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
Toronto Jewish Community Shaken After 3 Synagogue Shootings in Less Than a Week
People attend Canada’s Rally for the Jewish People at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, in December 2023. Photo: Shawn Goldberg via Reuters Connect
Two synagogues in Toronto were targeted by gunfire overnight on Friday, marking the third shooting targeting Jewish institutions in less than a week and intensifying fears of a rapidly deteriorating security climate for Jews and Israelis across Canada.
Local police confirmed that the two synagogues — the Shaarei Shomayim synagogue in North York and the Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto (BAYT) synagogue in Thornhill, both in Ontario’s Greater Toronto Area — suffered gunfire attacks, with multiple bullet holes found in their front windows and exterior walls.
The incidents came just four days after another attack in Toronto, in which a Jewish-owned restaurant and a local synagogue were also hit by gunfire.
Canadian authorities assured the public that they are investigating the incidents and examining any potential links, but no suspects have been identified at this time.
On Sunday, the local Jewish community gathered to confront this relentless wave of antisemitic attacks, standing in solidarity, raising awareness of the growing threats, and calling for meaningful protections for their safety and places of worship.
During a news conference outside the Shaarei Shomayim Synagogue, Sara Lefton, chief development officer of the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto, described last week’s attacks as shocking yet not surprising, highlighting the escalating wave of antisemitic violence sweeping Canada.
“We are shaken to our core at this moment,” Lefton said. “It’s beyond anything that we could have imagined.”
She called on “every part of Canadian society” to take action against discrimination toward Jews and Israelis, stressing that government officials must coordinate with concrete commitments and funding to ensure the community feels safe and protected.
“It’s not enough to say our thoughts and prayers are with the Jewish community. This is not a Jewish issue; this is a Canadian issue,” Lefton said.
Toronto-born Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel also condemned the shootings, describing them as “antisemitic terrorism.”
“Anti-Jewish terror is a result of a global failure to confront antisemitism and the hatred directed at the Jewish people,” the Israeli diplomat wrote in a post on X.
Israel’s ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed, urged Ottawa to take strong action to hold those responsible accountable and to strengthen security measures for Jewish institutions nationwide.
“The safety of Canada’s Jewish community must remain a national priority and a collective responsibility,” Moed said in a statement.
Toronto Deputy Mayor Mike Colle pointed out that he has been pressing both provincial and federal governments over the past three years to establish a task force specifically aimed at fighting antisemitism.
“[Local law enforcement] cannot do this alone. This is not a local police matter,” Colle said. “It’s not good enough to make speeches or propose laws now.”
Yet his initiatives stand in sharp contrast to Mayor Olivia Chow’s history of openly anti-Israel statements and positions. In November, several Canadian Jewish groups called on her to apologize and even resign for publicly calling Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip a “genocide”
Like most countries across the Western world, Canada has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Canadian Jews have been hit by a wave of antisemitic incidents, with at least 32 reported across five provinces in just the first week of January this year, according to data collected by the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith.
“Antisemitism in Canada is now accelerating at an increasing rate, spreading across provinces, platforms, and public spaces. That is a warning signal, and it demands more than piecemeal reactions,” the group wrote in a letter urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to create a Royal Commission that would explore the problem and draft policy proposals for solving it.
In one of the latest antisemitic incidents, a kosher restaurant and a neighboring business in Montreal, the largest city in the province of Quebec, were vandalized last week, with antisemitic graffiti and swastikas spray-painted across their walls.
In another troubling antisemitic incident, a 15-year-old Jewish student in Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, has been forced to continue his education online after his school failed to stop repeated antisemitic harassment and bullying.
According to B’nai Brith’s latest audit released last year, antisemitic incidents in 2024 rose 7.4 percent from 2023, with 6,219 adding up to the highest total recorded since it began tracking such data in 1982.
Seventeen incidents occurred on average every day, while online antisemitism exploded a harrowing 161 percent since 2022. As standalone provinces, Quebec and Alberta saw the largest percentage increases, by 215 percent and 160 percent, respectively.
Uncategorized
For the ‘Jazz Rabbi’ of Connecticut, music and Judaism are both about tradition and improvisation
Greg Wall, who has juggled a career as a professional jazz musician while holding down a day job as a pulpit rabbi, has long been known as The Jazz Rabbi. Though he has retired from his job at the Beit Chaverim Synagogue in Westport, Conn., where he served as full-time rabbi for 10 years, he’s still at the synagogue seven days a week.
“Jazz is really a model of how to put your own spin on an inherited tradition,” Wall told me. “And that’s what the practice of Judaism has been for me. I’m part of the tradition, yet I’m trying to come to my own understanding and make certain connections myself, rather than just dial it in by rote.”
The Jazz Rabbi prays three times a day and studies Talmud study daily. But Wall is also devoted to another congregation: Every Thursday night the jazz faithful gathers at a VFW Post in Westport. The shows, known as Jazz at the Post, are organized by the Jazz Society of Fairfield County, a non-profit organization Wall co-founded. He’s the organization’s artistic director.
“This is a really nice chapter of my life,” Wall told me just he as he was getting ready to perform at a sold-out show in late February. “I have people calling me all the time to come play here. A lot of them are Grammy Award-winning jazz artists.”
The venue, which has a capacity of about 80, is usually sold out. Admission is $20 and there is no drink minimum, making it much more affordable than the typical night out at a commercial jazz venue, where admission is often $50 with a two-drink minimum. Because the Jazz at the Post shows take place at a VFW hall, veterans are admitted for $15, as are students.
Wall said that the fact that there’s no adversarial relationship with a restaurant trying to sell food and drink makes for a much better listening experience for jazz lovers.
“People come here to listen to the music,” he told me. “The people that I would go out and listen to in New York now come to Westport. I feel a little guilty that this place is two minutes from my house, but so be it.”
Back in 2009 when Wall got his first pulpit, a part-time gig at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue in Manhattan’s East Village, his group Later Prophets was touring regularly. During his time at the Sixth Street shul, Wall created the Center for Jewish Arts and Literacy, which brought klezmer, jazz and big-band music to the synagogue’s basement social hall, along with Yiddish language and Torah classes. The music series lives on at the Hudson Yards Synagogue in Manhattan, thanks to the efforts of the percussionist Aaron Alexander.
Later Prophets has been inactive in recent years but Wall still plays freelance gigs with various artists and occasionally performs with the guitarist Jon Madoff’s horn-heavy Afrobeat ensemble Zion 80, as well as The Elders, a jazz group led by Frank London, his friend and collaborator of nearly 50 years.
At the VFW hall in Westport, The Jazz Rabbi joins the visiting artists on the bandstand every week. Wall said the experience of playing with different acts, many of whom perform original compositions, has been good for his musical chops. One of the regulars at the Westport shows remarked that when Wall really gets into a groove, he rocks back and forth like he’s davening.
The Jazz at the Post shows have been happening since April 2022 but Wall has been performing locally since 2015. He started playing in the back room of a local eatery known as Restaurant 323. That gig came about after Wall’s impromptu performance at a fundraiser for the Bridgeport community radio station WPKN-FM.
“After he played a couple of bars of music at the WPKN benefit, I was just blown away by his talent,” recalled Richard Epstein, a Bridgeport dentist who serves as vice-president of the Jazz Society. Epstein’s wife Ina Chadwick, a former Forward editor, was running a spoken word performance series at Restaurant 323 and suggested Wall start a jazz night there.
Eric Bilber, a co-founder of the Jazz Society and a board member, said he discovered the Restaurant 323 scene when his wife went to pick up their daughter one night at the Metro-North station in Westport and didn’t come home right away. Their daughter Zina noticed someone playing a stand-up bass and decided they should check it out. They had such a great time that they stayed until the last set.
“And that was it,” Bilber told me. “I went back with them the following week and we’ve been going ever since. We started bringing our friends and everybody that we could think of to try to support this.”
Bilber realized there was a need to start a non-profit after the Westport jazz lovers had collected thousands of dollars by passing around a cigar box at performances to purchase a piano.
“One day he asked Wall, “Who owns the piano?’” Bilber recalled. “And we decided maybe we should start a non-profit.”
The newly created Jazz Society paid $11,000 for a Steinway Model M that was built in 1937. It had served as one of the house pianos at the Village Gate, the iconic Greenwich Village nightclub that closed in 1988.
If a piano can be said to have yichus, the Gate’s Steinway would certainly fit the bill. Thelonius Monk and Nina Simone are among several jazz greats who played it on live albums recorded at the Gate. Mose Allison, Count Basie, Bill Evans, Eddie Palmieri, Sun Ra and McCoy Tyner have banged on its keys too.
Wall had been tipped off to the Model M’s availability by his piano tuner. But all that wear and wear had taken its toll on the instrument, so in 2018 the Jazz Society came up with $15,000 to refurbish it.
Paul Haller, a Stanford-based piano restorer, recalled with a chuckle that Wall brought down a few local pianists to his shop when the repairs were completed. They put the piano through its paces for a couple of hours before declaring they were pleased with the restoration.
Ted Rosenthal, a pianist who teaches at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, performed at the Post with a quintet that included Wall in late February. During the intermission, he reminded me that being a jazz musician means that one night you could be playing at Carnegie Hall and the next night your gig might be at the Carnegie Deli.
“They’ve created a jazz club in a place that wasn’t designed to be a jazz club,” he said. “I think that’s what we need to do because obviously rents in New York are so high that some clubs don’t succeed because of the expenses involved. If you can find a place and build an audience, I think that’s a perfect way to go.”.
“This place is like being in Greenwich Village,” said Alan Phillips, a Westport resident who comes to the Jazz at the Post performances almost every week. “The world-class jazz that we get right here — it’s the best kept secret.”
The post For the ‘Jazz Rabbi’ of Connecticut, music and Judaism are both about tradition and improvisation appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Trump Admin to Designate Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan as a Terrorist Group
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a US-Paraguay Status of Forces agreement signing ceremony at the State Department in Washington, DC, US, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt
The Trump administration will soon designate the branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan as a terrorist group, the US State Department announced on Monday, following similar steps targeting the global Islamist network’s activity in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan.
“Today, the Department of State is designating the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and intends to designate the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, effective March 16, 2026,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubion said in a statement.
“The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood (SMB) uses unrestrained violence against civilians to undermine efforts to resolve the conflict in Sudan and advance its violent Islamist ideology,” Rubio continued, noting the organization receives backing from the Islamist regime in Iran.
“Its fighters, many receiving training and other support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have conducted mass executions of civilians,” the top US diplomat added. “As the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, the Iranian regime has financed and directed malign activities globally through its IRGC. The United States will use all available tools to deprive the Iranian regime and Muslim Brotherhood chapters of the resources to engage in or support terrorism.”
The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood’s armed wing, the al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade (BBMB), was blacklisted by the US government in September 2025 for its role in Sudan’s ongoing war.
“SMB’s BBMB fighters have conducted mass executions of civilians in areas they captured, and repeatedly and summarily executed civilians based on race, ethnicity, or perceived affiliation with opposition groups,” according to the State Department.
The terrorist designations will deny the Brotherhood’s members access to the US financial system, restricting their access to resources they need to carry out attacks.
“All property and interests in property of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood that are in the United States or that are in possession or control of a US person are blocked. US persons are generally prohibited from conducting business with sanctioned persons,” the State Department warned. “Persons that engage in certain transactions or activities with the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood may expose themselves to sanctions risk. Notably, engaging in certain transactions with them entails risk of secondary sanctions pursuant to counterterrorism authorities.”
The State Department’s announcement came less than two months after the Trump administration designated branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan as terrorist groups.
US President Donald Trump in November signed an executive order directing his administration to determine whether to designate certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has long been affiliated with the Brotherhood, drawing both ideological inspiration and even personnel from its ranks.