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How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
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Herzl’s grandparents reburied on Mount Herzl, fulfilling Zionist leader’s final wish
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — When World Zionist Organization officials working with the Israeli Foreign Ministry opened the grave of Theodor Herzl’s grandfather on July 29 in Zemun, Serbia, they found it empty.
Shimon Leib Herzl was not buried beneath his tombstone. So they kept digging to the side of his wife Rivka’s grave and found his remains there, according to Yizhar Hess, the WZO’s acting chairman, who was present at the exhumation.
On Wednesday afternoon, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog in attendance, Herzl’s grandparents were reinterred on Mount Herzl.
“The long journey of the Herzl family, from foreign soil to the soil of Zion, ends here today on Mount Herzl,” Netanyahu said. “The vision has arisen and become reality. Zionism has won.”
The reburial came 77 years to the Hebrew date after Herzl himself was laid to rest on the Jerusalem hillside that bears his name. The Knesset had voted on Aug. 10, 1949, to bring his remains from Vienna in one of its first acts.
The WZO says the ceremony completes the last unfulfilled clause of Herzl’s 1903 will, which instructed that his body be transferred to the Land of Israel along with the coffins of his father, his sister Pauline and several close relatives.
“Having a chapter of his will that was not fulfilled is something that needed to be fixed,” Hess said. He credited the effort to Yaakov Hagoel, the organization’s chairman, who he said had worked on the exhumation for four years.
The transfer was ready to proceed two years ago, but it didn’t. “We could have done it after two years, actually,” Hess said. “But we could not bring them back, because the hostages were not home yet, and we felt there are more urgent things than to bring Herzl’s grandmother and grandfather to Israel. Now that the hostage affair is done, we felt it’s the right time.”
In a statement, Hagoel said the WZO was closing a historic circle and reconnecting the Herzl family’s roots to the land Herzl had devoted his life to. “When Zion brings her children home, she also brings home their forebears,” he said.
Diplomats and officials from across the Zionist institutional world filled the Mount Herzl plaza on Wednesday. Seated near the family plot were Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, Deputy Supreme Court President Noam Sohlberg, Police Commissioner Danny Levy, the Serbian ambassador to Israel and Sheikh Muwaffaq Tarif, spiritual leader of Israel’s Druze community.
An honor guard carried the two caskets and set them on a pedestal before the crowd. The mood was both somber and defiant, and both Netanyahu and Herzog turned quickly from the burial to the ongoing war.
Herzog used his remarks to argue that the day was about inheritance rather than ceremony.
“Dreams are not bequeathed in writing,” he said. “They pass at the Shabbat table, they pass in the living room, they pass in the story a grandfather tells his grandson.”
The Jewish section of the Zemun cemetery is small. The two tombstones — Rivka’s, and one bearing her husband’s name that had not been there originally — were only 65 feet apart, Hess said. He believes it was toppled at some point and reset carelessly wherever there was room.
Shimon Leib Herzl was born in Zemun in 1805, the son of a rabbi. He served as gabbai in the Sephardic synagogue where Yehuda Alkalai was rabbi.
Decades before the First Zionist Congress in 1897, Alkalai argued that Jews could not wait for the messiah to arrive, that they would have to buy land and petition the Ottoman sultan themselves. Today he is thought of as one of the forerunners of Zionism. Whether his ideas were the impetus for his congregant’s grandson, the eventual founder of the Jewish state, has never been definitively established.
Oded Feuer, who directs the WZO’s Herzl Center at the entrance to the mount, thinks they were.
“His grandfather was in touch with Rabbi Alkalai, one of the first people to speak about Zionism in the Orthodox world back then, to make Judaism not only a religious thing, but also a national thing,” Foyer said. “And his grandfather was in his synagogue.”
Hess said Herzl mentioned his grandfather more than once in his diaries and letters. Herzl’s bris was held in Zemun.
Herzog made the same case from the podium, describing Shimon Leib as a man who was not a leader, who addressed no congresses and wrote no books the world read, but the gabbai who opened the synagogue door first and locked it last. “We know one thing,” Herzog said. “He carried those words home with him.”
The reburial is also an argument about who Herzl was.
The Herzl most people know is the assimilated Viennese journalist who found Jewish nationalism at the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, the French army general falsely convicted of treason in an antisemitic affair at the turn of the 20th century. Hess said that portrait is out of date.
“Calling Herzl an assimilated Jew is a mistake in many ways,” he said. Herzl was raised in a house where Jewish tradition was, in Hess’s words, alive and well. He was secular, but that was a way of holding the tradition, not leaving it.
He said Herzl’s bar mitzvah is proof. It was held at a synagogue in Budapest that was associated with the Hungarian Neolog movement, which permits music on Shabbat but seats men and women separately.
Hess traced the assimilation charge to the fight between haredi Orthodox Judaism and the Zionist movement in the 19th century, when calling Zionism assimilation was a way to fight it. “There is more than one political interest in calling Herzl an assimilated Jew,” he said.
Netanyahu made the argument explicitly, telling the crowd that the monument was not the point. “Our gaze turns to the foundations of the building,” he said. “Judaism as the basis of Zionism. The Torah and the entire Bible as the bedrock of identity. The chain of generations as an anchor of values and heritage.”
The Herzl family plot on Mount Herzl has been filling in for 77 years. Theodor Herzl was reinterred there in 1949. His parents and his sister Pauline were brought as well. The bodies of his two eldest children, Pauline and Hans, came from Bordeaux in 2006. The remains of his grandson Stephen Norman, who died by suicide in Washington in 1946, followed in 2007.
One member of the family is still missing. Trude, Herzl’s youngest daughter and Stephen Norman’s mother, died at Theresienstadt in 1943. Her remains were never recovered.
Hess said the circle closes anyway. “On Mount Herzl there is a plot that will now be complete,” he said.
The ceremony comes at a moment when Zionism is contested abroad and inside parts of the Jewish diaspora, a frame the WZO has embraced.
“Zionism is again being attacked from all sides,” Foyer said. “And the first answer to those attacks is within ourselves. Strengthening our Jewish identity will help us give answers, though not everyone who attacks is willing to get an answer.”
Foyer added, “You can look at the Herzl family as the story of a Jewish family in the diaspora in Europe: The old grandfather was Orthodox, somewhere in the Balkans, in Serbia. And then starts the traveling of the Jew, the wandering Jew. His kids moved to central Europe, and they maintained a connection with Judaism, but in a different way, more secular.”
Asked whether removing Jewish remains from Europe in 2026 says something about the future of Jewish life there, Foyer declined the premise.
“This is not our goal,” he said. “This is not the reason for it.” Then he added, “Maybe I’m too optimistic and too naive. I’m choosing to be.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Herzl’s grandparents reburied on Mount Herzl, fulfilling Zionist leader’s final wish appeared first on The Forward.
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Orthodox Jews are scootering to synagogue. Will Shabbat ever be the same?
LOS ANGELES – For thousands of years, the Jews have walked. Dispatched by God to the promised land of Canaan, Abraham walked. When the Israelites became a nation in the desert, they camped, kvetched, warred, and worshiped, but mostly walked. And on Shabbat — when the Torah forbids riding horses, carriages, trains or cars — observant Jews have traditionally walked.
But when Ilana Jurkowitz and her two kids went to prayer services one recent Saturday morning, they did not walk. Nor, as Shabbat-observant Jews, did they drive. Instead, the trio made the mile-and-a-half trek to their Beverly Hills synagogue using a decidedly non-Biblical form of transportation: scooters.
They’re not alone. On Shabbat, the two-wheel, non-electric scooters — the kind you kick off to propel and brake by stepping on the back wheel — have in recent years become ubiquitous in Orthodox communities from LA to Miami Beach to the Five Towns. Kids and parents ride them to and from shul, tzitzit fringes flying in the wind, then to meals or playdates afterward. On long Saturday afternoons, Jewish teens cruise the streets on scooters like their California ancestors once did in classic cars.
Walking, it seems, has gone out of fashion, supplanted by what was once mainly a children’s toy. Sorry, Walter: These Jews do roll on Shabbos.
“We saw other people scooting and thought, OK, we need to start,” Jurkowitz said. “It makes it so much easier.”
For the Jurkowitz family, scooters cut what would be a 35-minute walk almost in half. Journeys the family wouldn’t dare take on foot — like the two-plus mile jaunt to Ilana’s parents — become manageable. “It extends the radius of the community,” she told me. For her kids, the scooters also signified maturity and taste. Seven-year-old Shylee Jurkowitz recounted her graduation from a three-wheel mini-scooter to the two-wheel model; Winston, 10, rocked a Transformers-themed helmet. Ilana, also wearing headgear, carried in a tote bag the straw hat she would wear in shul, and four-inch heels.
In Los Angeles, where electric scooters help residents and tourists alike navigate traffic congestion, the ascendance of kick scooters in Orthodox areas highlights the intersection of religious practice and 21st-century urban geography. As the Shabbat-observant population has surged — Orthodoxy being the fastest-growing Jewish denomination in the U.S. — neighborhoods like Pico-Robertson, where the Jurkowitzes live, have stretched the limits of walking distance. Factor in the heat and Shabbat formal attire, and long walks become a brutal proposition.
There’s just one catch. For all their analog simplicity — they contain no motor, battery, chains or gears — it’s not really clear whether scooters are a kosher Shabbat activity. I grew up in Pico-Robertson in the early aughts, when Razor scooters were a fad; I rode mine so much its orange foam handles turned auburn. But I distinctly remember my Modern Orthodox rabbi advising me that on Shabbat, I should leave my wheels at home — scootering, he said, was against the spirit of the Jewish day of rest. So what happened with everyone else?
Each Shabbat for the last several months, I’ve been putting that question to friends and strangers scootering on the streets of Pico-Robertson. The people I’ve spoken to — at least 30, including respondents to a survey I taped up on street corners — described a trend that speaks to climate and real estate, adolescence and parenting, gender and style, and ultimately the meaning of Shabbat itself.
Eventually I heard enough hype about scooters that I ordered one on Amazon; when the Jurkowitzes went to shul, I was rolling along with them.
Micromobility comes to the shtetl
As the Jurkowitz kids raced ahead, Ilana told me how they wound up living so far from shul.
Before they moved into their current home a little more than a decade ago, she and her husband Nick were living about a half-mile east of their synagogue, Beth Jacob Congregation. But with plans to grow their family, they were lured south by cheaper real estate. The Jurkowitzes’ block today would be considered the outskirts of Pico-Robertson; twenty years ago it might as well have been San Diego.
Initially, they walked, pushing their oldest in a stroller. “And then it just, you know, took a lot longer to get there,” Jurkowitz said. Putting the kids on scooters, she quickly learned, meant they could leave the stroller at home.
Shylee and Winston waited at the end of the block for us to catch up. There’d been some skinned knees and bloody elbows over the years, Ilana said, but nothing dramatic. (Other kids I spoke to weren’t so lucky — one teenager told me he’d broken his arm when his scooter plunged into a crack in the sidewalk and threw him off.)
Greater Los Angeles contains several Orthodox neighborhoods, of which Pico-Robertson is the largest. But since the early 2000s, the majority of them are bound by a single eruv, which is the ritual enclosure that allows observant Jews to bypass the prohibition of carrying objects in public on Shabbat. The ludicrously capacious LA eruv — bound by the 405, 10 and 101 freeways, it covers an area roughly the size of Washington, D.C. — allows people to scooter not merely between home and shul, but from one Jewish neighborhood to another.
One man I spoke to planned to scooter four miles that night from Pico-Robertson to his house in Hancock Park, an Orthodox neighborhood colloquially referred to by Pico’s Jews as “the other side of town.” Another rode to Pico from Chabad of Mount Olympus — a distance of more than five miles. The eruv meant these journeys have long been possible on Shabbat. But the scooters are making them almost routine, and in turn, challenging the paradigm of Orthodox community. Having to walk to synagogue on Shabbat has kept Jews living in close proximity for centuries; with a scooter, Orthodox Angelenos really can live anywhere in a 67-square-mile area.
For now, those crosstown treks — facilitated by dry weather, wide residential streets and the generally flat LA basin — represent the extreme in trip length. But they underscore the appeal of intra-community scoots like the Jurkowitzes’. Property values around the neighborhood’s edges have nearly doubled in the past decade, reflecting the increased demand from Orthodox families priced out of the core. Scooters don’t just help people get to synagogue faster; in some cases — especially families with kids — they are the difference between getting there at all or just staying home.
Of course, people do more than pray on Shabbat, and the turn to scooters had as many social motivations as religious ones. For older kids, having a scooter was the first whiff of independence, a status symbol that made you both taller and faster than your peers. And for younger adults, it was an antidote to Saturday doldrums.
Motti Zuker and Joshua Engelson, Orthodox millennials who I met up with one recent Saturday night, use their scooters less to pray than to meet friends and make afternoon plans. “If I was married and had a family, I wouldn’t,” Engelson told me. But as an older single, he said, “I need to move around places.” In other words, he’s shmooze-maxxing.
Though Shabbat-observant themselves, he and Zuker sometimes attend Jewish Friday night functions where most of the other guests drove. Self-conscious of their garishly unsexy devices — Engelson called it “social suicide” to be caught with one at his age — the two have turned their foldable off-brand scooters into a kind of ironic shtick.
“My go-to thing when I introduce myself is I’ll say, ‘Yeah, it’s the vintage model,’” Zuker said with a grin. He’d used that line on me a few days earlier, when I flagged him down on my walk home from Friday night dinner.
Pumping the brakes
So many yidden breeze by you on scooters in Pico-Robertson that it can be easy to forget how many people object to them. What reminded me was the experience of riding one myself. After services ended at Beth Jacob, I grabbed my ride from a rack in the alley behind the shul and kicked off toward my usual religious haunts. As I hurtled past my coreligionists on the sidewalk, it seemed they were looking at me with a mix of bemusement and contempt. My “Good Shabbos” greetings went ignored.
There is nothing in the Torah that overtly forbids riding a scooter on Shabbat. Instead, scooters fall into the gray area of Shabbat prohibition known as uvda d’chol, or “weekday activity.” Uvda d’chol encompasses activities not explicitly prohibited on Shabbat but which are discouraged — as my rabbi did 25 years ago — because they undercut the notion of the Jewish day of rest. The Talmud specifies modes of transportation as an example: The way one gets around on Shabbat, it instructs, should not be the same as how one travels during the week. (The Shulchan Aruch, a 16th-century legal compendium, forbids running on this basis.)
A scan of Orthodox commentary in the last five years seems to reflect consensus that scootering on Shabbat is improper for this reason. An article on the website of the Orthodox Union, the organization to which most Modern Orthodox synagogues belong, and various lectures about scooters on Orthodox learning library YUTorah, declare scootering uvda d’chol.
But uvda d’chol is an evolving designation, determined not by mere rabbinic mandate but also by community habit. And something unusual occurs in the sources discussing scooters: The rabbis tend to concede it’s happening anyway. Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz, a rosh yeshiva (senior rabbinic scholar) at Yeshiva University who leads a synagogue in Long Island, said in a lecture last year that he once forbade his son from scootering places on Shabbat, a stringency not abided by the boy’s friends.
“But then the yeshivish community moved in, and they’re all on scooters,” said Lebowitz, referring to a more strictly religious crowd. “The adults are on scooters. So now, people in my shul say, ‘How do I tell my kids not to?’”
According to at least one halachic authority, however, kids are in the clear. Rabbi Yosef Zvi Rimon, an influential Orthodox legal scholar based in Israel, permits children scootering on Shabbat because it is a leisure activity, rather than a form of transportation. And he says that in communities where families live far from their synagogue, adults, too, should not be prohibited from scootering to get there — just as the Shulchan Aruch grants an exception for adults to run to shul, because it facilitates the mitzvah of prayer.
In any event, most riders I spoke to weren’t considering it a gray area at all. To Ilana Jurkowitz, scootering wasn’t a thing she did during the week — so how could it be considered a weekday activity? The upsides, on the other hand, were obvious: They made shul more accessible to the whole family, deepened friendships, and enabled her kids to spend more time with their grandparents.
She had not seen a need to consult her rabbi, she said, because so many other families at her shul were doing it first.
“I’ve just looked at the community and seen it as an adopted mode of transportation, and so kind of went with that,” Jurkowitz said. “I guess I felt like if there was an issue with scooting on Shabbat, knowing that so many do it, that the rabbis would address it.”
At least one Pico-Robertson rabbi had tried to ban scooters from his shul. In an interview, he compared their appeal to that of cars in the Conservative movement, which in 1950 permitted driving on Shabbat only for the purpose of getting to services. “Ultimately, it was exactly this — that, ‘Well, people are living far away, so they have to come on Shabbos,’” said the rabbi, who asked to remain anonymous. “Then people kept going further away, and then the whole community, the sense of community faded.”
Others I spoke to shared his sentiment, but few were willing to say so publicly; two local pulpit rabbis I reached out to for this piece declined to speak at all about the topic.
The rabbi who banned the devices empathized with those colleagues. A rabbi’s imperative, he noted, is to set rules his congregation can follow. Taking a position against an activity that is already accepted community practice may only serve to undercut their authority on everything else.
“The reality of the situation regarding scooters,” he said, “is that it’s not where they want to make their battles.”
Day of leisure or day of rest?
There’s an adage in the Talmud that a man is blessed for every step he takes to reach his synagogue — the longer the walk, the greater the reward. But the heavenly incentives, it turned out, shrank in the glare of Los Angeles sun.
Scooter riders cited fatigue, the heat and time commitment as the main reasons they didn’t want to walk. The first two factors went together; Los Angeles now experiences roughly nine to ten more days per year when temperatures hit 90°F or higher compared to two decades ago. In the parts of Pico-Robertson where the Orthodox community has expanded more recently, shade is in short supply.
But people’s resentment of time wasted on foot may say as much about modern social anxieties as it does about the built environment. Whether shul-hopping singles or families of five, people wanted to squeeze more out of the day of rest.
When I was flitting around town on my blue Razor, my Shabbat itinerary became more ambitious. I timed myself riding from Beth Jacob to another synagogue, then headed to lunch on the eastern edge of Pico-Robertson. From there I swung over to my folks’ for dessert, then kick-pushed another 1.4 miles back southeast to my apartment. By nightfall, and without ever leaving Pico-Robertson, I had scootered just under seven miles. I am confident I have never walked that much on one Shabbat; realizing that, I wondered whether that was a sign I had altered something essential about it.
Wisely, I did not reach out to my childhood rabbi until after I completed my experiment; Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky, who today holds the same position as senior rabbi of B’nai David-Judea, had not changed his stance on scooters since I first sought his counsel some 25 years ago. “I’m glad that I’m consistent,” he said when I shared the memory.
Kanefsky, who recently relayed Rimon’s teachings to congregants, said that enabling more children and parents to get to shul was an important consideration in permitting scooters. But he still wasn’t entirely comfortable with the activity more broadly. He recalled the instruction Moses gives the Israelites not to collect manna on Shabbat. “Shvu ish tachtav,” Moses tells them: Stay put.
“Filling our day with busyness, that’s what the other six days are for,” Kanefsky said in an interview. “We fill our schedule with busyness, and Shabbat is intended to be a day of non-busyness. ‘I got places to go. I got things to do. I can’t stay here too long’ — that’s really what we’re supposed to take a break from.”
Perhaps the best case to be made against scootering, then, is not that it feels like a weekday activity; it’s that walking — even or especially a distance you’d rather drive — feels like a Shabbat activity.
But the debate around scooters isn’t just about scooters. The deeper matter, Kanefsky said, is that as technology has become more advanced, more and more things we would intuitively consider Shabbat-violating actually fall into uvda d’chol rather than clear Biblical prohibitions. Lighting a candle on Shabbat is Biblically prohibited, but turning on an LED light? That’s probably uvda d’chol. Same goes for a smartphone, getting in a short-distance Waymo or talking to Alexa.
This is not to say that permitting scooters on Shabbat means allowing Snapchat, too. But scooters do expose an unavoidable fact about Shabbat in the 21st century and beyond: It will ultimately reflect how communities define uvda d’chol for themselves.
“We need this category, desperately,” Kanefsky said. “If we have the opportunity to be a little more conservative with this category — literally to conserve it — I think that’s in our interest. Because — well, just imagine a Shabbat in which everyone’s phone is on, everyone’s computer is on, and everyone’s taking their EV to shul. That’s the future if uvda d’chol disappears as a category altogether.”
Until then, the scooters roll on. The last person I interviewed for this story was the kid who broke his arm — 14-year-old Natan Wintner, a rising high school freshman. Wintner rounds up what he called “a little Jewish scooter gang” most Shabbat afternoons — five to ten guys bouncing from house to house to pass the time. Girls did this too in their own groups, Wintner said; for him it was “having our bro time.”
Wintner’s dad grew up on the other side of town, back when scootering on Shabbat was a clear no-go. But in a sign of the changing times, Natan got his first scooter when he was 5 and — save for the broken arm a few years ago — has been riding it ever since.
He expects to grow out of the Razor someday. “I do view it as somewhat childish,” he said. But when he sees parents scootering with their kids, he begins to imagine an older version of himself grabbing the handlebars again.
“I think I speak for most kids when I say that walking isn’t really fun,” he said. “Just being able to push yourself off a scooter and give yourself a little less to do, it really makes a big difference for kids. And it’s just more fun, you know? You get to gain speed.”
The post Orthodox Jews are scootering to synagogue. Will Shabbat ever be the same? appeared first on The Forward.
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Why did Moses command Jews to choose between a blessing and a curse?
אין פּרשת ראה רופֿט משה רבינו דאָס ייִדישע פֿאָלק צו זען די ברכה און די קללה, וואָס דער באַשעפֿער גיט פֿאַרן מקיים זײַן אָדער, חלילה, פֿאַרן עובֿר זײַן אויף זײַנע מיצוות. „ראה, אָנוכי נותן לפֿניכם היום ברכה וקללה“ — זעט, איך גיב אײַך הײַנט אַ ברכה און אַ קללה.
אין די פֿאָריקע פּרשיות האָבן מיר שוין דערמאָנט, אַז דער חומש „דבֿרים“ פֿאָקוסירט אויף דירעקטע באַציִונגען צווישן דעם מענטש און דעם באַשעפֿער. דער רבונו־של־עולם האָט אָנגענומען משה רבינוס ווערטער ווי אַן אינטעגראַלן חלק פֿון זײַן תּורה, ווײַל משה האָט דערגרייכט די הויכע מדרגה פֿון אַ געטלעכן מענטש; די הייליקע שכינה אַליין האָט גערעדט דורך זײַן מויל.
אויב אַזוי, קאָן מען פֿאַרשטיין, אַז פֿון משה רבינוס דערהויבענער פּערספּעקטיוו האָט ער פּערזענלעך געזען די ברכות, וואָס קומען ווי אַ רעזולטאַט פֿונעם מקיים זײַן די מיצוות. אין אונדזער פּרשה לייענען מיר אָבער, אַז משה האָט אָנגעזאָגט די ייִדן דורכצופֿירן אַ קאָקרעטן ריטואַל בעתן אַרײַנקומען אין ארץ־ישׂראל, כּדי יעדער זאָל משׂיג זײַן די דאָזיקע קאָנצעפּציע מיט זײַנע אייגענע אויגן. ווי די תּורה דערקלערט שפּעטער, האָבן זעקס ייִדישע שבֿטים געדאַרפֿט זאָגן אַ גאַנצע ריי ברכות אויפֿן באַרג גריזים, און די אַנדערע זעקס שבֿטים האָבן געשאָלטן די רשעים אויפֿן בשכנותדיקן באַרג עיבֿל, כּדי אויף אַ גשמיותדיקן אופֿן צו שילדערן דעם חילוק צווישן שׂכר־מיצוות און דער שטראָף פֿאַר עבֿירות.
די חסידישע מפֿרשים אַסאָציִיִרן דעם נאָמען פֿון אונדזער סדרה מיט די ניסים פֿון מתּן־תּורה. די תּורה באַטאָנט, אַז ווען דער אייבערשטער האָט געגעבן די תּורה אויפֿן באַרג סיני, האָבן אַלע ייִדן געזען דאָס קול פֿונעם באַשעפֿער; די חז״ל דערקלערן, אַז דעם אייבערשטנס ווערטער האָבן זיך אין זייער שׂכל פֿאַרוואַנדלט אין וויזיעס.
הרבֿ אַריה קאַפּלאַן, דער באַקאַנטער וויסנשאַפֿטלעך־אָריענטירטער פּאָפּולאַריזאַטאָר פֿון קבלה און חסידות, האָט אין זײַנע ווערק מסביר געווען, אַז לויט דער מאָדערנער פּסיכאָלאָגיע זענען די דאָזיקע דבֿרי־חז״ל גאַנץ פֿאַרשטענדלעך. הגם אונדזער מוח באַהאַנדלט די אינפֿאָרמאַציע פֿון די אויערן און אויגן אויף באַזונדערע אופֿנים, איז דער פּראָצעס בעצם דער זעלבער. אין אויסעראָרדנטלעכע סיטואַציעס – און די מתּן־תּורה איז זיכער אַ גוטער בײַשפּיל דערפֿון – קאָנען אונדזערע חושים זיך צונויפֿשמעלצן. למשל, ווען מיר זעען אַ חלום און עצעמער פּרוּווט אונדז אויפֿצוּוועקן, ווערן די ווערטער פֿונעם דרויסנדיקן מענטש צומאָל פֿאַרוואַנדלט אין חלומדיקע וויזועלע פֿיגורן. אין דער הײַנטיקער פּסיכאָלאָגיע ווערן אַזאַ פֿענאָמען אָנגערופֿן „סינעסטעזיע‟.
די תּורה בלײַבט אָבער אַקטועל אין יעדן דור. הגם מיר זענען ווײַט פֿון משה רבינוס דערהויבענער מדרגה פֿון דבֿקות און פֿונעם מיסטישן שׂכל־צושטאַנד בעת דער מתּן־תּורה, זאָגט אונדז משה רבינו קלאָר, אַז אין אַ געוויסער מאָס קאָנען מיר אַלע זען די פּירות פֿון אונדזער עבֿודת־השם אין דער וועלט. די גײַסטיקע דערפֿאַרונג בײַם באַרג סיני בלײַבט אײַנגעקריצט אין אונדזערע נשמות, און מיר זענען טאַקע מסוגל צו זען מיט אונדזערע אויגן דעם באַשעפֿערס שפֿע פֿאַרן מקיים זײַן די מיצוות.
אין די פֿריִערדיקע צוויי סדרות האָבן מיר געלייענט די ווערטער פֿון דער וויכטיקסטער ייִדישער תּפֿילה: קריאת־שמע. צוויי מאָל אַ טאָג, מוזן מיר זיך דערמאָנען, אַז אַלץ אין דער וועלט איז אַ געטלעכע אַנטפּלעקונג. דער אות „ח‟ אינעם וואָרט „אחד‟ איז מרמז בגימטריא, אַז דער רבונו־של־עולם איז איינער אויף די זיבן הימלען און אויף דער ערד, און דער אות „ד‟ דערמאָנט אונדז, אַז אין אַלע פֿיר ריכטונגען אַרום אונדז און אין אַלע פֿיר עלעמענטן פֿון דער נאַטור דערשפּירט זיך דער געטלעכער כּוח. ווי רבי לוי־יצחק באַרדיטשעווער, דער באַרימטער חסידישער צדיק, זינגט אין זײַן ניגון „דודעלע‟, געפֿינען מיר איבעראַל דעם אייבערשטן און פֿאָרט בלײַבט ער פֿון אונדז באַהאַלטן. ווי דער בעל־שם־טובֿ האָט זיך אויסגעדריקט, ווען אַ בלאַט פֿאַלט אַראָפּ פֿון אַ בוים, איז עס אַ טייל פֿונעם געטלעכן באַשאַף־פּלאַן.
אויב מע טראַכט זיך אַרײַן, זעען מיר יעדן טאָג מיט אונדזערע אויגן גאַנץ קאָנקרעטע ברכות און קללות אויף אַ גאַנץ פּשוטן אופֿן, אָן קיין הויכע עבֿודות און מעדיטאַציעס. אַדרבה, צום באַדויערן, זענען די מענטשן אָפֿטמאָל אַליין שולדיק אין דעם, וואָס דעם אייבערשטנס השגחה בלײַבט פֿון אונדז באַהאַלטן. ווען אין די נײַעס דערציילט מען שרעקלעכע ידיעות וועגן מלחמות און אַנדערע צרות, דאַרפֿן מיר געדענקען, אַז די וועלט נייטיקט זיך אין אַ תּיקון. וואָס מער מיר זאָרגן זיך וועגן די מיצוות בין אָדם־לחבֿרו, אונדזערע עטישע פֿליכטן לגבי אַנדערע מענטשן, אַלץ קלאָרער זעען מיר מיט אונדזערע אויגן, ווי די וועלט ווערט אַ בעסער געבענטשט אָרט.
דער גרויסער מקובל און בעל־מוסר אלעזר אַזכּרי באַמערקט אין דער הקדמה צו זײַן „ספֿר־חרדים‟, אַז דער באַקאַנטער ספֿרדישער צדיק רבי יוסף סרגוסי האָט זוכה געווען צו דערגרייכן אַ הויכע מדרגה פֿון רוח־הקודש, ווײַל ער פֿלעגט אַרומלויפֿן אין צפֿת, כּדי שלום צו מאַכן אַפֿילו צווישן צופֿעליקע צעקריגטע אַראַבישע פּאָרפֿעלקער. אונדזער באַטייליקונג אינעם וועלט־תּיקון, לאַוו־דווקא אין אונדזערע אייגענע קהילות, ברענגט גאַנץ פּראַקטישע רעזולטאַטן סײַ אין דער אַרומיקער סבֿיבֿה, סײַ אין אונדזערע נשמות.
פֿון דער צווייטער זײַט, כּל־זמן ערגעץ אין דער וועלט הערשט שׂינאה און אומיושר, בלײַבן מיר אין גלות, פֿאַרזונקען אין סיטרא־אַחרא. אַדרבה, ווען אַ ייִדישע קהילה זאָרגט זיך בלויז וועגן אירע אינערלעכע ענינים, ווערט זי אָפֿט באַוואַקסן מיט אַ גאַנץ פּעקל קללות און צרות. אין אַ סבֿיבֿה, וווּ מע היט זיך אָפּ אויף כּלערליי אופֿנים פֿון דער „פֿאַרשאָלטענער‟ דרויסנדיקער וועלט, קריכן גרינג אַרײַן אינטריגעס, קריגערײַען און אַנדערע פּראָבלעמען; צוליב אַזאַ באַציִונג, נעבעך, קאָן מען אַליין פֿאַרשאָלטן ווערן. אויב מע טראַכט זיך אַרײַן, קאָנען מיר גאַנץ קלאָר דערזען, אַז די וועלט נייטיקט זיך אין אונדזער גלאָבאַלער עבֿודת־התּיקונים; די לעכערדיקע און קרומע באַציִונג צו די מיצוות בין אָדם־לחבֿרו זענען אַ קוואַל פֿון בפֿירושע קללות.
עס באַקומט זיך, אַז וואָס שייך די צווישן־מענטשלעכע מיצוות, איז גאַנץ גרינג צו דערזען די ברכות און קללות, וואָס ס׳שטעקן אין זיי. די תּורה באַטאָנט אין אונדזער פּרשה, אַז דער אייבערשטער האָט פֿאַרטריבן די כּנענים און געגעבן זייער לאַנד צו ייִדן נישט צוליב די ייִדישע זכותים, נאָר צוליב די רישעותדיקע מעשׂים פֿון די אַמאָליקע כּנענישע פֿעלקער, וועלכע האָבן אויף עקסטרעם אַכזריותדיקע אופֿנים צעטראָטן די עטישע יסודות פֿון מענטשלעכקייט.
פֿון דער צווייטער זײַט, איז גאַנץ גרינג צו דערשפּירן די ברכה אין אַ היים, וווּ עס הערשט שלום־בית און פֿרידלעכע באַציִונגען מיט די שכנים. אין אַ שיל, וווּ אַלע מתפּללים זענען בשלום איינער מיטן צווייטן און האָבן דרך־ארץ פֿאַר דער אַרומיקער וועלט רוט אויך אַ געזונטע און געבענטשטע אַטמאָספֿער.
רבי פּינחס־אליהו האָראָוויץ דערקלערט אין זײַן „ספֿר הברית‟, אויפֿן סמך פֿון רבי חיים וויטאַל און אַנדערע קלאַסישע קבלה־קוואַלן, אַז אין אַ ברודערלעכער און פֿרײַנדלעכער געזעלשאַפֿט קאָנען אַפֿילו דורכשניטלעכע מענטשן דערגרייכן דעם רוח־הקודש. אויב מיר זענען מקיים ווי געהעריק די מיצוות בין אָדם־לחבֿרו, קענען מיר אויך דערזען די ברכה, וואָס שטעקט אין די מיצוות בין אָדם־למקום, ריין־גײַסטיקע באַציִונג־ענינים צווישן דעם מענטש און דעם אייבערשטן. כּדי צוצוקומען אויף וויפֿל מע קען צו דער שכינה־אַנטפּלעקונג און אויסצומײַדן די דערמאָנטע קהילה־פּראָבלעמען, מוזן מיר זיך קודם־כּל פֿאָקוסירן אויפֿן סאָציאַלן אַספּעקט פֿון דער תּורה, וואָס דערמעגלעכט צו זען דירעקטע פּאָזיטיווע רעזולטאַטן פֿון אונדזער עבֿודת־השם.
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