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A German town built a granary atop its Jewish cemetery. Now the bones are yielding insights about Ashkenazi DNA.
BERLIN (JTA) – The city of Erfurt in central Germany is home to an impeccably restored medieval synagogue made possible because local Jews had been expelled long before the Nazis began their campaign to destroy Jewish sites.
Now, Erfurt’s long-hidden Jewish past is again offering new insights — this time about the genetic history of Ashkenazi Jews.
Human remains from a medieval Jewish cemetery in Erfurt have allowed what researchers say is the largest ancient Jewish DNA study to date. Conducted without disinterring any remains, in keeping with Jewish law, the study published Wednesday in the scientific journal Cell found that Erfurt’s medieval Jewish community was more genetically diverse than their modern-day cousins, and carried many of the same Jewish genetic diseases — such as Tay Sachs and cystic fibrosis — that affect Ashkenazi Jews today.
“There have been many previous DNA studies, but not of Jews,” said geneticist Shai Carmi, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose search for study material led him to an archaeological dig at the Jewish cemetery in Erfurt. He and his collaborators were able to analyze DNA of 33 individuals who died between 1270 and 1400, using teeth they found there.
The study follows a similar analysis revealed in August by researchers in England, who studied the DNA from skeletons found at the bottom of a medieval well and concluded that the remains were likely of victims of an antisemitic massacre in 1190. Analysis of six individuals prior to their identification as Jewish revealed that Ashkenazi Jews developed a unique genetic variation centuries earlier than realized.
The Erfurt analysis also includes samples from before the epidemic of Black Death that was until recently understood to have created the genetic “bottleneck” that created the genetic markers common among Ashkenazi Jews today.
Erfurt’s Jewish settlement existed from the 11th to 15th century, with a brief gap following a 1349 massacre perpetrated after the Jews were falsely blamed for causing the bubonic plague. Surviving Jews returned there, but after all Jews were expelled once and for all in 1454, the city built a granary on top of the Jewish cemetery.
Karin Sczech participates in the excavation at the medieval Jewish cemetery of Erfurt. (Courtesy of TLDA Ronny Krause)
In 2013, the city approved the repurposing of the unused granary into a parking lot. Because it was an historic site, a rescue excavation was initiated, overseen for the State of Thuringia by German archaeologist Karin Sczech.
Meanwhile, Carmi had been looking for Jewish cemeteries anywhere in the world “where we could analyze remains already excavated,” he told JTA in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. “I consulted historians and eventually reached the archeologist in Erfurt.” Fortunately, he said, “they still hadn’t reburied the remains.”
He approached Sczech, who later became a co-author of the new study. In 2018, with a supportive judgment from Rabbi Ze’ev Litke — an Israeli expert on genetics and Jewish law — and permission from Erfurt’s then-rabbi, Benjamin Kochan, work began to extract and analyze DNA from detached teeth found in the graves. (About 500 Jews live in Erfurt today, most of them having migrated from the former Soviet Union since 1990.)
American geneticist David Reich picked up the teeth and brought them back to the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where drilling and DNA extraction took place.
While the skeletons were reburied, the teeth are still stored at the research institutes where they have been analyzed, in case scientists need to retest to verify the result.
The project provides an ethical basis for studies of ancient Jewish DNA, Carmi said. “Of course we couldn’t just go to a cemetery and dig and take out skeletons; this would be prohibited,” he said, referring to Jewish law prohibiting the removal of bones from where someone was buried.
But Litke opined that the study could be done, because the bones already had been disturbed for an unrelated reason. “He recommended using teeth, as the analysis does almost no damage,” Carmi said.
There are many motivations to study Jewish DNA: One can find lost relatives going back a few generations, and answer questions about Jewish origin of partners intending to marry. But the goal of Carmi’s team was “to fill the gaps in our understanding of Ashkenazi Jewish early history.”
There are several non-destructive ways to obtain DNA from human remains, said Carmi, who also works as a consultant to an Israeli firm that helps clients trace their genetic roots.
“You can take an almost microscopic slice of bone and extract DNA in a solution, or put the entire bone in a solution and extract the DNA without drilling, without disturbing the dead. This opens the way to doing studies even without teeth,” he added.
His team found that the Erfurt community appeared to fit into two genetically distinct groups, descending either from Middle Eastern or European populations. This genetic variability no longer exists, Carmi said.
At the same time, Carmi said, the analysis found remarkable continuity in the local community, as well. “One third of the Erfurt individuals descended from one woman through their maternal lines,” he said, adding that evidence suggested that she lived between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago.
In a press statement, geneticist Reich of Harvard said the work “also provides a template for how a co-analysis of modern and ancient DNA data can shed light on the past. Studies like this hold great promise not only for understanding Jewish history, but also that of any population.”
The research team, with more than 30 scientists, included Hebrew University’s Shamam Waldman, a doctoral student in Carmi’s group, who performed most of the data analysis.
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Slovenia’s last Jewish institution endures through desecration and decay
On a Saturday morning last July, Robert Baruh Waltl watched two processions converge on central Ljubljana. From one direction, near the river, came a column of neo-Nazis chanting nationalist slogans chanting “Long live Slovenia.” From the other came pro-Palestinian marchers singing “from the river to the sea”.
The city, he notes drily, is very small. “You could see both demonstrations at the same time,” he told me over a video call from his office. “Far right from one side, far left from the other.”
In Slovenia, this is what the view looks like from the only Jewish institution in the country.
The Jewish Cultural Center Ljubljana, which Waltl has directed since its founding in 2013, is overextended by design and necessity. In the absence of a synagogue elsewhere, it functions as one. It is also a cultural center, a museum, and, increasingly, a one-man operation.
“If I’m not in Ljubljana,” Waltl says, “there is no one to even open the door.” For more than a decade, the center has run almost entirely on donations, German embassy micro-grants, and cross-subsidies from Waltl’s adjacent performance space, the Mini Theater. The Slovenian government has never provided stable funding. Applications to the Ministry of Culture go unanswered. “They tell us the Festival of Tolerance is the most important anti-racism event in Slovenia,” Waltl says, speaking of an open event organized by him and the community, “and we don’t receive a single euro for it.”
Waltl did not grow up Jewish. He was born near the Austrian border and moved to Ljubljana as a young man to study theater. Then came a letter from the local Jewish community: did he know that his grandmother had been Jewish? He didn’t. He began attending events, cautiously at first. A trip to Israel changed things. He started reading, learning Hebrew and collecting Judaica. Eventually, he underwent a formal conversion — a giyur — at a liberal congregation in Frankfurt. “I said, OK, now I’m so deep,” he recalls. “I will never feel truly Jewish if I don’t take this last step.”
The community he joined had only barely survived the 20th century. Before the Second World War, Slovenia’s largest Jewish population lived in the Prekmurje region in the northeast. Most were deported to Auschwitz after 1941; roughly 90% were killed. In Ljubljana itself, Jews had been expelled in 1515, and the postwar communist Yugoslav government did nothing to restore their memory: cemeteries and schools were destroyed or simply left to ruin. By the time Waltl arrived, the standard answer when Ljubljana tour guides were asked about Jewish history was blunt: no Jews after 1515. “They didn’t know anything about the Holocaust,” he says. “Nothing about anything.”
His response was methodical. He installed the first memorial plaque on the site of Ljubljana’s medieval synagogue. In 2014, at a gathering of young Jewish leaders in Berlin, he met Gunter Demnig, the German artist behind the Stolpersteine project, and brought the initiative home. Today, Ljubljana and surrounding cities have 68 stumbling stones and one large stone commemorating 150 Jewish refugees expelled from Croatia who sheltered in Ljubljana. He co-founded the Festival of Tolerance with Branko Lustig, the Auschwitz survivor and double Oscar-winning producer of Schindler’s List and Gladiator, born in Osijek, Croatia, who brought early credibility and international reach to the project before his death.
For years, the center also served as a functioning synagogue, anchored by a wave of Israeli tourism. After the Jewish congregation of Slovenia lost its premises in 2014 and moved into Waltl’s building, the arrangement found its footing through sheer numbers. According to Walt 50,000 to 60,000 Israeli tourists visited Slovenia each summer and many of these came to services organized by a Chabad rabbi from Trieste, Ariel Hadad. Then COVID hit. The tourists vanished. So did the rabbi. The pandemic forced a theological rethinking: Waltl discovered liberal Judaism through the Central Synagogue of New York’s online programming and began working with a rabbi from Luxembourg, who now visits several times a year alongside a rabbi from Vienna. When there is money to bring them, they come.
Oct. 7 transformed the center’s situation entirely. On November 6, 2023, someone painted a large swastika equated with a Star of David on the center’s front door. The Jewish graveyard was desecrated during the Festival of Tolerance. When Waltl attempted to screen footage from the Hamas attack for the city’s diplomatic corps, hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside and tried to set the doors on fire. The screening was cancelled. There is no Israeli embassy in Slovenia, and no other address for the anger. “In their eyes, we represent Israel,” Waltl says. “We represent everything bad happening in the Middle East.”
Today the center carries a 60,000-euro mortgage taken out for emergency renovations after earthquakes damaged the 500-year-old building, leaving water leaking and unsustainable structural issues. Robert thought that he would receive some sort of financial help from the government to keep this, the only Jewish center in the country, running, but he was unpleasantly surprised to have received none. Since Oct. 7 the relationship with the government soured even more: the prime minister and the president used to show up for Holocaust Remembrance Day and Chanukah festivities, but stopped, says Waltl.
This month, Slovenia changed leadership again, with Israel ally Janez Janša returning as prime minister.
Some other signs of hope: The Rothschild Foundation recently awarded a grant for the country’s first permanent exhibition on Jewish history in Slovenia, set to open this September. The German Embassy contributed 3,000 euros. American tourists — a growing presence — help cover operating costs through summer donations. But the structural problem remains unchanged: roughly 150 Jews, one institution, and a government that adopted the expansive International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which encompasses anti-Israel actions, while declining to fund the sole organization actually sustaining the community.
“If I say I will stop doing this,” Waltl says, “there will be no Jewish life in Slovenia anymore.”
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Volatility, Hit Frequency, and RTP: Why the Number Casinos Advertise Is the Least Useful One
The return to player percentage looks clean as a casino data point. It gives players a neat number, usually around 94% to 97% for many online slots, and that number feels easy to compare. A 96.5% game appears better than a 95.2% game. The problem starts when players treat RTP as a forecast for their next 50 spins or one evening.
You may find the RTP listed on slot pages on a leading online casino in Ontario, but the number only tells part of the story. Two games can share the same RTP and create different sessions: one may return small wins often, while the other may drain a balance before one bonus round changes everything.
The RTP Trap
Return to player (RTP) measures the theoretical share of total wagers a game returns across a very large number of rounds. In plain terms, a 96% RTP slot returns about $96 for every $100 wagered in the long run. That does not mean one player who deposits $100 should expect $96 back.
The trap sits in the word “theoretical.” RTP comes from the game’s math model. It works across huge samples, not personal sessions. A player can finish far above that percentage, far below it, or with nothing left after a short run of poor results.
Is it useless then? No, RTP can still help. It gives a baseline cost of play. Lower-RTP games cost more on average than higher-RTP games. Still, once a game passes a reasonable threshold, the next question matters more: how does it distribute that return?
Hit Frequency: The Number That Shapes Session Feel
Hit frequency tells you how often a game produces a winning outcome. This often misleads players because any win can count. A spin that returns $0.10 on a $1 bet may still count as a hit, even though the player lost $0.90 in real terms.
A game can feel active because symbols connect often, sounds play, and the screen keeps celebrating small returns. The balance may still fall. In many modern slots, “win” does not always mean profit on the spin.
Hit frequency answers one practical question: how much silence can you tolerate? Some players dislike long dry spells. Others accept quieter sessions because they chase bonus rounds or larger payouts.
The educational site Get Gambling Facts gives a useful distinction: RTP concerns the percentage of money returned over time, while hit frequency concerns how often a machine stops on a winning combination.
Volatility: The Risk Label Players Need More Often
Volatility, also called variance, describes how unevenly a game pays. Low-volatility games tend to return smaller amounts more often. High-volatility games hold more value in rare events: bonus rounds, premium symbols, multipliers, or jackpots.
Here is where RTP becomes less useful on its own:
- A 96% low-volatility slot may give modest returns and longer play from the same balance.
- A 96% high-volatility slot may burn through funds quickly unless the player hits a strong feature.
- A progressive jackpot game may look exciting, but it often places more value on rare top prizes.
The same RTP can hide very different risk profiles. Players who ignore volatility often blame the casino or the game when the session follows its math design.
Why the Same RTP Can Feel So Different
Picture two slots with 96% RTP. Slot A pays small wins on many spins, has a modest top prize, and rarely creates dramatic balance swings. Slot B pays less often but offers a large max win and volatile bonus rounds. The advertised return matches, but the experience does not.
Slot A may suit a player who wants a slower bankroll drop and more regular feedback. Slot B suits someone who accepts sharper losses in exchange for a shot at a heavier payout.
A Better Way to Read a Slot Page
Most slot pages give players more clues than they notice. The trick is to read the details together rather than chase the highest percentage.
Start with RTP. If two games look similar, the higher number has better long-term value. Then check volatility. If the game uses terms such as high, very high, or extreme variance, lower your bet size or expect shorter sessions. Next, look at the paytable. A huge max win usually means the game saves a lot of its value for rare outcomes.
A sensible pre-play check looks like this:
- RTP: What is the average long-term return?
- Volatility: How rough can the session become?
- Hit frequency: How often will the game show any wins?
- Paytable: Where does most value sit?
To Conclude
Casinos advertise RTP because it looks objective, tidy, and easy to rank. Players should read it, but they should not give it more authority than it deserves. For long sessions, volatility may matter more than a small RTP difference. For comfort, hit frequency may explain the feel better than the payback rate.
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Lahmeyer, pastor who says Antichrist will be Jewish, heads to Oklahoma GOP runoff
(JTA) — Jackson Lahmeyer, a pastor who supports Israel and believes the Antichrist will be Jewish, is headed to a runoff in his district’s Oklahoma congressional primary.
The Donald Trump-backed Lahmeyer will face off against Mark Tedford, a member of the state House of Representatives from Tulsa, in the August runoff to decide who will be the Republican candidate for Congress in Oklahoma’s 1st Congressional District.
The runoff will pit candidates with two very different approaches to politics, and Israel, against each other at a time when the Republican Party is divided on multiple lines. Lahmeyer is part of Trump’s MAGA movement, while Tedford is a more traditional conservative. Both men promote a hard line on immigration, but Lahmeyer’s rhetoric has been peppered with incendiary claims about efforts by Muslims to establish “sharia law” in the United States.
While both competitors are also evangelical Christians with training in ministry, Lahmeyer works as a pastor and preaches an end-times theology that includes an Antichrist with Jewish heritage. Lahmeyer is also a vocal supporter of Israel, in keeping with his Christian Nationalist outlook, while Tedford has made few if any public comments about Israel or the war in Gaza.
The two candidates pulled far ahead of the pack in Tuesday’s crowded primary, which attracted 11 candidates to fill an open seat. Tedford received 32.1% of the votes, and Lahmeyer drew 25.9%, according to the Oklahoma State Election Board.
Lahmeyer had been seen as a favorite, but his star fell in the days before the election amid revelations that he had been unfaithful to his wife. (He said the episode, which he confirmed, was a private matter and in the past, and Trump reaffirmed his endorsement following the revelation.)
Few if any of the nine candidates who did not make the runoff are part of the MAGA movement, suggesting that Tedford could see more of their supporters turn to him in November.
“We need everyone who came out today to keep fighting until we succeed,” Lahmeyer said in a statement to local media. “Let’s send a Trump-endorsed warrior to fight for Oklahoma values in Congress.”
The district is solidly red, virtually assuring the primary winner of victory in November. The Democratic candidate, John Croisant, is a Tulsa school board member who has not spoken publicly about Israel or Gaza, issues that are occupying some Democrats.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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