RSS
A chance discovery connected US soccer star Matt Turner to his Jewish roots
(JTA) — Unexpected events converged not only to forge Matt Turner’s career as a professional soccer player. They enabled him to find Jewish roots he never knew he had.
Turner, 29, the starting goalkeeper for the U.S. men’s national team and Nottingham Forest in England’s Premier League, discovered those roots in finding his paternal great-grandmother’s emigration papers. Those papers allowed her to leave Lithuania and escape the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of over 150,000 Lithuanian Jews.
“Once I found the documents, I was certainly very, very excited,” Turner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “America, in general, it’s a melting pot, and everybody has those roots elsewhere. So to understand your story, your history a little bit is really nice.”
Before finding those documents, Turner’s curiosity about his roots went unfulfilled while growing up in Park Ridge, New Jersey.
“Growing up in northern New Jersey, you’re around everyone who has a bit of identity about their family life,” he said. “There’s a lot of Italian-Americans, a lot of Irish-Americans. We know families that are like, ‘Yeah, my great-grandmother came here from Italy and she’s been cooking for us for 30 years.’
“Naturally, when you’re around a pack of people, you just gravitate towards what everybody else does. Everybody celebrates Christmas and the holidays, and you want to do all those things.”
Though Turner met his great-grandparents “when I was really little,” he said, “we never had those talks, or they never talked to my parents about that stuff.”
As a result, Turner’s Jewish father, Stuart, and his Catholic mother, Cindy, had no specific answers to his questions.
“Whenever I asked my parents, ‘Where’s our family from?’ I never got a clear, clear answer,” he said. “My mom was pretty unsure and same with my dad, to be fair.”
But when Matt and Stuart were cleaning the house of Matt’s late grandfather in 2015, they found the great-grandmother’s emigration papers. Taube Sobel left Lithuania in 1921 and arrived at Ellis Island in New York.
“My great-grandmother had a Lithuanian foreign passport issued on Aug. 25, 1920, in Kaunas that was issued in two languages, Lithuanian and German,” Turner said. “On the page in the Lithuanian language, it says that her name is Taube Sabelaite, and on the page in German language, Taube Schabel.”
But to get her emigration papers, she had to go to Riga, Latvia, where the United States had its diplomatic representative to Lithuania until 1930.
“When my great-grandmother applied for the immigration papers at the U.S. consulate in Riga, the U.S. consulate ‘simplified’ her last name into ‘Sobel,’” Turner said. “That became her last name until she got married.”
Two years later, the man who would become her husband, Polish-born Chakiel Turnovski, arrived from Paris. They married in 1927, with his name changed to Charles Turner. The family owned a multi-family home in Brooklyn, where Charles worked as a printer.
“We didn’t even know we were Lithuanian to begin with,” Turner said. “My initial feeling was, ‘Wow, this is cool.’ I finally have a little piece of me that I can look into and understand a little bit more. I was very intrigued about the history. And the more my father and I dug, the more we learned, the more connected I felt to my Jewish side, the Jewish culture of my family. It really changed a lot of me because I understood different values.”
Turner brought those values into his marriage with Ashley, whom he married in 2022. The couple has a 15-month-old son, Easton, and a daughter, Everley, born on Sept. 14. Ashley is Catholic, like Turner’s mother, and they are letting their children decide what religion they want to adopt, if any.
“The general foundations of both religions are the same, and the values of marriage would be the same,” said Turner, who identifies as Jewish. “I think it’s really great to have religion as a guideline because having faith and values and seeing the bigger picture are what we believe.
“But at the same time, we want our kids to be able to choose for themselves or connect with things for themselves. We want to open their eyes to the world and have them experience different religions in different ways and different rites of passage, have a really open mind and find things in the values that they might connect with more.”
That approach comes directly from Turner’s own experience in a household with a Jewish father and a Catholic mother.
“A lot of times, people would say that those two groups of people might not get along,” Turner said. “But I saw them love and go through conflict together and work together and be great partners, even to this day. Over time, I was able to connect with both sides in different ways at different moments in my life. I think it made me really well rounded as a person and more accepting. It was amazing to have that experience, to be honest. I’m really grateful.”
The papers also enabled Turner to consider playing professional soccer in Europe. He found them after completing his career at Fairfield University in Connecticut, where he made the All-Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference’s second team as a senior. But none of Major League Soccer’s clubs chose him in the 2016 draft, so Turner looked to Europe as an option. For that, he needed a European Union passport. Since Lithuania joined the EU in 2004, Turner applied for a Lithuanian passport.
But in the end, the New England Revolution invited Turner to camp in 2016. He made the club, became a starter in 2018 and a standout star soon after. In 2021, he was named the MLS Goalkeeper of the Year and the MLS All-Star Game’s most valuable player.
Turner received his passport in 2020 after “a three- or four-year process,” he said, but would not need it to make his biggest career move. In February 2022, two years after Great Britain left the EU (and its soccer passport rules), the Revolution sold him to Arsenal, a club in London and one of the Premier League’s perennial contenders.
Such a move might seem impossible for a goalkeeper whose career also started accidentally. Turner played baseball and basketball in high school but watching the 2010 World Cup transformed him.
The turning point came one day before Turner’s 16th birthday, when Landon Donovan scored a late goal to give the United States a 1-0 win against Algeria, helping them move on to the round of 16.
“I watched so many games, so many sports, and nothing made me feel quite like I felt in that moment,” he said. “I was jumping up and down, screaming and cheering. I’d never done that for any other sport. I just realized right then and there that there’s something different about this sport, the way it makes me feel and the way it brings people together.”
Donovan’s goal motivated Turner to join his first youth soccer club and get a goalkeeper coach at 16. Despite that late start, Turner developed enough to receive his first invitation to the national team’s training camp in 2019.
But the young goalkeeper made an inauspicious impression in that camp, as coach Gregg Berhalter recalled.
“We’re doing a training exercise,” Berhalter said. “He receives the ball and he goes to throw it and then he second guesses himself and throws into his own goal.”
From that discouraging start, however, Turner blossomed. After making his international debut in 2021, Turner started all four of the U.S. national team’s matches in the 2022 World Cup, keeping England and Iran to 0 goals. Since joining the national team, Turner won awards as the best goalkeeper in the 2021 CONCACAF Gold Cup and 2022-23 CONCACAF Nations League tournaments.
By now, he has amassed 20 career victories and 20 career clean sheets in just 33 games, a quicker rate than any other goalkeeper in the national team’s history. Berhalter called Turner’s development “abnormal,” he said.
“You don’t have a guy go to Fairfield and then start in the World Cup for the national team,” Berhalter said. “It all has to do with his work ethic. His learning curve is steep but he learns really quickly and applies it.”
With Arsenal, Turner played only five games last season, so the club sold him in August to Nottingham Forest, where he started the club’s first six games and earned his first Premier League clean sheet Sept. 2, a 1-0 win against powerhouse Chelsea.
“I’m forged in fire, as I like to say,” Turner said at his first press conference with Nottingham Forest.
So were his Lithuanian Jewish great-grandparents, a fact Turner chooses not to take for granted.
“I’m sure a lot of families from either side have gone through Hell to give their families a better life,” he said. “It lit a fire inside of me to repay my great-grandparents for taking the risks that they did to make it over to the United States, and provide us with the opportunities that we might not have had elsewhere in the world.”
—
The post A chance discovery connected US soccer star Matt Turner to his Jewish roots appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Letter from Vancouver: A monument draws on Jewish tradition to remember victims of Oct. 7
The garden of Temple Sholom Synagogue in Vancouver is a serene and contemplative place to remember the horrific events of Oct. 7, 2023—and the Israeli civilians, soldiers and foreign nationals who […]
The post Letter from Vancouver: A monument draws on Jewish tradition to remember victims of Oct. 7 appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
RSS
Israel-Lebanon Ceasefire Deal ‘Tantamount to a Hezbollah Defeat,’ Says Leading War Studies Think Tank
Israeli tanks are being moved, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, in the Golan Heights, Sept. 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
The terms of the newly minted ceasefire agreement to halt fighting between Israel and Hezbollah amounts to a defeat for the Lebanese terrorist group, although the deal may be difficult to implement, according to two leading US think tanks.
The deal requires Israeli forces to gradually withdraw from southern Lebanon, where they have been operating since early October, over the next 60 days. Meanwhile, the Lebanese army will enter these areas and ensure that Hezbollah retreats north of the Litani River, located some 18 miles north of the border with Israel. The United States and France, who brokered the agreement, will oversee compliance with its terms.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), in conjunction with the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project (CTP), explained the implications of the deal on Tuesday in their daily Iran Update, “which provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests.” Hezbollah, which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon, is the chief proxy force of the Iranian regime.
In its analysis, ISW and CTP explained that the deal amounts to a Hezbollah defeat for two main reasons.
First, “Hezbollah has abandoned several previously-held ceasefire negotiation positions, reflecting the degree to which IDF [Israel Defense Forces] military operations have forced Hezbollah to abandon its war aims.”
Specifically, Hezbollah agreeing to a deal was previously contingent on a ceasefire in Gaza, but that changed after the past two months of Israeli military operations, during which the IDF has decimated much of Hezbollah’s leadership and weapons stockpiles through airstrikes while attempting to push the terrorist army away from its border with a ground offensive.
Additionally, the think tanks noted, “current Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem has also previously expressed opposition to any stipulations giving Israel freedom of action inside Lebanon,” but the deal reportedly allows Israel an ability to respond to Hezbollah if it violates the deal.
Second, the think tanks argued that the agreement was a defeat for Hezbollah because it allowed Israel to achieve its war aim of making it safe for its citizens to return to their homes in northern Israel.
“IDF operations in Lebanese border towns have eliminated the threat of an Oct. 7-style offensive attack by Hezbollah into northern Israel, and the Israeli air campaign has killed many commanders and destroyed much of Hezbollah’s munition stockpiles,” according to ISW and CTP.
Some 70,000 Israelis living in northern Israel have been forced to flee their homes over the past 14 months, amid unrelenting barrages of rockets, missiles, and drones fired by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah began its attacks last Oct. 8, one day after the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel. The Jewish state had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah but intensified its military response over the past two months.
Northern Israelis told The Algemeiner this week that they were concerned the new ceasefire deal could open the door to future Hezbollah attacks, but at the same time the ceasefire will allow many of them the first opportunity to return home in a year.
ISW and CTP also noted in their analysis that Israel’s military operations have devastated Hezbollah’s leadership and infrastructure. According to estimates, at least 1,730 Hezbollah terrorists and upwards of 4,000 have been killed over the past year of fighting.
While the deal suggested a defeat of sorts for Hezbollah and the effectiveness of Israel’s military operations, ISW and CTP also argued that several aspects of the ceasefire will be difficult to implement.
“The decision to rely on the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and UN observers in Lebanon to respectively secure southern Lebanon and monitor compliance with the ceasefire agreement makes no serious changes to the same system outlined by UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war,” they wrote.
Resolution 1701 called for the complete demilitarization of Hezbollah south of the Litani River and prohibited the presence of armed groups in Lebanon except for the official Lebanese army and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
This may be an issue because “neither the LAF nor the UN proved willing or able to prevent Hezbollah from reoccupying southern Lebanon and building new infrastructure. Some LAF sources, for example, have expressed a lack of will to enforce this ceasefire because they believe that any fighting with Hezbollah would risk triggering ‘civil war,’” the think tanks assessed.
Nevertheless, the LAF is going to deploy 5,000 troops to the country’s south in order to assume control of their own territory from Hezbollah.
However, the think tanks added, “LAF units have been in southern Lebanon since 2006, but have failed to prevent Hezbollah from using the area to attack Israel.”
The post Israel-Lebanon Ceasefire Deal ‘Tantamount to a Hezbollah Defeat,’ Says Leading War Studies Think Tank first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
What Nutmeg and the Torah Teach Us About Securing a Long-Term Future
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
Here’s a fact from history you may not know. In 1667, the Dutch and the British struck a trade deal that, in retrospect, seems so bizarre that it defies belief.
As part of the Treaty of Breda — a pact that ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War and aimed to solidify territorial claims between the two powers — the Dutch ceded control of Manhattan to the British.
Yes, that Manhattan — the self-proclaimed center of the universe (at least according to New Yorkers), home to Wall Street, Times Square, and those famously overpriced bagels.
And what did the Dutch get in return? Another island — tiny Run, part of the Banda Islands in Indonesia.
To put things in perspective, Run is minuscule compared to Manhattan — barely 3 square kilometers, or roughly half the size of Central Park. Today, it’s a forgotten dot on the map, with a population of less than 2,000 people and no significant industry beyond subsistence farming. But in the 17th century, Run was a prized gem worth its weight in gold — or rather, nutmeg gold.
Nutmeg was the Bitcoin of its day, an exotic spice that Europeans coveted so desperately they were willing to risk life and limb. Just by way of example, during the early spice wars, the Dutch massacred and enslaved the native Bandanese people to seize control of the lucrative nutmeg trade.
From our modern perspective, the deal seems ridiculous — Manhattan for a pinch of nutmeg? But in the context of the 17th century, it made perfect sense. Nutmeg was the crown jewel of global trade, and controlling its supply meant immense wealth and influence. For the Dutch, securing Run was a strategic move, giving them dominance in the spice trade, and, let’s be honest, plenty of bragging rights at fancy Dutch banquets.
But history has a funny way of reshaping perspectives. What seemed like a brilliant play in its time now looks like a colossal miscalculation — and the annals of history are filled with similar trades that, in hindsight, make us scratch our heads and wonder, what were they thinking?
Another contender for history’s Hall of Fame in ludicrous trades is the Louisiana Purchase. In 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was strapped for cash and eager to fund his military campaigns, sold a vast swath of North America to the nascent United States for a mere $15 million. The sale included 828,000 square miles — that’s about four cents an acre — that would become 15 states, including the fertile Midwest and the resource-rich Rocky Mountains.
But to Napoleon, this was a strategic no-brainer. He even called the sale “a magnificent bargain,” boasting that it would “forever disarm” Britain by strengthening its rival across the Atlantic. At the time, the Louisiana Territory was seen as a vast, undeveloped expanse that was difficult to govern and defend. Napoleon viewed it as a logistical burden, especially with the looming threat of British naval power. By selling the territory, he aimed to bolster France’s finances and focus on European conflicts.
Napoleon wasn’t shy about mocking his enemies for their mistakes, once quipping, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” But in this case, it’s tempting to imagine him swallowing those words as the United States grew into a global superpower thanks, in no small part, to his so-called bargain.
While he may have considered Louisiana to be a logistical headache — too far away and too vulnerable to British attacks — the long-term implications of the deal were staggering. What Napoleon dismissed as a far-off backwater turned out to be the world’s breadbasket, not to mention the backbone of America’s westward expansion.
Like the Dutch and their nutmeg gamble, Napoleon made a trade that no doubt seemed brilliant at the time — but, with hindsight, turned into a world-class blunder. It’s the kind of decision that reminds us just how hard it is to see past the urgency of the moment and anticipate the full scope of consequences.
Which brings me to Esav. You’d think Esav, the firstborn son of Yitzchak and Rivka, would have his priorities straight. He was the guy — heir to a distinguished dynasty that stretched back to his grandfather Abraham, who single-handedly changed the course of human history.
But one fateful day, as recalled at the beginning of Parshat Toldot, Esav stumbles home from a hunting trip, exhausted and ravenous. The aroma of Yaakov’s lentil stew hits him like a truck. “Pour me some of that red stuff!” he demands, as if he’s never seen food before.
Yaakov, never one to pass up an opportunity, doesn’t miss a beat.
“Sure, but only in exchange for your birthright,” he counters casually, as if such transactions are as common as trading baseball cards. And just like that, Esav trades his birthright for a bowl of soup. No lawyers, no witnesses, not even a handshake — just an impulsive decision fueled by hunger and a staggering lack of foresight.
The Torah captures the absurdity of the moment: Esav claims to be “on the verge of death” and dismisses the birthright as worthless. Any future value — material or spiritual — is meaningless to him in that moment. All that matters is satisfying his immediate needs.
So, was it really such a terrible deal? Psychologists have a term for Esav’s behavior: hyperbolic discounting — a fancy term for our tendency to prioritize immediate rewards over bigger, long-term benefits.
It’s the same mental quirk that makes splurging on a gadget feel better than saving for retirement, or binge-watching a series more appealing than preparing for an exam. For Esav, the stew wasn’t just a meal — it was the instant solution to his discomfort, a quick fix that blinded him to the larger, long-term value of his birthright.
It’s the classic trade-off between now and later: the craving for immediate gratification often comes at the expense of something far more significant. Esav’s impulsive decision wasn’t just about hunger — it was about losing sight of the future in the heat of the moment.
Truthfully, it’s easy to criticize Esav for his shortsightedness, but how often do we fall into the same trap? We skip meaningful opportunities because they feel inconvenient or uncomfortable in the moment, opting for the metaphorical lentil stew instead of holding out for the birthright.
But the Torah doesn’t include this story just to make Esav look bad. It’s there to highlight the contrast between Esav and Yaakov — the choices that define them and, by extension, us.
Esav represents the immediate, the expedient, the here-and-now. Yaakov, our spiritual forebear, is the embodiment of foresight and patience. He sees the long game and keeps his eye on what truly matters: Abraham and Yitzchak’s legacy and the Jewish people’s spiritual destiny.
The message of Toldot is clear: the choices we make in moments of weakness have the power to shape our future — and the future of all who come after us. Esav’s impulsiveness relegated him to a footnote in history, like the nutmeg island of Run or France’s control over a vast portion of North America.
Meanwhile, Yaakov’s ability to think beyond the moment secured him a legacy that continues to inspire and guide us to this day — a timeless reminder that true greatness is not built in a moment of indulgence, but in the patience to see beyond it.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
The post What Nutmeg and the Torah Teach Us About Securing a Long-Term Future first appeared on Algemeiner.com.