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Extraordinary lives: 18 notable New York Jews who died in 2022
(New York Jewish Week) — Recalling the lives of what obituary writer Marilyn Johnson has called the “important dead” is one of the honors and pleasures of reading — and writing — daily journalism. Jewish tradition teaches that every life is of infinite value, but many people make their marks in ways that inspire readers to pause and ponder on the sheer variety of human endeavor.
In the case of the New York Jewish Week, we’ve been honored to remember those who died in 2022 and whose lives represent the diversity of Jewish experience and what it means to be a New Yorker. Below, we recall 18 Jewish New Yorkers whose contributions to religion, the arts, communal life, popular entertainment, public affairs or just their loving families were either the subject of an obituary that we had written, or who came to our attention thanks to their friends and relatives. May their memories be for a blessing.
David Henoch
Recent high school graduate who died doing what he loved.
Henoch and his parents, sisters, brothers-in-law and niece the day of his graduation from SAR High School in the Bronx, June 13, 2022. (Courtesy Henoch family)
The tight-knit Modern Orthodox community in the Bronx, where David Henoch grew up and attended the SAR Jewish day schools, remembered him as a curious, sensitive and empathetic leader among his peers, with a deep sense of humor and excitement for many different areas of life. Friends and family described “Divi” as an avid adventurer whose favorite activities — many of which he loved to do with his father Avi — included snowboarding, sailing and basketball. He was a certified scuba diver who died at 18 July 10 in a diving accident in Florida, a month after his graduation from SAR High School. He was buried in Israel, where he had planned to spend a year studying before going to college. “Divi always challenged me to improve. He was open to anyone and everyone’s ways no matter how mild or extreme,” a friend, neighbor and classmate recalled, adding, “He was as fearless as it gets and never once was he afraid to be himself.”
Michael Lang
A promoter behind the 1969 Woodstock festival.
Woodstock Music Festival co-producer Michael Lang attends a celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock at the at Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC in New York CIty, Aug. 13, 2009. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
Michael Lang, the Jewish co-creator of 1969’s legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair, died on Jan. 8 in Manhattan. He was 77. A concert promoter who was just 24 at the time, he was one of several Jewish collaborators who made the generation-defining festival, billed as “Three Days of Peace and Music,” happen. Other key players included music executive and promoter Artie Kornfeld — another Brooklyn-born Jew — and businessman Joel Rosenman, a Jewish native of Long Island. Lang was born in 1944 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Lang credited his Jewish parents, who were small-business owners, with teaching him the skills he needed to pull off an event of such scale. His father, he said, “gave me a strategy for getting out of tough situations: take charge and keep moving. Step back just enough to think clearly, and trust your instincts.”
Edward Schoenfeld
A Brooklyn-born maven of Chinese cuisine.
Ed Schoenfeld speaks at a Food Network event in New York City, Oct. 18, 2014. (Michael N. Todaro/Getty Images for NYCWFF)
Like a lot of Jews growing up in Brooklyn, Edward Schoenfeld learned to love Chinese food. He made it a career, opening a series of famed restaurants that introduced New Yorkers to the wide variety of Chinese cuisine. In 1973, he got his first restaurant job as assistant to restaurateur David Keh when he opened Uncle Tai’s, one of the first Hunan restaurants in New York. He went on to a career developing and running restaurants over some four decades. Among his well-regarded Chinese restaurants were Auntie Yuan and Pig Heaven, both on the Upper East Side, as well as Red Farm, a farm-to-table restaurant in Greenwich Village, which opened in 2010. “My personal joke is that I learned to speak Yiddish in the Chinese restaurant from my customers,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2013. Schoenfeld died Jan. 14 at 72.
Lori Zabar
A lawyer and activist devoted to landmarks — including her family’s gourmet food emporium.
Lori Zabar, left, with Kate Wood and David Sprouls at the book launch of “Interior Landmarks: Treasures of New York,” at The Four Seasons, Oct. 8, 2015. Zabar was the first director of the NYC Historic Properties Fund at the New York Landmarks Conservancy. (New York School of Interior Design)
Lori Zabar, a lawyer, author, antiques dealer and historic preservationist whose grandparents founded Zabar’s, the Upper West Side gourmet food emporium, died Feb. 3 the age of 67. The cause of death was cancer. The first director of the NYC Historic Properties Fund at the New York Landmarks Conservancy, she died shortly before the publication of “Zabar’s: A Family Story, with Recipes” in May. In an excerpt from her book published in the New York Jewish Week, she wrote about the perfectionism of her grandfather Louis when he opened the first reiteration of what became the famed “appy” store and a landmark in its own right: “For this new venture, Louis would sample deli meats and fish from various purveyors before he would commit to doing business with those suppliers. To taste fish, Louis would tour dozens of local smokehouses, large and small, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens. He was notorious among the wholesalers for rejecting more than he accepted. His retail mantra was simple: the highest quality at the lowest price.”
Sheldon Silver
A powerful politician undone by a corruption scandal.
Then-Speaker of the New York State Assembly Sheldon Silver walks in front of the State Capitol in Albany, New York, March 12, 2008. (Daniel Barry/Getty Images)
Sheldon Silver, who for two decades wielded enormous power as the speaker of the New York State Assembly before being brought down by a corruption scandal, died Jan. 24 at 77 at Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he had been serving a 6 1/2-year sentence on federal corruption charges. An Orthodox Jew and Democrat who represented New York’s Lower East Side, Silver was one of the most influential political leaders in the state, using the power of his office to guide legislation and stall opposition even when, for 12 years, Republican George Pataki was governor and Republicans held a majority in the state Senate. Silver’s arrest and conviction sent shock waves through New York’s Jewish establishment. “Shelly Silver was one of the strongest forces for progressive issues in the New York State Legislature,” Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, a Jewish Democrat from Manhattan, told the New York Times. “It’s a tragedy that those achievements have been overshadowed by his criminal record.”
Pinchas Stolper
A leader of the Orthodox Union and its powerhouse youth movement.
Rabbi Pinchas Stolper delivers a Passover message to NCSY alumni on April 10, 2014. (YouTube)
Rabbi Pinchas Stolper, a pioneer in making Orthodox Judaism accessible to young people, died on May 25 at 90. Stolper helped turn the National Council of Synagogue Youth into a national powerhouse. He served as the first full-time national director of NCSY and as the longest-serving executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, and wrote a series of books making the holidays and Shabbat more accessible to younger readers. He retired from the leadership of the Orthodox Union in 2000, the same year that a rabbi under his supervision. Baruch Lanner, was accused of years of sexual and physical abuse. In the first report about the scandal, he told the New York Jewish Week that he had heard several complaints from young women about improper behavior by Lanner, but lacking specific allegations, let the youth leader off with a warning.
Miriam Winiarz
A Staten Island widow who was devoted to outreach.
Miriam Winiarz and her husband Rabbi Mendy Winiarz were known for their outreach to Jews on Staten Island. (Courtesy)
Miriam Winiarz lived through the unthinkable: In 2015, her husband Dovid Winiarz died in a Maryland car crash, leaving the Staten Island mother alone to raise their 10 children. And yet, after losing her husband, she remained a pillar in the borough’s Jewish community, Mendy Mirocznik, president of the Council of Jewish Organizations of Staten Island, told silive.com. She continued the kiruv, or outreach work that she and her husband had conducted before his death, bringing other Jews closer to their tradition through social media and through his rabbinate. “This was somebody who, when they got wind of the situation, somebody had a problem, they would interrupt their own lives and make you a priority,” said Mirocznik. Miriam Winiarz died in early December at the age of 56 after what was described as a brief illness. Her funeral at Young Israel of Staten Island in Willowbrook drew more than a thousand people. A fund has been set up to support her children, the youngest of whom is 14.
Philip Pearlstein
Modern realist painter and champion of Jewish art.
Modern realist painter Philip Pearlstein photographed in his New York studio in 1971. (Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)
Philip Pearlstein, an artist whose painting of nudes revived realistic painting after decades of dominance by abstraction, died in Manhattan on Dec. 17 at age 98. Born in Pittsburgh, he moved to Manhattan in 1949 as a sort of chaperone to a young Andy Warhol. He became an instructor at the Pratt Institute, and taught at Brooklyn College from 1963 until his retirement in 1988. Pearlstein served on the board of the Covenant Foundation in the early 2000s, and , according to Judith Ginsberg, former executive director of the foundation, opened the board to funding Jewish art in a bigger way and promoting the artists Debbie Friedman, Liz Lerman and Liz Swados.
Barbara Roaman
A grandma with a keen fashion sense and commitment to social justice
Barbara Roaman and her granddaughter, Sandy Fox. (Courtesy)
Barbara “Bobby” Roaman, who died on Nov. 6 at 91, was born in Manhattan and lived on the Upper West Side as a child. After attending Syracuse University and Columbia University, where she majored in Spanish, she moved to Long Island with her husband, Richard. In a eulogy shared with the New York Jewish Week, her granddaughter, Sandy Fox — an editor at In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies — remembered both her sense of fashion and her work in the civil rights movement on Long Island:
“Our conversations as a child instilled in me much more than a love of clothing. She taught me values of social justice and tzedakah, or what she would have called charitable giving, and because she wasn’t at all religious, those were the pillars of her Judaism. She and my grandfather were born in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They were upwardly mobile and privileged. In their class status and whiteness, they had blind spots when it came to race. Nevertheless, their commitments to social justice and civil rights were inspiring to me as a child and teen. They were involved in attempts to desegregate Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s. In more recent years, grandma had become involved in a local group called ERASE Racism, and donated to many non-profits that I also care about: Planned Parenthood, Democratic campaigns of all kinds, American Jewish World Service, and so on. It would have been so easy for them to become Republicans, as many Jews in their generation did. But they didn’t…. My mom died when I was 18, and from then on we tried to bridge that cavernous loss that affected us so differently but both so profoundly. She could not replace my mother and I could not replace her daughter, but we came pretty damn close. I sensed that she poured into me everything she wished she had poured into my mother.”
René Slotkin
A survivor of Mengele’s sadistic experiments on twins.
Ita Guttmann and her twins, René and Irene (then Renate), were photographed for Nazi propaganda while they were imprisoned at Theresienstadt. (Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Irene Guttmann Slotkin Hizme)
René Slotkin, who with his twin sister Renate (Irene) was subjected to Josef Mengele’s infamous medical experiments on twins, died July 10 at age 84. Born in Teplice-Sanov, a city in northern Bohemia, he and his sister were sent, at 4, with their mother, to Theresienstadt. After a year, the three were shipped to Auschwitz. Then they were split up, the children becoming part of the infamous medical experiments conducted by Mengele, the sadistic “Angel of Death.” Orphaned, Slotkin and his sister survived a death march and arrived in New York in 1950. He was married at a young age and, after serving as a sergeant in the U.S. National Guard, worked for a box manufacturing company as a cost estimator. In 2019, he joined the Speakers Bureau at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, sharing his testimony with students. “I am here because of good people, good people everywhere,” he told the museum in an interview.
Sarah Schlesinger
A force in musical theater education.
At NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts , Sarah Schlesinger was the recipient of the David Payne Carter Award and the University Distinguished Teacher Award. (tisch.nyu.edu)
Sarah Schlesinger was an award-winning lyricist and librettist whose works, with composer Mike Reid, included “The Ballad of Little Jo,” “The Last Day,” “Casanova Returns,” “Prairie Songs,” “A Wind in the Willows Christmas” and “In This House.” But her most lasting legacy may well be the composers and lyricists she mentored as an arts professor and dean at the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She joined the program in 1989, served as associate chair of the department from 1995 to 1997, and was named chair in 1998. “Under her leadership, the program produced a huge, international alumni network of artists who are at the forefront of every facet of musical theatre activity: as creators, teachers, scholars and business leaders,” the program said in a statement. “Her insight, razor-sharp mind and her ability to get things done and to identify and encourage faculty, students and alums was frankly staggering in its longevity and reach. Sarah was a force that could make things happen.” Schlesinger died Dec. 14 following an illness.
Menahem Schmelzer
The ‘go-to’ librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Menahem Schmelzer tended perhaps the greatest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere. (Courtesy Jewish Theological Seminary)
In 1966, after a fire gutted the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, Menahem Schmelzer led what the flagship Conservative seminary said in a statement was “the extraordinary effort to reopen it, restore it to health, and ultimately open a new Library building in 1983.” When he stepped down as its longtime librarian in 1987, he had watched over the resuscitation of perhaps the greatest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere. Schmelzer, who spent four decades at JTS, also served as provost and held the title of Albert B. and Bernice Cohen Professor Emeritus of Medieval Hebrew Literature and Jewish Bibliography. A Holocaust survivor who was born in Hungary, Schmelzer was also a scholar in his own right, specializing in medieval Hebrew literature and the Jewish liturgical poetry known as piyyut. David Kraemer, the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian at JTS, remembered his colleague as “the ‘go-to’ person on questions of Jewish bibliography for researchers around the world.” He died on Dec. 10 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.
Steven Salen
Holocaust survivor who dressed presidents
Steve Salen in an undated photo in his Manhattan atelier. (Family)
Born Zoltan Salomon in Czechoslovakia in 1919, Steven Salen first learned tailoring at a trade school run there by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Then the Nazis arrived and they deported Salen. He never saw his parents or seven of his 11 siblings again. But he stuck with his trade, establishing himself after arriving in New York City as a tailor to the elite, making garments for the likes of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Martin Scorsese (and keeping mementoes of their business at his Bayside home). Salen was an old-school, word-of-mouth tailor who started working at FL Dunn on Fifth Avenue in New York, and eventually had his own full-floor atelier on Madison Avenue and 53rd Street, at the heart of the city’s high-fashion district. In 2011, when Salen already topped 90, a New York style blog profiled his shop, noting that it was one of fewer than 30 bespoke tailors in a city that had once been home to more than 300. Salen would work until 95 before retiring; he died Nov. 23 at 103.
Maximilian Lerner
A World War II “Ritchie Boy” who went undercover behind German lines.
Maximilian Lerner served as a translator and interrogated prisoners on behalf of U.S. intelligence during World War II. (Via Museum of Jewish Heritage)
Maximilian Lerner, an Austrian Jewish immigrant, served as a translator and interrogated prisoners on behalf of U.S. intelligence during World War II as a member of the “Ritchie Boys,” a special unit trained in espionage and frontline interrogation. He died Sept. 10 at his home in Manhattan at age 98. Lerner left Austria with his family two months after Germany’s March 1938 annexation of his homeland and, after layovers in Paris and Nice, came to the U.S., via Lisbon, in 1941. After volunteering for the draft, he became one of the 2,000 to 3,000 European-born Jews who learned to interrogate prisoners of war and civilians, interpret and translate for foreign officials, and read codes. “I wore civilian clothes”— posing as German behind enemy lines – “a number of times,” he told the New York Jewish Week in 2004. “This was my war. I would do whatever it took.” After the war, her worked for a horticultural products business and later started his own business in the same field. He also earned a master’s degree in business education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1952, and wrote two spy novels and an autobiography. In recent years Lerner volunteered at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, talking to groups about his experiences.
Chave Hecht
A camp director devoted to Jewish outreach.
Rebbetzin Chave Hecht and Rabbi J. J. Hecht receive a dollar and a blessing from the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, before a trip to South Africa in 1989. (Hecht Family/JEM van Chabad.org)
Rebbetzin Chave Hecht, the founder of Camp Emunah Bnos Yaakov Yehudah — an overnight camp for observant Jewish girls — and a host of other educational initiatives originating in the Chabad-Lubavitch community, died Feb. 8 at the age of 95. Born in the East New York section of Brooklyn and educated at public schools, she, along with her husband, the late Rabbi J.J. Hecht, also directed a Jewish summer day camp on Coney Island for public school children, pioneering Chabad’s outreach to non-observant Jewish families. Rebbetzin Hecht ran the day-to-day operations of Camp Emunah for decades, when her husband was back in Brooklyn running his synagogue. “She slept in her office,” her son, Rabbi Sholem Ber Hecht, a Chabad emissary in Queens, told Chabad.org. “She had no secretary; if you called the camp at 7 a.m. or 10 p.m., she answered the phone.”
Frederick Terna
Survivor, Brooklyn artist and “someone to watch” late into his 90s.
Artist Fred Terna, a Holocaust survivor, continued painting well into his late 90s. (Courtesy of Terna)
Holocaust survivor and painter Frederick Terna, who remained active at his Brooklyn studio into his late 90s, died on Dec. 8 at 99. Born in Vienna and raised in Prague, he was imprisoned in four Nazi concentration camps, including Terezin, where he began to make art. Terna moved to New York in 1952; his work was collected by a variety of museums and institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Albertina Collection in Vienna and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Earlier this year he was named to the New York Jewish Week’s “36 to Watch” list of notable Jewish New Yorkers.
Saida Somekh
Immigrant, entrepreneur and loving grandmother.
Saida Somekh demonstrates her cooking skills for her family. (via Instagram)
Saida Somekh, who owned Dora Hosiery, a go-to lingerie shop in Midtown Manhattan for decades, died Nov. 5. She was 94. Her granddaughter, Erin Dana Lichy, a real estate agent and a new cast member on “The Real Housewives of New York,” remembered her in an Instagram post:
“She came from a different world, married very young and was expected to raise a family as a stay-at-home mom with little choice in her major life decisions. Well, that didn’t work for her, so she forged her own path. As a young immigrant with little practice in English, she became a female homeowner, businesswoman and successful entrepreneur…. As a grandmother, she was simply always there, like one’s backbone. She was a pillar of strength. Her presence made me feel safe and warm. She loved purely, deeply and didn’t pass judgment. She was patient. If I ever needed to fix a garment or didn’t have something to wear, she’d sew me something from scratch, however long it took. She was warm to my friends and anyone close to me. She would send us home with bags of food and cook with me for hours if I wanted to learn new a new dish. All I had to do was ask. My kids adored her and she them. They brought her so much joy and watching how prideful she was of them was heartwarming. She had pictures of us all around her house just so she could look at ‘her babies’ every morning when she woke up.”
Freddie Roman
Catskills comedian and keeper of the flame.
Freddie Roman, left and fellow comedian Shecky Greene attend “The Friars Club Salute to Freddie Roman and Stewie Stone” at New Tork’s Pierre Hotel, April 21, 2014. (John Lamparski/WireImage)
Comedian Freddie Roman, who died Nov. at 85, was never a crossover star in the mold of Alan King, Jackie Mason or Joan Rivers — three other Jewish comics with roots in the Catskills. And yet in a capstone to a long and steady career he resurrected the spirit of the Borscht Belt with the 1991 show “Catskills on Broadway” and, as the long-serving dean of the Friars Club, he injected new life into the fading Manhattan showbiz venue by inviting younger comics to join. Born Fred Kirschenbaum in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, Roman started emceeing at age 15 at the the Crystal Spring Hotel in the Catskills, which was owned by his uncle and grandfather. He soon was performing at hotels and resorts in the region for the largely Jewish crowd. “Catskills on Broadway,” starring him and fellow tummlers Dick Capri, Marilyn Michaels and Mal Z. Lawrence, was a bona fide hit, running for 453 performances. “I’m like the Fidel Castro of comedians,” he once said of his tenure at the Friar’s Club. “I’m president for life.”
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The post Extraordinary lives: 18 notable New York Jews who died in 2022 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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These college students have favorable views of Israel. They also think it’s committing genocide.
A quarter of college students who view Israel favorably also believe its government is committing genocide.
That’s according to a Brandeis study published earlier this month, which surveyed nearly 4,000 students across 303 colleges in fall 2025 about their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and concluded views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more nuanced than often portrayed.
So how do students reconcile those views?
Researchers can’t say for sure, but one possibility is that students are distinguishing between supporting Israel’s existence and the actions of its current government.
The fact that many of the same students who say Israel is committing genocide also affirm its right to exist is not a contradiction, according to the Nexus Project, a watchdog group that works to combat antisemitism and protect open debate. In an Instagram post referring to the Brandeis study, the group lauded the nuance of the report.
“Collapsing both views into a single all-encompassing camp of ‘anti-Israel sentiment’ erases the gray area where most students actually live,” the post said.
Another explanation, the study says, is that the “genocide” label has less to do with actual views on Israel than political affiliation. Respondents who identified as liberal were much more likely to agree that Israel was committing genocide than those who identified as moderate or conservative. In fact, political ideology was a better predictor of whether someone said Israel was committing genocide than their stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, the study found.
Overall, condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza is the more popular position on campus. Close to three-quarters of all students agreed with the statement that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.
Students may also have different interpretations of the term “genocide,” said Graham Wright, first author on the study and an associate research scientist at Brandeis.
“It’s possible that some of them think, ‘I do generally support the Israeli government, but I don’t like some of the things they’re doing,’” Wright said. “The word genocide is just a stand-in for, ‘I don’t think they’re doing a good thing.’”
The very word genocide has also been a subject of debate.
Some Jewish groups, such as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, have argued genocide is an accurate term to describe what they see as the deliberate destruction of Palestinian society.
Meanwhile, many pro-Israel advocates loathe the word genocide, legally defined as the intentional destruction of any national, racial, ethnic, or religious group, to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza following Oct. 7, 2023. They argue that Israel is seeking the destruction of Hamas, a terror group that states its intent to destroy the Jewish state.
Here are two other key takeaways from the study.
1. Most students differentiate between governments and their citizens — but not all
The study divided students into four groups based on their stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The largest group, 49% of students, supported civilians on both sides of the conflict.
Those students viewed both the Israeli and Palestinian people positively, while they expressed disdain toward the Israeli government, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
“This suggests that most people are able to make that distinction and have fairly nuanced views about a lot of these conflicts,” Wright said.
The vast majority of students, 85% of those surveyed, had unfavorable views of the Israeli government. But those views did not always extend to hostility toward the Israeli people. Students were split about half and half between favorable and unfavorable views of Israeli citizens.
Out of the 20% of students who held strong anti-Israel views — meaning they were likely to view both the Israeli government and its people unfavorably — half also viewed Hamas favorably.
“Certainly, I think that’s concerning,” Wright said. “You have a relatively small number of students who have very extreme views on Jews in Israel, and that seems to be contributing to a lot of the hostility that Jewish students are experiencing.”
Those students may make headlines, Wright said, but most undergraduates aren’t thinking about Israel day-to-day. In fact, 56% of surveyed students said they had low knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the topic was of low to moderate personal importance to them.
2. Jewish students have diverse views on the conflict, but they were also more likely to view Israel favorably than their non-Jewish peers
The survey included responses from 743 Jewish students. About 29% of those respondents viewed Israel favorably, the largest share of any ethno-religious identity surveyed.
That higher support for Israel among Jewish students held across political divides. Both politically liberal and politically conservative Jews were less likely to hold anti-Israel views than their non-Jewish peers, the study found.
The largest proportion of Jewish students, 56%, were “civilian sympathizers” — the group that views both Israeli and Palestinian civilians favorably while disliking both governments.
A minority of Jewish students, 9%, held unfavorable views of both the Israeli government and its people and favorable views of Palestinians.
Overall, the results show subtleties in how college students view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the media rarely captures, Wright said. “You only detect the nuance if you ask about it specifically.”
The post These college students have favorable views of Israel. They also think it’s committing genocide. appeared first on The Forward.
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In a forest where Jews fought the Nazis, a German military base and Lithuanian politics encroach on memory
(JTA) — Rūdninkai, LITHUANIA — Deep in the trees and swampy thickets of Lithuania’s Rūdninkai Forest, a series of makeshift forts is sinking into the earth.
These represent the remains of underground bunkers where Jewish partisans resisted their annihilation in the Holocaust. Under German occupation, some 400 Jews escaped the Vilnius ghetto to this forest and organized attacks against the Nazis.
After World War II, the story of these partisans was folded into Soviet propaganda, leaving a shroud of mystery over the bunkers. Now, construction of a new German military base in the area is throwing into question the fate of the forts — and the memory of their fighters.
Jewish former partisans and their descendants have traveled for decades to visit the bunkers, which mark the only memorial to their resistance in Lithuania. But in recent months, new obstacles have appeared: Signs forbidding entry and demarcating a “dangerous area” are installed on the road to the forest and pinned on trees approaching the forts.
Lithuania is nearing the final stage of constructing a military base for German troops in Rūdninkai Forest, nestled about 27 miles south of Vilnius. The training ground near the former partisan camps was planned after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to shore up NATO’s eastern flank. Strategically located some 12 miles from the border with Moscow-allied Belarus and east of Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, the troops will be Germany’s first permanent deployment abroad since World War II. About 5,000 German soldiers will begin arriving this fall.
“You cannot easily find the forts, so those who know how to get there, we just go,” Aušra Mikulskienė, a Jewish history tour guide from Vilnius, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But now, there are ‘don’t enter’ stickers and stop signs. It’s becoming impossible to get there because they are closing all of the forest.”
Mikulskienė has brought the children and grandchildren of Jewish partisans to Rūdninkai for 10 years. They need her guidance to find eight standing forts, covered in logs and soil, which are not marked on maps and GPS systems. In such remote corners of the forest, partisans planned to ambush their enemies, lay explosives on German trains and equipment and sabotage telephone lines and infrastructure in Vilnius.
The bunkers are not protected by the Lithuanian government as cultural heritage sites, and they have deteriorated over years of neglect. But as the German base is completed and military training begins, Mikulskienė worries that prohibitory signs related to construction will turn into more serious barriers to the forts, and visitors could lose access altogether.
Twists of history over decades plunged the forts into obscurity. Lithuania was occupied from 1944 to 1990 by the Soviet Union, which honored hundreds of Soviet partisans who went to Rūdninkai Forest to battle the Germans. The Jewish partisans who joined them, and who helped Russian forces liberate Vilnius from the Nazis in 1944, were not part of this narrative.
The Lithuanian Soviet Republic, or Lithuanian SSR, began to commemorate Soviet partisans on the site of the Rūdninkai forts in the 1970s. Soviet and Jewish fighters only had access to wood and soil to build their bunkers. But the forts standing today are reinforced with concrete, an indication that the Soviet government fortified the structures to serve as memorials, said Mikulskienė. She remembers visiting the site on a school trip in the 1980s and listening to lessons about how the forebears of Soviet citizens resisted the fascists.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, researchers have debated how much of the structures is original, and how much was reconstructed by the Soviet government for propaganda purposes. The first sign memorializing Jews was installed in the area by Bildungswerk Stanisław Hantz, a German educational group, in 2024. A small silver plaque reads, “In memory of the Jewish partisans who fought out of these forests against the Nazi occupiers and their helpers.”
The legacy of the forts — and the memory of Jewish partisans — is now mired in Lithuania’s repudiation of its Soviet past. Thousands of Lithuanian intellectuals, dissidents and other citizens were arrested, deported to Gulags and executed under Soviet rule. Once Lithuania gained independence in 1990, the stench of Soviet repression overpowered that of the Nazi occupation for many Lithuanians.
Lithuania was for centuries a center of rich Jewish thought, religious life and secular culture; Vilna, as the capital was known in Yiddish, was nicknamed the “Jerusalem of the North.” But after more than 90% of Lithuanian Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, few remained to commemorate the Holocaust.
“The collective memory of Lithuanians basically sees only one occupation: the Soviet occupation,” said Ilya Lempertas, a researcher and editor of books on the Holocaust in Lithuania. “Soviet partisans, in Lithuanian memory, are those who deported Lithuanians to Siberia.”
That means the Jewish partisans of Rūdninkai Forest are often viewed not as heroes, but as traitors, according to Mikulskienė. “They are not considered as fighting against Nazis, these Jews,” she said. “They are considered to be fighting with the Soviets.”
Fania Brantsovsky, the last living Jewish resistance fighter of Rūdninkai Forest, died in 2024 at 102. She joined a Jewish partisan unit under the command of the writer Abba Kovner, known as the Nokmim, or Avengers. On Sept. 23, 1943, the same night she was smuggled out of the Vilnius ghetto, the Nazis began their final liquidation of the ghetto. None of her family survived.
Brantsovsky led tours to the forest bunkers in the 2000s. Until her death, she advocated for the structures to be preserved and protected as a site of learning about the Jewish partisans’ struggle.
Dovid Katz, a Brooklyn-born, Vilnius-based scholar of Yiddish and the Holocaust who runs the online journal “Defending History,” was a friend of Brantsovsky’s. “Her one last request was, ‘Dovid, please, never stop reminding Jews around the world to speak up for the existence of the forts,’” said Katz. “‘Let our grandchildren be able to come to this place in the forest and see wooden forts in the ground, which were the only postwar physical remnant of Jewish resistance.’”
Germany’s federal government has signaled that it will not disturb the site. In response to a parliamentary inquiry, the Bundestag announced in July that it was “committed to preserving the former World War II partisan camp in Rūdninkai Forest, located on the training grounds of Panzer Brigade 45 stationed in Lithuania, as a place of learning and remembrance.”
The government added that the former partisan bunkers were not part of Germany’s training facilities and would not be affected by construction, but it was in Lithuania’s hands to manage the site’s preservation and access.
“The Lithuanian government has been asked to examine whether the area in question merits protection and to take this into account in further planning,” said the Bundestag.
Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture told JTA that the bunkers do not have protected status as cultural heritage sites because they “are not authentic and are not located at their original sites.” Instead of being linked to Jewish fighters, the ministry said the forts were “associated with Soviet partisans.”
“During the Soviet era, they were included in the list of historical monuments of the Lithuanian SSR, while a significant proportion of such ‘monuments’ were intended to reinforce Soviet ideology and historical narratives,” the ministry said in a statement.
The area will be maintained in the future with an information board installed nearby, according to the ministry, which said the content of that information has yet to be decided. Visiting the forts won’t be prohibited altogether, but those who wish to go will have to comply with military rules and obtain advance approval from the Rūdninkai Training Area Command, the ministry said.
Katz believes nationalist factions in the Lithuanian government are revising the history of a site that hosts genuine remnants of Jewish bunkers. He views the government’s resistance to protecting the site as an outgrowth of the “double genocide” theory, a nationalist narrative that emerged in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union. This theory equates World War II atrocities committed by the Soviets, who occupied Lithuania in 1940-1941 following a non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler, with those of the Nazis, who took control after Hitler broke the agreement and invaded the Soviet Union. (The Soviets reoccupied Lithuania in 1944.)
In this framework, the Soviets committed genocide against Lithuanians through mass deportations — with the complicity, some add, of Jewish communists — and only afterwards came the killing of Jews by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.
“The Soviets and their Jewish friends, as the narrative has it, committed the first genocide, and then came the reaction, the tragic second genocide,” which was the Holocaust, said Katz.
The equating of Soviet deportations with the Holocaust has been widely rejected by international scholars and Jewish institutions. The Soviet regime deported some 17,500 Lithuanians in 1941 to remote parts of Siberia and northern Russia. While individual Lithuanian Jews served in the Soviet administration, Jews were also disproportionately targeted in the deportations.
Lempertas, who like Katz is Jewish, does not believe the forts standing in Rūdninkai Forest include genuine remains of Jewish partisan bunkers. He supports the government’s view that the structures were built entirely as Soviet propaganda — but even so, he believes they should be protected.
“It has to be saved, from my point of view, for those who are coming there because of family,” said Lempertas. “It serves as an exhibition.”
Mikulskienė said the forts are deeply important to the families of Jewish fighters. She watches visitors stand before them, recite memories of war and sing partisan songs passed down through generations.
Yet in recent years, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked security threats and surging anti-Russian sentiment in Lithuania, Mikulskienė has found it increasingly difficult to advocate for the memory of Jews who fought alongside Soviets.
“You are seen as a follower of Soviet propaganda, and also now Putin’s propaganda,” she said. “That’s a bit dangerous, being this person in Lithuania.”
Anna Avidan, who was born in Vilnius to Holocaust survivors and founded the Jewish history nonprofit Jerusalem of the North, said the bunkers should be treated as a memorial site with educational opportunities.
“There is a strong stereotype here that Jews were communists and they deserved the killings — this simplified worldview,” she said. Dispelling such stereotypes “is a good case for explaining why it has to be commemorated.”
One the eve of World War II, about 4 in 10 people in Vilnius were Jewish. But decades after the end of the Soviet Union, Avidan said the city has yet to fully recognize the Jewish world that vanished from Lithuania’s cities, towns and forests.
“Lithuania has been independent for more than 35 years already,” said Avidan. “Still, we have no clear memorial in this city to the victims of the Holocaust, and for me, that’s a message.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In a forest where Jews fought the Nazis, a German military base and Lithuanian politics encroach on memory appeared first on The Forward.
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Abdul El-Sayed and Jamie Raskin sidestep Hasan Piker, and Israel, in Michigan campaign stops
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR – As Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed made campaign stops with a prominent Jewish congressional leader on Wednesday, there was one subject neither he, nor his Democratic allies onstage, were interested in discussing.
“Don’t any reporter ask me again about Hasan Piker,” Michigan U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell told the crowd at an Ann Arbor, Mich., town hall, to cheers. “It’s not what November is about.”
Dingell’s crack was the only time the prominent left-wing streamer’s name was mentioned at all during the pair of El-Sayed rallies that day. Piker’s recent comments that American Jews who “tie” themselves to Israel would “suffer the consequences of the actions of that state” prompted uproar from several corners of Democratic leadership. Despite this, El-Sayed’s new Jewish campaign surrogate, U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, avoided the topic altogether.
That reluctance to talk about Piker on the campaign trail Wednesday extended to the candidate himself. El-Sayed didn’t mention Piker, nor Israel, once in either of his campaign stops with Raskin, except when asked directly by reporters.
The former county health official campaigned with Piker during the primary — including at one stop at the University of Michigan a stone’s throw away from Wednesday’s event — as the two made opposition to Israel a central issue of his candidacy. But at a press conference following his Ann Arbor event, El-Sayed described Piker as “a streamer in California,” adding that the media was putting too much focus on his most prominent supporter.
“I’m less interested in going to the tabloid version of our politics where we cover this as who’s in, who’s out, who’s up, who’s down, who’s talking to who,” El-Sayed said. “I’m a lot more interested in talking to the people in the state who had a bum deal because of Donald Trump and the politics that [El-Sayed’s GOP opponent] Mike Rogers has been the epitome of for a very long time.”
Raskin, one of the most prominent Jewish Democrats in the House, also showed a reluctance to talk about Jewish voters in general. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency asked the congressman in Ann Arbor how he would sell El-Sayed to Jewish Democrats uncomfortable with his rhetoric. In response, he did not mention Jewish concerns.
“Those of us who have been fighting Donald Trump and his authoritarianism and corruption and violence against American citizens and immigrants for 10 years now understand that this is an essential referendum about the future,” Raskin said in response. “Will we have democracy or will we have autocracy?”
He added that he has been “campaigning for Democrats all over the country,” and praised the party for being “a very big tent.”
“Just like any big family Thanksgiving dinner, there can be arguments and people jostling, and there’s unruliness,” Raskin said. “But fundamentally, we all believe in democracy and freedom and the progress and prosperity of our people.”
Yet questions about Piker, and how close the movement he represents may come to remaking the Democratic Party’s values, hang over both Michigan’s Senate race and the future of Jewish inclusion in the party. As the party fights to retake Congress this fall, some liberal Jewish voters believe the growing backlash against Israel among the “big tent”’s progressive wing is damaging their historic coalition. A growing number of Jewish voters in Michigan who previously backed Democrats are now supporting Rogers instead, and El-Sayed’s association with Piker is often cited as a key reason why.
In playing the role of uniter, Raskin is slaloming carefully between the party’s different factions. Before campaigning with El-Sayed, the congressman stumped for Michigan Rep. Hillary Scholten, a moderate Democrat who has withheld her endorsement of El-Sayed while specifying his association with Piker as a sticking point.
Also being silent on the rallies is a key target of Piker’s: Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, whose likeness the streamer had made his latest comments in front of. The Jewish and pro-Israel Democratic congressional candidate is running in a heavily Jewish district that encompasses Oakland County, where El-Sayed’s second rally of the day took place. In recent days, Moss said that El-Sayed was “going to have to demonstrate some serious outreach to Oakland County’s Jewish community.” He declined to comment to JTA about the day’s rallies.
As they largely avoided the elephant in the room among Democrats, El-Sayed and his allies also preached the importance of party unity in taking on their Republican opponents.
“There’s a big effort to divide us,” Raskin told the second rally’s audience in Farmington Hills. “They’re trying to pick on disagreements in our party, trying to exacerbate conflict, because we have freedom of thought in our party and freedom of speech in our party and freedom of dialogue.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Abdul El-Sayed and Jamie Raskin sidestep Hasan Piker, and Israel, in Michigan campaign stops appeared first on The Forward.
