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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 post A Holocaust survivor and her family saw ‘Leopoldstadt.’ The Broadway play told their story. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel’s Top Diplomat Calls on Jews to Make Aliyah Amid Global Surge in Antisemitic Violence
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar attends a press conference with the Danish Foreign Minister (not pictured) in Jerusalem, Sept. 7, 2025. Photo: Ritzau Scanpix/Ida Marie Odgaard/via REUTERS
Amid a global surge in antisemitic violence, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has urged Jews living abroad to make aliyah to Israel, warning that diaspora communities are increasingly vulnerable to hatred and hostility as foreign governments fail to protect them.
“Over the past year, we have concentrated efforts in the fight against the rising antisemitism around the world,” Saar said Sunday during a Hanukkah candle-lighting event in Rishon LeZion, a city in central Israel.
“We demanded that foreign governments take real steps against the new antisemitism. Few did so. Most allowed an unrestrained surge of overt antisemitism in the public sphere,” the top Israeli diplomat continued.
Saar’s latest remarks come in the wake of a deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach last Sunday, which left 15 dead and at least 40 injured.
Earlier this year, a string of deadly terrorist attacks also targeted Jewish communities, including the Yom Kippur assault in Manchester that killed two Jewish men, the firebombing of a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado – which killed one and injured 13 – and the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, DC.
“Jews have the right to live in safety everywhere. Today, Jews are being hunted across the world. Today I call on Jews in England, Jews in France, Jews in Australia, Jews in Canada, Jews in Belgium: come to the Land of Israel! Come home!” Saar said during his speech.
“We are waiting for you here with open arms. With love. In the true home of the Jewish people. Why raise your children in this atmosphere?” the Israeli diplomat continued. “Come with your families to the land of our forefathers, to the State of Israel, where the Jews taught the entire world what Jewish self-defense means. The time has come.”
Jewish communities around the world, especially in Europe, have faced a troubling surge in antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel sentiment since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Jewish leaders have consistently called on authorities to take swift action against the rising wave of targeted attacks and anti-Jewish hate crimes, ranging from the vandalism of murals and businesses to violent physical assaults, that their communities continue to face.
In the United Kingdom, more than half of British Jews — 51 percent — believe they have no long-term future in the country or elsewhere in Europe, according to a survey conducted by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, released Monday.
Amid this climate of rising hostility, almost half of British Jews (45 percent) report feeling unwelcome in the UK, while a majority (61 percent) have considered leaving the country in the past two years, citing the recent surge in antisemitism as the main reason.
The newly released report also found that 59 percent of British Jews try to avoid displaying visible signs of their Jewish identity out of fear of antisemitic attacks, while 96 percent believe that Jews in Britain are less safe now than they were before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Fewer than one in ten British Jews believe authorities are doing enough to tackle antisemitism, with only 14 percent feeling that the police are adequately protecting them.
In France, the local Jewish community has also faced a growing climate of hostility and antisemitic violence, which has even extended into politics, sparking national debates and drawing condemnation from leaders and civil society groups.
In one of the latest controversies, Bernard Bazinet, the mayor of Augignac in the southwestern Dordogne region, was expelled from the French Socialist Party earlier this month after posting antisemitic comments online about Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest.
“France is too Jewish to boycott [Eurovision]!” Bazinet wrote in a post on Facebook.
French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez strongly condemned Bazinet’s comments, warning that he could face sanctions ranging from suspension to outright dismissal.
However, the rising wave of antisemitic attacks and hatred has spread beyond Western countries, reaching nations across the Eastern Mediterranean and other regions worldwide.
On Sunday, a group of Jews in Istanbul were attacked by pro-Palestinian protesters while on their way to light the eighth and final Hanukkah candle at the Neve Shalom synagogue.
According to widely circulated social media videos, the attackers approached the group while shouting, “These Zionists should leave this country,” waving Palestinian flags as they tried to get closer.
In a separate incident over the weekend, an Israeli man was attacked outside the hotel where he was staying in Limassol, Cyprus, after assailants reportedly heard him speaking Hebrew on the phone.
According to the victim’s father, his son was talking on the phone when a man approached him, asked for a cigarette, and then brutally assaulted him.
The victim was rushed to a local hospital and then flown to Israel on Sunday for emergency eye surgery after the attack, but doctors were unable to save his vision.
“My son, a young Israeli, was violently attacked at the entrance to the hotel where he was staying in Cyprus. Not on the street, not in a bar. At the entrance to the hotel — a place that is supposed to be safe and secure,” the victim’s father wrote in a post on Facebook. “He was brutally beaten, injured in the head and face, and evacuated for medical treatment.”
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Northwestern University’s Doha Campus a ‘Pipeline’ for Qatari Elites, New Report Finds
Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani speaks on the first day of the 23rd edition of the annual Doha Forum, in Doha, Qatar, Dec. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
The children of the Qatari aristocracy are vastly overrepresented at the Northwestern University campus in Qatar (NU-Q), a fact that, according to a new report, undermines the school’s mission to foster academic excellence by acting in practice as a “pipeline” for the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class.
The Middle East Forum (MEF), a think tank whose mission is to protect Western values and promote US interests in the Middle East, published its findings on NU-Q in a damning new report. MEF found that 19 percent of NU-Q graduates carry the surnames of “either the Al-Thani family or other elite Qatari families.” Additionally, graduates from the House of Thani, the country’s royal family, are overrepresented in NU-Q by a factor of five despite being only 2 percent of the population.
“Northwestern’s Qatar (NU-Q) campus has become a de facto elite access pipeline, admitting members of Qatar’s most powerful royal and ruling families at rates that bear no resemblance to the country’s demographic reality,” says the report, titled “How the Qatari Royals and Elite Conquered Northwestern University’s Qatar Campus in Doha.”
“Rather than functioning as an open academic institution, NU-Q operates as a selective training ground for the same families who finance and control the campus, effectively blurring the line between a US university and a state-run patronage system,” the report continues. “What emerges is not merely an educational partnership, but a closed-loop system of influence production which a US university’s foreign campus helps cultivate the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class, with direct implications for US policy, national security, and foreign influence.”
The report goes on to say that NU-Q uses its immense wealth, which includes a whopping $700 million in funding from Qatar, to influence the Evanston campus in Illinois, Northwestern’s flagship institution. “Endowed chairs, faculty exchanges, and governance links” reportedly purchase opinions which are palatable to the Qatari elite instead of investments in new NU-Q campus facilities and programs.
“The financial flows raise concerns about whether the Doha campus is a facade and whether the funding is in effect underwriting access and institutional influence rather than solely supporting the overseas campus,” the report continues. “The pattern at NU-Q mirrors the dynamic uncovered by the US Department of Justice in the 2019 Varsity Blues Case, where federal prosecutors exposed how a small group of privileged families exploited side-doors into elite universities through fraudulent athletic recruiting and exam manipulation. While the tactics differ, the structural similarity is clear: insiders repeatedly securing access that ordinary applicants could never obtain.”
MEF’s report has deep roots in debates over the Middle East and the ambiguities inherent in how countries conduct their international affairs.
Until the collapse of the British Empire in the years following the conclusion of World War II, Qatar functioned as a pillar and beneficiary of Great Britain’s regional order in the Middle East, having agreed to be one of many Persian Gulf protectorates which blocked Ottoman expansion and protected Great Britain’s sea route to its imperial holdings in India. The US opened diplomatic relations with the oil-rich kingdom in 1971 after it achieved independence from Great Britain, and the two states continue to enjoy what the US State Department describes as a “strategic partnership” for fostering economic growth, counterterrorism, cultural exchange, and defense and security cooperation.
The US designated Qatar as a major non-NATO ally in 2022, and President Donald Trump earlier this year committed, via executive order, to defend it if attacked.
However, Qatar has also been a patron of Hamas for years, hosting the Palestinian terrorist group’s political bureau in Doha since 2012.
During the same period, the Middle Eastern monarchy has invested tens of billions of dollars in the US. MEF released a separate report in May exposing the extent of Qatar’s far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, shedding light on what experts described as a coordinated effort to influence US policy making and public opinion in Doha’s favor. The findings showed that Qatar has attempted to expand its soft power in the US by spending $33.4 billion on business and real estate projects, over $6 billion on universities, and $72 million on American lobbyists since 2012.
This effort has focused heavily on higher education.
A recent report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), for example, found that Qatar has funneled roughly $20 billion into American schools and universities over five decades as part of a coordinated, 100-year project to embed Muslim Brotherhood ideologies in the US.
The 200-page report, unveiled in Washington, DC to members of Congress, chronicled a 50-year effort by Brotherhood-linked groups to embed themselves in American academia, civil society, and government agencies, exposing what ISGAP called the Brotherhood’s “civilization jihad” strategy, while maintaining an agenda fundamentally at odds with liberal democratic values.
In June, ISGAP released a separate report titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood,” a 132-page document which described dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown University’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its Qatari benefactors — who have given it over $1 billion over the past decade — the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
“The Qatari regime targets Georgetown due to its unrivaled access to current and future leaders. Over two decades, that investment has paid off — embedding Muslim Brotherhood scholars and narratives deep within the American academic and political culture,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, said in a statement on the report. “This masterful use of soft power is not only about Georgetown. It is how authoritarian regimes are buying access, narrative control, and ideological legitimacy — and too many universities are willing sellers.”
According to the report, the trouble began with Washington, DC-based Georgetown’s decision to establish a campus on Qatari soil in 2005, located in the Doha Metropolitan Area. The campus has “become a feeder school for the Qatari bureaucracy,” the report said, enabling a government that has disappeared dissidents, imprisoned sexual minorities without due process, and facilitated the spread of radical jihadist ideologies.
In the US, meanwhile, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding “minimize the threat of Islamist extremism” while priming students to be amenable to the claims of the anti-Zionist movement, according to ISGAP. The ideological force behind this pedagogy is the Muslim Brotherhood, to which the Qatari government has supplied logistic and financial support.
Trump signed an executive order last month directing his administration to determine whether to designate certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
The order did not mention Qatar, but experts have flagged Doha’s support for a wide range of Islamist groups.
“From the Taliban to Hamas to violent Muslim Brotherhood offshoots to Somalia’s Al-Shabab, Qatar allows the groups it hosts to access the global financial system and launder money,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Michael Rubin wrote in September. “Qatar has long been part of [a] war on the West, even as it tries to escape accountability for its actions. Moral clarity matters.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Pennsylvania principal to be fired over antisemitic voicemail: ‘They control the banks’
A Pennsylvania elementary school principal is facing termination by his school district after he accidentally recorded himself making antisemitic remarks in a voicemail to a Jewish parent.
Philip Leddy, the principal of the Lower Gwynedd Elementary School in Montgomery County, confirmed to the Wissahickon School District that he had made the antisemitic remarks heard on the voicemail message Friday morning after he believed he had disconnected the call, according to an email sent to the district’s parents.
In the recording, Leddy made a reference to “Jew camp,” and told another staff member at the school that the parent has “Jew money” and claimed that “they control the banks,” according to the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. Later, when asked whether the parent was a lawyer, Leddy responded, “the odds are probably good.”
“What is most concerning is not only the language itself, but the mindset it reflects,” the federation wrote in a statement. “The comments rely on well-known antisemitic stereotypes that reduce a parent to caricature and signal hostility rather than respect. For a family entrusting their child to a school community, hearing this kind of language, particularly from a principal, is profoundly unsettling.”
Leddy was hired as the principal for the Lower Gwynedd Elementary School in 2023 after previously serving as committee chair of the district’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee, according to a since-deleted profile for him on the school’s website.
In an email to the Wissahickon School District, Superintendent Mwenyewe Dawan wrote that the district’s administrative team was recommending immediate termination of Leddy, pending an “informal private hearing on Monday morning.”
The school district did not immediately respond to a request for an update on the hearing from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Monday morning.
Dawan wrote that Leddy had been placed on administrative leave, and that another staff member heard on the call was also placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.
“The fact that any employees entrusted with the care and well-being of students could make, or passively tolerate, such remarks raise concerns that extend beyond the conduct of a single individual,” wrote Dawan. “This incident underscores concerns for broader, systemic issues related to antisemitism that must be examined and addressed.”
The Jewish parent, who requested anonymity, told Action News 6ABC that Leddy had initially called him in response to an email about an incident involving his daughter.
“I couldn’t believe it, like I was seeing Jew this, Jew that, and I was thinking, ‘This can’t be the principal leaving a voicemail,’” the parent told Action News 6ABC.
Rabbi Kevin Lefkowitz, the leader of Tiferet Bet Israel, a Conservative congregation in Montgomery County, told Action News 6ABC that Leddy’s rhetoric had “boiled my blood.”
“He’s in charge of keeping our kids safe. For it to come out of his mouth so carelessly, so easily, it boiled my blood,” Lefkowitz said.
The incident comes one month after the House Education and Workforce Committee launched an investigation into the School District of Philadelphia for allegedly promoting a hostile environment for Jewish K-12 students.
In 2024, Pennsylvania saw 465 antisemitic incidents, marking a 18% rise from 2023, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual antisemitism audit.
“No one promoting antisemitic rhetoric should be leading and teaching our children,” said Andrew Goretsky, the senior regional director of ADL Philadelphia, in a post on Facebook. “We are urging them to fully investigate the situation, take the appropriate systemic action, and meet with Jewish families to begin the process of rebuilding trust.”
In her email to the district community, Dawan added that the school had already partnered with the ADL to provide trainings on antisemitism and bias response to the district’s administration in November and December, and that the trainings would be provided to the rest of its teachers and staff as planned.
‘While this incident is clearly deeply damaging, upsetting, and concerning, it is important to remember that our staff as a whole are deeply caring, respectful, and sensitive,” wrote Dawan. “I do not believe the actions and words of this principal reflect the views of our staff. One person’s hateful actions should not negatively impact the way our community views the rest of our staff.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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