Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post A Holocaust survivor and her family saw ‘Leopoldstadt.’ The Broadway play told their story. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The rabbi’s son who drew an antisemitic mural on Wilshire Boulevard
The mural went up in a day in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles. By Thursday morning, Los Angeles Jews who saw it expressed outrage, calling it hateful and incendiary. The artist who drew it, meanwhile, told me he is the son of a Jewish father who didn’t mean to offend, just start a conversation.
Welcome to the bizarro world of antisemitism, circa 2026.
The 40-foot by 12-foot mural depicts Jews dancing on caskets and holding missiles above the heads of grieving mothers, rows of tanks and a sign that reads: “Buy More Things,” alongside images of diamonds and televisions.
One section depicts parents who appear to be Muslim holding their children and weeping. Five bodies of children are laid out on an altar-like table beside a figure with a yarmulke holding a missile. As your eyes move to the left, there’s a dollar sign and the words, “Freedom has Never Been Free.”
The piece, drawn in chalk against painted slate on a long panel of plywood construction fencing, combines the graphic scope and drama of Picasso’s “Guernica” with antisemitic caricatures straight out of the pre-World War II Nazi periodical Der Sturmer.
I’ve seen photos and videos of the mural, located at 5376 Wilshire Blvd. between Cloverdale Street and S. Detroit Street next to The Heart LA Church and just a few blocks from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. My wife, Rabbi Naomi Levy, received the video via an urgent text message on Thursday from a congregant who came across it on her morning walk.
The “grotesque expressions on their faces, surrounded by images of war/suffering/greed,” the congregant wrote, play into “the worst antisemitic propaganda imagery.”
She’s not wrong. The congregant reported the mural to the city’s 311 complaint line. The Jewish Federation of Los Angeles confirmed it also fielded complaints.
The location is close to L.A.’s Orthodox Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood and just over a mile east of the headquarters of the city’s Jewish Federation and Shalhevet, a large Jewish day school.
The mural isn’t signed by the artist, but a phone number appears in the same chalk on an adjoining panel. David Sabastian, long a fixture in the L.A. fashion, music and art scene, posts the same phone number on his Instagram account bio.
So I called him.
“Right now there’s people who are offended by you simply saying ‘Free Palestine’,” he told me. “So can somebody be offended? Hell yeah! I offend people when I go to Whole Foods sometimes and I’m like wearing shorts. People get offended for everything.”
Sabastian said he doesn’t see the mural as antisemitic, or even that political.
“I’m not some radical pro-Palestine or pro-anything,” he said. “I’m an artist who simply illustrates my human experience.”
Sabastian told me he likes art that provokes conversation and stands for something. That’s one way to describe the mural. Another is that it crosses the line to hate.
“That would be a vast exaggeration and an irresponsible one,” he said. “But it is art. It could be interpreted in many ways, but I don’t think that way.”
When I pointed out that Jews I spoke with took offense, he told me he didn’t see it as representing all Jews.
“My father was a Hasidic rabbi,” he said.
Sabastian’s given name is David Miklatski. A 2016 profile of Sabastian in the L.A. Weekly reported that his father was a gallery owner who had recently died. Sabastian told me his father had a brief liaison with his mother, who lived in Watts. Then his father became very religious. He led a synagogue in the Pico-Robertson district — Sabastian couldn’t recall the name — and then moved to Israel.
“That story goes deep,” said Sabastian, who is in his late 30s. “He pretty much disowned me when I was a child.”
I told him there was a long history of antisemitic cartoons fueling hate and violence, and many people would see what he drew as offensive, just as they would stereotypical images of Blacks or Latinos. What does he see as the line between symbolism and vilification?
He answered me with a question of his own.
“I’ve lived the Black experience growing up in Los Angeles, right?” he said. “If I wanted to paint a picture that kind of dealt with that human experience of racism, and I chose to include a white person in it, am I villainizing all white people?”
I brought up George Floyd. The images that spread after his murder, a white foot or a white hand on Floyd’s neck, were clearly about the officers who killed him. They weren’t an indictment of all white people.
But his mural, I said, reads as an indictment of all Jews when it’s the Israeli army fighting the war.
“If you know who are murdering and slaughtering Palestinians, is it Mexicans? Is it Chinese?” he said. “It’s the Israeli army. Do the majority of them happen to be Jewish? Sure. So that’s just the drawing. If it was Black people doing it, then I would draw Black people or whatever the case may be. It’s simply like a political cartoon.”
Of course, it’s not so simple, given the way antisemitic images get weaponized to incite violence against Jews.
In our conversation, Sabastian himself wasn’t sure who he was targeting. He called the dancing figures “Jews,” not “the Israeli army.” Then, defending the piece, he said he’s drawing “the Israeli army” and that most of them “happen to be Jewish.” That shift from Israeli army to Jews and back is the exact line that is so easily blurred when criticism of Israel bleeds into antisemitism.
If that’s a matter of interpretation, it’s clear from the comments in Sabastian’s Instagram post of the mural how others are reading the artwork, which he titled, “Palestina.”
“You forgot to put them on there the ancient families that pull the strings while everyone fights on religion color or where they were born,” wrote one commenter.
“Now do a star of David symbol with a swatzika [sic]and a heart,” read another, followed by laughing emojis.
No word yet on any institutional response, but the social media popularity the mural has already garnered — more than 2,000 likes shortly after he posted it — will complicate any attempt to address it, to say the least.
So much of antisemitism these days comes down to a judgment call, especially when it comes to the line between criticizing the government of Israel and attacking all Jews. This mural, even if Sabastian didn’t intend for it to endanger Jews, isn’t a close call. That puts Jews in the no-win position of living with a work in their neighborhood that regurgitates and broadcasts age-old antisemitic tropes, or being seen as the enemies of artistic freedom.
It’s not a simple problem. Just consider the rapper Macklemore — who received massive support and attention for saying “Free Palestine” at an Ed Sheeran concert. Macklemore, by the way, follows Sabastian on Instagram.
The post The rabbi’s son who drew an antisemitic mural on Wilshire Boulevard appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘Vote him out’: Israeli-Americans rally against Netanyahu, plan to return to Israel to vote against him
Gripping Israeli flags in Union Square, a crowd of roughly three dozen chanted “Vote him out,” as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to speak before the United Nations on Thursday.
“It’s really an embarrassment that he’s even at the U.N.,” said Israeli-American protester Steve Lax, who is planning to fly to Israel to vote in the upcoming election.
UnXeptable, an organization founded by Israeli expats who say they are striving to save Israeli democracy, organized the demonstration. While those protesting opposed the Netanyahu government, the rally was intended more broadly to support change in Israel as the election looms. Roughly three dozen Israelis, Israeli-Americans and Jewish-Americans joined the protest.
Lax, who splits his time between Israel and America, said he supports Yair Golan and the Democrats. The main issues driving his vote are government corruption, settler violence in the West Bank and “the lack of hope for peace.”
“Jewish terrorism is creating more Arab terrorism,” said Lax, chairman of Naot Worldwide. “The settlers are totally out of control, and unfortunately some of the Israeli army, and certainly [Itamar] Ben-Gvir, have been supporting the settlers in what they’re doing.”
Israeli citizens living abroad may vote in the election if they are physically in the country to cast their ballots and have resident status. This is different from America, where citizens can vote by absentee ballot while outside the U.S.
Change, for those at the protest, means supporting one of the many opposition blocs. Offir Gutelzon, the Israeli-American co-founder of UnXeptable, is supporting the Gadi Eisenkot bloc. Critics of Eisenkot question what significant changes he will bring, as he aligns with Netanyahu on opposing Palestinian statehood. However, Gutelzon said Eisenkot’s stance on internal issues is what really matters to Israelis.
These include opposing judicial overhaul, setting term limits for prime ministers and drafting the Haredim into the military.
“I know that from the outside, everyone is looking at what will be different with Palestinians, what will be different in Gaza,” Gutelzon, who moved to America in 2011 for business reasons, said. “Most Israeli voters don’t think about that right now. They want to secure the country as a Jewish and democratic state, and then start talking about other things.”
But for Israeli-American Leora Agron, Gaza is one of the main reasons she is flying back to vote.
“Innocent people are dying,” she said. “Let them live. Give them support to do it, because everything is broken.”
Agron moved to Argentina in 1987 at age 30 to be with her husband. The couple considered moving back to Israel when they had children, but were discouraged by then opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, which inflamed tensions with Palestinians.
What’s at stake?
Gutelzon is confident Netanyahu won’t remain in power. Even so, he says the stakes couldn’t be higher, and that if the PM doesn’t change, the country will slip into a “messianic theocracy.” This is in part due to brain drain, the concept of highly educated citizens emigrating.
Nearly 300,000 Israelis have left the country for at least three months since 2023, suggesting a mass emigration trend, according to a study from Tel Aviv University. Professor Itai Ater, who led the study, said the country is currently able to sustain itself despite these numbers. However, if the trend continues, emigration will severely harm the nation’s security and economy.
“We see that it’s many, many physicians, engineers, tech people and academics,” Ater told i24 News. “This is the best of Israel in a sense. The Israeli economy depends on human capital.”
Citing Ater’s study, Gutelzon noted healthcare would be impacted by physicians leaving, along with education if academics emigrate. Additionally, this group of people is paying the highest taxes, he said. They also serve in the military, and are needed given the exemption for Haredim.
Yonatan Schwartz, 19, participated in the protest and said he is reconsidering immigration to Israel. Schwartz, an American with two Israeli parents, attended the UnXeptable protest and said he had been planning to join the Israel Defense Forces. But if Netanyahu is reelected – or a different “right-wing extremist” wins – he said he’ll likely stay in America and go to college instead.
Supporting Israel, not the government
UnXeptable was initially inspired by the 2020 Balfour protests when hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to streets and bridges demanding Netanyahu resign after he was indicted on corruption charges.
“The Balfour protests started with a very simple statement that said that an indicted prime minister is unacceptable,” said Gutelzon, explaining how UnXeptable got its name.
The Bay Area-based organization wanted to show Israelis back home that those in the diaspora supported them. So they demonstrated at their own bridge, the Golden Gate.
Now, the protests have gone beyond showing solidarity with Israelis back home. As Gutelzon puts it, UnXeptable wants to show the world “the other Israel,” one that’s looking “for change.”
The post ‘Vote him out’: Israeli-Americans rally against Netanyahu, plan to return to Israel to vote against him appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
A candy crisis has cast a pall on upcoming bar and bat mitzvahs
Ahead of my New Jersey synagogue’s first bar mitzvah this weekend, we learned that Sunkist Fruit Gems, the popular sacred confection lovingly lobbed at the end of many services to shower the b’nai mitzvah boy or girl with sweetness, had been discontinued by its candy maker.
I dreaded delivering this news to my son and daughter, Max and Rose, who are beginning to celebrate their classmates’ bar and bat mitzvahs and prepare for their own. For children, even those on the brink of adulthood, fruit-flavored gummies matter.
This also deals a blow to a silent protest that had already begun to percolate last spring when I celebrated my own bat mitzvah. When my classmates and I asked where we should take cover when our fans pelted us with the traditional fruit-flavored gummies, we were promptly informed that candy had been banned from the sanctuary.
A candy ban? I audibly gasped.
“This is unacceptable,” Rose declared when I told my kids the news. “We have to do something.”
The Los Angeles-based Ben Myerson Candy Company introduced Fruit Gems in 1955 after working with Sunkist on pectin candies, or natural fruit gels. Sunkist began putting its name on the label in 1966.
To focus more attention on wine and spirits, the Myerson family sold the candy business in 2006 to Jelly Belly Candy Co., which 17 years later was acquired by The Ferrara Candy Company. Apparently, Fruit Gems could not compete with Ferrara’s other products, which include Atomic Fire Balls, Fun Dip, Nerds, Pixy Stix and Lemonheads. And so, in May, Ferrara retired the Gems.
But an Atomic Fire Ball to the head is no way to celebrate a job well done. And lightweight Pixy Stix can not be lobbed hard enough to clear 10 rows of pews and hit their target. In fact, none of those confections can truly replace the sugar-coated, cellophane-wrapped Fruit Gem, which by the way, is also kosher.
While tossing sweets isn’t a sacred ritual, it does add a dose of cathartic joy for children at the end of a two-hour religious service and for the bar or bat mitzvah and their family at the end of a stressful occasion. Scholars trace the practice back to a passage in the Talmud, which mentions throwing grains and nuts at a couple during wedding celebrations.
As other milestones have taken on greater importance, a similar custom has spread to bar and bat mitzvahs in which jelly candy is used to bestow joy and sweetness on the teen as they transition into maturity.
I asked Kenneth Feibush, our temple’s former cantor, how the tradition there started. Now the cantor of Congregation Beth Israel in Houston where no one throws sweets, Feibush said it’s actually more common in Conservative and Orthodox congregations than Reform temples. But a handful of families at Temple Sholom introduced it on their own and it caught on. He had seen it before at a temple in Alaska where he had interned. There, the bar or bat mitzvah would don a helmet or open a parasol to shield themselves from the projectiles.
When I asked our spiritual leader, Rabbi Laurence Groffman, how the tradition ended, he said Temple Sholom prides itself on being an inclusive congregation but there are limits. “Unfortunately, ants don’t make the cut,” he said.
Turns out ants had infested the piano ahead of our Purim spiel last year. And as our temple readied for a costly renovation to our sanctuary, the powers-that-be said no more food fights.
So now that Sunkist Fruit Gems are no longer an option, is the protest against the candy ban a moot point? Is there a way to do a symbolic Gatorade dump to salute the sweat that went into the proverbial win? That’s precisely what our religious school director Cara Moroze recommended.
“I like a good compromise,” she said. “How ‘bout Rose dumps all the candy at once over her brother’s head? Then the kids come up to get the candy. No errant Twizzlers buried in a piano.”
I warned her that she had just reignited the protest movement.
The post A candy crisis has cast a pall on upcoming bar and bat mitzvahs appeared first on The Forward.
