A new mural in Nolita celebrates a Holocaust rescuer
(New York Jewish Week) — In the heavily trafficked neighborhood of Nolita, a larger-than-life mural has popped up on the corner of Spring St. and Elizabeth St. Bright orange and pink paint spell out the words “Saved 3,000 Jewish Lives” next to a black and white portrait of Holocaust rescuer Tibor Baranski.
The mural, an art piece designed to combat hate and spark conversation, is the brainchild of “Artists 4 Israel,” a non-profit organization that aims to “prevent the spread of antisemitic and anti-Israel bigotry by helping to heal communities that have been affected by hate through art,” according to its CEO and co-founder Craig Dershowitz.
“Our rallying cry is art over hate,” Dershowitz said. Baranski’s portrait, painted by Fernando “SKI” Romero, a renowned graffiti artist based in Queens, is part of the organization’s “Righteous Among the Nations Global Mural Project.” It aims to establish a network of murals painted in cities around the world that feature other “Righteous Among the Nations” members who helped save Jews during the Holocaust.
“His story was beautiful and it really touched me,” Romero, who is Dominican, said of Baranski, who collaborated with Artists 4 Israel on deciding whom to feature in the New York mural. “The want to paint something came very easily with something so selfless.”
The Baranski mural in Nolita is the third installment of the mural project; eventually there will be 10 murals around the world, said Dershowitz. Each subject is given a mural in their home state or country where they aided Jews: In Portugal, a mural of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a diplomat who helped arrange passports for Jews has become a popular tour bus stop. In Greece, a mural of Mayor Loukas Karrer and Archbishop Dimitrios Chrysostomos led to national media coverage.
Though Baranski was Hungarian, he lived in Buffalo, New York for nearly six decades and felt at home in New York, which is why the Artists 4 Israel chose him for the mural in Manhattan.
In 1944, Baranski was 22 and studying to become a Catholic priest in Slovakia when the Russian Army invaded and he was forced to return to Budapest, where he grew up.
He never returned to the seminary, and abandoned his dream of becoming a priest. Instead, he dedicated the next years of his life to orchestrating the escape of more than 3,000 Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust.
After arriving in Budapest, Baranski headed to the Vatican embassy residence of the Papal Nuncio Angelo Rotta, where a long line of people were requesting help. The Vatican embassies in Switzerland, Sweden, Spain and Portugal were some of the only places where Jews and other refugees were able to secure letters of protection and necessary documents to leave their countries.
Carol Romeo, who said her family survived the Holocaust, pauses to touch the mural of Holocaust rescuer Tibor Baranski created by Fernando “SKI” Romero, a Dominican-American artist born and raised in Queens. “I never knew he existed,” she said of Baranski. “And he lived here in New York. Everyone should know his story.” (CAM and Artists4Israel)
Pretending to be a priest, Baranski managed to arrange a meeting with Rotta, where he secured documents for a Jewish family he knew. As the story goes, Rotta soon recruited Baranski to help organize protection letters, baptismal certificates and immigration certificates for Jews trying to escape Hungary. He also helped coordinate food and housing for the escapees. Over the next two months, Baranski saved 3,000 Jewish lives, according to official records — though his sons have said he believes the number was closer to 15,000.
After the war, Baranski was imprisoned by the Soviet army for five years for his anti-communist beliefs. He became a freedom fighter during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 before moving to Rome to start a refugee camp with his wife Katalin.
Eventually the couple moved to Canada and then settled in Buffalo, where they were active members of the community and raised their three children, Tibor Jr., Kati and Peter.
Baranski, who died in 2019, was recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations in 1979, and was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.
In an obituary in the New York Jewish Week, writer and close friend of Baranski’s Steve Lipman recalls an anecdote Baranski often repeated: “’Why do you, a Christian, help Jews?’ Uncle Tibor told me the Nazis asked him. ‘You are either silly or an idiot,’ he would answer. ‘It is because I am a Christian that I help the Jews.’”
For Dershowitz, who is based in Los Angeles, one of the goals of the murals — and his organization at large — is fighting antisemitism through education about Israel and the Holocaust. By making the art public and accessible, Dershowitz hopes people of all backgrounds will enjoy the art, and learn from it.
“These murals are very much for everyone to enjoy,” he said. “For the most part, they’re not geared towards the Jewish community as much as they’re geared towards a younger demographic, regardless of their religion or cultural heritage.”
Since its foundation in 2009, Artists 4 Israel’s principal mission has been to bring diverse groups of graffiti, street and mural artists to Israel to create projects that “benefit people in a direct, on-the-ground way,” such as painting murals in hospitals, bomb shelters and army bases. The organization has worked with more than 5,000 professional and amateur artists from 32 countries around the world, according to its website.
“When [the artists] come back [from Israel], they’re able to talk about the country and they’re able to speak about the Jewish people and be a window into the reality of Israel in the Middle East to their millions of followers,” Dershowitz explained.
In 2020, when COVID-19 arrived and international travel halted, the organization switched gears and started bringing their advocacy to cities around the world with the “Righteous Among the Nations” project.
For the artist Romero, the work has been especially gratifying. The 44 year-old artist has been involved with Artists 4 Israel since its inception and has visited Israel three times, painting murals for battered women’s shelters, community shelters and army bases.
“I’m creating art with purpose, which is beautiful. I’m also creating a dialogue. There’s a conversation,” Romero said. “This is one of those murals that touches home and it makes you really feel good. It is art that just separates itself from a lot of the noise out there.”
Painted over the course of two days, the mural will remain on the downtown corner for the next nine months.
At the unveiling party last month, which included a performance by singer Neshama Carlebach and blessings led by Rabbi Menachem Creditor, Baranski’s son Tibor Jr. retold his father’s story and emphasized the strong Catholic faith that guided him.
“Tibor Baranski was the merger of intellect and faith,” said his son, who drove from Buffalo for the event. “My father’s deeply held belief in God was uncompromising. It was the core driver in his saving thousands of innocent Jewish lives in 1944 in Nazi-occupied Hungary.”
“I will quote my father since his words captured the essence of our Catholic faith and what this mural that Fernando painted commemorating him represents: ‘Love each other, love each other sincerely. God is love. Love destroys hatred,’” he added.
A little‑remembered Gilded Age millionaire helped make milk safe for American kids through his ‘retail giving’
The 1844 edition of the widely used schoolbook written by William H. McGuffey, “Newly Revised Eclectic Fourth Reader,” includes a dialogue about the difference between “true and false philanthropy”:
Mr. Fantom: I despise a narrow field. O for the reign of universal benevolence! I want to make all mankind good and happy.
Mr. Goodman: Dear me! Sure, that must be a wholesale sort of a job: had you not better try your hand at a town or neighborhood first?
As the discussion continues, the lesson becomes clear. Mr. Fantom’s approach is too ambitious to accomplish much, while Mr. Goodman’s, if narrower in scope, was likely to be more useful in practice.
Nathan Straus made his mark in philanthropy after a successful career running the Macy’s department store. Library of Congress Image by
Many of Straus’ contemporary philanthropists were setting lofty goals for their giving. In oil magnate John D. Rockefeller’s case, it was promoting “the welfare of humanity throughout the world.” For steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, it was “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.”
Straus pursued more mundane objectives that included championing milk pasteurization. Although his efforts are not as well known today as those of his more ambitious – and wealthier – counterparts, they accomplished a lot and showed that what might be called “retail giving” can have far-reaching effects.
Successful immigration story
The Straus family came to the United States from Germany in the 1850s during the first big wave of Jewish immigration. Lazarus Straus, Nathan’s father, followed a familiar path for Jewish immigrants at the time, beginning as a peddler and eventually establishing his own store in the small town of Talbotton, Georgia, where the members of his family were the only Jews.
He prospered, became a respected citizen and saw that his children received good educations, including in their religion.
Then the Civil War upended the family’s life, first by reviving antisemitic prejudices and then, eventually, by destroying the family’s business.
Starting anew in New York City, Lazarus and his older sons, Isidor and Nathan, began to sell imported china, glassware and other crockery to retailers in the Northeast and South. One was Rowland H. Macy, who had founded an eponymous store that was on the cutting edge of what Fisher calls a “retailing revolution.”
Macy’s innovations included stocking large inventories of many kinds of merchandise, competitive pricing, extensive advertising and providing a variety of services like public restrooms and a cafeteria to make shoppers’ experiences more pleasurable.
Aided by the rapid urban and economic growth of the late 19th century, the model flourished. Department stores displaced smaller, specialty shops. Other retail powerhouses, such as Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor, soon competed with Macy’s.
The Straus family sold their wares at Macy’s. After Rowland H. Macy died, the Straus family became partners with its new owners. By 1896, the Strauses owned the store outright. And Macy’s was expanding: It bought another department store in Brooklyn and created a flagship building on Manhattan’s Herald Square, which Macy’s still occupies.
The landmark Macy’s department store in New York’s Herald Square opened in 1902 while Nathan and Isidor Straus ran the retailer. Library of Congress Image by
His philanthropy journey begins
While Isidor Straus oversaw the store’s internal operations, Nathan focused on the company’s external activities, such as purchasing, marketing and dealing with government and business leaders.
A third brother, Oscar, pursued a career as a politician and diplomat, eventually becoming secretary of commerce and labor under President Theodore Roosevelt and the first Jewish member of a presidential cabinet. Perhaps inevitably, this led to a series of public appointments for Nathan Straus.
However, as they became wealthier, Nathan and his wife, Lina, increasingly devoted their attention to a series of philanthropic projects.
In 1893, the U.S. entered a four-year economic depression, its worst until the 1930s. As unemployment in New York City rose, Nathan Straus used his merchandising skills to address the needs of the jobless and poor.
He created a number of “depots” near tenements and boarding houses that sold coal, food and fuel at discount prices. Fisher, Straus’ biographer, rightly calls these early examples of what is now known as “social entrepreneurship”: the application of business principles to solving social problems.
Making milk less deadly
As these efforts were getting away, Straus also launched what would become his major preoccupation: promoting pasteurized milk.
In New York City in the early 1890s, Fisher writes, “the annual mortality rate among children under five was about 15 percent,” or 18,000 infants and toddlers per year. A main cause was consuming raw milk, which, unless certified by inspectors, was likely not only to contain a variety of pathogens, such as tuberculosis bacteria, but spoil easily going from farm to table.
Although scientists had long known that heating could make milk safer, doctors and public health officials worried that sterilizing milk might also destroy its valuable nutrients.
Straus, who had lost one of his own children to what he believed was a milk-borne infection, built on his projects for the unemployed by working with New York social service agencies to develop pasteurization plants and infant-milk stations near low-income neighborhoods.
They sold sterilized and refrigerated milk at below-wholesale prices, or donated it to those who could not afford to pay. Businesslike efficiency kept costs low, as did donations. Multilingual ads publicized the product’s availability, doctors and nurses advised parents on child-rearing, and careful recordkeeping aimed at assessing the program’s health benefits.
Straus and his wife devoted much of their time and money to this work. In addition to establishing 297 milk stations in 36 cities, they also spoke and wrote widely about the merits of pasteurization.
By 1908, their efforts paid off when the U.S. Public Health Service endorsed pasteurization and state and local governments began requiring that milk sold in their jurisdictions be pasteurized. Raw milk remained available in many states, and debates over its safety continue to this day.
As a result of this and other Progressive Era measures, New York City’s health commissioner estimated that infant deaths dropped by two-thirds
during the first two decades of the 20th century, with similar declines elsewhere in the country.
The coastal Israeli city of Netanya was named after philanthropist Nathan Straus. Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images Image by
Other causes
While most of Nathan Straus’ efforts occurred in the U.S., he used his trips to Europe for Macy’s to promote pasteurization on the continent.
During a 1904 visit, he toured the Mediterranean and stopped in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Impressed by the early Jewish settlements and holy sites he saw, Straus became an ardent advocate for creating a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, an unusual position for a Jewish businessman of that era, according to Fisher.
On a subsequent trip, a broken leg kept Straus from returning to New York on the maiden voyage of the Titanic; his brother Isidor and sister-in-law Ida were not so fortunate.
In the U.S., Nathan Straus led Zionist organizations, while in Palestine, his chief contributions involved supporting a variety of health care and economic development activities, including Hadassah, the women’s health and community development organization founded by Henrietta Szold.
Nathan Straus’ achievements as a philanthropist are not widely known today because he did not create a grantmaking foundation that outlasted him, as Rockefeller and Carnegie did.
Instead, by the time of his death in 1931, Straus had donated much of his fortune. Fisher writes that Straus used to invoke an old Hebrew proverb: “Money given in health is gold. Money given in sickness is silver. Money given after death is lead.”
He also didn’t donate heavily to the burgeoning network of communal organizations set up to assist the growing population of Jewish immigrants, as did the financiers Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg, who were also affluent Jewish immigrants from Germany.
As Fisher notes, this pattern of philanthropy resembles that of Straus’ friend – and pallbearer – Julius Rosenwald, the longtime head of Sears, Roebuck and Co. Both supported Jewish causes as well as major initiatives aimed at helping others: In Rosenwald’s case, it was schools for African American children in the South, while for Straus, it was milk pasteurization in New York City and beyond.
During and after World War I, they worked together to assist Jewish refugees in Europe. Fisher might have added that neither Straus nor Rosenwald sought much recognition for their work.
His thorough account should help give Straus the credit he deserves for his philanthropy. It should also show that donors do not have to aspire to “make all mankind good and happy” to make an important difference.
In many ways, Nathan Straus was an old-fashioned do-gooder, responding to the needs he saw with innovative solutions. As a result, he wound up accomplishing a lot of good.
“Emma,” a young Jewish woman who we met in 2019, didn’t belong to a synagogue. She didn’t have a Jewish partner. She didn’t observe Jewish rituals regularly. On most surveys about religion, she would not seem very engaged with Judaism.
But as Emma talked about what she did in her free time, a very different picture began to emerge. She visited Jewish websites and enjoyed listening to Jewish music. She read books about Jewish topics and had recently attended a retreat for young Jewish adults to learn Torah while also doing yoga.
She was highly invested in learning about Judaism, but she explored her identity without joining traditional institutions.
Most major surveys about religion ask whether someone belongs to a congregation, how often they attend services, whether they pray regularly and whether belief is important in their lives. Those measures help identify broad shifts, like the growing percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated: the “nones.”
But many Americans’ religious lives, like Emma’s, are not disappearing; they are moving away from membership of traditional institutions. To understand what religion looks like in 21st-century America, researchers may need to ask different questions.
Learning through art
As scholars of Judaismand education, we have been exploring how people learn about religion beyond traditional places like synagogues, Jewish schools and summer camps. Between 2019 and early 2023, we spoke with hundreds of people and explored different leisure time activities to discover what people learn about Judaism and Jewishness through cultural arts.
We interviewed dozens of audience members at Jewish-themed shows on Broadway, such as “Leopoldstadt”and “Parade.” We attended Jewish concerts and asked attendees what they learned. We explored how social media communities offer spaces to talk about different Jewish topics, like what fans learned about ultra-Orthodox Judaism from watching the television show “Shtisel.”
‘Shtisel,’ an Israeli series about an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem, ran for three seasons.
Our research revealed that there is a vibrant ecosystem of people learning about religion in their leisure time. Through the arts, both Jews and non-Jews encounter Jewish history, Jewish religious practices and representations of Jewish communities.
Screen and stage
Most people we spoke with told us that they felt meaningful connections to Judaism during activities that would rarely appear on a standard religion survey.
“Joan,” an unmarried woman in her 50s from Connecticut, told us that she was deeply invested in Judaism, but felt that synagogues and Jewish community centers were not welcoming to single people without families. Instead of joining a Jewish institution, she watched Jewish-themed TV shows and movies on Netflix, and joined social media communities to chat with other fans.
“Luis,” who lived in Boston but was born in Argentina, was a Sephardic Jew, a group that traces their ancestry and traditions to Jewish communities who once lived in Spain and Portugal. His wife was Ashkenazi, meaning her ancestors came from Central and Eastern Europe. She considered herself secular, and so the couple joined the Worker’s Circle, a nonreligious Ashkenazi institution rather than a synagogue.
Yet Luis loved deepening his knowledge of Sephardic culture, and he often attended concerts of music in Ladino, a Sephardic language related to Spanish, with other Sephardic immigrants.
American singer Sarah Aroeste writes and performs in Ladino.
For Joan and Luis, these activities were not peripheral to their Jewish lives. Rather, they were central avenues for learning and community. We interviewed hundreds of Jews who told us that cultural experiences were opportunities to reflect on Jewish practices, explore questions of belonging, connect with family histories and find friends with common interests.
New questions
Some aspects of these patterns were distinctive to Judaism. Historically, many Jews have understood Judaism to be a cultural world, and not only a theological tradition. Learning about cultural dimensions of Judaism has long been part of Jewish education.
The broader phenomenon of informal learning, though, extended far beyond a single tradition. Across America, increasing numbers of people learn about religion through media, cultural productions and digital networks. Christians may study biblical themes through podcasts, online discussion groups or religious influencers. Muslims may participate in online learning communities that connect believers across the world.
The challenge for religion researchers, then, is not simply to determine whether engagement with religion is rising or falling. Rather, it is to develop more nuanced ways of understanding how people explore religious themes and practices, beyond traditional institutions. Only then can we more fully understand how contemporary Americans actually live their religious lives.
