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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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The post Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Nazi imagery nothing new for crypto casino behind Orlando fight with swastika flags and Hitler salutes
(JTA) — Nazi salutes. A swastika flag. Fights in the stands. They were all part of the scene at a recent combat sports event in Orlando that pitted an Israeli Jew against an avowed racist with SS bolts tattooed on his chest – and ended with the latter mocking his defeated foe as “a short little f–king Jew prick.”
The condemnation that followed the Aug. 29 event was aimed in a number of directions: at Paul Miller, the fighter who performed the Hitler salute after his win; at the attendees who returned the salute and displayed the Nazi flag; and at the Kia Center, the city-owned arena best known as the home of the NBA’s Orlando Magic, which hosted the fight night.
Politicians were shocked by the display and wrote statements condemning the event — but the Nazi symbols were nothing new for Duel, the online cryptocurrency casino behind the promotion.
Founded last year and billing itself as “the first casino that gives a f–k,” Duel has used Nazi symbols and racist language in its gambling programming. And its owner, Ossi Ketola, a Finnish high-stakes poker player, is himself a self-described First Amendment absolutist with his own history of racially charged comments. He celebrated his free speech devotion just one week after the Orlando event, in a social media post featuring a photo of himself with Donald Trump Jr.
One of Duel’s blackjack dealers, Nelli Levonyan, has worn a Nazi outfit with a swastika armband on multiple occasions while dealing cards on the blackjack stream. In a skit from the blackjack table that circulated online, a man, dressed up as an Orthodox Jew and holding an Israeli flag, attacked Levonyan by throwing coins at her. Levonyan’s character then sprayed something at the Jewish man — “Gassing!” he yelled — and said, “Go away from me, you dirty kike.”
In another blackjack stream, the dealer imitated one of the two San Diego mosque shooters, who killed five people in May. Levonyan has sung the lyrics to “Heil Hitler,” the Ye (formerly Kanye West) song, during a stream. She has also appeared alongside Miller while hosting the card game.
Earlier this month, Ketola joined a neo-fascist rally in Helsinki staged by the far-right party Sinimusta Liike, or the Blue-and-Black Movement. Ketola, who was dressed in a Spongebob costume, livestreamed the rally and posted the footage with the title “Saving white Finland.” Speaking about immigrants, he said that people “need to be educated about how the genes work, and how these people realistically cannot be integrated here.”
He then attended an anti-fascist rally held elsewhere in Helsinki simultaneously, prompting left-wing demonstrators to chase him and his video crew back to their car. Ketola could be heard off-camera yelling “Sieg heil” as they drove away.
“What f–king violent pussies. Imagine what f–ing leftists,” Ketola said after taking off the Spongebob costume. “You see? These right-wing people, white people, the most friendly people. I just walked there, we didn’t say anything, we didn’t do anything — we go to these leftists and they try to f–ing attack us. F–ing dumb stupid f–ing n–ers.”
The following night, Ketola attended the dinner with Trump and about a dozen others in Tallinn, Estonia, hosted by Studioworks, a company that develops software for online casino sites. Ketola posted a photo of himself and the U.S. president’s son on Instagram, and wrote that he discussed “Duel, the state of the world and current political climate with him and his staff.”
“The political situations in our respective countries have become increasingly similar, with a rising tide of violence and radical leftism in both America and Finland,” Ketola wrote. “As a firm 1st amendment absolutist and an individual with many values that coincide with Republicans and Donald Trump himself, this was a great chance to align on many things important to both.”
Neither the Trump Organization, Miller, Ketola nor Levonyan responded to requests for comment.
Duel was founded last summer and has featured some prominent personalities on its streams, including boxing great Mike Tyson — who told Levonyan, “You dumb b–h, you like Hitler” — and the “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, who is known as Clavicular.
The fight night that it organized and promoted in Orlando was its first foray into combat sports, and made for the company’s biggest splash yet. It also caught the attention of at least one watchdog and a local lawmaker.
“Right after the event there was a lot of criticism put on the venue, which didn’t have much responsibility in this, and not enough eyes on the people who actually made it happen,” Mark Pitcavage, senior fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. (The city had said that, as an operator of public venues, it “cannot deny access because we disagree with the political ideology, opinion or perspective, regardless of the message.”)
State Rep. Anna Eskamani called for the Florida Athletic Commission to revoke Duel Arena’s license. The commission’s members were appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has not commented on the event. The governor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from JTA.
DeSantis’ immediate predecessor and fellow Republican, U.S. Senator Rick Scott, posted that the event was “utterly disturbing” and that “Antisemitism has NO PLACE in Florida.”
Pitcavage said that combat sports are “a draw for far-right extremists and white supremacists” who often view themselves as “white warriors.” He noted, however, that they make up a small portion of the participants and fans.
“It’s not at all surprising that some of them will get into various types of what they would consider manly, or warrior-like athletics,” he said.
Duel’s involvement in the Orlando event put the intersection of online gambling sites and far-right ideologies on his radar. “It’s something we’re starting to look into,” Pitcavage said. He noted that Duel is registered and licensed offshore on the autonomous island of Anjouan, making it more difficult to investigate.
Eskamani, who is running for mayor of Orlando, told JTA that Duel should not be allowed to operate in Florida, citing reasons that she says would beat the city’s First Amendment defense.
“These offshore cryptocurrency — I mean, there are so many red flags in how this entity is operating that from a purely financial security position for a public venue, I would not want to accept a reservation,” Eskamani said.
Duel set and promoted the matchups on the fight card, which included the kickboxing match between Miller, who goes by the moniker “Gypsy Crusader,” and his fellow influencer Ben “King” Azoulay.
Miller, who has made numerous appearances on Duel’s casino games streams, has been known to use racial slurs and denigrate minority groups in his online content. He was convicted in 2021 of felony weapons charges, and sentenced to 41 months in federal prison. He had posted about initiating a race-based civil war.
During a livestreamed conversation with Adin Ross, a Jewish streamer who has interviewed or maintained friendly relationships with controversial figures including Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, Miller said there are no exceptions in his feelings toward Jews.
“I respect you for having an opinion that is different from the Jews,” Miller told Ross. “But that doesn’t mean that I would not laugh if I see you in a gas chamber.”
Clips from the Orlando event showed Miller performing the Nazi salute twice after his victory — something he has done after winning previous fights — prompting a number of attendees to do the same. One fan brought a Nazi Germany flag and waved it in his seat.
“He’s not a tough guy, he’s not an alpha male. He’s a short little f–ing Jew prick,” Miller declared about his opponent Azoulay in his post-fight interview, eliciting some cheers from the crowd.
U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, the Jewish Republican firebrand whose district includes Palm Coast and Daytona Beach, posted a video of the Nazi flag being unfurled and wrote, “This is not a joke and it is not edgy. The guy who did this is old enough to know exactly what that symbol means and to know that it’s not funny. We will make an example out of him.”
Asked what he meant by making an example of the attendee, Fine told JTA, “We put the video out so he would be recognized and be held publicly accountable. Most folks are unwilling to associate with Nazis.”
Cheering Miller on ringside was Jake Shields, a former mixed martial artist-turned far-right influencer who has espoused conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel. Shields wore a shirt reading “FCK ISRL.” Myron Gaines, a prominent streamer who has spread similar conspiracy theories and performed Nazi salutes, was in the stands, and told Miller before the fight, “You fight for the goyim,” according to clips shared on social media.
Pitcavage said he has been tracking a trend of the far-right getting involved in combat sports since the late 1990s, as mixed martial arts and UFC became a more mainstream phenomenon and amateur gyms became widespread and increasingly accessible.
The ADL has flagged that in recent years “active clubs,” or “localized white supremacist crews” that gather for fight training, have become more common. The ADL writes that these groups “see themselves as fighters training for an ongoing war against a system that they claim is deliberately plotting against the white race.”
As news outlets covered backlash to the Orlando fight night, Duel issued its own statement saying it was horrified “to learn that a group of viewers were displaying symbols of hate at our event.” The company criticized the city’s “shocking remarks that the ‘First Amendment’ applies and that ‘free speech’ is permitted at their arena,” and pledged to “work with local activist groups to push back on this and ensure that this kind of hate does not fester ever again.”
The statement appeared to be an example of Duel trolling with deadpan, buttoned-up language. Before the fight, Ketola had similarly released a promotional video that appeared to be condemning Miller’s views. “Paul Miller is a Nazi. Being a Nazi is bad,” Ketola narrated, over footage of him shaking his head. “We cannot support this. The only reason we are allowing him to fight is to ensure the good guys get to add another victory to their record.”
Then, after Miller’s win, Duel’s Instagram account left a comment that told a different story.
“The good guys won,” Duel wrote.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Nazi imagery nothing new for crypto casino behind Orlando fight with swastika flags and Hitler salutes appeared first on The Forward.
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I want to rescue the word Zionism. We cannot reduce a vast Jewish idea to the politics of the moment.
On Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about my predecessor Rabbi Alexander Kohut. He was the renowned European scholar who gave his first sermon here in 1885 and began with the Gomel prayer, thanking God for bringing him safely to America, to this promised land.
I need to tell you how the rest of that sermon went down. Our new German-speaking rabbi proceeded to warn our congregation about the changes he saw happening in American Judaism that threatened our connection to the Jewish people as a whole.
Two years earlier, when Hebrew Union College ordained its first class of American-trained Reform rabbis, its celebratory dinner included littleneck clams and shrimp salad: the infamous Trefa Banquet. It was a provocative declaration that American Jews were no longer bound by archaic laws that separated us from our neighbors.
Kohut cautioned that discarding tradition would leave Judaism a skeleton “without spirit and heart.” If every Jew could simply pick which rules to follow, what would hold us together as a people?
Kohut illustrated this point with a famous Midrashic parable. A group of people are traveling together on a boat. When one passenger begins drilling a hole beneath his seat, the others cry out, “What are you doing?” He responds, “Why do you care? The hole is only under my seat.” Kohut’s sermon sent shock waves through the Jewish community.
The next Shabbat, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, the leading voice of radical Reform, answered from his own pulpit just eight blocks uptown, arguing, “Judaism is a living faith, not a religion confined to dead letters.” For weeks, the two rabbis traded sermons before packed pews. The Kohut–Kohler debates even made the front page of The New York Times.
Later that year, Kohler helped author the Pittsburgh Platform, defining the principles of a new American Reform Judaism. Its most consequential statement was not about kashrut or ritual garb but about peoplehood, declaring, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.”
America had offered Jews a radical promise: you could be fully Jewish and fully American. With America gratefully embraced as our new nation, Judaism could just be our religion, like our Protestant neighbors’ down the street. It was liberating, but it also amputated a part of Jewish identity that had been essential for thousands of years.
Of course, Judaism is a religious practice. But for centuries, it was also our law and calendar, our language and literature. Jewish identity runs through how we speak and argue and tell a joke, and through that inexplicable pull that, when something happens to a Jew we have never met in a place far away, we somehow feel it happened to us.
The 20th-century philosopher Martin Buber understood why. Most religions, he noted, begin with an individual revelation. A prophet or a spiritual teacher has an encounter and shares it with others. But Judaism’s defining religious encounter is different. At Sinai, revelation happens to an entire people. Buber wrote, “In the hour of faith, the group becomes a nation. Only as a nation can it hear what it is destined to hear.” Jewish faith and peoplehood cannot be pulled apart.
But we kept trying. Modernity asked us to check a box. Religion, race, nationality: What are we?
The author Dara Horn gives the best answer I’ve heard. She says, “It’s not complicated. It’s just old. Jews are a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture.” That’s a whole sentence in English, but in Hebrew, it’s just two letters: Am. We are Am Yisrael, the people Israel.
Around the turn of the 20th century, just as Reform Jews were loosening their claim on nationhood, Europe told our Jewish brethren, “Not so fast.” Pogroms swept through the Russian Empire. Political movements in Germany demanded the rollback of Jewish rights. Vienna, the glittering capital of European culture, elected an openly antisemitic mayor. And in France, Alfred Dreyfus, a Frenchman by birth, language, and military service, discovered that to his accusers, he was simply a Jew.
Europe kept asking what was called the Jewish Question: What to do with the Jews? Could they assimilate enough to belong, or would they always remain strangers in the lands they called home?
Jewish leaders began asking a different question: How can we take our future into our own hands? Different Jews gave radically different answers. Their answers came to be called Zionism.
The political Zionist Theodor Herzl asked, “How do we save the Jews?” His answer was sovereignty. Jews could no longer depend on the tolerance of other nations for our safety.
The cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am pushed back: “What good is saving the Jews if we fail to save Judaism?” His answer was cultural renewal, a Hebrew spiritual and cultural center that could renew Jewish life everywhere.
The Labor Zionist A.D. Gordon pushed the question further: But what kind of Jews are we trying to become? His answer was labor. Jews would become rooted again by working the soil, remaking not only a homeland but ourselves.
The religious Zionist Rav Kook asked, “How can this national rebirth also be a spiritual rebirth?” His answer was redemption. By rebuilding Jewish national life, even secular pioneers participated in a sacred process larger than they understood.
There was never just one Zionism, and there still isn’t today. Early Zionists disagreed about every aspect of the state they hoped to build. Zionism was a family argument about how an ancient people takes responsibility for its future.
Journalist Haviv Rettig Gur has defined Zionism as a rescue project, because underlying all of those competing visions was one urgent conviction: There has to be somewhere in the world where we do not need another nation’s permission to live as Jews.
The Holocaust made that need undeniable. Even after the world witnessed the Nazis’ machinery of extermination, hundreds of thousands of survivors languished in displaced persons camps because most nations still refused to take us in. Later, more than 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries such as Iraq, Libya, and Iran, erasing Jewish communities that had endured for thousands of years.
And in the 1990s, Israel took in over a million Jews fleeing persecution from the former Soviet Union, and tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews escaping famine and civil war. After the founding of the State of Israel, Jewish survival never again had to depend on whether someone else would open the door.
And that brings me to a rescue project for our generation. I want to rescue the word Zionism.
A Jewish Federation survey earlier this year grabbed my attention. Nine out of 10 American Jews believe Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Nine out of 10. But only a third of us are willing to call ourselves Zionists. Why does that matter? Because when a majority of Jews reject the name Zionist, it obscures just how mainstream support for the Jewish state and attachment to Jewish peoplehood is for Jews.
Zionism, simply put, is the belief that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. If you believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state, you are already standing inside the Zionist argument.
Let me tell you why I am a Zionist. To me, Zionism is what becomes possible when the Jewish people can fully shape our own lives. In Israel, Jews not only live from January to December, but from Nisan to Adar, from Rosh Hashanah to Tisha B’Av. Children order ice cream in the language of our prophets. Jews have built amazing universities and hospitals where Jewish and Palestinian citizens study side by side and save lives together. Engineers make the desert bloom one drip at a time. And we live again in a land toward which Jews in exile have directed our prayers for 2,000 years.
With that return comes the responsibility to build a society worthy of our deepest Jewish values, always striving for peace. And because I know how essential safety and self-determination are for my people, my Zionism cannot deny those same fundamental rights to another. Palestinians, too, must live with dignity, security, and freedom in that land. That, too, is my Zionism.
Today, I’m not addressing the one in 10 Jews who reject the very idea of a Jewish state, though my door and this synagogue remain open to you. I’m speaking to the majority of Jews who believe in the Jewish state but refuse the Zionist name. And you’ve told me why.
You’ve said, “I don’t want to call myself a Zionist because I can’t support the Israeli government’s or military’s treatment of the Palestinians.” But Zionism is older and larger than any government. Dissent, even contempt for an Israeli leader or policy, does not place you outside Zionism. It puts you alongside Israelis who have filled the streets for years protesting their own government because of their Zionism.
You’ve said, “I’m ashamed of Israeli extremists who commit crimes in the name of religious Zionism.” But all of us should be appalled by extremist settler violence. No one should stand in the same camp with racist ministers who excuse or enable this Hillul Hashem, this desecration. Hundreds of prominent Zionists, including prime ministers, former IDF generals, and heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet, have all condemned this Jewish terrorism and demanded an end to the violence and displacement in the West Bank.
You’ve said Zionism has become a slur, “She’s a Zionist” is now shorthand for colonialism, racism, apartheid, even genocide. But these words have a history. In the 1960s, Soviet propaganda deliberately recast the Jewish national liberation movement as a colonialist and imperialist project, while using anti-Zionism to oppress Soviet Jews, even sponsoring a 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. The label Zionist has been weaponized against Jews for more than half a century.
We cannot reduce a vast Jewish idea to the politics of the moment. As British writer Howard Jacobson says, “Zionism is not a country or a system of government. Zionism is an expression of a people’s soul. It is a longing and a necessity, a utopian fantasy. It’s an understanding of history and a solution, an act of reasoning, an act of despair, a prayer, a poem, and a song.”
And since when do we Jews let other people do our naming for us? If we refuse the Zionist name because others have smeared it, or because some have stained it with violence, we hand the word to its most fanatical followers and its most hostile opponents. We abandon the Zionists working every day to build a more just, secure, and peaceful Israel for all its inhabitants. And we surrender a word that has carried the dreams, sacrifices, and hopes of Am Yisrael for generations.
One of our young Central members spent the last year in Israel, and he said his time there both increased his love for the Israeli people and his disgust for the current government. He’s not the type to join in protests, but on Fridays he traveled to the West Bank to accompany Palestinian shepherds and farmers so they could work with less fear of harassment or violence from settlers. Israeli groups call this “protective presence.” This young man called it his Zionism.
I especially want the next generation to know that claiming Zionism means believing in Jewish sovereignty and insisting that it’s not exempt from our tradition’s moral demands. It means seeing clearly where Israel has been a beacon and a blessing, and where it has failed to live up to the values stated in its own Declaration of Independence: freedom, justice, and peace, and equal rights for all its citizens.
When we fall short of our promise, as every person and every nation does, the Jewish response is not abandonment. It is teshuvah, a return to who we are meant to be. That is what Yom Kippur asks of us. Teshuvah requires honest accounting and change. But the goal of teshuvah is not shaming. Teshuvah is fundamentally an act of hope, the hope of return.
When the Israelites first returned to Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE after their first exile, they sang.
“When God returned us to Zion, we were like dreamers.” They couldn’t believe it. They were living inside what once seemed impossible: to be back in their land.
Zionism has always required that kind of imagination. Theodor Herzl looked at a scattered, vulnerable people and imagined us sovereign again in our ancestral homeland, saying, “Im tirtzu, ein zo agadah. If you will it, it is no dream.” Less than half a century later, the State of Israel was born. Impossible, until it happened.
And after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israelis regarded Egypt as their most formidable enemy, and the vast majority of Israelis did not believe peace was possible. But soon thereafter, Israel’s mightiest adversary became the first Arab state to make peace with it. Impossible, until it happened.
And in recent memory, after 738 days of despair and fear that we would never see every hostage out of Gaza, on Simchat Torah, two years after their kidnapping, every last living hostage came home. It was a miracle made possible by the relentless work of so many and the prayers of Am Yisrael from around the world. Impossible, until it happened.
Im tirtzu, ein zo agadah. If you will it, it is no dream.
There is so much that still feels impossible in Israel right now. But if our history teaches us anything, it’s not to underestimate what is yet to come, or our responsibility to help shape it.
Rabbi Kohut served this congregation around the time of the birth of the modern Zionist movement. His message to us in 1885 is no less true today. We Jews are in the same boat. Half of the Jews of the world live in the State of Israel. No Jew should say, “Why should I care? The hole is only under their seat.” We cannot walk away from the most important sovereign project of the Jewish people. We must proudly claim the name Zionist and take our place in the unfolding story of Am Yisrael.
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Canadian leaders condemn shooting outside Ontario synagogue at the start of Yom Kippur
(JTA) — Canadian leaders have condemned a shooting outside the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ontario, at the start of Yom Kippur that left a police officer seriously injured and forced the congregation to cancel services on the holiest day of the year.
“Jewish people must be able to practice their faith safely. They deserve to live their Jewish lives proudly, freely, and openly,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote on X on Monday.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford joined in the condemnation with his own X post. “I’m disgusted by the shooting that took place outside the Sons of Jacob Synagogue,” he wrote. “My thoughts are with the Jewish community in Belleville and across Ontario, who have every right to gather and worship safely and without fear.”
At a press conference on Monday, Belleville’s deputy police chief Sheri Meeks identified the shooter as Shawn Ward, 29, from the neighboring city of Quinty West and the injured officer as Constable Jeff Smith.
The incident occurred at 7:10 p.m. Sunday, according to brief statements by the Belleville Police Service and the Special Investigations Unit (SIU). Belleville is a little more than 100 miles east of Toronto.
Both Meeks and SIU spokesperson Kristy Denette gave details of the gun battle that unfolded outside the synagogue, which is located at the corner of a residential street of single family homes.
The synagogue posted on social media that “there were no injuries of anyone inside the building.”
Ward allegedly arrived at the scene in a truck with a shotgun and fired at Smith, who was stationed outside the synagogue. Smith returned fire and as did a second officer who arrived at the scene.
Some 20 to 30 shoots were fired, with some hitting nearby vehicles and homes, Denette said, explaining that Ward was now in “life-threatening condition” at a hospital. Meeks added that Smith was in a hospital’s intensive care unit with serious injuries but was expected to recover.
There is a team of four investigators and two forensic investigators who are speaking to witnesses and looking through surveillance and body camera video footage, Denette explained.
A CBC report showed footage of Smith’s black unmarked vehicle parked outside the synagogue, which is now riddled with bullets, and explained that Ward’s truck was parked just across the street.
Synagogue president Norm Weddum recalled the attack for the CBC, explaining that he was ushering worshippers into the sanctuary to start the Yom Kippur services when they heard noises that sounded like “boom, boom.”
When it became clear it was gunfire, everyone ran into the synagogue auditorium and closed the doors, recalled Weddum as he described yelling at everyone to “hit the floor.”
Once the gunfire stopped, he and a number of members went to the synagogue doors and saw the impact of the gun battle and the evacuation of the shooter and the police officer from the scene by ambulance. After the attack, he said, police also entered the synagogue.
Weddum said he believed the gunman had intended to attack the synagogue but was thwarted by Smith, who had been in an unmarked vehicle.
At the press conference on Monday, a reporter asked Denette if the incident could be considered a “terrorist attack aimed at the Jewish community.”
She responded that said “common sense would say that probably was the case,” but that her department’s investigation was limited to the exchange of fire and that the Belleville police were looking at motive.
Meeks characterized it as a hate crime in a statement she made at the press conference aimed at the Jewish community.
“We recognize the concern and uncertainty many may be feeling, particularly given that this occurred near the Sons of Jacob synagogue during one of the holiest days in the Jewish faith. Let me be very clear: Antisemitism, hate and violence have no place in our community,” Meeks said.
“Every person deserves to feel safe when attending a place of worship, gathering with loved ones or participating in community life,” she stated.
There are increased patrols and heightened police presence through the city, including houses of worship, Meeks added.
A number of Canadian politicians spoke out on X against the attack, including opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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