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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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Birthright participants are more Orthodox, more right-wing and more familiar with Israel than before Oct. 7
(JTA) — Len Saxe, a researcher at Brandeis University, has been studying the impact of Birthright trips to Israel since the initiative launched in 1999. Last year, he noticed something unusual in the data.
At a rate far outpacing anything he’d ever detected before, people who signed up for Birthright in summer 2025 but did not participate became less connected to Israel and less connected to their own Jewish identity in the months after.
Nonparticipants — whether their trips were canceled because of the June war with Iran, or they opted out on their own — reported a declining sense of connection to Jewish values, Jewish history, Jewish tradition and a “worldwide Jewish community.”
The study did not attempt to explain the change, but Saxe has a theory about what happened.
“Many of the applicants live in communities where they hear frequent criticism of Israel,” Saxe said. “Unlike the period on campuses pre-COVID, when Birthright was taking 35,000 North Americans a year to Israel, students don’t know many others who have experience in Israel and know Israelis.Their perspective on the conflict lacks context.”
The organization said 7,300 North Americans took a Birthright trip last summer, out of 10,000 total. (War with Iran disrupted some trips and canceled others.) Of the total, 65% were college-aged.
The survey detected other changes for Birthright since 2023, when Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel triggered the Gaza war and anti-Israel sentiment around the world.
More than half of last year’s participants, 54%, had already participated in some variety of Israel programming, up from 38% in 2023, according to Saxe’s report. (Birthright loosened its eligibility requirements in 2014 to allow students who had visited Israel in high school to go again.)
About 1 in 5 participants were Orthodox, a more than threefold growth from summer 2023, the last trips before the start of the Gaza war. And 38% of participants attended Jewish day school, up from 23% two years prior.
The survey also detected a rightward political shift among Birthright participants. Forty-two percent of 2025’s Birthright participants identified as conservative, and 34% as liberal, a dramatic shift from 2023, when 20% identified as conservative and 57% as liberal.
Those who do participate in Birthright still report that it deepens their connection to Judaism, and there is mounting evidence that connection is long-lasting. According to a recent survey by the Jewish Federations of North America, millennial Jews — the demographic where Birthright had the greatest penetration — were the only age group to have a majority identify as “Zionist.”
The analysis found that for self-identified liberals who did go on Birthright, the trip’s most important impact was on their conception of what it means to be Jewish.
Liberals reported large upswings in their sense of being Jewish as “extremely important to their identity” after their trips, the authors wrote — 48% after the trip, compared to 29% beforehand. Even Birthright participants who had to be sent home early due to fighting still overwhelmingly reported that the trip had made a difference in their understanding of their Jewish identity.
In other words, Saxe said, Birthright is still fulfilling its intended purpose: strengthening its participants’ Jewish identities more generally.
“Among those with the least prior connection to Judaism and Israel, including those politically liberal, they showed the largest increase in their connection to Israel, as well as other facets of their Jewish identities,” he said.
In statements accompanying the report’s release, Birthright’s leadership trumpeted the program as a necessary antidote to declining Jewish engagement.
“The cultural headwinds facing young Jews are real, and they are pushing Jewish connection and pride downward,” Gidi Mark, international CEO of Birthright Israel, said in a release. “But what this research makes unmistakably clear is that Birthright Israel moves participants in the opposite direction. The decline occurred only among those who did not go.”
Elias Saratovsky, president and CEO of the Birthright Israel Foundation, painted the situation in even starker terms.
“We are at a crossroads. If our community does nothing, we risk losing the younger generation,” Saratovsky said. “But if we invest in an effective intervention — Birthright Israel — we can win them back.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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The promised land is… Oklahoma? Inside Tulsa’s campaign to court young Jews
TULSA, Okla. — The house had prairie views, four bedrooms and a pantry large enough to support a small diaspora.
More than 50 people wandered through the kitchen inspecting cabinets, opening drawers and video chatting with relatives back home as if they had stumbled upon a newly discovered continent.
They were not, strictly speaking, house hunters. They were Jews.
They had flown to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the weekend to see whether they could picture a life here, along a stretch of historic Route 66. This is not how most Jewish migration stories begin.
Sunlight spilled across a kitchen island the size of a small boat. In the living room, the ceiling rose two stories high, the kind of architectural flourish meant to make visitors imagine their future lives unfolding beneath it.
Two sisters from Northern California peeked into a walk-in closet, while a family of four from Winnipeg, Canada, stepped into the backyard.
“I have Sylvester Stallone to thank for this,” said a man from Maine, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt that read “Israel – Established 1273 BCE.” He had been watching the Paramount+ television series Tulsa King, the one where Stallone plays a New York mob boss exiled to Oklahoma to start over. Curious about the setting, he opened Zillow.
The home prices did not make sense. The numbers next to the square footage looked like they were missing a comma, maybe two.
He typed a question into Google.
Are there Jews in Tulsa?
The answer, it turned out, was yes. More surprising still: Tulsa was actively trying to recruit them.
Tulsa is not the tumbleweed town many outsiders imagine, but a leafy, art-deco city stretched along the Arkansas River, where oil money once built skyscrapers and philanthropy now builds parks where families gather at sunset.
In the early 20th century, Tulsa was known as the oil capital of the world, its petroleum boom turning a prairie town into one of the richest cities per capita in America. When oil prices collapsed in the 1980s, the economy faltered.
Like many once-booming cities forced to reinvent themselves, Tulsa rebuilt. Today its economy stretches beyond oil into aerospace, technology and finance, and the city supports a surprising range of cultural institutions, including the Tulsa Ballet, Tulsa Symphony Orchestra and the Philbrook Museum of Art.
Over the past several years, its Jewish leaders have hatched an audacious plan. Instead of watching young Jews drift toward the familiar centers of American Judaism — cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago — they are trying to persuade some of them to move in the opposite direction.
The program is called Tulsa Tomorrow. Since 2017, it has flown groups of young Jews to Oklahoma for long weekends — covering airfare, hotels and meals — and then shows them the city: neighborhoods, synagogues, parks, restaurants, jobs opportunities and the people who live here.
It is, in essence, Birthright for the Sooner State.
So far, 144 people have moved through the program; 113 still live here. In a city with fewer than 3,000 Jews, those numbers matter.
Until recently, Tulsa’s most recognizable Jewish exports were the actor-director Tim Blake Nelson and the professional wrestler simply known as Goldberg. The idea that the city might become known instead for importing Jews is a newer development.
Across the country, dozens of small and mid-size Jewish communities are confronting the problem of young Jews leaving for larger cities, institutions shrinking and congregations aging. Tulsa’s unusual experiment — recruiting Jews instead of losing them — has begun attracting attention from Jewish leaders elsewhere who are wondering whether the model might work in their own towns.
In Kansas City, which already runs its own recruitment effort called See KC, a federation representative attended a Tulsa Tomorrow retreat to see what might translate back home.
Brooke Bowles, the CEO of the Birmingham Jewish Community Center, first heard about Tulsa Tomorrow at a conference last fall. Birmingham’s Jewish population has hovered for years between 5,000 and 6,000 people.
“If you’re not growing,” Bowles said, “you’re dying.”
She spoke with Tulsa Tomorrow’s organizers and plans to attend a recruitment weekend herself to see how the program works up close.
But whether the Tulsa model can work elsewhere may hinge on something harder to replicate. Rabbi Lily Kowalski, who served at Tulsa’s Reform congregation during the early years of the Tulsa Tomorrow project, said its success is in part because it was never managed by any single Jewish institution.
“It really has the buy-in and the backing of the entire Jewish community,” she told me. “If it were just one or two groups trying to make it happen, it wouldn’t be as successful as it is.”
An international destination
The program usually holds two recruitment weekends each year with maybe a dozen participants on each. This particular trip, held at the end of February, was unusually large. Fifty-two participants had come, 41 of them from Canada.
For them, Tulsa represented more than opportunity. It promised potential refuge.
Since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents across Canada have surged. Jesse Brown, a Canadian Jewish journalist who has been documenting the trend, said the shift has been dramatic. In recent years, synagogues and Jewish schools have faced arson, vandalism, bomb threats and shootings.
But Brown said the sense of unease extends beyond those headline-grabbing incidents. Across parts of Canadian civil society — in schools, unions, hospitals and arts organizations — Jews have reported growing hostility or exclusion.
Brown describes that broader atmosphere as something closer to what he calls a “polite pogrom,” a slow accumulation of insults that have left many Canadian Jews wondering what the future holds.
“My fear is that the next Bondi Beach massacre is going to take place in Canada,” Brown said, referring to the December 2025 Hanukkah attack in Australia that killed 15 people.
Watching fellow Canadian Jews contemplate leaving the country has unsettled him in its own way. “There’s a sadness,” Brown said. “I’m not enthused or compelled by what I see as a re-shtetling.”
For some Canadians, relocating is no longer a hypothetical.
Michael Sachs, 44, arrived in Tulsa last summer from Vancouver, pulling into town just in time for the Fourth of July.
With salt-and-pepper hair and the easy confidence of a salesman who believes in his product, Sachs has quickly become one of the city’s most enthusiastic ambassadors.
In Canada he built a career in Jewish communal life — working with the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish National Fund and serving as president of his Orthodox synagogue.
Now Sachs works to recruit new families to Tulsa. “I feel like there’s opportunity everywhere,” he told me, tilting up the brim of his felt cowboy hat.
Part of what pushed his family south was the same set of issues many Canadians on the trip described: antisemitism, soaring housing costs, a sluggish economy and a health care system under strain. But the real difference, Sachs said, has less to do with economics than with possibility.
Tulsa has a population of around 415,000. It’s big enough to matter, but small enough that ideas move quickly. More than once I heard the same sentiment: In Tulsa, you are usually just one phone call away from anyone you need to reach.
Conversations turn into projects. Programs appear where none existed before. The distance between suggestion and action is short.
“There’s a secret sauce here,” Sachs said. “Even I don’t know the recipe. But I’ve tasted it, and I know it exists.”
In larger Jewish cities, Sachs said, communities can feel settled — institutions established, leadership long entrenched. Tulsa still feels different, a place where the future of a Jewish community can be shaped in real time.
Seven months after arriving, Sachs is already putting down roots. His 13-year-old son recently celebrated his bar mitzvah here — a ceremony the family had originally planned to hold back in Vancouver. His wife now teaches at Tulsa’s Jewish elementary school.
Like many cities in the American heartland, Tulsa has long been treated as somewhere people pass over. But increasingly, some Jews are beginning to look down.
The relocation playbook
Tulsa is not the first Jewish community to try this. Every few years, a synagogue or federation decides to solve Jewish demography the way a small town might try to lure a Kia factory: with incentives.
In 2009, a hotel magnate in Dothan, Alabama, offered up to $50,000 to Jewish families willing to relocate to the town’s shrinking Reform congregation. Eleven families came. Seven eventually left.
In 2022, an Orthodox synagogue in White Oak, Pennsylvania — a fading mill town outside Pittsburgh — offered $100,000 to anyone willing to move there. Three families arrived. The program is now paused.
There have been modest successes.
After Hurricane Katrina, the Jewish community of New Orleans offered stipends for moving expenses, discounted day-school tuition and a year of free membership to a synagogue and the JCC. Hundreds took part before the program ended in 2012. About a quarter stayed.
Tulsa took a different tactic.
Tulsa Tomorrow is the brainchild of local businessman David Finer, who started the program along with a few of his friends. Instead of paying people to move, the community invites them to visit and rolls out the red carpet. What Tulsa lacked, he believed, wasn’t Jewish life. It was awareness.
“Tulsa is a hidden gem,” Finer, 69, told me one morning over breakfast at Chimera Cafe in the Tulsa Arts District, a block away from museums dedicated to Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. “When people come here, they’re shocked at how nice it is.”
Tulsa also has something working in its favor that many places its size do not. “It is, per capita, one of the most philanthropic cities in the country,” said Rebekah Kantor-Wunsch, Tulsa Tomorrow’s executive director and its sole employee.
The city is home to several major Jewish foundations — including the Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the Zarrow Family Foundation and the George Kaiser Family Foundation — all of which have helped shape large parts of Tulsa’s civic life through their giving. Kaiser, a lifelong Tulsan whose parents fled Nazi Germany, was the main donor to the Gathering Place, a 66-acre park along the Arkansas River that opened in 2018 — a lush stretch of tree-lined lawns, playgrounds and winding paths. It cost $465 million to build; Kaiser gave $350 million of that, the largest private gift to a public park in the United States.
Some participants discover another local incentive while they’re visiting. Tulsa Remote, also funded primarily by the Kaiser foundation, offers remote workers $10,000, a local business mentor and three years of free coworking space if they relocate to the city.
More than 4,000 people have taken that offer. Most have stayed.
The city’s philanthropic culture explains why Tulsa’s Jewish community is punching far above its weight, said Rabbi Yehuda Weg, the local Chabad rabbi. “Tulsa,” he said, “is money looking for a problem.”
The cousin theory
Just how broad that community backing runs became visible inside the downtown Bank of Oklahoma Center, a 19,000-seat arena where the Tulsa Oilers minor-league hockey team was hosting its first-ever Jewish Heritage Night.
The players wore special edition blue-and-white jerseys with a large Star of David across the chest. Fans could buy them, too. A few had already made their way to people in the stands, including Rabbi Daniel Kaiman, who had pulled one over his shirt.
From the bleachers, he watched the players circle the ice.
Kaiman, 41, moved to Tulsa in 2013 from Los Angeles and leads Congregation B’nai Emunah. It was founded in 1916 as Orthodox and is now denominationally ambiguous. (Squint long enough and it looks Conservative-adjacent.) Today it has about 520 member households, making it the largest synagogue in Oklahoma.
“No one moves to Tulsa for the weather,” Kaiman said loudly, over the roar of the crowd, referring to the humid summers and occasional tornado. “No one moves to Tulsa for the scenery. You move to Tulsa for the opportunity.”
Unlike places like Dothan or White Oak — towns that once boomed and then hollowed out — Tulsa is still growing. “It’s easier to build a life here,” Kaiman said.
The synagogue he leads occupies an entire city block and operates like a small ecosystem.
There is a preschool. A five-day-a-week after-school program picks children up from public schools and keeps them until early evening, offering Hebrew, piano and tumbling classes. About half the students are not Jewish.
Then there are the projects that extend beyond the synagogue’s traditional role: a bakery that employs people recovering from mental illness, a pop-up Jewish deli that raises money for social programs, and a refugee resettlement program run in partnership with HIAS.
The synagogue also houses a mikvah. Jews from across the region — sometimes driving for hours from Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri — come to use it.
Kaiman likes to explain the community this way. “Imagine you move somewhere and you have a cousin there,” he said. “We’re the cousin.”
Sitting beside him in the bleachers was Rabbi Batsheva Appel, the interim rabbi of Tulsa’s Reform congregation, Temple Israel. She arrived last summer from Boise, Idaho.
Temple Israel, founded in 1914, has about 300 member households and is currently rebuilding its synagogue campus after tearing down its longtime building. Groundbreaking on a new structure is set for the weekend after Passover.
In the meantime, her congregation meets elsewhere. Friday night services take place in the federation auditorium or sometimes in the lobby of the Jewish museum beneath a Tiffany stained-glass window depicting the binding of Isaac. Religious classes meet at the Jewish day school.
It is, in other words, a congregation temporarily without a building but not without momentum.
Appel said she had seen programs like Tulsa Tomorrow proposed before in other cities. “Frequently this kind of idea would come up, and then nothing ever happened,” she said. “So to see it come to fruition and to see how effective it has been is pretty amazing.”
On the ice below them, the Oilers scored a goal.
Kaiman watched for a moment, then returned to a metaphor he often uses to describe Jewish life in the city. Tulsa, he said, is like a whetstone (the stone used to sharpen a knife).
“The Jew is the knife,” he said. “And Tulsa sharpens you.”
Orthodox limits
When the first period of the hockey game ended, people drifted toward the arena’s concourse, where the smell of popcorn hung in the air.
Near one of the entrances, Weg, the Tulsa Chabad rabbi, and his wife, Etel, sat behind a folding table covered with Purim flyers and a tray of hamantaschen. The holiday was two days away.
They handed the triangular pastries to anyone who slowed down long enough to take one — including a few confused spectators who seemed unsure why a rabbi had materialized next to the nacho stand.
Weg, 65, wore a suit and tie and a black kippah perched on his head. With his long white beard and easy smile, he looked like a slimmer Santa Claus.
Weg arrived in Tulsa in 1987 as a young Chabad emissary. Today, three of his children serve as Chabad rabbis in communities of their own across America.
The Tulsa Tomorrow program, he said, makes sense for many Jews considering a move. “It allows people to see the Jewish landscape and the Jewish possibilities of Tulsa,” he said.
But he was careful not to oversell it. For Orthodox families, the infrastructure still has limits. Jewish schooling in Tulsa only runs through elementary grades, and keeping kosher requires some improvisation.
“You can get chicken, you can get meat — not every cut of meat, but quite a few,” he said, extolling the virtues of the local Trader Joe’s. “Enough to live on.”
Still, Weg argued that Tulsa offers something many larger Jewish communities do not: the feeling that every person counts, and is counted on. “In Atlanta or Dallas, you can get lost,” he said. “Here, everybody is engaged.”
He gestured toward the concourse to take in the totality of the moment, with hockey fans passing beneath Jewish banners while a rabbi handed out Purim cookies. Scenes like this, he suggested, capture something about the city. In Tulsa, Jewish life may be smaller. But it is hard to miss.
‘A Bell Labs for Jewish life’
The recruitment weekend eventually shifted from hockey arenas and real estate tours to what may be the most important piece of Tulsa’s Jewish infrastructure: the Zarrow Jewish Community Campus.
It’s vast, at 15 acres and 77,000 square feet.
The campus is deliberately multigenerational, and nearly every major Jewish institution in the city lives here — including the Jewish Community Center, the federation offices, the Mizel Jewish Community Day School, the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art and Zarrow Pointe, a senior living complex with more than 400 residents.
Among them is the 90-year-old grandmother of Isabella Silberg, 28, a Tulsa native who now serves as the federation’s director of development. Between the preschool and the retirement community, Silberg said, “this campus caters from baby to bubbe.”
Her fiancé, Shane Ross, 29, first visited on a Tulsa Tomorrow recruitment trip in 2023. He has since moved to town.
Walk through the midtown campus and something becomes clear almost immediately: The people running the place are young. The federation board chair is in his 30s. The museum curator is in her early 30s. The development director, public affairs director and several federation staff members are all under 35.
“I’m the old guy around here at 41,” joked Joe Roberts, who runs Jewish Tulsa, the umbrella organization overseeing the city’s federation, JCC and Jewish museum.
Roberts looks less like an executive than someone you might expect to find behind the bar at a downtown brewery — bald, thick beard, jeans and a tight black T-shirt stamped with the words Zionist Weightlifting Club, a brand he started himself.
He works out every day in the gym inside the JCC. “Our claim to fame,” he said, “is that we’re the cleanest gym in Tulsa.”
Roberts was born in Dayton, Ohio, and spent a decade in politics — even running for Congress at 26 — before pivoting into Jewish communal work. He worked at federations in Boston, Los Angeles and Columbus, did pro-Israel advocacy in Washington, D.C., and later ran a federation in Ontario.
Then Oct. 7 changed his trajectory. At the time, Roberts was living near Toronto, working as a public-affairs consultant and writing columns about antisemitism and Israel. The threats that followed, he said, forced him and his wife to reconsider where they wanted to raise their two young sons.
Around that time he heard about Tulsa Tomorrow. He came out of curiosity. Instead, he left with a job. Roberts now sees Tulsa as something larger than a recruitment program. “I want us to be a Bell Labs for Jewish life,” he said.
The stakes extend far beyond Oklahoma. “If we want a national Jewish future,” Roberts said, “we need a national Jewish present.”
‘A big fish’
Marisol Karcs, her curly dark hair clipped back, ambled through the campus with the quiet curiosity of someone who spends her days studying language and stories.
Karcs, 28, is finishing a creative writing MFA at Iowa State University. She had traveled to Tulsa with her younger sister Morgan, 25, who works in climate policy for a local government in California.
They had come to help Marisol think about her future. Her fiancée grew up Jewish in Tulsa. Now the couple is trying to decide whether to build a life here.
Karcs moves easily through corners of Jewish culture that would seem to rarely intersect with Oklahoma. She has studied Yiddish, attended the klezmer festival KlezKanada, taken language courses at the Yiddish Book Center and spent time around the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Her dream, she told me, might be to start a Tulsa Yiddish club — which, as far as she knew, did not yet exist.
In a large city, she said, that might be one niche among many. Here, it might actually matter.
“You’re a big fish in a small pond,” she said, the kind of place where a single idea can ripple through an entire community. “Everyone knows each other. People take care of each other. You don’t really leave people behind.”
In a place this size, she said, one person can build what the community becomes.
Places like Austin and Nashville were once like this — smaller cities where young people arrived early and helped shape what came next. Tulsa, she said, still feels like that kind of place.
Karcs paused outside the Jewish art museum, which also houses a Holocaust education center. Oklahoma now requires Holocaust education in public schools beginning in middle school, making the museum a regular destination for student field trips.
Standing in the quiet gallery, it was easy to see the argument Tulsa’s Jewish leaders were making.
For someone like Karcs, that kind of density carries a particular appeal. If her sister moves here, Morgan said, she would likely follow. Their parents might not be far behind.
“We’re a really tight-knit family,” Morgan said.
For now, the decision remains open. Karcs and her fiancée are weighing graduate school offers and thinking about what it would mean to build a queer Jewish life in a politically conservative state.
But Tulsa, she said, has surprised her.
“There are vibrant communities here that you wouldn’t expect when you hear ‘Oklahoma.’”
A new generation
Across town, another Jewish gathering was underway. This one involved a crime.
Sort of.
Several dozen young Jewish Tulsans, mostly in their 20s and 30s, had gathered in a hotel ballroom for a Shabbat dinner that doubled as a Purim-themed murder mystery.
The room looked like a costume party collided with a synagogue social hall, with a script that required both alibis and blessings. An astronaut mingled with a Renaissance noble. Kentucky Derby socialites in elaborate wide-brimmed hats chatted with a 1960s hippie. At least one gnome wandered through the crowd. Between courses, guests interrogated suspects in the whodunit plot while shaking groggers.
Among the participants was Jacob Parra, the federation’s director of public affairs, wearing denim farmer overalls and holding a red plastic cup.
Parra, 25, spends his days meeting with lawmakers, city leaders and policymakers on issues affecting Tulsa’s Jewish community. Before joining the federation, he worked on dozens of political campaigns.
“I think it speaks to the energy of the community,” Parra told me. “Many cities say they want to hear from younger people. But when push comes to shove, they’re not getting seats on boards.”
The jaunty Shabbat gathering teased the promise of community Rayna Franco, 38, had hoped Tulsa might deliver.
Franco, an advertising professional from Manhattan with long dark hair and tortoise cat-eye glasses, had arrived with three single friends — another New Yorker, one from Cleveland and a digital nomad currently working from Mexico City.
They moved through the weekend together, the four of them conversing in the easy shorthand of women who had spent years navigating big cities.
They represented a different slice of the cohort than many of the couples and young families touring houses: urban and unattached. Moving to Tulsa would mean leaving behind the dense web of family, friends and institutions that make Jewish life in places like New York feel almost automatic.
But what struck Franco about Tulsa’s Jewish community was the opposite dynamic. “In New York, you’re the norm,” she said. “There are Jews everywhere.”
In Tulsa, she noticed something different. “The people here opt to actively create opportunities for community,” she said.
She compared it to expat culture. When Americans live abroad, she explained, they tend to seek one another out. They form tight circles precisely because they are far from home.
Being Jewish in Tulsa, she said, felt similar.
“In New York City, it’s easy to not give living Jewishly a second thought,” she said. “But the effort that the Jewish Tulsans are putting in is purposeful, visible and admirable.”
‘Tulsa is a refuge’
The room filled quickly. Name tags appeared. Business cards began changing hands. Tulsa’s Jewish future, at least for the next two hours, was being negotiated over coffee and folding chairs.
Around a dozen local professionals had gathered at a downtown coworking space to make their case for life, and work, in Tulsa: a recruiter with open jobs, a real estate developer, a startup founder building AI companies, a banker ready to help newcomers open accounts and a tax consultant who specializes in helping Canadians move their businesses to the United States.
The message was simple: If the participants decided to relocate, Tulsa already had a path waiting.
“You’re not going to get routed through some random call center,” said Jared Goldfarb, a local banker whose Jewish family has lived in Tulsa for generations. “You can text me anytime.”
Then the mayor of Tulsa walked in.
Monroe Nichols, 42, is the first Black mayor in the city’s history, a milestone that carries particular weight here. Tulsa still lives in the shadow of the 1921 massacre that destroyed the prosperous Black neighborhood known as Greenwood, once called Black Wall Street.
Nichols arrived in a blue blazer, Oxford shirt and jeans. A former state representative, he greeted participants like a host welcoming guests into his home.
“We are so excited to have you in this community,” he told the group. “More excited when you move to this community.”
Then he made a point that seemed to resonate deeply with the crowd. “As a Black man in America,” Nichols said, “I can identify with some of the hate that you all have felt.”
For several of the Canadians in the room, the moment felt striking. Since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, some told me they had watched their own political leaders respond to antisemitic incidents with little more than statements of “thoughts and prayers.”
Here was a mayor doing something different: telling them plainly that he wanted them in his city.
“If you’re looking for a place where you can contribute,” Nichols said, “you’ve found that place.”
Then he used a word that carried particular weight in a room full of Jews — especially Jews who had traveled here because they were no longer sure where they belonged.
“Tulsa,” he said, “is a refuge.”
Afterward he lingered to shake hands, pose for photos and continue the conversation. For many in the Tulsa Tomorrow cohort, it was the kind of public welcome they had not heard from their own elected officials in years.
The next move
Participants on this Tulsa Tomorrow trip had created a WhatsApp group to introduce themselves before traveling. After the weekend ended, the chat continued with photos from the retreat and messages about what might come next.
Then the tone shifted.
Within a week of the trip to Tulsa, Toronto saw shootings at three synagogues. No one was injured, but the attacks — yet again — rattled Canada’s Jewish community.
One of the Canadians dropped a news link into the group chat. Another reminder, the message read, of what Jews are facing in cities across Canada. It was a reminder of why the question of where Jewish life takes place, and how it is sustained, feels newly urgent.
Tulsa, for some, had begun to feel like more than a curiosity. It suggested the possibility of building Jewish life somewhere that still felt open — a place where a community might be shaped, rather than simply inherited.
Some cities feel finished — their skylines built, their hierarchies set, their patterns long established. Tulsa still feels like a city becoming something. That sense of possibility is the wager at the heart of Tulsa Tomorrow.
A few weeks after the trip, the group chat was still active. People shared house listings. Compared notes. Asked practical questions about schools, jobs, synagogues.
The question was no longer whether there were Jews in Tulsa.
It was whether they might soon be among them.
The post The promised land is… Oklahoma? Inside Tulsa’s campaign to court young Jews appeared first on The Forward.
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Somalia’s South West State Says It Has Severed Ties With the Federal Government
FILE PHOTO: Somalia’s presidential candidate of South West state Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed speaks inside the Somali Parliament house in Mogadishu, Somalia April 30, 2018. Photo: REUTERS/Feisal Omar/File Photo
Somalia’s South West state said on Tuesday it was suspending all cooperation and relations with the government in Mogadishu, the latest sign of strain in the Horn of Africa country’s fragile federal system.
At a press conference, South West officials accused the federal government of arming militias and trying to unseat the state’s president, Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen. Somalia’s defense and information ministers did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Disputes over constitutional changes, elections and the balance of power between Mogadishu and regional administrations repeatedly open up political fault lines in Somalia. The South West administration says relations with Mogadishu worsened after the federal government pushed through constitutional amendments opposed by some state leaders.
Travel agencies told Reuters on Tuesday that commercial flights between Mogadishu and Baidoa, the administrative capital of South West state, had been halted. Humanitarian flights, including for United Nations operations, were continuing. Baidoa, which lies about 245 km (150 miles) northwest of Mogadishu, is a politically and militarily sensitive city because it hosts federal troops, regional security forces and international humanitarian operations in a zone affected by drought, conflict and displacement.
The Mogadishu government’s relations with other states have also been fraught. Somaliland declared independence in 1991 and has long been outside Mogadishu’s control. The administration of semi-autonomous Puntland said in March 2024 it would no longer recognize the federal government until disputed constitutional amendments were approved in a nationwide referendum.
Semi-autonomous Jubbaland suspended ties with Mogadishu in November 2024 in a dispute over regional elections.