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A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past
(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States.
While on tour promoting the book, he explained in an interview Tuesday, he’d often be asked if any country had gotten it right when it came to memorializing its own dark past. “I kept invoking the memorials in Germany, but I had never been to the memorials in Germany,” Smith said. “As a scholar, as a journalist, I felt like I had to do my due diligence and excavate the complexity and the nuance, and the emotional and human texture, that undergirds so many of these places and spaces.”
The result is December’s cover story in the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” Smith traveled to Germany twice over the past two years, visiting Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, its Topography of Terror Museum, the museum in Wannsee where the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, and the concentration camp at Dachau, talking to historians and curators along the way. As a Black man wrestling with how America accounts for the crimes of its past, he went to learn from the experience of the Germans, who “are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.”
In an interview, Smith talked about the inevitable differences between the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade, the similarities in how two countries — and communities — experience their histories, and how his article could serve as a bridge between African-Americans and Jews in a time of increasing tension between them.
Smith spoke to JTA from his parents’ home in his native New Orleans.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Your book is about the ways America succeeds and fails to come to terms with slavery, and your article is about the ways Germany is, in your phrase, “constructing public memory.” I was struck by someone who warned you, “Don’t go to Auschwitz.” What were they saying?
Clint Smith: It was Frederick Brenner, a Jewish man and a remarkable photographer who has photographed the Jewish Diaspora across the world for the past several decades, who said that, because people are standing [at Dachau] and they’re taking selfies, and it’s like “me in front of the crematorium” and “me in front of the barracks.” That was deeply unsettling to him, especially as someone whose family was largely killed in the Holocaust.
I don’t want to be reductive about it and say that you don’t want people to go to these spaces and take pictures. I think it’s all about the sort of disposition and sensibilities one brings to a space. If someone went to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I don’t necessarily want them doing puckered-lip selfies in front of a slave cabin. I can understand why people wouldn’t want those places engaged with in that way, but you do want tourists to come, right? I mean, before the pandemic, 900,000 people visited Dachau every year, and part of what brings people to Dachau is seeing and taking a picture of the crematorium, taking a picture of themselves on this land in that space where history happened, and posting it online. And maybe that serves as a catalyst for somebody else to make that journey for themselves.
You did go to Dachau, which you call a “memorial to the evil that once transpired there.”
I am a huge believer in putting your body in the place where history happened. I stood in many places that carry the history of violence: plantations, execution chambers, death row. But I’ve never experienced the feeling in my body that I felt when I stood in the gas chamber at Dachau. And you just see the way that this space was constructed, with the sort of intentional, mechanized slaughter that it was meant to enact on people. The industrialized nature of it was something unlike anything I’d ever experienced before and it made me feel so much more proximate to that history in ways that I don’t think I would have ever experienced otherwise.
Physically standing in a concentration camp and physically standing and putting my body in the gas chamber fundamentally changed my understanding of the emotional texture and the human and psychological implications of it. Because when you’re in those spaces you’re able to more fully imagine what it might have been like to be in that space. And then you can imagine these people, these families, these women, these children who were marched into camps throughout Europe. You can never fully imagine the fear, that sense of desperation that one would have felt, but in some ways, it’s the closest we can get to it if you are someone who did not have family who lived through or survived the Holocaust. It provided me with a radical sense of empathy. And that’s why I took the trip in the first place.
A tourist takes a selfie inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews Of Europe in Berlin, Sept. 25, 2019. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
By contrast, there are the memorials that are not historical sites, but either sculptural or architectural, like Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, nearly five acres of concrete slabs. What do you think makes an effective memorial that isn’t necessarily the historical place itself, but a specifically memorial project?
Well, for example, the big one in Berlin. It’s just so enormous. The scale and scope of it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I tried to imagine what an American analog would be like. What if in the middle of downtown Manhattan there was a 200,000-square-foot memorial, with thousands of stone columns, dedicated to commemorating the lives of indigenous people who were killed in the early Americas? Or a 200,000-square-foot memorial in the middle of downtown D.C., not far from the White House, to the lives of enslaved people?
With that said, what I found really valuable were the people I spoke to, who had very different relationships to that space. Some thought of that memorial as something that was so meaningful because of its size and because of its scope, and because it was a massive state-sanctioned project. And then there were others who thought that it was too abstract, that it was too passive, even in its name, right, the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” which sounds as if something happened to people without naming the people who enacted the harm and who committed the crime. Those are the sort of nuances and complexities that I wanted to spend more time with, and found really valuable because, in the same way, descendants of enslaved people here in the United States have many different conceptions of what the iconography of slavery should look like or what repair and reparations to slavery should be made.
You write about the “stumbling stones” or “Stolpersteine”: Those are the small brass plaques placed in the streets, inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed in front of their last known residence. The stones are exactly the opposite scale of the Berlin memorial.
Right. I think that is the memorial that I was most struck by: the largest decentralized memorial in the world, with 90,000 stones across 30 different European countries. I remember the moment I was walking down the street looking for landmarks and saw my first Stolpersteine, and I only saw it because at that moment the clouds moved and the sun shone off the brass stone. You see the name, the birth date, the deportation date, the death date, the place where the person was killed. You walk past another home, you see seven; you walk past another home, you see 12. You begin to imagine entire lives based on the names and information that exist on these stones. It creates this profound sense of intimacy, this profound sense of closeness to the history and it’s so human, because it’s individual people and individual names.
One of the most valuable things about the stumbling stone project, I think, is all the work that precedes it. It’s the school students who are doing research to find out about the lives of the people who were taken from the home across the street from their school. It’s the people in the apartment complex, who come together and decide that they’re going to figure out who were the Jewish families who lived in that apartment complex before them. And sometimes it’s really remarkable, granular details about people’s lives: what their favorite food was, what their favorite flavor of ice cream was, what the child liked.
Artist Gunter Demnig lays “stumbling stones” that memorialize persecuted or murdered Jews on the streets of Frankfurt. (Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As Gunter Demnig, the originator of the project, says, 6 million people is a huge abstraction, and now it becomes about one man, one woman, one child, and [people] realize that it truly was not that long ago. There are so many survivors of the Holocaust who are still with us. Gunter Demnig, his father fought for the German army. He represents this generation of people who are engaging in a sort of contrition for the acts of their parents and their grandparents.
You ask in the piece what it would look like for a similar project to be created in the United States as a memorial to enslaved people.
I’m from New Orleans, and the descendant of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was at one point the busiest slave market in the country. And as Barbara Steiner, a Jewish historian, said to me in Germany, entire streets [of New Orleans] would be covered in brass stones! That was such a striking moment for me. That helped me more fully realize the profound lack of markers and iconography and documentation that we have to enslaved people in our landscape here in the United States relative to that of Germany.
Why are physical monuments important? I have sometimes wondered why we spend so much money on the infrastructure of memory — statues, museums, memorials — and if that money could be better used for living memorials, like scholarships for the descendants of victims, say, or programs that study or archive evidence of genocide. Why is it important to see a statue or a museum or even a plaque?
First off, museums and statues and memorials and monuments are by no means a panacea. It is not the case that you put up some memorials or you lay down some Stolpersteine and suddenly antisemitism is gone. Obviously, Germany is a case study and is experiencing its own rise in antisemitism. And that’s something that’s deeply unsettling, and is not going to singularly be solved by memorials and monuments.
With that said, I think there is something to be said to regularly encounter physical markers and manifestations of the violence that has been enacted and crimes that have been done in your name, or to the people that you are the descendant of. I try to imagine Germany without any of these memorials and I think it would just be so much easier for antisemitism to become far more pervasive. Because when your landscape is ornamented by things that are outlining the history that happened there, it is much more difficult to deny its significance, it is much more difficult to deny that it happened, it is much more difficult not to have it shape the way you think about public policy. I do believe that if we had these sorts of markers in the United States, it wouldn’t solve the racial wealth gap, it wouldn’t solve racism, it wouldn’t solve discrimination. It wouldn’t eradicate white nationalism or white supremacy. But I do think it would play some role in recalibrating and reshaping our collective public consciousness, our collective sense of history in ways that would not be insignificant.
And to your point, my hope is that those things are never mutually exclusive. It’s a conversation that’s happening here in the United States with regard to how different institutions are accounting for their relationship to slavery. Universities are coming up with reports, presentations, panels and conferences that outline their relationship to the history of slavery, especially since the murder of George Floyd [in 2020]. Activists and descendants have pushed them to not just put out a report, or put up a plaque or make a monument. It’s also about, well, what are you going to do for the descendants of those people? Harvard, where I went to grad school, put $100 million aside specifically for those sorts of interventions. Places like Georgetown have made it so that people who were the descendants of those who are enslaved have specific opportunities to come to the school without paying. And people of good faith can disagree over whether those initiatives are commensurate with or enough to atone for that past, and I think the answer is almost inevitably no.
Certainly people on what we like to think of as the wrong side of history understood the importance of physical monuments in creating memory.
The origin story of my own book was that I watched the monuments come down in 2017, in my hometown in New Orleans, of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, and there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. What does it mean that to get to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? That to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway? That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy? And that my parents still live on a street today named after someone who owned 115 enslaved people? The names and iconography are reflective of the stories that people tell and those stories shaped the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy and public policy is what shapes the material conditions of people’s lives.
One thing about Germany is that its national project of memory and repentance has been accompanied by a vast reparations program — for Israel, Jewish survivors, their families and programs to propagate Jewish culture. I wonder if you think Germany could have moved ahead without reparations? And can America ever fully grapple with the legacy of slavery without its own reparations?
The short answer is no. America cannot fully move forward from its past without reparations. The important thing is not to be limited and reductive in the way that we conceive of what reparations are or should look like. In some ways, I’m as interested if not more interested in what specific cities and states are doing in order to account for those histories and those crimes. For example, in Evanston, Illinois, they created a specific program to give reparations to Black families who experienced housing segregation, in a certain period of time, given how prevalent redlining was in and around Chicago in the mid-20th century. I know in Asheville, North Carolina, there’s a similar program that’s thinking about how to meaningfully engage in repair to the descendants of communities that were harmed from some of the policies that existed there. This is not to say that those programs themselves are perfect. But I think we sometimes talk about it so much on a federal level, that we forget the local opportunities that exist.
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signs the reparations agreement between his country and Israel, Sept. 10, 1952. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Ferencz, from “Reckonings”)
Many people who were redlined or experienced housing covenants — all the sort of insidious manifestations of wealth extraction that were part of Jim Crow — are still alive today. So sometimes it’s not even a question of what you have to give the descendants. Sometimes it’s like, what do you give the actual people who are still here?
That’s an important distinction you make in your article, about the difference between grappling with the past in Germany and the United States. In Germany, there are so few Jews, while in the U.S. we see the living evidence of slavery, not the evidence of absence.
That’s perhaps the greatest difference that allows for both a landscape of memory to be created in Germany, and also allows for Germany to pay reparations in ways that the United States is reluctant to do: Jewish people in Germany represent less than one quarter of one percent of the population of Germany. One of the folks I spoke to told me that Jewish people in Germany are a historical abstraction. Because there’s so few Jewish people left, because of the slaughter of the Holocaust. I think about the reparations that were given to Japanese Americans who were held in incarceration camps during World War II. They got $20,000 checks, which is not commensurate with what it means to be held in a prison camp for multiple years, and cannot totally atone for that. But part of the reason that can be enacted is that there’s a limited amount of people. There are 40 million black people in this country. So the economic implications of reparations are something fundamentally different here in the United States.
So let me ask you if there’s anything else you wanted to mention that we haven’t talked about.
I want to name specifically for your readers that I’m not and would never intend to conflate slavery and the Holocaust. They are qualitatively different historical phenomena that have their own specific complexities and should be understood on their own terms. With that said, I do think it can be helpful to put the two in conversation with one another, specifically in the profound ways that these two monumental periods of world history have shaped the modern world and how they are remembered in fundamentally different ways.
And there are similarities as well, which you write about.
I did find so many parallels. The Jewish people I spent time with in Germany explained that some of the manifestations of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States are not so different from the sort of manifestations of antisemitism that exist in Germany, especially as it relates to public memory. When I was at the museum devoted to the Wannsee conference, the executive director, Deborah Hartmann, told me that she and Deidre Berger [the chair of the executive board of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation] were talking about how Jewish people did not always have a seat at the table when these monuments and memorials were being built. Jewish people were not allowed to participate beyond a certain extent, because many Germans felt that Jewish people were not objective. Jewish historians couldn’t be taken seriously because they were too close to the history.
That just echoes so much of what Black scholars and historians have been told about their ability, or the lack thereof, to study the history of Black life. The godfather of African-American scholarship, W.E.B. Du Bois, was told by white scholars that he couldn’t be taken seriously because he was too close to the history of slavery.
Meanwhile, Deborah Hartmann talked about how so many of the historians and scholars who played a role in shaping the landscape of memory in Germany were themselves “close to the history,” including former members of the Hitler Youth.
Somebody sent me a message that really meant a lot to me this past week, basically saying that my essay is an exercise in “solidarity via remembrance” — in a moment where, unfortunately, there have been a lot of public manifestations of ideas and antisemitic remarks that might threaten to rupture a relationship between Black and Jewish people. Obviously, we didn’t time it this way: I worked on this piece for a year. But it’s my hope that as someone who is a Black American, who is the descendant of enslaved people, who is not himself Jewish — that my respectful, empathic, curious, journey reflects the long history of solidarity that has existed across Black and Jewish communities and that that I hope we never lose sight of.
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Assad Regime Remnants on the Ground in Lebanon Helping Hezbollah
Hezbollah fighters walk near a military tank in Western Qalamoun, Syria, Aug. 23, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki
Senior officers from the former Assad regime in Syria are currently in neighboring Lebanon helping the terrorist group Hezbollah, raising tensions between Damascus and Beirut as the two governments seek to deepen their fragile cooperation.
The extensive coordination between Iran-backed Hezbollah and remnants of Assad’s security apparatus, which was also supported by the Iranian regime until its fall, has fueled fears of an emerging dynamic that could undermine Syria’s new government and deepen regional instability.
Last week, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam met with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus as the two countries work to expand bilateral cooperation and engagement, with talks centered in part on former Syrian regime figures in Lebanon amid fears of emerging forces that could destabilize the new government.
Following the fall of long-time Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, many officials in his regime are believed to have fled to or sought refuge in Lebanon, a development that has intensified diplomatic friction and security tensions between Damascus and Beirut.
Hundreds of pro-Assad military and intelligence officers and other security officials had reportedly entered the country through illegal border crossings in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon and via northern border regions.
In an interview with Saudi broadcaster Al Arabiya, Salam dismissed claims that most senior Assad-era officials have sought refuge in the country, while reaffirming the government’s commitment to help preserve Syria’s security interests.
“Most are in Russia and other countries, with just a small number still on Lebanese soil. But the government will work to ensure Beirut is not used as a base to undermine Damascus or to facilitate any political or military activity against it,” the Lebanese leader said.
During last week’s talks, Lebanese and Syrian officials agreed that any extradition of anti-regime forces would proceed under a joint legal framework to be coordinated through the justice and interior ministries in both countries.
The Syrian government has urged Lebanese authorities to arrest and extradite former Assad-era officers amid fears they are joining forces with Hezbollah and allied Alawite networks, where they have reportedly found refuge as part of a renewed effort to destabilize the country.
“We will not allow anyone on Lebanese soil to act against the Syrian government,” a Lebanese security source told Al Arabiya. “Lebanon will never serve as a platform for remnants of the former regime or militias operating against Arab states.”
Last year, al-Sharaa became Damascus’s president after leading the rebel campaign that ousted Assad, whose Iran-backed rule had strained ties with the Arab world during the nearly 14-year Syrian war, with an offensive spearheaded by al-Sharaa’s Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, a former al-Qaeda affiliate.
After years of intervening in Syria’s civil war to support Assad, the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah significantly expanded its political and military influence across the country as Iran’s chief proxy force.
However, the fall of Assad’s regime cut off Hezbollah’s key overland supply corridor through Syria, dealing a major setback to Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” and disrupting one of the group’s most vital strategic lifelines.
According to intelligence assessments, Assad regime supporters who fled into Lebanon have not simply gone into exile but are believed to have formed an organized network described by Syrian officials as the “operational brain” of Assad’s army on Lebanese territory, according to Arab and Israeli reports.
More than 200 former officers and senior figures from Assad’s military and intelligence apparatus have reportedly taken refuge in Hezbollah strongholds and heavily Alawite areas in northern Lebanon, where, Syrian officials warn, they are working to preserve the military infrastructure and strategic assets of the Iran-backed Shiite axis.
Arab media networks report that Hezbollah has provided former regime officers with protection and safe houses in exchange for intelligence expertise and operational support, aimed at helping establish armed cells and Alawite militias inside Lebanon.
Recently, Syrian authorities identified a covert Hezbollah-linked network allegedly plotting attacks against senior figures in the new Syrian government, with Damascus suspecting exiled Assad-era officers based in Lebanon are playing a central role in efforts to undermine the country’s stability.
Last week, Syria stopped a Hezbollah terrorist cell that was plotting to assassinate senior government officials, according to the Syrian Interior Ministry. With raids at multiple locations, Syrian security forces made 11 arrests and seized a cache of weaponry.
In April, the same Interior Ministry announced five arrests in another assassination attempt plotted by Hezbollah. The terrorists targeted Rabbi Michael Khoury in Damascus, with authorities identifying a woman who attempted to plant an explosive outside his home. The suspects later confessed to authorities they had drones supplied by Hezbollah they intended to use in an attack.
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1912 Yiddish operetta tackles class conflict and women’s rights
One of the smash hits of New York’s thriving Yiddish theater scene in the early 20th century grappled with socio-political issues that still resonate 100-plus years later. It’s coming back for a very limited run and you don’t have to speak Yiddish to enjoy it.
The production — a concert of songs from the 1912 Yiddish operetta Khantshe in Amerike — will be performed twice this month, first at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York and then at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan.
The protagonist, Khantshe, is a young working-class woman who dresses as a man, working as a chauffeur for a nouveau-riche immigrant family. Khantshe flirts with and romances the women she works for — mother and daughter alike. The operetta grapples with class conflict, women’s rights, gender fluidity and cars.
The performances, made possible by material reconstructed from archival documents, will feature students from Bard accompanied by piano. There will be no dialogue; instead the singers will deliver brief plot summaries in English before each song. A translation of the lyrics will be included in a booklet for the audience, who will also be able to follow along watching English supertitles.
The operetta first opened on Dec. 31, 1912 at Sarah Adler’s Novelty Theatre in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and was a runaway hit. It was mounted in Warsaw just six months after the New York premiere.
“This is one of the shows that were in dialogue with all of the political and social issues that people were talking about,” said Alex Weiser, director of public programs at YIVO and a member of the trio that reconstructed the performance materials. “They were made because the masses needed the cultural material in their language that spoke to the specificity of their milieu.”
Khantshe in Amerike was also a turning point in the career of both its composer, Joseph Rumshinsky, and its star, Bessie Thomashefsky. The previous year she had left her renowned husband Boris Thomashefsky, the titan of the Yiddish stage, known as a compulsive philanderer.
At the height of their influence, the Thomashefskys owned theaters in and out of New York, published their own magazine, The Yiddish Stage and wrote columns in the popular Yiddish newspapers of the day. When Boris Thomashefsky died in 1939, some 30,000 people lined the streets of the Lower East Side for his funeral.
“This show was a star vehicle for Bessie when she first left Boris,” notes Weiser. “They were a power couple and this was a really important turning point in her career. She left him, she went out on her own and there was a big question: ‘Is this it for her?’”
The angry, wily, rebellious and militantly feminist character that Bessie Thomashefsky portrayed became the prototype for a series of heroines she played going forward. They were tough, brassy, usually working-class fighters, endowed with chutzpah.
Bessie Thomashefsky also produced the operetta.
The musical was a watershed moment for Rumshinsky, as well. He went on to dominate the American Yiddish musical for the rest of the decade. It marked the first time that “American rhythm” had been incorporated in Yiddish music, a euphemism for acknowledging the influence of African-American music on the genre.
“Nothing had ever happened like that in Yiddish theater before,” said Ronald Robboy, who was part of the team that reconstructed the performance material. “Yiddish theater then quickly started incorporating elements of Tin Pan Alley. It also became interestingly more self-consciously Jewish, as smarter and better educated composers learned how to manipulate Jewish modal material, the scales that came from liturgical music and klezmer music. So the music was at once more American and at the same time more skillfully Jewish in its self-identity.”
Robboy’s connection to the material is a lengthy one. For five years he served as researcher for the Thomashefsky Project, an homage to the legacy of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky instigated by their grandson, the late conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. The culmination of the project occurred in April 2005 with the premiere of The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater at Carnegie Hall. A recording of a subsequent performance in Miami Beach aired on the PBS series Great Performances in 2012.
Robboy worked with Weiser and Max Friedman, a law student in Memphis, to turn a number of archival documents into the printed matter needed to do the Khantshe performance. In 2023 the team reconstructed Rumshinsky’s Shir-hashirim operetta.
The documents for Khantshe came from YIVO and the American Jewish Historical Society, among other sources. They included a copy of the libretto that had been published as a bootleg in Warsaw.
Friedman got obsessed with Yiddish while studying for a master’s degree in music composition at Brandeis. For his master’s thesis he set to music sound recordings of Yiddish poets H. Leivick, Yankev Glatshteyn, Kadia Molodovsky, and Rokhl H. Korn reading their own work.
The last musical number in Khantshe in Amerike has the protagonist singing about herself. Soon the song Khantshe was played whenever Bessie Thomashefsky walked into restaurants and social gatherings. Tilson Thomas often played it as she made her triumphant entrance into the family living room.
Khantshe in Amerike will be performed on Thursday, May 14, in the Bitó Conservatory Building at Bard College from 7 – 8:30 p.m.
It will also be performed at YIVO on Monday May 18, at 7 p.m., as part of Carnegie Hall’s United in Sound: America at 250 festival. Admission is $15, $10 for YIVO members and students. Registration is required for the free livestream on Zoom.
The post 1912 Yiddish operetta tackles class conflict and women’s rights appeared first on The Forward.
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They texted about Torah and mitzvahs. Feds say they were insider trading
The suspects texted one another as though they had everyone fooled.
“How’s the rabbi?” one asked in a message. “Is he still scheduled for surgery?”
“We are still waiting for the doctor to check if it’s still needed,” came the response.
But there was no surgery, authorities say, and there was no rabbi. Instead, prosecutors allege, the men were referring to Amazon’s impending acquisition of the vacuum company iRobot, hoping to trade on what was then still a closely guarded secret. According to a pair of federal indictments unsealed last week, the deal was one of dozens leaked to a criminal network that used Jewish code words to plan their investments.
At the center of the alleged insider trading scheme was Nicolo Nourafchan, 43, a corporate lawyer who prosecutors say used his access to company files to collect and share deal information with a sprawling network of middlemen and investors. Capitalizing on the lawyer’s knowledge of in-progress mergers and acquisitions, the crew allegedly racked up tens of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds over the course of a decade.
The indictments are rife with Jewish code words that the defendants used in the alleged plot. “Torahs” and “mitzvahs” were stock tips, and a merger was a “flight to Israel.” A “chavrusa” — Aramaic for study partner — meant another lawyer or investor, and a company was a “shul.”
And to share the ticker symbol of a company soon to be acquired, one alleged co-conspirator spelled out its initials using Jewish names.
Nourafchan and the other lawyers received kickbacks when the deals hit, according to prosecutors.
Nineteen of the case’s 30 defendants have been arrested in Los Angeles, New York and Florida and have appeared in federal court. (Two located in Russia and Israel are considered fugitives, according to the Department of Justice.)
Of those, 16 defendants are each charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, two counts of securities fraud and one count of money laundering conspiracy. The conspiracy charges carry a combined sentence of up to 30 years in prison, while the fraud charges carry a sentence of up to 45 years and money laundering up to 20 years. Fines could exceed $5 million per defendant.
Those charged in the first indictment include Nourafchan, who prosecutors say drew extensively on a network of family and friends to build the scheme, and David Bratslavsky, the former director of the U.S. Israel Business Council, a group that brings together business leaders from those two countries.
An additional five alleged co-conspirators, including Nicolo’s brother Lorenzo Nourafchan, face two counts of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, two counts of securities fraud and one count of money laundering conspiracy.
Reuters has reported that Avi Sutton, a former Israeli Supreme Court law clerk, is among the unindicted co-conspirators involved in the alleged scheme. (Sutton could not be reached for comment.)
The prosecutions have caused an earthquake in the world of M&A law, with the Wall Street Journal calling it “one of the most brazen insider-trading schemes in years.” Nicolo Nourafchan had worked at top M&A law firms and leaked information on corporate giants that included Amazon, Johnson & Johnson and Burger King.
“Everyone charged today is accused of scoring significant profits from expected market moves and making out like bandits,” Ted Docks, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division, said May 6 after the charges were announced. “That’s not merely gaming the system — it’s a federal crime.”
If proven guilty, the Nourafchan brothers, who have not yet entered a plea, could face decades in prison. Lawyers for each did not respond to a request for comment.
No attorneys are on record for other defendants and no pleas have been entered yet in the case. The Forward could not reach them for comment.
Ask the ‘rabbi’
To most who knew them, Nicolo and Lorenzo Nourafchan were LA brothers who had made good. They had graduated from top schools — Nicolo from Yale Law School, Lorenzo from Yeshiva University — and gone on to careers in corporate law and finance.
Nicolo bounced around between major law firms including Sidley Austin, Latham & Watkins and Goodwin Procter. At each stop, authorities said, he used internal document management systems to access information about deals that were in progress. He recruited Robert Yadgarov and Gabriel Gershowitz, respectively his former roommate and classmate, to gather tips from their firms, prosecutors allege.
The three would allegedly then pass on the tips to middle-men, who would share the knowledge with investors. (Yadgarov is among the 16 charged in the first indictment. Gershowitz has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with authorities, who have recommended a sentence of two years in prison.)
Eager for the next tip, the investors often badgered the middlemen in code, authorities say.
“Gavy, we are all just waiting for you to tell us when the next flight to Israel is,” one investor named Simon Fensterszaub asked alleged middleman Gavryel Silverstein. “It’s coming soon,” Silverstein replied. (Silverstein is also charged in the first indictment.)
In June 2022, court documents say, Fensterszaub, who had invested in a company expected to be acquired, asked Silverstein for an update on the deal: “Any chance you can find out how the rabbi is feeling?” Fensterszaub wrote.
“Unfortunately nothing,” Silverstein replied.
Then Fensterszaub dropped the code entirely: “Should I tell ppl to pull out?” he said.
Ultimately, he didn’t — and the brothers netted about $179,000 from their iRobot trades.
In another instance, one of the investors, unable to remember the name of the company being purchased, asked a co-conspirator to remind him. The company’s name was Momentive — ticker symbol MNTV.
According to authorities, the person replied:
“Menachem
Nachman
Tuvya
Vladmir”
Silverstein and Simon Fensterszaub, who do not have lawyers currently assigned in court documents, could not be reached for comment.
Family affairs
The Nourafchans are not the only brothers named in the indictments, which in total run more than 120 pages. Text messages from Brian and Mark Fensterszaub, of Hollywood, Florida — Simon’s brothers — show the two using code to discuss Nourafchan with Silverstein, who is their brother-in-law.
The first indictment shows the brothers as regularly agitated about the status of deals. “We need that damn rebbe already,” Mark Fensterszaub allegedly told Silverstein in 2022 as the two discussed money issues.
Soon after, Silverstein came through, court documents say. With Amazon on the verge of acquiring iRobot, he used Hebrew letters to allude to iRobot’s stock symbol in a text, allegedly tipping the brothers to the opportunity.
The traders in Nourafchan’s network made a total of $1.7 million trading on the Amazon/iRobot deal, according to court documents.
After Nourafchan lost his job at Goodwin Procter in September 2023, the Fensterszaubs appeared worried that the tips might stop coming.
“Let’s say he’s not davening or doing any Torahs, mitzvahs,” Brian Fensterszaub told Silverstein that October. “Let’s say he said ‘I don’t have anything, f”ck you, give me my money.’ We’d still be like alright, torah and mitzvahs. We gotta do what we gotta do.” (The three Fensterszaub brothers are charged in the first indictment.)
Nicolo Nourafchan reassured Silverstein that December that more info would be on the way soon. “I’m working on getting a job,” he said, according to court documents. “So baruch hashem we’ll have more.”
Silverstein’s brother-in-law Yisroel Horowitz is also charged in the scheme, as is Brian Fensterszaub’s brother-in-law Joseph Suskind; Eliyahu and Daniel Kavian, another sibling duo, were allegedly connected to the plot through Simon Fensterszaub.
It was the relationship between the Nourafchan brothers, however, that may have led the decade-long scheme to unravel.
Lorenzo Nourafchan, 38, ran a business he started called Northstar Financial Consulting Group, and on LinkedIn had accrued several thousand followers. He also wrote a money column for the Los Angeles Jewish Home, an Orthodox print weekly, in which he wrote about the challenges and opportunities of being an Orthodox business owner. (The LA Jewish Home did not respond to an inquiry.)
Lorenzo was looser with the information, court documents show, recruiting his hair stylist to the scheme, who then involved nearly a dozen of his friends and relatives. Lorenzo instructed the stylist, Miakel Bishay, not to do the trading himself so the trail would not lead back to him, authorities say, but Bishay did anyway. Bishay’s friend, Nowel Milik, netted more than $700,000 in the iRobot deal, according to one of the indictments. (Bishay and Milik are both charged in the second indictment.)
Soon, the jig was up. In March 2024, a federal agent posing as a representative from FINRA, a regulatory organization that monitors trading activity, called Brian Fensterszaub asking for more information about the iRobot trade. The call alarmed Fensterszaub, who immediately called Silverstein to let him know.
“Listen, God forbid that I don’t think anything should come of it,” Fensterszaub told Silverstein, “but God forbid if something did, you don’t need it pointing back to you and you having to deal with it.”
A legal filing from Tuesday by lawyers for the Nourafchan brothers asked the court to grant Lorenzo permission to use the proceeds from the sale of his business to pay for Nicolo’s legal representation. Judge Leo T. Sorokin granted the request.
The post They texted about Torah and mitzvahs. Feds say they were insider trading appeared first on The Forward.