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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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They settled in a city where 200,000 Jews thrived. After Kristallnacht, her family fled and she stayed behind.
The City Without Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vienna
By Douglas Smith
FSG, 560 pages, $37
Several years ago, the historian Douglas Smith, who has won wide recognition for his several books on modern Russia, turned his attention to Vienna and its Jewish community during the rise and fall of the Third Reich. During his research, he discovered the recently published diary and letters of Mignon Langnas (née Rottenberg), one of the few Jews who remained and survived in Vienna under Nazi rule. Gripped by Langnas’ experience of events we have difficulty even now of fully grasping, Smith decided to center his book on this remarkable woman.
It was a brilliant choice: Smith’s new book, The City Without Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vienna, seamlessly weaves Langnas’ story with the wider account of how Vienna, home to the largest Jewish population of any city in the German-speaking world with nearly 200,000 inhabitants, was declared by Nazi officials, with only slight exaggeration, as Judenrein.
From its fin-de-siècle brilliance in the late 1800s to its fin-des-juifs darkness in the mid-1930s, Vienna was home to both illustrious Jews like Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler as well as notorious antisemites like the influential politician Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger, the city’s mayor from 1897 to his death in 1910. But antisemitism was a worldview that extended far beyond a political elite. Smith underscores the countless acts of spontaneous antisemitism that erupted in Vienna following the 1938 Anschluss, when Jews were forced to scrub anti-Nazi graffiti from sidewalks and carry pro-Nazi placards. The American journalist and historian William Shirer, on a visit to the city, reported that the Viennese, “usually so soft and sentimental, were behaving worse than the Germans, especially towards Jews.”
Of course, what followed was unspeakably worse. The rapid and rapacious process of Aryanization by the Viennese shocked even German Nazi officials, who hurriedly issued a series of laws and warnings against “wild Aryanization.” The lurid logic of Aryanization, in turn, beggared the Jewish community, making the resolution of the “Jewish question” even more imperative for the Third Reich.
Adolph Eichmann, recently arrived in Vienna, created the Central Office for Jewish Emigration and placed Josef Löwenherz, the director of the Viennese Jewish Community, at its head. Though Löwenherz’s actions were condemned by some survivors after the war, Smith echoes the Holocaust scholar Doron Rabinovici’s conclusion that, while Löwenherz was “co-opted” by the Nazi state, he nevertheless acted courageously in impossible circumstances, saving the lives of tens of thousands of Viennese Jews.
Smith’s account of the evolution of the Final Solution in Vienna, based on an impressive familiarity with primary and secondary sources, manages to be both cogent and comprehensive. What makes his narrative truly compelling, though, is how well he weaves the life of Mignon Langnas into the wider story. Upon settling in Vienna, her family quickly learned German, thoroughly immersed themselves in the literary culture and, despite recurring spasms of antisemitism, thought of Vienna as their home. As Smith observes, the parents’ very choice of “Mignon” as their daughter’s German name, rather than her Hebrew name of Mamcze, signaled their embrace of Viennese Kultur. In 1928, the young woman married Leon Langnas, also a Polish immigrant with whom she had two children, Georg and Manuela. Though they struggled financially, they had no reason to believe that their lives, along with their extended families, would not continue to improve.
Of course, this belief was shattered by the birth of the Third Reich and death of the Austrian Republic. As the prospect of annexation by Nazi Germany loomed, the deep reserves of Austrian antisemitism seeped then burst into public life. In Vienna, the violence of Kristallnacht was far greater and gruesome than in Germany, with dozens of synagogues and thousands of Jewish businesses destroyed, several thousand Jewish residents arrested, and at least 27 Jews murdered and dozens more who took their own lives. As Joachim Fest, a biographer of Hitler, concluded, Kristallnacht was “successful only in Vienna.”
This event persuaded the Langnas family that they had to leave. While fires lit the streets along which roving bands sought out Jews, SS officers came to the Langnas apartment to arrest Leon. He succeeded to hide that night and, at Mignon’s urging, eventually made his way to New York after nearly a year of travails and travels. Mignon then managed the Herculean task of completing the paperwork for the children, who joined Leon in 1940, but refused to leave her parents who could not secure the necessary money and visa.
At this point, alone and anguished, Mignon began the journal that serves as Smith’s window into her life. Over the next four years, what remained of her family, friends, and neighbors were gradually “extracted” — the term of art for the round-up and deportation of Jews by either the SS or Jewish “stewards” employed by the Central Office. Though both of her ailing parents died, Mignon managed to survive through pure luck and sheer will. She leapt at the chance to train as a nurse, a position that not only helped save her from the relentless wave of extractions, but no doubt helped save the lives of many of her patients.
During the final months of the war, when she worked twelve-hour shifts at the Children’s Hospital and Vienna was pounded daily by Allied air strikes, Mignon adopted a mantra: “Don’t think — just don’t think.” If she did allow herself a thought, it was that she wanted to live and see her husband and own children. When the city was liberated in April 1945, slightly more than 5,000 Jews — either employed by the Central Office or married to gentiles — had survived including Mignon, who had lost more than fifty family members. But there was an insurmountable distance between survival and revival.
In June 1946, Mignon arrived in the port of New York City and rejoined her family. Yet she had become a stranger to them — after six years in the US, the children had forgotten not just their German, but mostly their mother as well, and they had become strangers to one another. As she wrote to a cousin, “We are all broken people and nothing happy or bright can resonate in us anymore. I have to cry so much.”
Three years later, Mignon, ill and unable to leave her bed, was admitted to Gotham Hospital where she died a few weeks later. Yet thanks to Douglas Smith’s masterful account, it is not just the horrors Mignon experienced but also the humanity she embodied that will continue to resonate with the reader.
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Could a convert’s kid play Jewish geography?
It was, I think, some small measure of divine consolation that the most dispersed minority on the planet got a little game to bring us back together. Yes, I’m talking about Jewish geography — that special small-talk ritual that often follows when two Jews meet for the first time.
It’s a precious thing, finding out that the stranger from across the country is in fact related to your old day-school pal…or went to camp with his sister…or dunked on him one time in a gap-year program basketball tournament. These connections, however stretched, mark our closeness, placing us somewhere on a giant tree of shared Jewish ancestry that, presumably, begins at Sinai.
But Jewish geography never played that way for me. My dad converted — no Jewish friends or family there — and my mom’s relatives were non-observant, leaving me with dangerously few character references outside of my synagogue and day school class. We didn’t do Pesach programs or Camp Ramah — we didn’t even shul-hop. So on NCSY Shabbatons or at Hillel dinners, when everyone else knew someone who knew someone, I didn’t. Like the converts of the biblical desert, I felt I’d always be pitching my tent on the fringes.
Everything changed one day earlier this year when, doomscrolling on X, I came across a post from a user with my last name. I’ve never met another Keene I wasn’t related to, so I followed my curiosity to her profile. Her bio (it’s since changed) read something like: “Best-selling author. Feminist. Jew.” Gobsmacked, I followed her.
A few minutes later, a message arrived. “Holy s—,” Meg wrote, “are we the only two Jews on earth with the last name Keene?” I guess writing for a Jewish publication gave me away. Over DMs, she told me she lived with her husband and two kids in the Bay Area; like my dad, she had converted from Christianity. Her Keene ancestors hailed from the antebellum South; I told her mine fought for the North. We soon pieced together that we were both descended from Mayflower folks — believe it or not, the same one.
At some point, we realized this was the least Jewish game of Jewish geography that’s ever been played. Of course, playing at all was new for both of us. “Because talking about being a convert is discouraged,” Meg said, “and honestly because most people who talk about being converts converted 5 minutes ago, not 20 years, I end up just sitting quietly during Jewish geography convos. I find it interesting that people generally don’t notice.”
A few days later, we picked up the conversation over the phone, when I learned that she made her name writing about wedding planning but had since pivoted to fiction. She’d finished a novel — but was having trouble getting it out, she said, because her characters had been deemed too Jewish by publishers. (Not long after our call, Cousin Meg launched her own imprint, Meg Keene Books, to take the Big Five head on.)
Still, not all the Jewish Keenes were accounted for. A few months later, Meg told me she’d found another. Andrew Keene lives in Tel Aviv, and — here’s a real twist — he didn’t convert. Instead, Andrew told me over LinkedIn this week, his ancestors were Cohens who changed their name. I’d met Kanes, Kahns and Katzes who were at one point Cohens, but never Keenes. Well, unless I counted myself — after all, Cohen is my mother’s maiden name.
Andrew, whose family hails from Wisconsin, said he wasn’t sure how Cohen had become Keene, or why. “But I do know my grandfather had an uncle, Louis Cohen.” Funny he should say so: I’m named after one. His Louis Cohen worked for Pabst Brewing; mine was a dentist. Andrew’s visiting LA next month, and we’re trying to drag Meg down here for a Jewish Keene summit.
I should caveat that my newfound Jewish geography has come at a price. There had been one nice thing about being the sole Jewish Keene family, which was the illusion of brand control. I grew up believing that whatever name recognition Jewish Keenes achieved would begin with our family of five — what could be, unburdened by what has been. Then, this week, I got a text I had never received before: Are you related to Meg Keene?
The answer’s kind of a long story, but it dates back to Sinai.
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Herzog speaks with Jerusalem Reform synagogue leaders, personally checks in with police
(JTA) — President Isaac Herzog called leaders of Jerusalem’s Kol HaNeshama Reform congregation on the eve of the Sukkot holiday to express solidarity following a string of attacks against the synagogue and took the matter up with Israel Police, his office told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday.
The call came days after Jerusalem police arrested three minors suspected of involvement in a series of incidents targeting the congregation over recent weeks, including break-ins, vandalism and harassment.
Herzog expressed his “solidarity and support” for the congregation and stressed “the utmost importance of freedom of worship for all in Israel,” according to his office.
Oded Mazor, Kol HaNeshama’s leading rabbi, told JTA that Herzog spoke Friday with him and the congregation’s executive director, Anna Astmaker, describing Kol HaNeshama as “an important and valued Jerusalem institution.”
Herzog “condemned the attacks and the harassment of the community,” Mazor said and welcomed the arrests.
“We thanked him warmly for the call, for his concern and appreciation, and invited him to visit our sukkah during the holiday,” Mazor said.
Herzog called Mazor again on Sunday after speaking with Jerusalem’s police commander, saying police were taking the investigation “very seriously” and examining whether someone else was behind the youths’ actions, Mazor said. Herzog’s office confirmed the follow-up call.
Police said the minors were suspected of property damage and “insult to religion,” and said they would ask a court to extend their detention, Channel 13 reported.
In August, vandals broke into the synagogue, smashed a window and tore down a Pride flag. Weeks later, on Rosh Hashanah, youths threw eggs at worshippers arriving for services after first approaching members of the congregation with comments that Debi Shoua Haim, one of Kol HaNeshama’s rabbis, said were “homophobic and bordered on harassment.”
Around Yom Kippur, the synagogue was targeted three more times. Plates and other breakable objects were thrown through a window. An intruder later broke in and tore down a Pride flag and a rainbow-colored sign reading “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And on Yom Kippur morning, two youths arrived with a large dog and, in apparent mockery, asked to arrange a bar mitzvah for the animal.
Mazor said the congregation had been receiving updates from police but had not been told which of the five incidents the three minors were suspected of involvement in or the precise allegations against them. Officers had also “made a point of checking in with us,” he said, in a bid to maintain good relations with the congregation.
Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion condemned the attacks and expressed support for the congregation in a private conversation with Mazor before Yom Kippur, but Mazor said he was disappointed that Lion had not spoken out publicly.
Mazor contrasted Lion’s silence with his public responses to previous vandalism of Orthodox synagogues in the city, saying it was “unfortunate” that a Reform synagogue was being treated differently, and suggested it may reflect the mayor’s political considerations, given the influence of haredi parties in Jerusalem politics.
“When there have been previous incidents of violence and vandalism against Orthodox synagogues in the city, he knew how to show up and take a stand. He knows how to speak out clearly against violence,” Mazor said. “So I’m disappointed that in this case, when it involves a Reform synagogue, things are being handled differently.”
The congregation also asked Herzog to urge Lion to speak out publicly, Mazor said.
“If the city’s leadership does not speak out against violence, then, heaven forbid, it sends a message of acceptance of that violence,” he said.
Lion’s office rejected the suggestion that political considerations explained the mayor’s failure to condemn the attacks publicly at the time. His spokesperson said the city deliberately avoided drawing further attention to the synagogue “so as not to escalate things.”
Lion contacted Jerusalem district police commander Avshalom Peled to request additional forces for the synagogue while also instructing the municipality’s policing division to increase its presence there.
He also issued a statement Sunday condemning recent violence in the city. “I strongly condemn any attack, by anyone, on what is sacred to others, their activities, customs and ways of life,” he said. His office said the statement encompassed the attacks on Kol HaNeshama, though it did not name the synagogue.
Shoua Haim echoed Mazor’s call for public statements from both the government and Jerusalem’s leadership, warning that “this incitement could get worse if we don’t all work together to stop it.”
The congregation invited Herzog to a solidarity event at Kol HaNeshama on Wednesday, organized with Jerusalem communities from across the Jewish denominational spectrum. The gathering will express support for the congregation and opposition to “violence and fanaticism,” Mazor said.
After the first attack in August, members of different congregations, including Orthodox synagogues, joined Kol HaNeshama for a Kabbalat Shabbat service in support of the congregation.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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