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‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties

(New York Jewish Week) — The Geiks weren’t your typical Bronx working-class Jewish family. 

One brother ran a mob-protected trucking company in Manhattan’s Garment District. Another brother, an NYPD detective, chauffeured organized crime couriers around the city with illicit cash. Their kid sister visited a Las Vegas casino where the tween was set up with a couple of slot machines in a private room. 

And a close family friend was sent up the river for killing a notorious Jewish gangster.

Meet the family whose close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz,” a memoir just published by Alan Geik.

Dutch Schultz was the mob name of Arthur Flegenheimer, the Jewish bootlegger and numbers racket kingpin who left this mortal coil in October 1935 at the Palace Chop House in Newark. The triggermen were two Jews, members of the organized crime group Murder Inc. Mendy Weiss and Charles “Bug” Workman, the Uncle Charlie of the memoir’s title, did the hit. 

Workman, who reportedly killed more than 20 people before pleading guilty to the murder of Dutch Schultz, was not a blood relative of author Alan Geik. But Workman grew up with Geik’s father on the Lower East Side and was so close to the Geik family he was considered an uncle. The author was in his 20s when he first met Workman, after the hitman was released from a New Jersey prison in 1964.

“I would never think of calling him anything but Uncle Charlie,” said Geik, 80, a retired TV producer and radio host who lives in Las Vegas.

In addition to diving deep into Workman’s story, the book also explores how Jewish mobsters and their hangers-on fought antisemitism, beat up Nazis and helped a fledgling Israel acquire arms for its War of Independence.  

“These were people, from the first generation of Jews in America, who fought back against antisemitism in the streets,” Geik said. “Their parents fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe. They were not going to let it happen again and they didn’t.”  

Geik’s book joins a crowded shelf of histories and memoirs of the Jewish mob, including “But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters,” by Robert A. Rockaway, and “Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams,” by Rich Cohen. Like those books, Geik’s family history provides a sort of reverse image of typical Jewish immigrant stories: Instead of scrapping their way up from New York’s Jewish enclaves into retail and the professions, Geik’s family joined a criminal counterculture. 

Alan Geik’s family’s close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in a just-published memoir, “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz.” (Sonador Publishing)

Books such as Geik’s “really put a personal experience to this whole world that we all know about, the world of New York mobsters,” said Larry Henry, author of a monthly column for the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. “The public’s appetite for mob stories is insatiable.”

“Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz” describes a tangled family tree ripe with, well, rotten apples. Geik’s father, Lou, was not actually in the mob but did reap benefits from his ties with organized crime, Alan concedes. Lou Geik was one of several individuals who delivered mob cash to Workman’s family over 23 years.

“Uncle Charlie felt indebted to my father,” said Geik.

The author’s father is cited as a source for many of the anecdotes included in the memoir. Geik said that while his father’s business relied on mob protection, Lou Geik didn’t have “that extra whatever-it-took to be a really hardened criminal” — a trait, he said, his own older brother Bernard also lacked.

“My brother always wanted to be a gangland figure,” said Alan Geik. “So, instead my brother became a policeman.”

An ultimately very corrupt policeman. Bernard Geik joined the force in 1962 and resigned in 1971 after serving in the notorious Special Investigative Unit, which, as depicted in the book and the motion picture “Prince of the City,” devolved into an extortion ring. After resigning from the NYPD, Bernard Geik was arrested for bribery and bribe-taking in 1974. He reportedly pleaded guilty but served no time. 

The disgraced detective went to work at his father’s trucking company. According to the author, his brother was one of the detectives provided by a supervisor to drive their Uncle George and other mobsters around town when they were transporting mob money in New York.

Uncle George Gordon was a real uncle. Gordon is allegedly one of the gangsters the actor George Raft modeled himself after for his roles in 1930s and ’40s crime melodramas. For decades, beginning at a casino and speakeasy near the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, Gordon had a big hand in organized crime’s gambling operations, supervising enterprises in Florida, the Midwest, Las Vegas and Havana. 

Alan Geik isn’t the only keeper of his family’s convoluted story. His sister Iris has her own memories of growing up mob-adjacent, such as when she and her parents were Gordon’s guests at the Stardust Hotel in Vegas when the mob was running its casino and skimming cash from the profits. Gordon wanted Lou Geik to work there.

According to Iris, Gordon posted a guard outside a private room in which she had been ensconced with a couple of slot machines. The 13-year-old was “mesmerized” by the slot machines. Her mother was initially unaware of what was going on.

“Uncle Charlie” Workman, seen in 1941, pled guilty to the 1935 murder of mobster Dutch Schultz and was given a life sentence. (NYPD)

“I was having a blast,” Iris Geik said. “I’ll never forget when the door flung open and my itty-bitty mother came in with a big guard behind her. She immediately made me stop [playing with the slot machine] and give back the money I had won.”

Iris Geik, now a privacy lawyer in the Boston area, has written hundreds of pages of her own memoir about the wives and girlfriends of the Jewish gangsters, tentatively titled, “The View From the Women’s Table.”

“Their lives were complex but they were also heimische Jewish women,” she said, using the Yiddish word for cozy and familiar. She and her father eloped because they were a mixed couple: Her mother Reba was a Sephardic Jew and her father was Ashkenazi.

Geik remembered that as a child she noticed a newspaper article about a family friend being arrested. She said, “Mom! Mom! Look, we’re famous.” To which her mother replied, “That’s infamous, dear.”

Geik said that on several occasions her mother observed: “There are no second-generation Jewish mobsters. Jews don’t make gangsters out of their children.”

Reba Geik had been involved in caring for two of Iris’ aunts who lived in Brooklyn while they were dying. Those acts of kindness had a profound impact on Uncle George, the casino supervisor.

After the aunts passed away, Gordon always stood when Reba entered a room, Iris said. “My mother was very honored by that because he was such a big shot.”

Throughout her life, Reba Geik remained close to Sylvia Lorber, a friend from her teenage years. Lorber was the only mob mistress her mother would spend time with, said Iris. Lorber was the paramour of two Jewish gangsters: Benny Kassop, the brother of Murder, Inc. gunman Sammy Kassop, and Sam “Red” Levine, an observant Jew who wore a kippah under his fedora. Levine won the affection of Lorber while the Kassop brothers were in Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York. 

“Sylvia was a hell of a lot of fun but my mother worried about her,” Iris said. “Sylvia told me her stories, which were kind of glamorous when she was young but sad when she was older.” After spending 20 years with Levine, Lorber couldn’t attend his funeral. Sylvia Lorber stopped talking to Reba Geik in her last years.

Jewish gangsters do, on occasion, display some altruism in Alan Geik’s memoir. Take Moe Dalitz, the head of the Cleveland Syndicate. He was a major bootlegger during Prohibition whose flotillas of illegal liquor on the Great Lakes came to be known as The Little Jewish Navy. His family ran legitimate laundry businesses in Boston and Detroit. Too old to be drafted during World War II, he enlisted at the age of 42 and was commissioned as a lieutenant. Dalitz ran the military laundry service on New York’s Governor’s Island — but declined to bunk in the island’s barracks, opting instead to stay at a swanky hotel overlooking Central Park. 

Then there was Johnny Eder, a major source for Geik’s narrative. Eder was part of the Lower East Side teenage crime crew that included Uncle Charlie and Uncle George. As an adult he was a major fence for stolen jewelry and always had a bag of stolen rings on him. Eder also had many connections at City Hall and in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. 

According to Geik’s account, Eder was the mob’s representative to the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force in Palestine. Eder arranged meetings in the noisy kitchen of the Copacabana, a mob hangout, between Haganah agents and mobsters and others described as “former wartime U.S. intelligence agents” working to secure weapons for Israel’s War of Independence. (The late Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s longtime mayor, would tell a story about passing cash to an intermediary at the Copacabana, who brought the money to an Irish sea caption with a ship full of munitions bound for the Holy Land. The bagman, according to Kollek, was Frank Sinatra.)  

Author Alan Geik’s father-in-law, Lou Lenart, left, and other fighter pilots in front of Avia-S-199 plane. Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to the Holy Land for use in the War of Independence. (Courtesy of Boaz Dvir)

Alan Geik has a very personal connection to the creation of the Jewish state. His late wife Nina was the daughter of Lou Lenart, a World War II fighter pilot who served in the U.S. Marines. Geik’s memoir details how the elder Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to Palestine for use in Israel’s War of Independence. Lenart’s story was featured in Nancy Spielberg’s 2014 documentary “Above and Beyond,” about the creation of the Israeli air force. 

The story of how Jewish gangsters used some violent muscle against Nazi sympathizers in New York has been told before in historical accounts, but one episode in Geik’s memoir is particularly dramatic. A pair of Jews attended a Bund rally at Camp Siegfried on Long Island, a summer camp that taught Nazi ideology, and were offered a ride back to the city by a Nazi sympathizer who they ended up beating senseless in Brooklyn.

Alan Geik was not really hungry when he met Meyer Lansky at a Central Park hotel in the late 1950s. The gangster asked the 15-year-old nephew of George Gordon if he wanted a pastrami sandwich. Geik declined. Then Lansky, who struck Geik as an “older Jewish man who I knew was really powerful,” suggested that they split one. It was an offer that Geik did not refuse.

—
The post ‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Tidbits: This Jewish couple gives homeless dogs a free makeover

Tidbits is a Forverts feature of easy news briefs in Yiddish that you can listen to or read, or both! If you read the article and don’t know a word, just click on it and the translation appears. Listen to the report here:

אַ גרויסער בלאָער משׂא־פֿור האָט זיך אָפּגעשטעלט אויף אַ גאַס אין סקיד־ראָו, אַ באַקאַנטער אָרעמער געגנט אין לאָס־אַנדזשעלעס, פֿאַר אַ היימלאָזן מענטש מיט אַ הינטל.

„אײַער הינטל וויל אפֿשר מע זאָל אים צופּוצן אַ ביסל?“ האָט דער מאַן אינעם אויטאָ געפֿרעגט. לכתּחילה האָט דער היימלאָזער אויסגעזען צעטומלט. דערנאָך האָט ער געגעבן אַ קוק אויף זײַן הינטל, וואָס ער האָט שוין ווער ווייסט ווי לאַנג נישט געבאָדן אָדער אָפּגעשוירן, און צוגעשאָקלט מיטן קאָפּ.

מיט אַ שעה שפּעטער איז דאָס הינטל אַרויס פֿונעם משׂא־פֿור, אויסזעענדיק ווי אַ גאָר אַנדער הינטל. זײַן פֿעל, וואָס איז פֿריִער געווען שמוציק און פֿאַרפּלאָנטערט, האָט מען אויסגעוואַשן, צוגעשוירן און געבערשט ביז ער איז געוואָרן ווייך און גלאַנציק. איידער ער איז אַרויס פֿון אויטאָ האָט מען אים געגעבן אַ נאַש, וואָס ער האָט פֿריילעך אײַנגעשלונגען.

די אָרגאַניזאַציע וואָס האָט אויסגעבאָדן דאָס הינטל, „האָליוווּד מאָביל גרומינג“, באַלאַנגט צו טשאָק און יעל רובין. במשך פֿון די פֿאַרגאַנגענע 11 יאָר, האָבן זיי און זייערע מיטאַרבעטער גערייניקט בערך 5,000 הינט פֿרײַ פֿון אָפּצאָל.

דאָס פּאָרפֿאָלק, וואָס האָט אימיגרירט פֿון ישׂראל, האָט אין 2001 לאַנצירט אַ געשעפֿט וואָס ברענגט אַ לוקסוס־ספּאַ צו פֿאַרמעגלעכע אייגנטימער פֿון הינט. אָבער דערנאָך האָבן זיי באַשלאָסן אַז זיי ווילן אויך העלפֿן די מענטשן מיט הינט, וואָס קענען נישט באַצאָלן דערפֿאַר: סײַ הינט וואָס געפֿינען זיך אין אַ מיקלט פֿאַר חיות, סײַ הינט וואָס וווינען מיט זייערע אייגנטימער אויף דער גאַס.

„אַ מאָל האָבן די אייגנטימער מורא אונדז איבערצוגעבן די הינט, אַפֿילו אויב זיי קענען וואַרטן  אין דרויסן,“ האָט יעל געזאָגט. „מיר לאָזן זיי אַרײַנקומען און זען וואָס מיר טוען. די הינט פֿילן זיך אויך בעסער. מע קען זען וויפֿל זיי האָבן הנאה פֿון דער באַהאַנדלונג און ווי עס שפּאַנט זיי אויס. דו ווײַזט זיי ליבע, גיסט זיי אַ נאַש, וואַסער צו טרינקען, און זיי באַצאָלן דיר מיט זייערע קושן.“

אויף דער פֿראַגע, צי זיי זאָרגן זיך נישט, וואָס וועט זײַן ווען די הינט גייען צוריק צו די האַרבע באַדינגונגען פֿון דער גאַס, האָט טשאָק באַטאָנט עטלעכע זאַכן: „זייערע אייגנטימער זענען תּמיד מיט זיי און פּאַסן אויף אויף זיי וויפֿל זיי קענען נאָר. די הינטלעך זענען זייערע ׳קינדער׳. עס זענען אויך דאָ אַ סך אָרגאַניזאַציעס וואָס באַזאָרגן זיי מיט עסן אומזיסט און אַנדערע זאַכן. זיי פֿאַרמאָגן ווייניק, אָבער זיי טוען דאָס בעסטע אויפֿצופּאַסן אויף זייערע הינט.“

צו לייענען וועגן דעם אויף ענגליש גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.

To read about this in English click here.

The post Tidbits: This Jewish couple gives homeless dogs a free makeover appeared first on The Forward.

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The tech worker campaigning for ‘Antisemite of the Week’ doesn’t want to talk about antisemitism

After accusations of discrimination led his San Francisco Tech Week event to be pulled from the schedule, a tech worker has decided to embrace his newfound notoriety.

Mostapha Benhenda cited security reasons last week when he denied an Israeli programmer admission to his AI hackathon event, explaining that he didn’t want the Israeli army to make participants’ electronics “explode in their faces and injure them.”

The Israeli tech worker — a former Israeli soldier named Adam Levi — posted the message online, leading sponsors to pull funding for the event. In the days since, Benhenda has begun openly campaigning for an “Antisemite of the Week” award from pro-Israel watchdog group StopAntisemitism.

“I am a competitor, I play to win, this prize will be my Ballon d’Or,” Benhenda said in a message to the Forward, referring to the annual prize for the world’s best soccer player.

Running this week through Sunday, San Francisco Tech Week draws tens of thousands of tech industry workers to hundreds of panels, competitions and parties across the Bay Area.

The saga began Sept. 29 when Levi posted a screenshot of Benhenda’s messages rejecting his RSVP to the event, called “Build Your Agentic Investment Bank Hackathon.” A page for the hackathon on the digital invitation platform Partiful claimed it had been co-sponsored by Tech Week and the convention’s founder, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Levi’s post was reshared on X more than 1,000 times, leading to the event’s de-listing by Tech Week organizers, who said on X that the event had violated the program’s terms of service.

Levi told The Algemeiner that Andreessen Horowitz told him the company had removed its sponsorship.

Benhenda, whose LinkedIn says he attended college in France, declined to participate in phone interviews. But in messages to the Forward, his response to accusations of antisemitism appeared to shift over a manner of days from defensiveness to bemusement.

When first reached for comment, Benhenda denied that his rejection of Levi was antisemitic at all. He said he banned Levi because his LinkedIn indicated service in the Israeli military’s secretive Unit 8200 during September 2024, when the intelligence unit was linked to the simultaneous detonation of thousands of pagers owned by Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon. (Levi declined to be interviewed, but said on X that “building explosive pagers was never my thing.”)

“I understand Adam’s disappointment, and his resulting emotional accusation of antisemitism, but he perfectly knows it’s unfounded,” Benhenda wrote Sept. 29, adding, “I hope that over the next weeks he will get more clarity about this.”

However, after StopAntisemitism posted about Benhenda on X, he seemed to lose interest in contesting the claim — and began leaning into it instead.

On Saturday, Benhenda shared StopAntisemitism’s post about him with a request.

“I am competing for the ‘Antisemite of the Week’ award at the San Francisco Tech Week,” he wrote. “Can you show your support/hate with a retweet?”

Founded in 2018 by a social media influencer who goes by Liora Rez, StopAntisemitism.org frequently bestows its “Antisemite of the Week” awards to public figures — a mix of elected officials, civic leaders and celebrities — who antagonize Israel.

Recent recipients of the award — which is not actually awarded weekly — have included actor Javier Bardem and Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Last month, StopAntisemitism sponsored an event where a speaker was later criticized for Islamophobic rhetoric. (Rez did not respond to a request for comment on that story, or for this one.)

Benhenda said in messages to the Forward on Monday afternoon that he did not know very much about the organization, but that he was pining for its distinction, given the group’s 350,000 followers on X.

“What matters isn’t the label, but who puts it,” he added. “Go big or go home, that’s the game in the Silicon Valley.”

Later, though, Benhenda insisted that he still did not understand the accusations of antisemitism against him. His refusal of Levi, he said, had been solely due to Levi’s involvement in the Israeli military.

Meanwhile, he is forging ahead with the hackathon, hosting it Tuesday on the streaming platform Discord for nearly 200 registered participants.

Benhenda blamed the “tremendous lobbying from the Zionist lobby” for the change. But the venue where he had initially planned to host the event indicated there was no change. The supposed host, a coworking space called Frontier Tower, said in an email it had never booked Benhenda’s event to begin with.

The post The tech worker campaigning for ‘Antisemite of the Week’ doesn’t want to talk about antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.

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Chef Alon Shaya shares the stories, resilience and recipes of World War II survivors

(JTA) — In 2015, while visiting Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, James Beard Award-winning chef Alon Shaya came face-to-face with a World War II artifact that moved him deeply.

It was a red cloth triangle — cut from a Nazi flag — embroidered with the names of a few dozen female prisoners at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

In a place where they were starving to death, he learned these women had formed a clandestine “food” club. Together, they talked about recipes, their Friday night Shabbat candlesticks and cherished memories of home.

That red cloth was “100% the catalyst,” Shaya said, for his deep interest in food as “an agent of survival, defiance and bringing people together.”

Now, 11 years after that defining moment in Jerusalem, Shaya’s second book, “Memories of a Good Meal: Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival,” is being published on Oct. 6. Co-authored with food historian June Hersh, the book gathers accounts from survivors and heroes of World War II, illustrating the outsized role that food — and the memory of it — played in human survival. While featuring 80 recipes, it functions as much as a history book as a cookbook.

“The recipes are there to support the stories,” Shaya said. “It’s not the other way around.”

Shaya and Hersh tell the stories of 10 distinct groups impacted by the war, including Jewish partisans, hidden children, Navajo code talkers, persecuted homosexuals, Japanese Americans, and Austrian and German Jews who built new lives in the Dominican Republic.

Alongside these narratives, the authors included family recipes preserved across generations. Where none survived or existed, Shaya crafted recipes using ingredients available to the book’s subjects during the war.

The opening chapter highlights a story particularly close to Shaya’s heart. In 2019, during a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Shaya was shown a tattered, 100-year-old, handwritten recipe collection from the Fenves family of Yugoslavia. Saved during the war by the family’s cook, Maris, the Hungarian-language notebook was eventually donated to the museum by survivor Steven Fenves.

Determined to bring those dishes back to life, Shaya worked with Fenves to translate the recipes, filling in missing elements like precise steps, exact measurements and oven temperatures.

“I really became a part of their family,” said Shaya, whose collaboration on what became known as the Rescued Recipes project has raised nearly $1 million for the Holocaust Museum to digitize historical documents and artifacts. “The family wouldn’t be here if Steven and his sister didn’t survive Auschwitz,” said Shaya.

Featured recipes from this chapter reflect the Hungarian culinary traditions of Fenves’s hometown of Subotica, including körözött (a spiced cheese spread) and authentic Hungarian goulash.

Other chapters explore how people sustained themselves despite meager resources. In the profile of Polish Jewish partisan Shalom Yoran — who subsisted largely on potatoes while hiding in the woods — Shaya developed recipes centered on the staple tuber, including Polish herring and potato salad, potato dinner rolls and potato, and pine nut doughnuts with blackberry caramel.

“Shalom’s wife, Varda, shared his story with us,” Shaya explained. “The partisans lived in a hole in the ground in the Polish forest through winters that reached minus-20 degrees, and they did that for four years. Potatoes were a huge part of their survival.”

For Sarah Pelz, executive editor at Harvest, the book’s publisher and the granddaughter of a partisan, the concept of the book resonated deeply, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks inside Israel. “The throughline here is the power of food and memory — the power of food to bring us together at a table, and to remind us who we are and where we come from,” she said in an interview.

“Alon’s message is powerful and necessary right now,” she continued. “He hopes that people will read this book, will cook from it, and that it will bring people together at the table, people of diverse backgrounds, people of diverse perspectives, that it will not just help to enlighten readers, to history and to what happened, but also help bring people together.”

In gathering these accounts across the globe, Shaya and Hersh faced a race against time, as most interviewees were well into their 90s or older. John Kinsel, one of the last living Navajo code talkers, was 107 years old when the authors visited him on the Navajo Nation reservation. His chapter details the vital role Native American Marines played by using their complex language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific theater. The book features recipes inspired by Navajo traditions, including blue corn mush and stuffed pumpkin with stewed lamb.

Throughout the project, Shaya couldn’t help but draw parallels between past atrocities and modern struggles.

“One of the lessons that struck home the most for me is that people will persecute you for what you believe in and gather together and create laws to persecute you,” he said. “We saw it in what happened with immigration in the 1940s, and we see it with what’s happening in America today.”

He was also struck by the role of propaganda, promulgated then by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, and today by bad actors on social media, in spreading hate and disinformation.

Some of the stories, like the meal prepared by nuns in a convent for a group of persecuted homosexual prisoners, seem almost cinematic in nature.

“I have definitely thought about turning these stories into a miniseries or a movie,” said Shaya. “Nobody has shown interest in it yet, but it is something that I think the more ways these stories can be shared, the better.”

Born in Israel and raised in Philadelphia, Shaya has become one of the country’s leading interpreters of Israeli and Middle Eastern cooking, with a distinctly Southern sensibility. His 2018 cookbook, “Shaya: An Odyssey of Food, My Journey Back to Israel,” blends memoir with recipes.

Shaya was committed to the latest book despite huge demands on his time. The chef and his wife, Emily, have two children, aged five and two. His Pomegranate Hospitality operates three restaurants, Saba and Safta’s Table in New Orleans, where he lives, and Safta in Denver. (Saba means grandfather and Safta means grandmother in Hebrew.) He is also involved in a variety of philanthropic work.

“The work I put into this book fills my heart and makes me feel good, like I’m doing something that builds me up and can have an impact,” said Shaya.

Shaya views the book as an educational tool.

“This book might engage a 13-year-old who really loves the chocolate cake recipe,” Shaya reflected. “If he or she hears the history behind that chocolate cake and delves into the history behind it, they learn that Austrian and German Jews took refuge in the Dominican Republic and wanted to keep their culinary traditions alive and need to use the local resources. That’s how a traditional Sacher torte-inspired tres leches cake came to be. Or a plantain latke, or matzo ball soup with avocado, lime and yucca.

“If those stories can come together and have that kind of impact on one 13-year-old in the world,” he added, “I will feel complete.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Chef Alon Shaya shares the stories, resilience and recipes of World War II survivors appeared first on The Forward.

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