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A Holocaust survivor and her family saw ‘Leopoldstadt.’ The Broadway play told their story.
(New York Jewish Week) — On a Wednesday evening last month, three generations of a Jewish family made their way to their seats at the Longacre Theater to see “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s epic Broadway play about the tragedies that befall an extended Jewish family in the first half of the 20th century in Vienna.
The date of the family gathering was a significant one: Nov. 9, the 84th anniversary of the Nazi pogroms known as Kristallnacht. And in the audience was Fini Konstat, 96, who lived in the once thriving Jewish neighborhood after which the play is named, and witnessed the horrors it portrays first-hand. Alongside her were her daughter and her son-in-law, Renee and James Akers, and her oldest great-grandchild, Lexi Levin, 23.
When Konstat was a child, she lived in a “nice apartment” in Leopoldstadt. But exactly 84 years to the day of their theater date, “I was running with my father, seeing all the Jewish stores with all their windows broken,” she told Levin in a short video her great-granddaughter filmed before the curtain rose.
“It’s such a blessing for me to be here with you,” Levin said to her great-grandmother in response. “Ninety-six years old, survived a pandemic, at a Broadway show in New York City.”
Left: Fini as a child on the balcony of her apartment in Leopoldstadt. Right: Fini with her three children in front of the very same building, pictured in 2015. (Courtesy)
Since the beginning of its Broadway run in mid-September, “Leopoldstadt,” with its depiction of a prosperous Viennese family on the brink of destruction, has moved audiences to tears and inspired deep reflections on the Holocaust. Based on the celebrated playwright’s own family history — of which he was barely aware while growing up in England — it has provided a stark counterpoint to news about rising antisemitism and the celebrities who have been purveying it.
But for Konstat, the play was much more personal. “When I heard the word ‘Leopoldstadt,’ this alone gave me lots of thrills and memories,” Konstat, who is known in her family as Mimi, told the New York Jewish Week in accented English. She recalled how Levin, who recently moved to the city, invited her to fly to New York to see one of Broadway’s hottest tickets.
“Leopoldstadt,” she repeated, her voice breaking. “The second district. That’s where we lived.”
At the end of Stoppard’s five-act play, audiences learn that most of the Jewish characters had perished under the Nazis — of the four generations in the show, just three cousins survive to carry on the family’s legacy.
For Konstat too, she and her parents were among the very few in their extended family to survive the Holocaust. “Almost all of them went to Auschwitz or other camps,” Konstat said. “My mother was a twin and only the twins remained alive. [My mother’s] five other siblings and my grandmother perished.”
L-R: Renee Akers, James Akers, Lexi Levin and Fini Konstat at the Longacre Theater to see Tom Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt on Broadway,’ Nov. 9, 2022. (Courtesy)
In a Zoom conversation held over Thanksgiving weekend, Konstat, surrounded by two of her daughters, two of her granddaughters and three of her great-granddaughters, shared what the play meant to her — and how her family has restored what she lost.
In the months after Kristallnacht in 1938, Konstat and her parents hid in a neighbor’s apartment; Konstat recalls hiding under the duvet when German soldiers showed up. Eventually the family fled to Turkey, and then to India, before settling down in Mexico City. There, the teenage Fini met her husband David, also a survivor who escaped Poland. The two of them began to write the rest of their story — starting with the birth of the first of their three children in 1948.
Unlike many Holocaust survivors, Fini and David Konstat were open about their experiences during the war, instilling a sense of pride and duty to remember in their children — something that eventually extended to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“They were proud to speak about how they survived this,” said the Konstats’ middle child, Renee Konstat Akers. “Their life was an odyssey. They had the courage to do things that you would never think were possible. We grew up grateful knowing how our family survived in that incredible way.”
Each child moved to different places as they grew up and got married. Manuel, the oldest, stayed in Mexico. Renee married an American and moved to the Midwest, and Denise, the youngest, to Houston. Each became deeply involved in their Jewish communities, sending their children (Konstat’s grandchildren) to Jewish day schools, celebrating Jewish holidays and participating in synagogue life.
“The word ‘miracle’ really does not feel like an understatement in this scenario,” said Sherry Levin, one of Konstat’s grandchildren. “When we think about what it took for my grandmother and grandfather to survive and how they were able to intersect in Mexico, and such an amazing multi-generational family has come to fruition, it feels miraculous.”
Pictured here on their 40th anniversary, Fini and her husband David met in Mexico City after both had fled Europe. They were married 54 years before David died in 2001. (Courtesy)
Reviews of the show have ranged from rhapsodic to resistant, with some critics suggesting the play is simplistic and obvious in its story-telling or that it is less a well-crafted play than a well-meaning lesson on the Holocaust.
But just as the Merz family clashes and argues about everything from antisemitism to intermarriage to socialism in “Leopoldstadt,” each generation of the Konstat family that saw “Leopoldstadt” that night came away with something different — a reaction influenced by their age, their Jewish identity, their nationality and their relationship with their family.
For Konstat, the arc of “Leopoldstadt” was so familiar that it hardly stirred her. “It was just very happy watching it and enjoying it and enjoying my children with me, “ she told the New York Jewish Week. “I didn’t think about anybody else.”
Akers, too, felt an intense familiarity with the story, and, perhaps toughened by her own family history, didn’t experience an intense emotional reaction. Her own parents’ lives gave Akers a sense of purpose in her life — for example, in the 1990s, she was passionate about helping resettle Jews fleeing the former Soviet Union. With her own children, she instilled in them a strong sense of Jewish purpose in their work, their education and their family.
“I was a sandwich in between seeing my mother and my granddaughter,” she said of her “Leopoldstadt” experience. “I was emotional thinking of my mom who went through it, but I was more emotional about seeing my granddaughter be so moved. It really hit her at her core.”
Indeed, it was the youngest member of the family present that night who was most shaken by the play.
“It really felt like a gift to my family and to me, specifically, to be able to see what Mimi’s life looked like before the war,” Lexi Levin said, surmising that, as a fourth-generation survivor, she is among the first in her family to be able to start processing the loss on a grander scale.
“For the first time in my life, I really felt the magnitude of her loss,” she added. “I’ve known her story and I’ve been inspired by her story to be involved with my own Jewish causes, but I have never been able to access and truly empathize with her grief and what it meant that she lost the entire family she had before this one that she created.”
Turning to her great-grandmother, as if trying to make her understand the exact precision of the show, Levin explained, “It’s a play about generations and the family was large and then it was small.”
“You made it large again,” she said, referring to the generations of family that had assembled — in the Broadway theater and again over Thanksgiving weekend. “Look at this room.”
Pictured on her 90th birthday in 2017, Fini Konstat now has three children, ten grandchildren and twenty great-grandchildren. (Courtesy)
There was a coda for the family after the curtain went down. The day after the show, the family wanted to see the 1907 “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” one of Gustav Klimt’s most famous paintings, which currently hangs at the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side. A version of the portrait’s true story — how a painting of a socialite from a prominent Viennese Jewish family was looted by the Nazis and the family’s efforts to get it back — features in the plot of “Leopoldstadt.”
The gallery, however, was closed on the only day the family could visit. After a call to the management at the gallery, which showcases the German and Austrian art collections of Jewish philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder, the gallery’s director arranged a private tour.
“It felt like we were in a puzzle and everything was finally coming together,” said Akers. “It was an emotional, emotional time.”
When the week was over and the emotions were spent, Konstat and the Akers returned home with a reignited passion for their family story. But there was yet another twist: In addition to the whirlwind trip Levin planned for her grandparents and for Mimi, she had been undergoing the laborious process of applying for Austrian citizenship. Six members in Konstat’s large family have undertaken the process over the last two years.
“Part of the motivation was knowing Mimi’s story, and knowing that she survived because her mother had citizenship in Turkey,” Levin said. “That story was just inspirational to me, knowing that dual citizenship was what saved our family.” She convinced her brother and mother to apply for Austrian citizenship as well.
The day after her grandmother and great-grandmother left New York, Levin called them with news from her small apartment in Manhattan: An Austrian passport had arrived in the mail. The curtain was rising on another act.
Konstat was surprised at how interested her family was in getting Austrian citizenship. “I feel very good,” she said. “I’m very happy.”
“Does it make you emotional?” Levin asked her during the Zoom call with the New York Jewish Week.
“It does — of course it does. I used to love Austria,” she said. “I was sad to leave. I was disappointed. We never thought of coming back. I was happy to be able to escape. Thank God we made it out of hell.”
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The call of this Hanukkah moment remains simple and urgent: Light candles everywhere. Even when we’re under attack.
The massacre in Sydney has left Jews around the world shaken and grieving. This act is far more than a heinous crime: It is a regression to darker times, when Jewish visibility itself carried mortal risk.
The commandment of Hanukkah is not simply to light candles, but to light them publicly – pirsumei nisa, the publicizing of the miracle. The point is not private consolation, but shared visibility. Jewish survival, the tradition teaches, is not meant to occur behind closed doors, but in full view.
Historically, however, it rarely did. In exile, Jews learned caution. The Talmud records how, in times of danger, the candles are to be moved indoors – lit discreetly, shielded from hostile eyes. This was not a theological revision but a concession to reality: When the public sphere is unsafe, Jewish life retreats into the private domain. For most of our history, this was our reality.
Modern democracies promised something different. Jews would no longer have to choose between safety and visibility. We could light openly again – on windowsills, in public squares, in front of city halls – because the surrounding society would protect us not merely by law, but by norm. Antisemitism would not just be illegal, it would be unthinkable.
The Sydney massacre, alongside countless incidents in societies Jews have long trusted, forces us to ask whether that promise is still being kept.
Jewish safety in the diaspora does not rest primarily on police presence or intelligence services – necessary though they are. It rests on something more fragile and more fundamental: a public culture in which Jews are not merely tolerated but embraced; in which antisemitism is not merely condemned after the fact but rejected instinctively and unequivocally as a violation of the moral order.
When Jews are attacked for being Jews, and the response is muted, conditional, or delayed, the message is unmistakable. Jews may still live here, but only quietly.
That is why the response to Sydney must not be withdrawal, but the exact opposite. We cannot and will not retreat into hiding our light. The call of this moment is simple and urgent: Light candles everywhere.
Jewish communities and organizations must orchestrate public Hanukkah candle lightings in the central squares of democratic cities across Europe, across the English-speaking world, wherever Jews live under the protection of free societies. Not hidden ceremonies. Not fenced-off gatherings on the margins. But civic events, hosted openly and proudly, with the participation of local and national leaders – and of fellow non-Jewish citizens.
This is not unprecedented. Every year, a Hanukkah menorah is lit at the White House. The symbolism is powerful precisely because it is mundane: Jewish light belongs at the heart of the civic space, not as an exception, not as an act of charity, but as a matter of course. That model should now be replicated widely.
Israeli diplomatic missions, together with local Jewish organizations, should work actively with municipalities and governments to make these public lightings happen – not merely as acts of Jewish resilience, but as declarations of democratic commitment. Because this is not only a Jewish question.
A society in which Jews feel compelled to hide their symbols is a society already retreating from its own values. Antisemitism is never a stand-alone phenomenon; it is the canary in the democratic coal mine. Where Jews are unsafe, pluralism is already fraying.
Lighting candles in public squares will not undo the horror of Sydney. But it will answer it – not with fear, and not with silence, but with a refusal to normalize xenophobia, antisemitism, and Jewish invisibility.
The ancient question of Hanukkah – where we light – has returned as a modern moral test of democratic societies and leaders worldwide. Where Jewish light is extinguished, democracy itself is cast into shadow. If it can still be lit openly, with the full backing of the societies Jews call home, then the promise of democratic life remains alive.
Our light must not hide. Not now. Never again.
The post The call of this Hanukkah moment remains simple and urgent: Light candles everywhere. Even when we’re under attack. appeared first on The Forward.
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Australia shooting terrifies Jews worldwide — and strengthens the case for Israel
If the shooters who targeted Jews on a beach in Australia while they were celebrating Hanukkah thought their cowardly act would turn the world against Israel, they were exactly wrong: Randomly killing people at a holiday festival in Sydney makes the case for Israel.
The world wants Jews to disown Israel over Gaza, but bad actors keep proving why Jews worldwide feel such an intense need to have a Jewish state.
Think about it. The vast majority of Jews who settled in Israel went there because they felt they had nowhere else to go. To call the modern state “the ingathering of exiles” softpedals reality and tells only half the story. The ingathering was a result of an outpouring of hate and violence.
Attacking Jews is the best way to rationalize Zionism.
Judaism’s holidays are often (humorously) summarized as, “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat.” Zionism is simply, “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s move.”
Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, didn’t have a religious or even a tribal bone in his body. He would have been happy to stay in Vienna writing light plays and eating sacher torte. But bearing witness to the rise of antisemitism, he saw the Land of Israel as the European Jew’s best option.
The Eastern European pogroms, the Holocaust, the massacre of Jews in Iraq in 1941 — seven years before the State of Israel was founded — the attacks on Jews throughout the Middle East after Israel’s founding, the oppression of Jews in the former Soviet Union — these were what sent Jews to Israel.
How many Australians are thinking the same way this dark morning?
There’s a lot to worry about in Israel. It is, statistically, more dangerous to be Jewish there than anywhere else in the world. But most Jews would rather take their chances on a state created to protect them, instead of one that just keeps promising it will – especially when the government turns a blind eye to antisemitic incitement and refuses to crack down on violent protests, as Australia has.
“For over a year we have seen racist mobs impeding on the rights and freedoms of ordinary Australians. We have been locked out of parts of our cities because the police could not ensure our safety. Students have been told to stay away from campuses. We have been locked down in synagogues,” Alex Ryvchin, the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, wrote a year ago, after the firebombing attack on a Melbourne synagogue.
Since then a childcare centre in Sydney’s east was set alight by vandals, cars were firebombed, two Australian nurses threatened to kill Jewish patients, to name a few antisemitic incidents. There were 1,654 antisemitic incidents logged in Australia from October 2024 to September 2025 — in a country with about 117,000 Jews.
“The most dangerous thing about terrorism is the over-reaction to it,” the philosopher Yuval Noah Harari said. He was talking about the invasion of Iraq after 9/11, the crackdown on civil liberties and legitimate protest. But surely it’s equally dangerous to underreact to terrorism and terrorist rhetoric.
Israel’s destruction of Gaza following the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 led to worldwide protests, which is understandable, if not central to why tensions have escalated.
But condemning civilian casualties and calling for Palestinian self-determination — something many Jews support — too often crosses into calls for destroying Israel, demonizing Israelis and their Jews. That’s how Jews heard the phrase “globalize the intifada” — as a justification for the indiscriminate violence against civilians.
When they took issue with protesters cosplaying as Hamas and justifying the Oct. 7 massacre, that’s what they meant. And look at what happened in Bondi Beach, they weren’t wrong. Violence leads to violence, and so does support for violence.
Chabad, which hosted the Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, has always leaned toward a more open door policy with less apparent security than other Jewish institutions. But one of the reasons it has been so effective at outreach has also made it an easy target.
As a result of the Bondi shooting, Chabad will likely increase security, as will synagogues around the world. Jewish institutions will think hard about publicly advertising their events. Law enforcement and public officials will, thankfully, step up protection, at least for a while. These are all the predictable result of an attack that, given the unchecked antisemitic rhetoric and weak responses to previous antisemitic incidents, was all but inevitable.
It’s not inevitable that Australian Jews would now move to Israel, no more than it would have been for Pittsburgh’s Jewish community to uproot itself and move to Tel Aviv after the 2018 Tree of Life massacre. That didn’t happen, because ultimately the risk still doesn’t justify it.
But these shootings, and the constant drip of violent rhetoric, vandalism and confrontation raise a question: If you want to kill Jews in Israel, and you kill them outside Israel, where, exactly, are we supposed to go?
The post Australia shooting terrifies Jews worldwide — and strengthens the case for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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These are the victims of the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration shooting in Sydney
(JTA) — A local rabbi, a Holocaust survivor and a 12-year-old girl are among those killed during the shooting attack Sunday on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia.
Here’s what we know about the 11 people murdered in the attack, which took place at a popular beachside playground where more than 1,000 people had congregated to celebrate the first night of the holiday, as well as about those injured.
This story will be updated.
Eli Schlanger, rabbi and father of five
Schlanger was the Chabad emissary in charge of Chabad of Bondi, which had organized the event. He had grown up in England but moved to Sydney 18 years ago, where he was raising his five children with his wife Chaya. Their youngest was born just two months ago.
In addition to leading community events through Chabad of Bondi, Schlanger worked with Jewish prisoners in Australian prisons. “He flew all around the state, to go visit different people in jail, literally at his own expense,” Mendy Litzman, a Sydney Jew who responded as a medic to the attack, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Last year, amid a surge in antisemitic incidents in Australia, Schlanger posted a video of himself dancing and celebrating Hanukkah, promoting lighting menorahs as “the best response to antisemitism.”
The best response to antisemitism. Happy Chanukah! pic.twitter.com/33RSGYzhUY
— Rabbi Eli Schlanger (@SchlangerEli) December 17, 2024
Two months before his murder, he published an open letter to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urging him to rescind his “act of betrayal” of the Jewish people. The letter was published on Facebook the same day, Sept. 21, that Albanese announced he would unilaterally recognize an independent Palestinian state.
Alex Kleytman, Holocaust survivor originally from Ukraine
Kleytman had come to the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration annually for years, his wife Larisa told The Australian. She said he was protecting her when he was shot. The couple, married for six decades, has two children and 11 grandchildren.
The Australia reported that Kleytman was a Holocaust survivor who had passed World War II living with his family in Siberia.
12-year-old girl
Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told CNN that a friend “lost his 12-year-old daughter, who succumbed to her wounds in hospital.” The girl’s name was not immediately released.
Dozens of people were injured
- Yossi Lazaroff, the Chabad rabbi at Texas A&M University, said his son had been shot while running the event for Chabad of Bondi. “Please say Psalms 20 & 21 for my son, Rabbi Leibel Lazaroff, יהודה לייב בן מאניא who was shot in a terrorist attack at a Chanukah event he was running for Chabad of Bondi in Sydney, Australia,” he tweeted.
- Yaakov “Yanky” Super, 24, was on duty for Hatzalah at the event when he was shot in the back, Litzman said. “He started screaming on his radio that he needs back up, he was shot. I heard it and I responded to the scene. I was the closest backup. I was one of the first medical people on the scene,” Litzman said. He added, “We just went into action and saved a lot of lives, including one of our own.”
The post These are the victims of the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration shooting in Sydney appeared first on The Forward.