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Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022
(JTA) — All year long, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports about the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our community. To close out the year, we wanted to turn our attention to people who may not have been such household names but whose stories deserve to be remembered.
Here, with the help of readers who shared the names of people they are remembering, we recall 18 Jews who shaped their local communities and made a difference in the lives of those close to them. They include rabbis whose impact extended for decades, teachers who inspired generations of students and activists who were working to build a better world. May their memories be a blessing.
Harriet Bograd
A champion of emerging Jewish communities in far-flung places.
Harriet Bograd, center, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a visit to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish community in Ghana in an undated photo. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)
Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported emerging Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and other places far beyond the usual centers of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart at the West End Synagogue, she was inspired by a visit in 2004 to a remote village in Ghana, where about two dozen families considered themselves Jewish. In the years to come, she and Kulanu would provide support to emerging Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more. She once said of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the idea [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities that have their own richness and variety.”
Henry Berg-Brousseau
Transgender activist from Kentucky
Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Campaign)
Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied history, political science and Jewish studies at George Washington University, where he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had recently gotten a major promotion at the Human Rights Campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, home, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him,” his mother, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in a statement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was important to him to make the world a more accepting place. At 24 years old. he had finally found a community but that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Orthodox advocate for women’s rights
Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)
Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a leading figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for women’s rights within Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included creating a rabbinical court to support “agunot” — women whose husbands refused to divorce them — frequently earned him scorn from traditionalists within Orthodoxy. But many others saw him as a “gentle giant” who wielded his years of study and experience to fight for women’s rights in Jewish law. Krauss was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1948. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Young Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. During his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva University and began to get more involved in issues related to the role of women in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 came back to New York to found the International Beit Din, or religious court, to work on agunot cases. “Some say it is a modern revolution,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “I say that’s the way you should do it.”
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni
A survivor and scholar who teased out the many voices of the Talmud
Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was associated with Columbia University for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia University professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for many years at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, until leaving the institution in 1983 over its decision to ordain women rabbis. He later became dean of the rabbinical school of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement created by rabbis and scholars who similarly broke with the Conservative movement. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud study by treating Jewish text as a living, mutable conversation across generations, as opposed to a static document. Halivni’s approach to learning was the “corollary to loving the text so much that you just had to understand it to its fullest, whatever tools would enable you to do so,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.
Moris Albahari
A remnant of a Ladino-speaking past
Moris Albahari, shown in a documentary about his story called “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)
Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator force, came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac, the country’s equivalent of Auschwitz. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and David was able to help his son escape from the train. Because Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that is mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages, he was able to speak with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him several more times before the end of the war, but afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews dead or forever dispersed, he spoke the language largely at home. At one point the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a leader within Bosnia’s Jewish community. “It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevok,” said Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members.”
Rachel Brodie
A “master Jewish educator” whose influence was vast
Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish News of Northern California)
Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble yet through her work as an educator had a vast influence on the Jewish community in the Bay Area of California, where she lived, and beyond. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an educational resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She also served as “chief Jewish officer” at the Jewish community Center of San Francisco, a position created just for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley, where she had been a senior educator. “To learn with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and transformed.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her home in Berkeley.
Rabbi Steven Sager
“Leader, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and beyond
Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)
When Rabbi Steven Sager died May 15 at 71 after an extended battle with pancreatic cancer, he was mourned not only by his family and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, but by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry community spanning the globe. “Steve was a beautiful and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I generally do not believe in translation, especially translation of poetry. It seems to me that every language has an inner secret that cannot be transposed into another vessel. Yet, when Steve translated my poems I had a different feeling — I felt he entered an inner layer, one that lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”
Nate Geller
Devoted to building stronger Jewish communities
Nate Geller, at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” sign, which he took home and hung on his mantel. (Courtesy)
Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a struggle with leukemia that he faced with characteristic humility, faith and optimism. His death was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s parent company); to his synagogue community in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had dedicated his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University in 1983. In the hours after his death, chat rooms and email boxes filled up with loving tributes to Nate, remarkable for their consistency: Friends and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his passion for Jewish learning, his commitment to Israel, his willingness not just to hear but to listen when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his family: his wife Lyn Light Geller, herself a gentle and passionate force among “Jewish professionals,” his grown children Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s wife Talia, and their kids, Annaelle and Judah. Said one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is an enormous Nate-shaped void in the world now.”
Hedi Fried
A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden
Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s culture minister and handball player Linnea Claeson during a counterprotest against a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP via Getty Images)
Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, where she became a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke widely about her experiences during the Holocaust, gathering some of the most common exchanges in “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust,” published in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no question too difficult to answer. You were brave, generous, dedicated and extremely wise,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent but not your message. It lives on in everyone who met you, in your texts, books, films and your belief that man is still good — and that it is possible to build a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our entire existence.” Fried, who had three children, died in November at 98.
Rabbi Sy Dresner
The “most arrested rabbi in America”
Rabbi Martin Freedman, right, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,center, are taken to the Tallahassee city building where they were charged with unlawful assembly after they and 10 other “Freedom Riders” were arrested attempting to eat at the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Photos)
Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was sometimes called the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Dresner built a career as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was active in the fight against the Vietnam War and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dresner was born on the Lower East Side in 1929 to an Orthodox family and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a child but went on to become a Reform rabbi after serving in the Korean War and working on a kibbutz in Israel. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he said after an arrest in 1964 outside a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”
Eli Evans
‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’
Eli Evans, seen here in a picture from a trip to Israel in the 1970s, was “equally at home in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)
Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, where his father would become the first Jewish mayor and his mother the founder of Hadassah’s first chapter in the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native home despite spending his adult life in New York City, where he was a prominent grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Street” in both the United States and Israel. He wrote several memoirs about Southern Jews and also included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at multiple foundations according to an activist philosophy that helped launch the Children’s Defense Fund, seeded the South with Black lawyers who became local civil rights leaders and built ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their countries made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish establishment and strengthened American Jewish life, without losing his Southern Jewish soul,” said Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have known him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of complications of COVID-19, after a period of declining health.
Sheryl Grossman
A lifelong advocate for people with disabilities
Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish disability activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Series at Towson University)
Sheryl Grossman stood small, at just 4’3″ and 48 pounds, but in the world of Jewish disability advocacy she loomed large, as both the founder of a Facebook group for people living with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center. She died March 28 at age 46, the result of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked cancer. “I don’t think anyone will ever know just how much work Sheryl did during the pandemic to help Jewish communities support their most vulnerable neighbors who were in the hospital or isolated at home with COVID,” said Shoshana Finkel, a law student who met Grossman when she was an intern at the American Association of People with Disabilities. “She didn’t feel the need to share her accomplishments; that was never what the work was about for her.”
Dara Goldman
A professor of Spanish and Jewish studies in her prime
Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)
Dara Goldman was preparing for graduation at the University of Illinois, where she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and for the American Jewish Historical Society conference, when she died May 13 of a heart attack. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so diverse that she was affiliated with eight units within the University of Illinois; most recently, she was researching Jewish cultural production in Cuba, where she brought resources for the Jewish community during her research trips, and co-edited a volume on 21st-century Jewish writing. “With her characteristic wit, she would often joke that she was a Jewish woman who took a wrong turn at diaspora,” said a remembrance published by the university. “But jokes aside, she could be at the same time a Jewish woman from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and loved very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate within our halls for a long time.”
Yaakov Shalev
A beloved family man whose story was Israel’s
Yaakov Shalev, seated third from right, helped organize Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Shalev)
“When I arrived for a visit with family in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged nearly everyone at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my younger cousins badgered me to remove it. It took my elderly grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everyone down and declare that I am his same beloved grandson, with or without the piercing.
“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we called him, passed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, with his five children at his side. He spent his last few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Fairuz.
“Saba Yaakov helped organize the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 and then enlisted in the Israeli military as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself how to build houses and became a successful contractor in the 1960s. But he soon decided the stress was too much and opened a shop in south Tel Aviv where he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their paintings. He kept the shop running for more than 40 years, going to work every day until he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter
Trude Feldman
A journalist who specialized in Yom Kippur interviews
Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)
The daughter of a rabbinical family, Trude Feldman launched her career covering the 1961 trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she put her training as a Hebrew teacher to use by teaching the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She also taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) But it was in her coverage of American presidents that Feldman truly made her mark, becoming famous for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as an opportunity for redemption. That’s what got her the first interview with Bill Clinton after he copped in 1998 to yes, having sex with that woman. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Night Live” once did so in a sketch — but those close to her understood their value. “The joke, however, was on everyone else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired with her signature persistence, her style more often elicited not puff but profundity, more sincerity than sugar. The unique access she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable results.”
Harlene Winnick Appelman
A revolutionary leader in Jewish education
Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photo provided by the Covenant Foundation.
Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s career in Jewish education took off in 1982 when she became the director of family life education at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish learning, bringing children out of dry frontal settings into a more tactile experience of Judaism. After joining the board of the Covenant Foundation, which funds and promotes Jewish education, in 1994, she became its director in 2005 and held that role until 2021, allowing her to influence a generation of Jewish educators. Many of them mourned her death at 75 on Aug. 18; the cause was cancer. “I am one of an entire congregation of Jewish educational leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made feel special,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in an online remembrance. “I hope that in her memory, I will find ever new ways to help more Jewish rabbis and educators feel seen, heard, capable, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Foundation initiated a new prize, in Jewish family education, in Appelman’s honor.
Tom Tugend
An indefatigable journalist
Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles home, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)
Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his family left their home in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, where he had lived for most of his life. In the intervening decades, he fought in the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces; covered Jewish news for a wide array of publications, including JTA; and enjoyed 66 years of marriage during which he and his wife raised three daughters. “His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” said one of them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many people.”
Judah Samet
A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror
Judah Samet stands next to his portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Forget” project at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photo by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh)
Judah Samet became a national face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting because he survived: He had been running late that day, so was not inside the building when 11 of his fellow congregants were murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s guest to the State of the Union address. The experience was both very different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938, and in some ways similar. As a young child, Samet was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After a stop in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Sept. 27.
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‘Halloween meets Israeli chutzpah,’ as holiday grows beyond American expats in the Jewish state
Israeli cellphones have been pretty busy lately, given Tuesday’s monumental national election. There were the constant robocalls and daily text surveys leading up to Election Day. And with the scramble to form a coalition now underway, Israelis are glued to their phones, waiting for news alerts and debating every possible scenario in various group chats. But around Tel Aviv, hundreds of parents have an extra WhatsApp group to manage: the one dedicated to their neighborhood’s trick-or-treat event, set to take place this Saturday night.
“Can we change the date for Sabbath observers?” one mother asks.
“Halloween is always October 31st,” someone responds.
“I don’t think anyone here cares about the actual date,” another chimes in.
There are dozens of questions about where to buy candy in bulk, along with frantic costume emergencies. “Our order won’t make it! Does anyone have a witch costume for an 8-year-old?”
“We are so excited,” one parent writes. “This is our first time. Can someone explain how it works?”
Over the last decade, Halloween in Israel has grown from a small gathering of American immigrants into neighborhood-wide celebrations across Tel Aviv and other big cities. Bars and clubs now host annual spooky soirées, and costume shops that once depended almost entirely on Purim sales have added a second busy season in late October. And on Saturday night, thousands of children are expected to take to the streets for some classic trick-or-treating — with an Israeli twist.
The birthplace of Halloween b’Aretz remains its epicenter: Tel Aviv’s Old North neighborhood. The area has long been an enclave of both young families and English-speaking immigrants, a combination that helped transform the unfamiliar Halloween ritual into an annual local tradition.
The first trick-or-treat event was organized in 2015 by expat mothers Smadar Barak and Eliza Duenow, whose children were missing an American Halloween. It began with just 10 families spread out across the Old North. Within four years, that number had jumped to more than 100. And it was no longer just English speakers. Israeli friends and classmates had begun asking if they could join “American Purim.” Participation exploded as other neighborhoods began hosting their own Halloween-themed events.
But over time, many of the original families, including both organizers, returned to the States. The whole thing might have fizzled out completely had it not been for Noa Rudik, a young mother on extended maternity leave, who often ran Jewish holiday events for neighborhood families.
“A community candle-lighting for Chanukah. A kibbutz-style Shavuot celebration in the park. I saw that families, like mine, were hungry for opportunities to be together,” Rudik says.
Somehow, she ended up on an email list from Duenow, who was organizing a group pumpkin order and carving activity. Born and raised in Israel, Rudik had very little exposure to Halloween, but she was immediately enchanted. After taking her kids to the pumpkin carving, they eventually joined the trick-or-treaters. “In those early years, we didn’t have access to all of the Halloween supplies, so everything was very homemade — the costumes, the decorations, which I love. Plus, what kid doesn’t want to run around all night collecting candy?”
Beyond her own family’s enjoyment, Rudik understood the holiday’s potential for community building. “It doesn’t get any more communal than Halloween,” she points out. “Rosh Hashanah. Passover. You can celebrate those holidays just within your own family. Many people do. But for trick-or-treating, you literally cannot do it without your neighbors.”
Rudik and a few others eventually took over for Barak and Duenow and opened it up to the entire community. Today, the original WhatsApp group has close to 1,000 members, and nearly every Tel Aviv neighborhood hosts its own event. While the early trick-or-treaters sometimes had to endure strange looks as they traipsed from house to house in their costumes, these days you can feel the spirit of Halloween across the city, as the sidewalks fill with pint-sized ghosts and goblins.
Not everyone is on board with the Pagan-rooted holiday, though. Last year, Israeli pop star Miri Mesika sparked a public debate over Halloween and Jewish identity when she pointedly told an interviewer that her daughters would be waiting until Purim to dress in costume. Rudik has also sensed some reluctance on the part of the Tel Aviv municipality to support trick-or-treating, even though it typically helps fund her other events. Efforts to promote the activity through local schools were also met with objections from some parent representatives, leading to a compromise: each could decide whether to pass the invitation along to their class.
Occasionally, Rudik hears from more traditional families who are hesitant or have decided not to participate. “But otherwise, the response has been overwhelmingly positive,” she reports. “Most people do not even think about the religious aspect or the fact that it’s not ‘our holiday.’ They just see it as an opportunity to be creative, to spend time with friends, and to come together as a community.”
All of which involves some pretty complicated logistics. Even with the holiday’s growth in popularity, most residents don’t hand out treats, so America’s door-to-door model won’t work. In the early years, participants shared addresses, apartment numbers and even door codes with each other. But as the group grew, the prospect of giving hundreds of strangers access to their buildings became less appealing. Some families moved their candy stations downstairs; others divided up, with one parent taking the children around while the other stayed home to distribute candy, as they often do in the States. For years, families navigated with a Google map of participating homes. Last year, a tech-savvy neighborhood parent designed a custom trick-or-treating app that will now be available across the city.
“Start-up Nation does Halloween,” Rudik jokes.
The guiding principle is that anyone collecting candy should also help provide it. Some families put up elaborate decorations and stick around to distribute treats; others leave a simple help-yourself bowl by the door. Those who can’t host typically arrange to buy candy for someone else’s house, which gets coordinated through the Whatsapp group the week before.
“We go by the honor system,” Rudik says. “We trust people to figure out a way to contribute. And there is always plenty of candy for everyone.”
But just in case, Rudik spends much of the night manning a centrally located emergency candy station, dispatching reinforcements to households that are running low.
After more than a decade, the festivities usually run pretty smoothly, though the growing number of Israelis has brought with it a learning curve.
“I really love that this started with Americans,” Rudik says. “I think it lends a legitimacy that would not necessarily be there if a bunch of Israelis just decided to start trick-or-treating. But it has definitely changed shape over the years.”
“Halloween meets Israeli chutzpah,” she calls it. Like any cultural tradition, trick-or-treating comes with its own etiquette that isn’t necessarily obvious to newcomers.
“Usually parents would be responsible for making sure their kids follow the rules. But we realized parents themselves didn’t necessarily know the ins and outs. Most of us didn’t grow up on this,” she points out.
One year, after families complained that older children had emptied their unattended candy bowls, Rudik and her fellow organizers visited neighborhood schools to talk to the kids and sent parents reminders on WhatsApp.
“In the days before Halloween, we really urge everyone to review the rules with their children: just take one candy, leave enough for others. Be good neighbors.”
This year’s turnout is expected to be their biggest yet, Rudik says, with several hundred families registered in the Old North alone. It follows a string of quieter celebrations, beginning in 2020, when the pandemic kept everyone inside.
“I think we did something over Zoom,” Rudik says, rolling her eyes.
Then came the quietest year of all: 2023. Less than three weeks before Halloween, on Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel’s southern border, killing more than 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage.
“It wasn’t even a question,” Rudik recalls. “It was just obvious to everyone it would be cancelled. Nor was it specific to Halloween. No one was in the mood to celebrate anything. We were just engulfed in grief.”
The following year, the organizers went ahead with a toned-down version.
“The war wasn’t over, there were still hostages in Gaza,” she says, “but we also felt like we wanted to give the children some sense of normalcy. We asked people not to do anything too gory or scary — no blood or body parts or skeletons — and everyone really respected that. It was a pretty muted night.”
Last year, Israeli Halloween was back in full force, with one new addition: an adults only party, which Rudik also co-organized and will be bringing back this year as well. “Most of us didn’t get to celebrate Halloween as kids,” she says, with a smile. “So we are just making up for lost time.”
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Jewish Democrats head to the polls frustrated with their party. Will they still help flip control of Congress?
For decades, Jewish voters have been among the Democratic Party’s most loyal supporters, though Republicans have made some inroads in recent elections. Now, with early voting underway and the midterms just days away, Jewish voters could help decide control of Congress in what may signal a broader change.
After a heated primary season, Republicans see an opportunity and signs of a potential shift their way. They hope growing Jewish frustration with Democrats over antisemitism and support for Israel will translate into votes in closely contested races.
Democrats need a net gain of four House seats and four Senate seats to take control of both chambers. But the Democratic Party’s advantage among Jewish voters on the generic congressional ballot has fallen from 49 points to 13.
CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten recently highlighted a sharp decline, for example, in Democratic support among Jewish voters in New York. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s lead among Jewish voters has narrowed from 51 percentage points in 2022 to just 13 points this year.
In Michigan, Jewish Democrats remain divided over their party’s Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, who has intensified his criticism of Israel in recent weeks. Last weekend, a PAC supporting the El-Sayed campaign faced online backlash for a TV ad that showed a couple blaming Israel aid for the high price of groceries.
But whether that frustration will lead Jewish voters to stop supporting Democratic candidates is another question.
Two national surveys conducted this year show Jewish voters remain firmly in the Democratic camp despite the declines. A September poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 71% of Jewish voters planned to support Democrats for Congress, compared with 23% who planned to support Republicans. Another survey, conducted by GBAO Strategies, found Democrats with a 67%-26% lead among Jewish voters.
The Jewish Electorate Institute poll also found that Jewish voters were nearly equally concerned about rising antisemitism within both parties.
Still, with control of the House and Senate at stake and several close races, even a small shift among Jewish voters could make a difference.
Republicans see an opening in Michigan
Michigan offers perhaps the clearest test of the battle over the Jewish vote.
The Republican Jewish Coalition is spending $2 million to target approximately 50,000 Jewish voters, primarily in Oakland County, home to some of Michigan’s largest Jewish communities.
Sam Markstein, RJC’s spokesperson, said in an interview with the Forward that the campaign includes digital advertising, direct mail, text messages, phone calls and door-to-door canvassing in communities such as Bloomfield Hills, West Bloomfield and Southfield, where former Rep. Haley Stevens performed strongly in the Democratic Senate primary.
It’s the group’s largest general-election investment, after its super PAC, the RJC Victory Fund, spent $3.9 million against Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, an Israel critic, in the GOP primary earlier this year. Massie lost by nine points.
El-Sayed’s nomination has divided Jewish Democrats because of his criticism of Israel and his response to the March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield that some Jewish voters interpreted as justifying the attack. He later apologized for the remarks. Some Jewish Democrats are publicly supporting former Rep. Mike Rogers, saying El-Sayed has to assuage concerns in his outreach and in public comments.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the stakes are high, with polls showing a dead heat between El-Sayed and Rogers. In 2024, Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin defeated Rogers by fewer than 20,000 votes. A relatively small shift among Jewish voters could prove crucial.
In his closing statement during the last Michigan Senate debate, Rogers appealed directly to Jewish Democrats “who are afraid for their children, when their daughters can’t wear their Star of David walking across Michigan’s campus” to support him. “You’ll have a home with us,” Rogers said. At a rally last Sunday, Trump once again accused Democrats of disloyalty, saying that Jewish voters backing El-Sayed “should be ashamed of themselves.”
Markstein predicted that “you could see a Republican carry the Jewish community in Michigan for the first time in decades.” He suggested there’s an “acceleration of Jewish voters” out of the Democratic Party after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack and the subsequent rise in antisemitism. But Markstein also acknowledged that the change may be gradual.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen overnight,” he said. “I do think they’re going to be much more open-minded and be a lot more ticket-splitting in the future.”
The RJC plans to examine precinct-level election results rather than relying solely on exit polls, Markstein said, to measure whether Jewish voters are moving toward Republicans.
Jewish Democrats fight to hold their voters
The Jewish Democratic Council of America is also mounting its largest midterm voter outreach effort, hoping to prevent Jewish dissatisfaction with Democrats from turning into Republican votes.
While its advertising budget is significantly smaller than the RJC’s, JDCA is relying heavily on direct voter outreach.
JDCA said it is spending more than $300,000 on digital advertising specifically targeting Jewish voters, aiming for more than 4 million ad impressions by Election Day.
Its advertisements include campaigns against Rep. Mike Lawler in New York, Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton in Texas and Republican Sen. Jon Husted in Ohio. Other ads target younger Jewish voters in six states and 20 competitive House districts.
The organization has also mobilized more than 715 volunteers, who have made over 640,000 direct Jewish voter contacts through phone banks and canvassing; they’ve also recruited 32 campus fellows to help organize voters.
Halie Soifer, JDCA’s CEO, accused Republicans of exploiting Jewish fears about antisemitism.
“In the closing weeks of this election, Republicans are invoking fear as a political tactic, tapping into Donald Trump’s culture war,” Soifer wrote in an email to supporters. She accused Republicans of using antisemitism and Islamophobia to divide voters rather than addressing economic concerns. “It’s going to backfire,” she said.
“Democrats aren’t perfect, but Republicans under Trump aren’t the answer,” Soifer added.
The battle beyond Michigan
Beyond Michigan, Republicans are also trying to persuade Jewish voters to reject mainstream, pro-Israel Democrats, arguing that the party has moved too far to the left in an effort to satisfy the progressive wing.
One major test is New York’s 17th Congressional District, where Jewish voters make up an estimated 20% of the population. Although the RJC is not making a major investment there, other groups are spending heavily in one of the country’s most competitive House races.
The incumbent Republican congressman, Mike Lawler, has maintained close relationships with the growing Hasidic and Orthodox communities in Rockland County and parts of Westchester County and made Israel and antisemitism central issues in his campaign. The Democratic candidate, Cait Conley, an Army veteran and former national security official, is also a strong supporter of Israel. She has condemned antisemitism and publicly criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s statement marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack.
In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, faces Republican Rep. Mike Collins in another competitive race.
Ossoff has faced criticism from some Jewish supporters over his votes to block certain weapons sales to Israel. In a recent debate, Collins criticized Ossoff for supporting El-Sayed, describing the Michigan Senate candidate as “the guy that hates Israel.” Ossoff has accused his opponent of ties to white nationalism, a charge Collins rejected.
But that dissatisfaction with Ossoff has not necessarily translated into support for his Republican opponent. Georgia state Rep. Esther Panitch, a Jewish Democrat who has criticized Ossoff’s Israel positions, is supporting his reelection.
J Street, the liberal pro-Israel organization, is spending nearly $500,000 to support Ossoff as part of a $3 million digital advertising campaign across five competitive races. Unlike JDCA and the RJC’s Michigan campaign, J Street’s advertisements target the general electorate, not specifically Jewish voters.
Tali deGroot, J Street’s vice president of political and digital strategy, said J Street is working to elect a “pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-democracy majority.”
Florida offers another test of the Jewish vote.
In the newly drawn 25th Congressional District, Jewish Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz, an outspoken supporter of Israel, is facing Republican Scott Singer, the former mayor of Boca Raton who is also Jewish. The district’s new boundaries favor Republicans, with Trump carrying the area by nine percentage points in 2024.
Moskowitz has frequently criticized antisemitism within his party and clashed with progressives over Israel. The outcome of this close race could show whether a Jewish Democrat with strong pro-Israel bona fides can win a Republican-leaning district. The GOP’s leading House super PAC recently canceled a planned $6 million advertising campaign in the district after major political forecasters shifted the race to “Lean Democratic.”
Florida’s Senate race between Republican incumbent Ashley Moody and progressive Democrat Angie Nixon offers a broader, though less competitive, test of the Jewish vote in a state where Jews make up an estimated 3% to 5% of the population.
Together, these races could show whether Jewish voters are judging Democratic candidates by their own positions on Israel and antisemitism or by the direction of the party as a whole.
The post Jewish Democrats head to the polls frustrated with their party. Will they still help flip control of Congress? appeared first on The Forward.
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Two years after a judge’s order, a Spanish dictionary still defines ‘Jewish’ as ‘miserly’
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES — Two years after an Argentine judge ordered a Spanish dictionary to drop a definition of “Jewish” as “miserly or usurious,” the institution responsible for the dictionary has yet to comply — frustrating the Jewish groups that brought the case.
The definition reflects a long history of associating Jews with greed and moneylending, a stereotype reinforced by literary figures such as Shakespeare’s Shylock and by centuries of anti-Jewish prejudice. The Royal Spanish Academy, the Madrid-based language-standardization institution that is ignoring a September 2024 order by a federal judge here, has defended its dictionary as a record of how words are used, including pejorative meanings.
Jewish groups argue that preserving the definition perpetuates an antisemitic trope.
“We understand that the dictionary reflects how some people use language, but it is also true that many people learn through the dictionary,” Ariel Siedler, a member of the Latin American Jewish Congress (CJL) who monitors online discrimination, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last month. “That is why adding that definition seems negative. The aim was to avoid reinforcing discrimination, which would be perpetuated through the dictionary.”
The 2024 order came a month after CJL and DAIA, Argentina’s Jewish political umbrella organization, filed a criminal complaint against Santiago Muñoz Machado, the academy’s director, and other officials. It accused them of “inciting hatred against the Jewish community through the discriminatory definition of the term ‘Jew’.”
When the ruling came down, Muñoz Machado told EFE, the Spanish state-run news agency, that he would examine the ruling even though it is unenforceable in Spain, out of respect for the Argentine courts and the CJL’s parent body, the World Jewish Congress.
“It is a judge’s ruling; therefore, we receive it with the utmost respect — all the more so given that the petitioners behind it include the World Jewish Congress,” he told EFE. Nonetheless, he said then, he still held to what he had told the CJL in 2023, when he responded to the Jewish body’s direct request to remove the definition.
“If the [academy] defines ‘Jew’ as ‘miserly,’ it is because that’s how people use the word,” he said. He emphasized that dictionaries document language rather than invent it, and that deleting a definition would not necessarily prevent people from using the expression.
The academy’s online Dictionary of the Spanish Language lists five meanings for “judío” (Jew/Jewish). The first definitions are “Hebrew,” a person “who professes Judaism,” a “native of Judea, a country of ancient Asia” and “belonging or relating to Judea or the Jews.”
The fifth describes it as a person who is “miserly or usurious.”
In 2021 — the year the CJL first complained to the academy — it began to add that this usage is “offensive or discriminatory,” according to IEDRA, a website that tracks Spanish language usage.
English-language dictionaries routinely include antisemitic meanings of “Jew” while also noting that such usage is offensive.
Defenders of the Spanish academy’s dictionary said the work’s educational role should prevail. “The dictionary serves to explain and understand. Without collecting the various meanings that a word can have, it would be impossible to properly read ancient or modern texts,” Arturo Pérez-Reverte, an academy member and a Spanish novelist, told El Pais in 2024, when the Argentine court issued its ruling. “The RAE dictionary is not the normative police of the language, but the notary that draws up a record of how the language was used and how it is used now.”
There is a precedent for the academy removing an offensive definition. Spanish lawyer Borja Luján Lago in 2023 got the academy to modify the entry for the word “lawyer,” which included the definitions “talkative” and “chatty.” Panama’s Jewish community, hearing of his success, tapped Luján Lago to persuade the academy to remove the offensive “Jewish” definition. More than 20 Jewish groups in the United States and Latin America signed onto the effort.
Based in Madrid and founded in 1713, the academy is the leading authority on the Spanish language, coordinating linguistic standards with 22 other academies, mostly in Latin America.
Approximately 636 million people worldwide are Spanish speakers, according to the Instituto Cervantes’ 2025 report. The countries with the largest Spanish-speaking populations include Mexico (138 million), the United States (65.5 million), Colombia (53.1 million), Spain (48.9 million) and Argentina (47.5 million).
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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