אין קאַרלטאָן, אַ געגנט אין מעלבורן, האָט מען אַ מאָל געהערט ייִדיש אויף דער גאַס; געגאַנגען אויף בונדישע פֿאַרזאַמלונגען און אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, און געזונגען ייִדישע לידער.

‫אין אָט דער וועלט איז אויפֿגעוואַקסן דער שרײַבער אַרנאָלד זייבל, אַ קינד פֿון בונדישע אימיגראַנטן פֿון פּוילן. זונטיק, דעם 15טן נאָוועמבער, 7 אַ זייגער אין אָוונט ניו־יאָרקער צײַט, וועט אלי בענעדיקט, פֿון דער ייִדיש־ליגע, פֿירן אַ זום־שמועס מיט זייבלען וועגן זײַנע קינדער־יאָרן אין מעלבורן — דער עיקר, וועגן די ייִדישע שולן, טעאַטערס, לידער און די מענטשן וואָס האָבן געשאַפֿן יענע וועלט.

זיי וועלן אויך אַרומרעדן ווי אַזוי די זכרונות פֿון יענער וועלט לעבן ווײַטער אין זײַנע ביכער.

אַרנאָלד זייבל איז אַ שרײַבער, דערציילער און אַקטיוויסט פֿאַר מענטשנרעכט. זײַנע ביכער, וואָס זענען אויף ענגליש, באַהאַנדלען טעמעס פֿון אימיגראַציע, זכּרון און גלות. צווישן זײַנע באַקאַנטע ביכער געפֿינען זיך „קאַפֿע שעהעריזאַד“ און „בריליאַנטן און אַש“.

די אונטערנעמונג איז פֿרײַ פֿון אָפּצאָל. כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.

The post Zoom chat: Memories of Yiddish and Bund gatherings in Melbourne appeared first on The Forward.

AUSTIN, Texas – In an old churchhouse in Austin, with light streaming through the arched windows, a man wearing a cowboy hat and strumming an acoustic guitar croons the classic Willie Nelson ballad, “I thought about you, Lord.”

Along with his cowboy hat, the singer is also wearing a tallit. His bandmates, plucking at the bass and playing the drums, choose a different type of headcovering: yarmulkes. Welcome to Shabbat at Moontower Minyan, held at a former church turned artist collective.

Rabbi Dan Ain and his wife, poet Alana Joblin Ain, started Moontower Minyan shortly after the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — when many Jews in Austin who didn’t have ties to a community sought meaningful ways to express their Judaism and meet others seeking a similar creative outlet.

“We wanted to have experiences where we didn’t feel locked into expressing Judaism in only one monolithic way,” said the rabbi, who moved to Austin from San Francisco at the end of the COVID pandemic. “We wanted to experience the diversity of what it could be in this town in order to be more human and more alive.”

In a population of more than 2.5 million in the greater Austin area, more than 62,000 are Jewish. According to a recent study of Austin by the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, 44% of Jewish adults have lived in Greater Austin for less than one decade, while just 10% were raised locally.

The Ains are two of the 11,800 who have lived in the city for less than five years – part of a larger trend of people from the coasts coming to Austin to find something more laidback and affordable. With Moontower Minyan, they are trying to infuse that vibe into Judaism, along with a healthy dose of country tunes.

Think Purim pageants with country ballads about Esther, prayers sung to bluegrass melodies or a Honky Tonk Hanukkah with two-step lessons. Ain says Moontower Minyan is doing what Diaspora Jews have always done: blending local culture and their religion. And in a city once dubbed the “Live Music Capital of the World,” a minyan would not be authentically Austin without live music.

Though services often include traditional prayers, they also include bluegrass, jazz and other melodies. In addition, congregants take turns “making offerings,” which at Moontower means taking up a mic or an instrument and joining the band.

“If you go to a traditional synagogue, you’ll often hear melodies that are German,” Ain said. “If you go to a Reform synagogue, you might hear Debbie Friedman melodies, which are from the 1960s.”

“These are aesthetic choices, and the people that I’m meeting in Texas want to figure out ‘How do we create a Jewish community that looks and feels and sounds like us without it having to be reflected through how Eastern European Jewry looked and felt?’” he added.

David Rabinowicz, 32, moved from Boston five years ago with aspirations of gaining a foothold in the music scene. He quickly found his footing, but after Oct. 7, a lot of his industry friends turned their backs.

“I lost a pretty significant amount of my community,” he said. “A lot of the arts got dominated by anti-Jewish sentiments. It became very clear to me very quickly: I wished I had invested some time into building a Jewish community, in part as a safety net, and it became clear to me that was a very important thing to me missing from my life.”

Determined to do more “Jewish things,” he attended a Shabbat dinner where he met Ain and eventually became creative director of Moontower Minyan.

“It’s done a lot for me to get to take these ostensibly different sides of my life and not only have them coexist, but actively feed off of each other,” he said.

Jew Boom

Ain, now 50, hadn’t always planned to be a rabbi. He graduated law school, took the bar exam, and was about to begin practicing in Manhattan when 9/11 happened.

“I felt a calling to serve the Jewish people, in particular those who — like me — felt called back to their faith,” he said.

The following year, Ain enrolled in rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, part of the Conservative movement. For two decades now, he has served Jews both through traditional congregations and independent minyanim, creating start-up projects with his wife, including a Brooklyn-based group called Because Jewish, which offered musical meditations.

Raised in Long Island, he never saw himself living in the Lone Star State.

Little did he know, for more than a century, Austin had been home to a small Jewish population until 1968, when the community began to grow. Since then it has grown 20-fold, one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in the U.S. University of Texas at Austin,

the flagship of the University of Texas system, has had much to do with that growth, bringing Jewish professors and students from all over the country.

As Austin became a center for high-tech industry, more Jewish adults moved there in the 1980s to work for companies like IBM, Texas Instruments and Motorola. But it was a single company, started by a Jewish UT Austin student, Michael Dell, that really made the city’s Jewish population explode: Dell Computers.

The company transformed Austin from a medium-sized college town to a booming tech-hub, drawing workers from across the country. In 2000, Michael Dell shaped the Jewish community in another way, creating the Dell Jewish Community Campus, which hosts the city’s JCC, federation, a day school and three synagogues.

Austin saw another boom during the COVID pandemic, when the Austin metro area’s population grew by 15 %. Moving to Austin in 2022 from San Francisco where Dan was a rabbi at a Conservative congregation, the Ains became part of this boom.

But the suburban-style Texas sprawl of Austin covers nearly 320 square miles, a footprint larger than New York City. Only 13% of Austin’s Jewish

families live in close proximity to the Dell campus in northwest Austin. For the Ains and many other Austin residents, getting there is practically a road trip. That might explain in part why the Brandeis study found that only

15% of Jewish households belong to a Jewish congregation either locally or elsewhere.

Light up the Texas night

Moontower Minyan fills a void in more ways than one.

Ellie Cohen, 23, is one of the few members of Moontown who was born and raised in Austin. She left for college at the University of California in Los Angeles, then came back, hoping to take advantage of the laid back vibe and musical culture. But she discovered her hometown, whose slogan famously used to be “Keep Austin Weird,” now wasn’t all that different from other American cities with high tech hubs and corporate headquarters.

As the city has become a destination, it’s also gotten more expensive. Artists have been priced out and homegrown live music venues have shuttered. For Cohen, worshiping with Moontown Minyan conjures what she missed.

“I didn’t think Jewish life could be cool in Austin, Texas,” Cohen said. “Judaism is such an intimate way to get to

know people. I love what Moontower is doing to awaken that in a lot of people.”

Moontower Minyan’s name is inspired by Austin’s history. More than a century ago Austin erected its first “moontowers,” 165-foot steel lighting structures to light up the darkness. The city still has 17 in use today, and they even got a shout out in the film “Dazed and Confused,” where the characters party under a moontower.

Dan Ain likes the imagery of a light in the darkness: “lighting up like a menorah, wanting to light up the Texas night, is a nice feeling for us.”

The minyan’s monthly Shabbats, held at the Something Cool Studios artist collective, draw around 60 people. High Holiday services were standing room only.

The Ains are even expanding the community into the area’s Hill Country, a rapidly-growing area right outside the city.

“When you leave a service that he does, you feel really good about yourself, and you feel really good about being Jewish,” said Sarah Kline, a mother of four who lives in the Hill Country town Dripping Springs. “That’s what I want my kids to feel.”

Phill Brush, a bluegrass bassist and singer who regularly performs at Moontower Minyan, had never thought to incorporate his Judaism into this bluegrass.

“Rabbi Dan is the first rabbi I hung out with since I graduated Hebrew school,” said Brush.

“His service style is not the typical sit down and say the prayers that we always say, and do that,” said Brush. “He is building and cultivating his own style and interpretation of spirituality, especially based around art and music, which resonates with me.”

Moontower Minyan even inspired Brush to start a new band, “Old Time Religion,” which sings bluegrass songs about stories from the Hebrew Bible and has become Moontower Minyan’s house band.

At a recent Shabbat dinner with Moontower’s leadership team, Alana Joblin Ain covered her eyes as she recited the blessings over the Shabbat flames. Dan Ain blessed the wine and challah, tore the  bread and tossed chunks to guests across the table as he delivered a d’var Torah based on the parsha. He compared the Tower of Babel, built after the flood, to an ancient AI data center. Both illustrate humanity’s tendency toward self-preservation and conformity in the face of fear.

“God comes down and says this is not good,” he explained. “It’s not good if we lose the point of being human, which is to express our creativity and our individuality and our humanity the way God intended.”

“If you want to think about sort of after a tragedy when a lot of people wanted to get together and express their Jewish identity,” he said, referring to Oct. 7, “we’ve begun to create a space where people can do it in a way that feels authentic.”

The post At Moontower Minyan, cowboy hats meet kippot appeared first on The Forward.

The oak rolltop desk I write on was once the reception station at the Crystal Hotel on the Bowery. Back in the 1930s, a man could rent a single bed, clean sheets and a foot locker in a large barracks-style room at the Crystal for less than a dollar a night; some lived there until the hotel closed in the late 1960s.

I like to think of myself as a 3rd generation citizen of the Bowery. For 65 years, my grandfather and father worked on the Bowery, manufacturing store fixtures in the building that was once the Crystal Hotel and before that a Vaudeville theater named Miner’s. I remember the signs on the wall that warned against spitting and smoking in bed. Even as I live and work elsewhere, I feel connected to the place.

I love to walk the mile-or-so stretch in lower Manhattan from Chatham Square, where the oldest thoroughfare in New York City begins, to its northern reach on East 4th Street at Cooper Square. And I love the layers of history so visible on its streetscape. First a Lenape Indian pathway and then a popular route for Dutch farmers, the Bowery (from bouwerijs, the Dutch word for farms) hosted later waves of businesses, breweries, bars, theaters, artists’ lofts, lodging houses for people with nowhere else to go and social service agencies to help them; today, there are even some bespoke shops and a Chabad.

While the Bowery has had a reputation as “Skid Row” or “Devil’s Mile” — the title of an engaging exhibit now at The New Museum through Jan. 31, 2027 — for me, it’s alive with stories. It’s a wide avenue where the pace is quick, the energy is high and the architecture is wildly varied, highlighting one of the widest views of the sky in this city.

On a sunny fall day, light bounces off the glass storefronts and the metal restaurant equipment being unloaded onto the sidewalk. The street’s Honey Locust and London Plane trees are lovely but sparse, so there’s no leafy canopy blocking the view. Most seats along the stretch north of Delancey are BYO: Several men face the sunlight, sitting outside buildings in a cluster of abandoned office chairs, crates and a beat-up recliner.

The light wasn’t always this brilliant: From 1878 to 1956, the Third Avenue Elevated train cast the sidewalks and street into shadow, as seen in the celebrated photographer Weegee’s stark image in the New Museum exhibition, “Under the Third Avenue El, 1943-45.”

The exhibition provides a beautifully detailed overview of 400 years of Bowery history, culture and tumult, with early maps, paintings, playbills, contemporary sculpture, photographs by Harvey Wang from the book Flophouse: Life on the Bowery, and a 19th century fire vehicle that hasn’t been seen on the Bowery since 1840. The royal blue, gold-trimmed “Lady Washington Engine Co. No. 40, Hand Pumper Fire Engine,” with painted classical scenes on the front and back was used by a volunteer fire brigade who, despite their elegant carriage, were known as a brutal street gang.

The Bowery was the city’s first entertainment district, with serious theater in the early 19th century and later on melodrama, magic shows, tap dancing (born on the Bowery), minstrel shows and Yiddish, Chinese and Italian theaters.  A host of performers known as human curiosities filled the stages of dime museums. Peter Stuyvesant, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln all showed up on the Bowery, as did P.T. Barnum, who started his career selling “quack medicines and bear grease” at a dry goods store at 101 Bowery.

The site of the New Museum was once the London Theatre, which later became the Lipzen Theatre and Gabel’s Theatre, which staged Yiddish productions. And, a few blocks south is the footprint of the theater in my family’s history, Miner’s Bowery Theatre, established in 1878. Harry Miner was a former police officer, firefighter and pharmacist, who first owned the London Theatre before renovating this one. He helped launch the career of Eddie Cantor; Al Jolson sang and W.C. Fields juggled here. Miner also pioneered Amateur Night — and the “hook,” a wooden cane used to yank lesser performers off the stage. In 1929, the theater burned down.

I came across a photograph online of the top of the Crystal Hotel’s Art Deco façade. I reached out to the person who posted the image and met Kunihide Nakajima, a 3rd generation Japanese master sushi chef who also loves Bowery history. His gorgeous namesake restaurant, Nakaji, opened on the site of the 1826 Bowery Theatre, which later became the Thalia and a home to Yiddish theater. That building burned down six times, was rebuilt 5 times, but was completely destroyed, also in 1929.

“All you have to do is look up,” Nakajima says. “History is still there.”

I had to look twice at a photo in the exhibition that’s part of Martha Rosler’s installation of text and images from the 1970s to see the signage from my father’s business reflected back in the window of a cash register store across the Bowery.

Two decades ago, when I last reported on the Bowery for The New York Times, I walked around with my father, who was treated with much respect as the street’s elder statesman. Then, grand performances at the Amato Opera House were still being staged. The Amato family closed what was billed as the world’s smallest opera house in 2009. The Neoclassical building, originally a cigar factory and then a mission for the homeless, is now a Japanese restaurant with a mezuzah on its door and luxury apartments.

A few blocks north on the corner of Bowery and 1st Street, I couldn’t resist trying a blend of coffee called Marky Ramone’s Bowery Beat, a nod to the neighborhood’s punk history, at Adios Amigos – named for the Ramones’ breakup album. Sipping the robust coffee on a stool at the window, I looked out at the Bowery, much as I enjoyed doing when I was a child in the window of my father’s shop. I used to wave at the passersby back then; this time, I just watched a carnival of dog walkers carrying drinks more likely to be iced matcha than Wild Irish Rose (the favored drink of the Crystal Hotel crowd). I watched people pushing baby carriages or laundry carts filled with belongings, bicyclists, tourists with large shopping bags, a man inching forward trying to get his mismatched shoe back on, a woman with long gray hair pushing a walker, wearing the most colorful jacket I’ve ever seen.

At 202 Bowery, the Plato Gallery is hosting Shuto Okayasu’s solo exhibition of urban scenes. The exhibition’s title, “Impermanence,” seems fitting for this street. The New York-based Japanese artist cites the Buddhist concept that life is changing, constantly, and beauty can be found in fleeing moments.

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