RSS
A new play tells the true story of a former Hasid who translated the New Testament into Yiddish
(New York Jewish Week) — The true story of a formerly Hasidic Baltimore man who encouraged Jews to convert to Christianity during the Holocaust serves as the unlikely jumping-off point for a new, Yiddish-language play beginning previews this week in Manhattan.
“The Gospel According to Chaim” is based on the life of missionary Chaim Einspruch, who was born into a Szanzer Hasidic family in Poland and “found” Christianity before immigrating to the United States in 1913. Einspruch eventually translated the New Testament into Yiddish and self-published it in 1941 after a Yiddish print shop turned down the job.
A production of the New Yiddish Rep, a New York-based theater company dedicated to Yiddish-language theater, “Gospel” is being billed as the first new, full-length Yiddish drama written in the United States in 70 years. According to David Mandelbaum, the company’s artistic director, the last original Yiddish drama in this country was written in the 1950s by famed Yiddish writer Leivick Halpern, author of the dramatic poem “The Golem.”
“The Gospel According to Chaim” is also the first full-length Yiddish play by Mikhl Yashinsky, a 33-year-old who has made a name for himself in New York as Yiddish writer, actor, teacher and translator.
Yashinsky stumbled upon Einspruch’s story in 2016 when he was a fellow at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. Fellows are required to conduct tours of the center and, as such, Yashinksy become familiar with the Yiddish printing type Einspruch’s widow donated to the institution, which is on display in a recreated but non-functional Yiddish print shop. Some of Einspruch’s printing type will be used as props in the play.
“It got me thinking about the irony inherent in this singular individual,” Yashinksky told the New York Jewish Week. “He was a Christian who believed in the divinity of Jesus but was also a very proud Jew culturally. It made me want to look further into this person.”
Yashinsky wrote the first act of “Gospel” while he was in Amherst, naming one of the characters in the play Sadie after a colleague there. He completed the play in 2020 in Charleston, South Carolina, where he lived for a time during the pandemic before returning to New York more than a year ago.
Chaim Einspruch’s Yiddish translation of the New Testament. (Jon Kalish)
In the 1940s, Chaim “Henry” Einspruch drew the ire of Baltimore Jews by standing outside Orthodox synagogues and preaching about Christianity in Yiddish to Jews leaving Shabbat services. In addition to his translation of the New Testament, Einspruch also translated 100 Christian hymns into Yiddish in a collection titled “Hymns of Faith (Lider fun gloybn).”
Many Jews view efforts to encourage Jews to embrace Christianity as offensive and even antisemitic, with Jews for Jesus and other contemporary Messianic movements drawing particular scorn. But Yashinsky said he felt none of that as he sought to bring Einspruch to life.
“I wasn’t interested in just portraying him as a villain and having the play be a piece of propaganda against missionaries,” Yashinsky told the New York Jewish Week about his inspiration. “I really tried to understand why he was doing it. I don’t think Einspruch felt he was being malevolent in anything he did.”
Fascinatingly, Einspruch never formally converted to Christianity, “deeming his allegiance to evangelical Lutheranism a true fulfillment of his Judaism rather than apostasy or betrayal,” writes Naomi Seidman, a humanities professor at the University of Toronto whose scholarly article on translations of the New Testament into Yiddish was published in the Berkeley Journal of Religion and Theology. After Einspruch immigrated to the United States he earned a doctor of divinity degree at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. (Seidman will deliver a lecture on Thursday at YIVO, “A Very Jewish Christmas: When Jesus Spoke Yiddish,” discussing Einspruch’s New Testament translation, among others.)
“His native language was Yiddish and he enjoyed Yiddish literature,” Yashinsky said of Einspruch. “His innovation was writing this [New Testament translation] in a truly refined, literary, poetic, idiomatic Yiddish. It reads beautifully.”
Indeed, as Einspruch declares in one scene of the play — which takes place during Hanukkah and Christmas in 1940 and continues into 1941: “The holy Yiddish language is very precious to me.”
Yashinsky plays Einspruch in the production but that was not his original intent. A would-be actor who grew up as a Lubavitcher Hasid was in rehearsals to play Einspruch in a reading done last March but wasn’t up to the task, Yashinsky said. So the playwright decided to take the part himself. “The role felt good to me,” he said.
The other two characters in the play are Gabe, a printer Einspruch approaches to print the Yiddish New Testament, and Sadie, a friend of the printer and an anti-fascist activist alerting Jews to the atrocities happening in the Holocaust in Europe. During the course of the play, Sadie, whose father converted to Christianity, urges Gabe to turn down the New Testament job; Gabe, meanwhile, needs the business but is reflexively repulsed by the idea of Jews converting to Christianity.
The role of Gabe the printer will be shared by actors Sruli Rosenberg and Joshua Horowitz. Rosenberg, 30, grew up as a Satmar Hasid in Williamsburg and now lives in Monsey, a different Hasidic community upstate. He describes himself as “reformed hasidische” and said most of the time he doesn’t he doesn’t wear a kippah but he continues to observe Shabbat — meaning that Horowitz will play the printer then.
In an effort to master the English language, Rosenberg stopped reading and writing Yiddish as a teenager. He had little contact with the Yiddish arts revival until the Spring of 2021 when he attended Generation J, a Yiddish arts program in Germany, thinking he may want to become a writer. While he was there, Rosenberg was baffled when other participants informed him of the Yiddish theater scene in New York. “I’m, like, ‘No there isn’t. I would’ve known of it,’” he recalled.
Inspired, Rosenberg returned to New York and got a job as the assistant to New Yiddish Rep’s Mandelbaum, helping him move sets around the office and driving him around town. When Rosenberg was feeding lines to actors auditioning for “The Gospel According to Chaim,” Yashinsky asked him why he didn’t audition himself. Now, Rosenberg makes his professional acting debut in the play.
Sadie, a fiery antifacist organizer is played by Melissa Weisz, 40. In the play, on Christmas Day, she asks Einspruch: “And what are you going to give him as a gift, your messiah, huh? It’s his birthday, after all. Maybe a barrel of Jewish blood? A fitting gift. Maybe the extermination of another shtetl of Jews in Europe? His followers have been giving him such gifts for thousands of years, and it seems he never gets tired of it.”
Weisz, too, grew up as a Satmar Hasid in Borough Park and made her acting debut in 2010 playing Juliet in the feature film “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish,” which set the Shakespearean tale in Hasidic Brooklyn. She also had one of the leads in a New Yiddish Rep production of “God of Vengeance,” the Sholem Asch play about lesbian love.
“These two characters come from very different places but they’re both trying to figure out how to save people,” she said of the link between protagonists Sadie and Chaim.
Yashinsky said he sees a wide audience for the show, despite its niche topic and language.
“Many will come who are attracted to Yiddish and to the various dramas and emotions and curious personalities that are part of its tumultuous 20th-century history,” he said. “But I hope anyone also comes who may have ever wondered about the entanglements of opposing religions, the holiday wars in America, the confluence of ethnicity and faith and identity and human ambition.”
The recent Yiddish-language version of “Fiddler on the Roof,” which had a revival last year after an initial run interrupted by the pandemic, introduced audiences to “supertitles” — English-language translations that are projected behind the actors. But Yashinsky said even people who do not know Yiddish will benefit from hearing it on stage.
“The language should not hold anyone back,” he said. “On the contrary, I hope it draws them in.”
A bigger question is whether native Yiddish speakers in the city are likely to see the show. Rosenberg acknowledged that his Hasidic mother was not crazy about his career path. “Isn’t that the universal quarrel that parents have with their children going into the arts?” he said. “She definitely did not take well to it. She doesn’t get it. I don’t blame her.”
And new Yiddish Rep’s Mandelbaum chuckled when asked whether there might be chartered buses bringing theatergoers from Borough Park to see the play. But he does think that Yiddish plays can appeal to the Hasidic Orthodox community, as well as a more secular one: During the 2019 Folksbiene production of Leon Kobrin’s classic Yiddish comedy “Di Next-Door’ike (The Lady Next Door),” Mandelbaum said there were shows filled with young Hasidic Jews who had played hooky from their yeshivas.
Well aware of the Yiddish music revival that’s going strong in New York and abroad, Mandelbaum concedes that Yiddish theater has not enjoyed that same kind of renaissance.
“If Yiddish theater is to really have a life, then it is essential that there be people who are going to write Yiddish plays,” he said during a rehearsal break. “Yiddish theater ought to be more than re-staging things from the past. We need to have young Yiddish writers writing plays.”
Then he declared, “May there be many Yashinskys.”
“The Gospel According to Chaim (Di psure loyt khaim)” is performed in Yiddish with English supertitles. Previews begin on Thursday, Dec. 21; the world premiere is on Sunday Dec. 24 at 7:30 p.m. There will be a total of 21 performances through Sunday Jan. 7 at Theater for the New City (155 First Ave.).
—
The post A new play tells the true story of a former Hasid who translated the New Testament into Yiddish appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Two UK Men Convicted, Jailed Following November Antisemitic Harassment
Illustrative: A pro-Hamas march in London, United Kingdom, Feb. 17, 2024. Photo: Chrissa Giannakoudi via Reuters Connect
A court in the United Kingdom on Thursday sentenced Hussein Altamimi, 22, and Ali Alanzi, 30, to prison sentences of eight months and seven months respectively, for charges stemming from an incident at London’s Western Marble Arch Synagogue in November 2024, according to British media.
The two men received convictions for yelling at four Jewish worshipers such phrases as “Jews aren’t welcome here,” “you don’t belong here,” and “f—king Jew.” They also repeatedly screamed “free Palestine.”
The incident grew violent when Altamimi hit one victim’s arm to try and prevent her from filming the abuse. Alanzi also hurled liquid from an alcoholic drink toward one person. When police arrived to arrest the pair, he assaulted one of the officers.
The court convicted both men of four counts of religiously aggravated public order offenses and religiously aggravated assault. Alanzi also received a conviction for attacking the officer and will endure an additional 12 weeks’ incarceration due to a previous suspended sentence.
On Friday, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) described its reaction to the hate crime prosecutions on X in one word: “Vindicated.”
Altamimi also faced additional charges and guilty verdicts related to a July 2023 incident which included racial abuse and striking a police officer.
“The CPS is working closely with the police to tackle hate crime, making sure that perpetrators who target victims because of their religion, race, sexuality, gender identity, or disability are brought to justice,” Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) lawyer Anna Hindmarsh said following the trial. “We know that hate crimes have a significant impact on victims and the wider community, and we will continue to support victims and witnesses who come forward to report any examples of hate crime they have experienced.”
The convictions against Altamimi and Alanzi are part of a historic surge in antisemitic acts in the United Kingdom.
The UK experienced its second-worst year for antisemitism in 2024, despite recording an 18 percent drop in antisemitic incidents from the previous year’s all-time high, according to a report released in February.
The Community Security Trust (CST), a nonprofit charity that advises Britain’s Jewish community on security matters, released data showing it recorded 3,528 antisemitic incidents for 2024, a drop of 18 percent from the 4,296 in 2023. These numbers compare to 1,662 antisemitic incidents in 2022, 2,261 in 2021, and 1,684 in 2020.
In the 12 months following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, CST counted 5,583 antisemitic incidents in the UK, an increase from 204 percent from the same period the previous year.
Many of the incidents involved violence targeting the Jewish community.
Last month, On May 26, a group of six or seven men attacked three Jewish boys at the Hampstead Underground Station in North London, requiring hospitalization for one. CAA said that “this report is yet another stark reminder of the growing threat facing Jewish communities, including children.”
Another antisemitic assault occurred in Manchester in February, when an unidentified individual hit a Jewish man with what was believed to be a bottle, shattering the victim’s glasses.
The heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Stamford Hill in Hackney saw an antisemitic act last week when vandals targeted a Jewish-owned investment firm, smashing its windows and splashing red paint. The group Palestine Action claimed responsibility for the crime, as it had done previously for similar acts at the University of Cambridge’s endowment fund headquarters and the BBC’s New Broadcasting House.
“This should be treated as [an] antisemitic incident without any doubt. [The owners] are visibly Jewish people; the people who run the business and this business itself have nothing to do with Israel,” said Rabbi Herschel Gluck, president of Jewish security service Shomrim’s branch in Stamford Hill.
Days earlier, residents of Brighton in southeastern England discovered antisemitic vandalism at a memorial created to honor the victims of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terror attacks.
“There have been over 40 attacks on the site including vandalism, theft, and graffiti. The abuse has been relentless,” Heidi Bachram, who volunteers to maintain the memorial, told The Jewish Chronicle at the time. “It’s shocking that grief for innocents is met with such violence. The hate won’t stop us, and every night, a different victim’s story will be told [at the memorial]. We will never let them be forgotten.”
In April, according to prosecutors, Abdullah Sabah Albadri, 33, attempted to climb a wall outside of the Israeli embassy in London while carrying a “martyrdom note.”
Prosecutor Kristel Pous said that Albadri told police that he wanted to “do something to send a message to the Israeli government to stop the war.”
The Israeli embassy stated in response to the foiled attack that “we thank the British security forces for their immediate response and ongoing efforts to secure the embassy.” It vowed that “the embassy of Israel will not be deterred by any terror threat and will continue to represent Israel with pride in the UK.”
The post Two UK Men Convicted, Jailed Following November Antisemitic Harassment first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Large Pro-Israel Event in Texas ‘Indefinitely Postponed’ Due to Threats of Terrorism
A protester holds a sign that reads, ”From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” during a pro-Palestinian emergency demonstration outside the Consulate General of Israel in Houston, Texas, on March 19, 2025. Photo: Reginald Mathalone via Reuters Connect
The 2025 Israel Summit in Dallas, Texas has been indefinitely postponed in response to what organizers described as intensifying threats of terrorism.
Prior to the cancellation, the event was expecting over 1,000 attendees. The Israel Summit had already undergone a last-minute venue change due to mounting safety concerns. The gathering, scheduled for June 9–11, was set to feature prominent voices from both the Jewish and Christian pro-Israel communities.
Former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who had been scheduled to speak at the event, commented on the cancellation on social media: “This is what America looks like in 2025. A peaceful pro-Israel gathering with more than a thousand participants had to be scrapped because of threats from violent extremists.”
Ten days prior to this year’s event, local police and intelligence officials in Dallas alerted organizers that the gathering had been upgraded to a “high-threat event.”
According to Josiah Hilton, host of the Israel Guys show, which was scheduled to co-host the event with HaYovel, the organizers had to produce “a mandatory security plan with a substantial budget estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
The organizers then moved the Israel Summit to a facility in an isolated area of Kenneth, Texas. However, the event was forced to cancel after the Palestinian Youth Movement Dallas and Jewish Voice for Peace, a pair of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas organizations, revealed its location to their followers.
“[T]he Genocide Summit had to change plans last minute in desperation due to them claiming to be ‘under attack.’ The reality is they understand DFW’s commitment to confronting the extremist ideology that is Zionism,” Palestinian Youth Movement Dallas wrote on Instagram.
However, the organizers stated that they are going to hold the pro-Israel event “in the near future,” and vowed to “come back bigger and stronger, with more people.”
Hilton said that the cancellation reflects “the growing normalization of antisemitic threats and anti-Israel extremists, which are fueling intimidation and silencing voices of support for Israel across the United States.”
The cancellation of the Israel Summit also reflects growing concern regarding potential violence against supporters of the Jewish state. Last month, two Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lipschinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were murdered while exiting an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. Then this past Sunday, an assailant firebombed a pro-Israel rally in Boulder, Colorado, injuring 15 people and a dog.
The post Large Pro-Israel Event in Texas ‘Indefinitely Postponed’ Due to Threats of Terrorism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Anti-Israel Animus, Propaganda Is Leading to Violence Against Jews, Experts Warn
Police officers gather on Pearl Street in front of the Boulder County Courthouse, the scene of an attack that injured multiple people, in Boulder, Colorado, US, June 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mark Makela
Hatred for Israel, often motivated by the spread of misinformation about the Jewish state’s history and conduct in Gaza, is fueling violence against Jews in the US and elsewhere, according to experts who spoke with The Algemeiner.
On Sunday, an assailant firebombed a pro-Israel rally with Molotov cocktails and a “makeshift” flamethrower in Boulder, Colorado, injuring 15 people ranging in age from 25 to 88 in what US authorities called a targeted terrorist attack. Egyptian national Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, was charged on Thursday with attempted murder and a slate of other crimes that could land him in jail for more than 600 years if convicted. Prosecutors say he yelled “Free Palestine” during the attack. The suspect also told investigators that he wanted to “kill all Zionist people,” according to court documents.
The Colorado firebombing came less than two weeks after a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, while they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The suspect charged for the double murder, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago, also yelled “Free Palestine” while being arrested by police after the shooting, according to video of the incident. The FBI affidavit supported the criminal charges against Rodriguez stated that he told law enforcement he “did it for Gaza.”
Such language targeting “Zionists” and calling to “Free Palestine” is identical to the rhetoric that has been widely uttered by anti-Israel activists on university campuses since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas invaded southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and launched the war in Gaza.
Just two days after the Colorado attack, for example, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), one of the most notorious anti-Israel campus groups, issued a call for its followers to confront a “group of zionists [sic]” at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. It made a similar call to action the day before, charging that Pride Month festivities are “hijacked by Zionist pinkwashing.”
CUAD added, “LGBTQ+ rights can’t be weaponized to erase Palestinian genocide. Homonationalism isn’t freedom — it’s oppression with a rainbow flag. Real pride is standing against settler colonialism.”
The aim of such language, according to experts, is to deny Jewish history and the indigenousness of the Jewish people to the land of Israel while priming listeners to accept the notion that the existence of Israel is an illegitimate, imperialist project necessitating its destruction.
“Being a Zionist is to understand the Jews are a people, and as a people they have a shared ancestral heritage rooted in the land of Israel,” Alyza Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told The Algemeiner. “If you’re going to say, ‘No, Israel has no right to exist,’ what you’re doing is asserting that Jews are not a people with no history in the land. Those who are peddling today’s modern antisemitism are rewriting history, both erasing and denying it.”
Prominent media outlets have amplified those who hold such beliefs, Lewin noted, fostering a sense that anti-Jewish hatred is acceptable and even honorable.
“The day before the assassination of [Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, the victims of last month’s DC shooting], you had the blood libel claiming that 14,000 babies were going to be killed in Gaza spread by the United Nations and by several publications — it turned out of course to be completely false,” she explained.
“Just before this incident on Sunday [the Colorado firebombing], news media outlets, including the Washington Post, report that Israelis opened fire on Gazans as they collected humanitarian aid — which is also false, patently,” Lewin continued. “Certainly, you had campus groups spewing this kind of hatred and messaging for years, but now it’s even mainstream media doing so.”
Jonathan Schulman, executive director of the nonprofit group The Jewish Majority, agreed.
“You see a direct link between conspiracy theories and violence against the Jewish community,” he said. “Now we live in a world in which it is normalized to use the most extreme rhetoric against the Jewish community, and to accuse Jews of intentionally starving populations. You see Jews being accused of genocide, and the consequences, as described in a post I saw on [X/Twitter] are clear: Blood libel leads to blood in the streets.”
There have been several examples on university campuses of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel activists using language in an apparent effort to incite action against Zionists, many of which have been previously reported by The Algemeiner.
In November 2024, pro-Hamas activists at the University of California, Santa Barbara graffitied “Zionist not allowed” in an act of intimidation targeted at former student body president Tessa Veksler. In April 2023, months before the Oct. 7 massacre, Michal Cotler, Israel’s special envoy for combatting antisemitism, was greeted with flyers that said, “Zionism out of NYU!” and claimed that “Israel is an apartheid state.” During the 2023-2024 academic year at Stanford University a Jewish student was repeatedly called a “Zionist, Nazi pig.” In February 2025, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine called for a “future free of Zionism” following its vandalism of the home of a Jewish member of the UC Board of Regents, the governing body of the University of California system.
Antisemitism in the US is surging to break “all previous annual records,” according to chilling data released in the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) latest Audit of Antisemitic Incidents in April.
The ADL recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents last year — an average of 25.6 a day — across the US, creating an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly thirty years since the organization began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all increased by double digits, and for the first time ever a majority of outrages — 58 percent — were related to the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.
The Algemeiner parsed the ADL’s data, finding dramatic rises in incidents on college campuses, which saw the largest growth in 2024. The 1,694 incidents tallied by the ADL amounted to an 84 percent increase over the previous year. Additionally, antisemites were emboldened to commit more offenses in public in 2024 than they did in 2023, perpetrating 19 percent more attacks on Jewish people, pro-Israel demonstrators, and businesses perceived as being Jewish-owned or affiliated with Jews.
“This horrifying level of antisemitism should never be accepted and yet, as our data shows, it has become a persistent and grim reality for American Jewish communities,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Jewish Americans continue to be harassed, assaulted, and targeted for who they are on a daily basis and everywhere they go. But let’s be clear: we will remain proud of our Jewish culture, religion, and identities, and we will not be intimidated by bigots.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Anti-Israel Animus, Propaganda Is Leading to Violence Against Jews, Experts Warn first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login