-defense system and asked us to stay out of it. The United States would deal with Iraq.
So they did, but not before Iraq had fired dozens of Scud missiles at Israel. Miraculously, there was not a single fatality.
I remember clearly how the whole Jewish world was petrified at the time. There were prayer meetings and emergency fundraisers for Israel in Jewish communities around the world, including ours.
There was one lone voice in the wilderness, however, who declared that Israel was safe and would be safe from any such attacks. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, went further and advised the Israeli government that gas masks would not be needed. How right he was.
Here in South Africa, the Zionist Federation was organizing a solidarity mission to Israel. The Rebbe encouraged us to join and several of my Chabad colleagues went with me, along with the late Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris. I even took along my 12-year-old daughter, Zeesy. She was the youngest member of the mission.
It is my personal belief that Israel was miraculously protected by God from the Iraqi Scuds because Israel was simply minding its own business. It was attacked for no reason whatsoever. We had done nothing to compromise our security. The heavenly Guardian of Israel responded accordingly.
Similarly, in the recent Iranian attack, we were completely innocent targets. We have no border with Iran and they have zero justification for being involved. So, we suffered not one fatality. Again, God watched over us miraculously.
But when we make strategic mistakes in our approach to Hamas; when we allow international pressure and public opinion to endanger the lives of our valiant young soldiers; when we refrain from bombing and instead send them into booby-trapped buildings; then, tragically, we suffer fatalities.
It’s one thing to boast about being the most moral army in the world (and we are), but is it wise to tell our enemies in advance when and where we are coming for them? We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Our unprecedented noble gestures have been completely ignored by the world, and we are still being accused of genocide. So shouldn’t we be sparing our innocent, precious boys from harm instead?
I am fond of quoting Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who once said, “It doesn’t matter what the world says. It matters what the Jews do.” How true.
I believe that when we do what we must do, then God does what He must do. May we merit His Divine protection now and always and may our defenders be completely safe and successful.
Please God, we will practice Kiddush Hashem by behaving as noble examples of humanity rather than as martyrs in a war in which, sometimes, we seem to be fighting with our hands tied behind our backs. Six million was enough martyrs. Not one more, please God.
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