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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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The new U.S. passport design is fueling a Star of David conspiracy theory. Here’s what’s really there.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled a new U.S. passport design last week, online sleuths zeroed in on a curious detail: “Is that the star of david???” one TikTok user commented on a video of Rubio showing off the document’s revamped look.
“Why do we rock the Star of David on American passports?” asked an X user in a post that garnered 1.6 million views.
The symbol was not, in fact, the Star of David, but rather 13 stars arranged in a hexagram, representing the original 13 colonies. The design is part of the official Great Seal of the United States, approved by the Continental Congress in 1782 as the official symbol for the newly sovereign country.
The hexagram shape wasn’t a new addition to the passport, either. The Great Seal has long been a fixture of the U.S. passport cover; the new design just enlarges it. The seal — including the cluster of 13 stars in a hexagram — appears on all sorts of government materials, including military uniforms, official presidential documents, and the dollar bill.
The shape’s resemblance to the Magen David, however, has long fueled conspiracy theories about secret Jewish or Israeli influence over the U.S. government. To some online commentators, the redesigned passport was fresh confirmation of that belief.
“It’s a colony of israel (sic) so it makes sense to pay homage to their owners,” a TikToker commented about the new design.
The seal’s history
Shortly after they adopted the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers had another important matter to attend to: appointing a committee to design a seal for the United States.
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams made up the all-star team. Franklin suggested an image of Moses parting the Red Sea. Jefferson wanted “the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.” Adams preferred an image of Hercules, the Greek hero known for his strength.
Evidently, none of them had a great eye for graphic design. Congress tabled their proposals.
Two more committees took up the project. In 1782, Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson integrated the various committees’ ideas into a new design, which featured a bald eagle, a shield, an olive branch and arrows, and a constellation of 13 stars. Congress approved the seal that year.
Thomson described the design as featuring “thirteen stars forming a constellation”; he did not specify a hexagram or six-pointed star. Original sketches, in fact, show the stars in a seemingly random arrangement.
Robert Scot, the chief engraver of the United States Mint, is credited with arranging the 13 stars into the six-pointed geometric star.
According to legend, George Washington ordered the 13 stars arranged as a Star of David as a tribute to Haym Salomon, a Jewish financier who aided the Revolutionary cause. But there’s no historical evidence of that, nor that Washington or Salomon had any role at all in designing the seal.
One plausible theory is that Scot may have simply been emulating the arrangement of stars on the American flag at the time, rearranging the 13 stars to fit symmetrically inside a circular field.
Even so, the myth of the Star of David intentionally appearing on the seal has reached as far as former presidential candidate Ben Carson, who in 2015 suggested that “Salomon gave all his funds to save the U.S. Army and, some say, no one knows for sure, that’s the reason there’s a Star of David on the back of the one dollar bill.”
Historians were quick to correct the record.
“If you squint, you can say there’s some resemblance but that certainly was not the intention of the designers, that we’re aware,” Wayne Homren of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society, which studies currency, told ABC News.
The theory behind the theory
Kent Harber, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University who studies conspiracy theories, said the passport claim fits within the emerging zeitgeist, in which “conspiracy beliefs about Jews and Israel are getting an increasing amount of currency.”
In this case, gaps in the historical record surrounding the hexagram’s design may have helped the theory take hold.
“We can’t take ‘no reason’ for an answer,” Harber said. “We have to have an explanation, and we will fill in that blank with other explanations, even bogus, sometimes sort of seemingly silly ones.”
Harber’s research has found a strong relationship between conspiracy theories, antisemitic attitudes, and hostility toward Israel.
Conspiracy theories are like “epistemological junk food,” he said. “They satisfy this craving by giving you exactly what you want, even though it’s not particularly good for you or for society.”
The post The new U.S. passport design is fueling a Star of David conspiracy theory. Here’s what’s really there. appeared first on The Forward.
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Swastikas, racist slurs painted on a playground and a golf course outside Philadelphia
The police were still there when neighbors arrived to clean up the Philadelphia playground where vandals had struck.
They had come to a playground in Abington Township, just outside Philadelphia, on Saturday morning with cleaning supplies. Officers had been called and were still collecting evidence from the swastikas that someone had spray-painted on the playground equipment and the blacktop, and from the N-word painted on the playground’s sign. So the volunteers waited. Then dozens of them, along with volunteer firefighters and school district staff, went to work.
Abington Township police have several investigative leads, Deputy Chief Ed Quinn told the Forward. “I’m confident we’re making an arrest and holding those responsible accountable for their actions,” he said, adding that it is too early to say whether charges would include a hate crime.
A week earlier, about 25 miles away, someone carved swastikas and a racial slur into the greens at Yardley Country Club, a private golf course. The similar incidents occurred at both the start and the close of the festival of Sukkot.
No arrests have been announced in either case. Neither police department knew about the other’s case until the Forward called. Quinn said he had never heard of the golf course, and Yardley’s police chief, William Golden, said the same of the playground. Golden declined to discuss leads or whether the vandalism would be charged as a hate crime.
Golden said he had also learned of a golf course about five miles away in Morrisville that was vandalized a week before Yardley’s. The course, he believed, did not report it to police and repaired the damage on their own. Golden said there were no swastikas in that vandalism, but that it included a racist slur.
The Yardley Country Club is adjacent to the Abrams Hebrew Academy, a Jewish elementary school with close to 200 students. Rabbi Ira Budow has run the school for more than four decades. His car is parked beside the hole that was hit, he said, and golf balls sometimes sail onto the school grounds.
“I really think it was probably a prank,” he said, noting that he can’t recall any other local antisemitic incident in his time there. “This is a good town.” Yardley, where Budow lives, is also home to three synagogues. The local police work with the school on security, and he is scheduled to speak to the Borough Council on Tuesday night.
The school already receives state security money. Applications ask whether a school feels threatened and requires them to provide an example – which gave Budow a message for whoever did this.
“This person should know that because of him, the school will be able to get more security grants,” he said. “They did the job for me.”
Why Shapiro is watching
Abington Township is also home to Gov. Josh Shapiro’s private residence.
“Gov. Shapiro has always been clear: antisemitism and hate have no place in Pennsylvania,” Rosie Lapowsky, a spokesperson for Shapiro, told the Forward. “These acts are intended to intimidate our neighbors and we condemn them unequivocally. Every Pennsylvanian deserves to feel safe in their community.”
For Shapiro, it is close to home in more than one way. His wife, Lori, went to elementary school at Abrams, in the building beside the golf course. Shapiro was Pennsylvania’s attorney general on Oct. 27, 2018, when a gunman killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. That anniversary is three weeks away. He was sworn in as governor on three Bibles, one of them rescued from the synagogue.
His own brush with violence opens his memoir, Where We Keep the Light. In April 2025, hours after the Shapiro family hosted a Passover seder, a man firebombed the governor’s residence in Harrisburg while the family and guests slept inside. Shapiro writes that it sharpened his sense that antisemitic violence is a lived reality, even for a governor with a police detail. “The bubble burst that morning,” he writes.
Shapiro is up for reelection next month. He is also widely seen as a possible Democratic candidate for president in 2028, which would make him the nation’s first Jewish president if he won.
Two communities, one response
Jason Holtzman, who runs the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, has been watching the headlines pile up. The region’s Jewish community, which he puts at between 250,000 and 300,000 people, now responds to incidents “far more often than we were a few years ago,” he said.
In August, the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia was vandalized, the third attack on it in one year. “These headlines are regular to us,” he said.
What worries Holtzman this week is the setting. “It’s really concerning that it’s also moving into everyday spaces,” he said, like a playground and a golf course. The one in Yardley, beside a Jewish school, “definitely affects children and it definitely affects people in our community.”
He also sees an opening. Antisemitism and anti-Black racism, Holtzman said, “grow from the same root,” and local churches, synagogues and elected officials have rallied together. “While this is a horrible thing, we’re hoping that this is an opportunity to actually bring people together in both communities.”
The Salem Baptist Church of Abington said much the same in a statement. The church called the N-word “the nuclear weapon in the English language” and the swastika “the symbolic equivalent.” Ignorance, it said, “has shown its vile face. At a park. The symbol of civic unity.” It called the vandalism “yet another opportunity for Blacks and Jews to be reminded that our enemies are two sides of the same coin. Unity. Not polarity. Not isolation.”
On Thursday, the town is set to hold a vigil at the park. The idea, the invitation says, is to “reclaim a shared community space from hate.”
The post Swastikas, racist slurs painted on a playground and a golf course outside Philadelphia appeared first on The Forward.
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What do Germans talk about when they talk about antisemitism?
In today’s Germany, an accusation of antisemitism can end careers, shutter institutions and put political alliances beyond consideration. That gravity is understandable in the country responsible for the Holocaust. What has become less clear, particularly since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza, is what Germans mean when they use the word “antisemitism.”
Days before Berliners went to the polls on Sept. 20, Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz provided a particularly awkward illustration. At a campaign event for his party, the CDU, Merz called antisemitism “the most perfidious form of xenophobia.” German Jews were quick to point out a glaring problem; they were not foreigners. The contentious IHRA framework officially embraced by Germany stresses that antisemitism and hostility toward foreigners are separate phenomena.
The confusion has become politically consequential since Berlin voted. Die Linke, a democratic socialist party, won 25.7%, more than doubling its 2023 share and finishing nearly seven points ahead of the CDU, which came in at 18.8%. The far-right AfD came third with 16.3%, itself an extraordinary gain of 7.2 points. Yet, since the election, the question consuming German politics has been whether Die Linke is too antisemitic to govern.
Israel’s ambassador, Ron Prosor, described antisemitism within Die Linke as systemic. The Central Council of Jews warned the SPD and Greens against joining a Linke-led coalition. Bavaria’s premier, Markus Söder, called Die Linke “deeply antisemitic.”
Philipp Peyman Engel, editor in chief of the Jüdische Allgemeine, the weekly newspaper of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, distilled the case against Die Linke in Britain’s Jewish Chronicle. The party, he wrote, was “riddled with people who hate Jews and Israel” and represented “the elimination of Israel.” Even voters drawn by rents and social policy had tolerated its hatred of Israel; SPD and Green politicians would forfeit any claim to moral seriousness by governing with it. “No non-Jewish democrat should simply accept this election result either,” he wrote.
That is an extraordinary indictment of a party that just received more votes than any other in the German capital. It is also hard to reconcile with the party that actually exists.
Die Linke does carry unusual historical baggage. It was formed in 2007 from a movement of trade unionists and Social Democrats alienated by Gerhard Schröder’s welfare reforms and the PDS, successor to East Germany’s ruling communist party. The GDR pursued an anti-Zionist foreign policy, strands of which survived reunification; the modern party also absorbed a western anti-imperialist tradition in which hostility toward Israel has at times shaded into antisemitism.
A 2011 analysis published by Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education found serious hostility toward Israel in parts of Die Linke but rejected describing the party itself as antisemitic. A year later, Die Linke nominated Beate Klarsfeld — the Nazi hunter who spent decades pursuing German war criminals and famously slapped former Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger over his Nazi past — for the German presidency. She received 126 votes in the Federal Assembly.
Die Linke’s current official position is markedly different from Engel’s characterization in the Jewish Chronicle. At its federal congress in June, Die Linke explicitly affirmed Israeli and Palestinian self-determination and the right of both Israel and Palestine to exist. It passed a separate resolution condemning antisemitism and describing its sharp rise since Oct. 7. While one may regard those positions as inadequate, contradictory or politically naïve, they do not amount to a program for eliminating Israel.
The party that won Berlin last month has changed in other ways as well. Its candidate for mayor, Elif Eralp, a trained lawyer, was born in Munich to Turkish socialist trade unionists who fled the 1980 military coup. Her campaign centered on housing, rent controls and migrant rights, and borrowed consciously from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York; Linke activists even traveled there to meet his advisers.
That helps explain why this election has rattled Germany’s political center. Die Linke is no longer easily dismissed as the residual party of eastern German communism. In Berlin, it has assembled a young, urban and increasingly diverse electorate around an issue — the cost of housing — that the governing parties have conspicuously failed to solve. Unlike the AfD, it also has potential coalition partners. A Linke-SPD-Green government could remove the CDU from power and seek to implement the result of a 2021 referendum, approved by 57.6% of voters, calling for the socialization of large housing companies.
There are nonetheless questions about parts of its Berlin organization, especially in Neukölln. A rapper at a campaign event sang “Yalla Yalla Intifada” and “Death to the IDF.” Ferat Koçak, the district’s Linke Bundestag member, was photographed on election night with Ibrahim Ibrahim, described by Democ, an anti-extremist monitoring group, as a longtime activist with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the EU lists as a terrorist organization. Ibrahim has also been reported to have praised Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a “steadfast leader” and “martyr hero.”
Beyond Berlin, a June investigation by Bayerischer Rundfunk into internal forums and chats of Linksjugend, the party’s youth organization, found messages by a spokesman for Die Linke’s youth organization in Rhineland-Palatinate referring to Israeli “concentration camps” and a “genocide in the name of Judaism” and telling Israel to “drop dead!”
Wolfgang Benz, who directed the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Berlin’s Technical University for more than two decades and edited an eight-volume handbook on antisemitism, told the Tagesspiegel that the term Antisemitismus is undergoing an Ausverkauf — an inflationary depletion of its meaning.
“Die Linke is not antisemitic,” he said. Anti-Israel slogans can be crude, denunciatory, even “misanthropic,” without thereby becoming Jew-hatred. His answer when asked whether the chant “Death to the IDF” was antisemitic was no.
In the same interview, Benz also argued that Die Linke’s leadership should deal loudly and decisively with genuinely unacceptable conduct and singled out Bodo Ramelow, who became Linke’s first minister-president in 2014, and Petra Pau, a veteran Linke politician and former Bundestag vice president, as politicians with strong records against antisemitism. Benz’s successor, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, has likewise called the debate around Die Linke “overblown” and warned that antisemitism is being used to influence coalition formation.
The consequences of collapsing antisemitism and anti-Zionism have extended beyond electoral politics. In Verfassungsblog, an open-access forum on constitutional law and politics, scholars Dörthe Engelcke and Ilyas Saliba documented Palestinian-related events at German universities losing rooms or being canceled, while antisemitism commissioners intervened in debates over terms such as “genocide,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism.” Berlin’s Jews, meanwhile, are hardly unanimous. An open letter signed by 150 Jewish Berliners, including Susan Neiman, Deborah Feldman and Eva Menasse, accused parts of the media and Jewish community of instrumentalizing antisemitism against Die Linke while the far right advances.
The signatories also point out some obvious facts that, I imagine, tend to get overlooked: that Jews in Berlin pay rent, send children to schools, use hospitals and, like their neighbors, worry about economic insecurity.
Britain’s Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn offers a cautionary precedent. As genuine failures over antisemitism became entangled with factional warfare, parts of Corbyn’s camp focused so heavily on the political motives behind the accusations that they appeared to minimize the underlying problem. The result was to strengthen the very attacks they regarded as politically motivated. Die Linke would be unwise to repeat that mistake.
Right now, far more than Die Linke’s reputation is on the line. The far-right AfD party won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt last month, an increase of 23 percentage points. On the same day Berlin voted, it won 38.2% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, according to preliminary official results, while the CDU fell to 4.9% and disappeared from the state parliament. In Berlin, the AfD rose from 9.1 to 16.3% and finished third.
Those results should provide some perspective on the attempt to establish whether Die Linke’s 25.7% represents an antisemitic rupture in German democracy. Die Linke’s leadership will have to demonstrate that its stated opposition to antisemitism has real-world consequences. But the claim that Jew-hatred is baked into the party itself is unsupported by its program, its history or the records of many of its leading politicians.
What the controversy more clearly reveals is the alarm produced when a party long treated as marginal suddenly wins and becomes capable of leading its government. Antisemitism, the most devastating accusation available in German political language, offers Die Linke’s opponents a means of turning questions about the behavior of certain activists into a referendum on the party’s legitimacy.
Yet while Berlin argues over whether Die Linke is fit to govern, a far-right party with openly ethnonationalist positions and powerful antidemocratic currents, is winning close to 40% in parts of the former East. What’s shocking is that Germany’s political center is devoting its fiercest moral language to the left precisely when the far right is remaking the country’s electoral map.
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