Uncategorized
Alarmed by their country’s political direction, more Israelis are seeking to move abroad
TEL AVIV (JTA) — When Daniel Schleider and his wife, Lior, leave Israel next month, it will be for good — and with a heavy heart.
“I have no doubt I will have tears in my eyes the whole flight.” said Schleider, who was born in Mexico and lived in Israel for a time as a child before returning on his own at 18. Describing himself as “deeply Zionist,” he served in a combat unit in the Israeli army, married an Israeli woman and built a career in an Israeli company.
Yet as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power, assembled a coalition that includes far-right parties and started pushing changes that would erode hallmarks of Israeli democracy, Schleider found himself booking plane tickets and locating an apartment in Barcelona. Spain’s language and low cost of living made the city a good fit, he said, but the real attraction was living in a place where he wouldn’t constantly have to face down the ways that Israel is changing.
Israel’s strength over its 75 years, Schleider said, is “the economy we built by selling our brains.… And yet, in less than half a year, we’ve managed to destroy all that.”
Schleider has been joining the sweeping protests that have taken root across the country in response to the new right-wing government and its effort to strip the Israeli judiciary of much of its power and independence. But while he considered recommitting to his country and fighting the changes rather than fleeing over them, he also accepts the government’s argument that most Israelis voted for something he doesn’t believe in.
Daniel Schleider and his wife Lior are leaving Israel for Barcelona because of the political instability in their country. (Courtesy Schleider)
“I have a lot of internal conflict,” he said about the protests. “Who am I to fight against what the majority has accepted?”
Schleider is far from alone in seeking to leave Israel this year. While Israelis have always moved abroad for various reasons, including business opportunities or to gain experience in particular fields, the pace of planned departures appears to be picking up. No longer considered a form of social betrayal, emigration — known in Hebrew as yerida, meaning descent — is on the table for a wide swath of Israelis right now.
Many of the people weighing emigration were already thinking about it but were catalyzed by the new government, according to accounts from dozens of people in various stages of emigration and of organizations that seek to aid them.
“I’ve already been on the fence for a few years — not in terms of leaving Israel but in terms of relocating for something new,” said Schleider.
“But in the past year, with all the craziness and everything, I realized where the country was going. And after the recent elections, my wife — who had been unconvinced — was the one who took the step and said now she understood where the public is going and what life is going to be like in the country. You could call it the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.
“And then when the whole issue of the [judicial] revolution started, we just decided not to wait and to do it immediately.”
Ocean Relocation, which assists people with both immigration to and emigration from Israel, has received more than 100 inquiries a day from people looking to leave since Justice Minister Yariv Levin first presented his proposal for judicial reform back in January. That’s four times the rate of inquiries the organization received last year, according to senior manager Shay Obazanek.
“Never in history has there been this level of demand,” Obazanek said, citing the company’s 80 years’ experience as the “barometer” of movement in and out the country.
Shlomit Drenger, who leads Ocean Relocation’s business development, said those looking to leave come from all walks of life. They include families pushed to leave by the political situation; those investing in real estate abroad as a future shelter, if needed; and Israelis who can work remotely and are worried about the country’s upheaval. Economics are also a concern: With foreign investors issuing dire warnings about Israel’s economy if the judicial reforms go through, companies wary to invest in the country and the shekel already weakening, it could grow more expensive to leave in the future.
The most common destination for the new departures, Drenger said, is Europe, representing representing 70% of moves, compared to 40% in the recent past. Europe’s draws include its convenient time zones, quality-of-life indices, and chiefly, the relative ease in recent years of obtaining foreign passports in countries such as Portugal, Poland and even Morocco. Many Israelis have roots in those countries and are or have been entitled to citizenship today because their family members were forced to leave under duress during the Holocaust or the Spanish Inquisition.
Israelis protesting against the government’s controversial judicial reform bill block the main road leading to the departures area of Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv on March 9, 2023. (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images)
On the other hand, Drenger said, emigration to the United States, where the vast majority of the 1 million Israeli citizens abroad live, has declined significantly. The United States is known for its tough immigration laws and high cost of living in areas with large Israeli and Jewish communities, and even people who have no rights to a foreign passport have an easier time obtaining residency rights in Europe than the United States.
Some Israelis aren’t picking anywhere in particular before leaving. Ofer Stern, 40, quit his job as a tech developer, left Israel and is now traveling around the world before deciding where to settle.
“We’re living in a democracy and that democracy is dependent on demography and I can’t fight it,” he said, alluding to the fact that Orthodox Jews, who tend to be right wing, are the fastest-growing segment of the Israeli population. “The country that I love and that I’ve always loved will not be here in 10 years. Instead, it will be a country that is suited to other people, but not for me.”
While others have already started their emigration process, American-born Marni Mandell, a mother of two living in Tel Aviv, is still on the fence. Her greatest fear is that judicial reforms could open the door to significant changes in civil rights protections — and in so doing break her contract with the country she chose.
“If this so-called ‘reform’ is enacted, which is really tantamount to a coup, it’s hard to imagine that I want my children to grow up to fight in an army whose particularism outweighs the basic human rights that are so fundamental to my values,” Mandell said.
Most people who look into emigrating for political reasons do not end up doing so. In the weeks leading up to the United States’ 2020 presidential election, inquiries to law firms specializing in helping Americans move abroad saw a sharp uptick in inquiries — many of them from Jews fearful about a second Trump administration after then-President Donald Trump declined to unequivocally condemn white supremacists. When President Joe Biden was elected, they largely called off the alarm.
The Trump scenario is not analogous with the Israeli one for several reasons, starting with the fact that the Israelis are responding to an elected government’s policy decisions, not just the prospect of an election result. What’s more, U.S. law contains safeguards designed to prevent any single party or leader from gaining absolute power. Israel has fewer of those safeguards, and many of those appear threatened if the government’s proposals go through.
Casandra Larenas had long courted the idea of moving overseas. “As a childfree person, Israel doesn’t have much to offer and is a really expensive country. I’ve traveled around so I know the quality of life I can reach abroad,” she said. But she said she had always batted away the idea: “I’m still Jewish and my family are still here.”
Clockwise from upper left: Benjamin-Michael Aronov, Casandra Larenas and Ofer Stern are all leaving Israel because of political unrest there. (All photos courtesy)
That all changed with the judicial overhaul, she said. While not against the idea of a reform per se, Laranes is firmly opposed to the way it is being carried out, saying it totally disregards the millions of people on the other side. Chilean-born, Laranes grew up under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.
“I still remember [it] and I don’t want something like that again,” said Larenas, who has purchased a plane ticket for later this spring and plans to take up residency abroad — though she said she would maintain her citizenship and hoped to return one day.
The departure of liberal and moderate Israelis could have implications on Israel’s political future. Israel does not permit its citizens to vote absentee, meaning that anyone who leaves the country must incur costly, potentially frequent travel to participate in elections — or cede political input altogether.
Benjamin-Michael Aronov, who grew up with Russian parents in the United States, said he was taken aback by how frequently Israelis express shock that he moved to Israel in the first place. “The No. 1 question I get from Israelis is, ‘Why would you move here from the U.S.? We’re all trying to get out of here. There’s no future here.’”
He said he had come to realize that they were right.
“I thought the warnings were something that would truly impact our children or grandchildren but that our lifetime would be spent in an Israeli high-tech, secular golden era. But I’m realizing the longevity of Tel Aviv’s bubble of beaches and parties and crazy-smart, secular people changing the world with technology is maybe even more a fantasy now than when Herzl dreamt it,” Aronov said. “I found my perfect home, a Jewish home, sadly being undone by Jews.”
Not everyone choosing to jump ship is ideologically aligned with the protest movement. Amir Cohen, who asked to use a pseudonym because he has not informed his employers of his plans yet, is a computer science lecturer at Ariel University in the West Bank who voted in the last election for the Otzma Yehudit party chaired by far-right provocateur Itamar Ben-Gvir. Cohen was willing to put aside his ideological differences with the hared Orthodox parties if it meant achieving political stability — but was soon disillusioned.
“None of it is working. And now we’re on our way to civil war, it’s that simple. I figured, ‘I don’t need this nonsense, there are plenty of places in the world for me to go,’” he said.
Thousands of Israeli protesters rally against the Israeli goverment’s judicial overhaul bills in Tel Aviv, March 4, 2023. (Gili Yaari Flash90)
Cohen stuck with the country after one of his brothers was killed in the 2014 Gaza War. Now, he said, his other brothers have recently followed his lead and applied for Hungarian passports in an effort to find a way to move abroad permanently.
“I’m not alone,” he said. “Most of my friends and family feel the same way.”
Others still, like Omer Mizrahi, view themselves as apolitical. A contractor from Jerusalem, Mizrahi, 27, headed to San Diego, California, a month ago as a result of the reform. Mizrahi, who eschewed casting a vote in the last election, expressed a less common impetus for leaving: actual fear for his life. Mizrahi described sitting in traffic jams in Jerusalem and realizing that if a terror attack were to unfold — “and let’s be honest, there are at least one or two every week” — he wouldn’t be able to escape in time because he was caught in a gridlock. “Our politicians can’t do anything about it because they’re too embroiled in a war of egos.”
Now 7,500 miles away, Mizrahi says he feels like he’s finally living life. “I sit in traffic now and I’m happy as a clam. Everything’s calm.”
Back in Israel, Schleider is making his final preparations for leaving, advertising his Tesla for sale on Facebook this week. He remains hopeful that the massive anti-government protests will make a difference. In the meantime, though, his one-way ticket is scheduled for April 14.
“I dream of coming back, but I don’t know that it will ever happen,” he said. “We made a decision that was self-serving, but that doesn’t mean we’re any less Zionist.”
—
The post Alarmed by their country’s political direction, more Israelis are seeking to move abroad appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Long after he was murdered by the Nazis, Marc Bloch enters the Panthéon
Yesterday, Paris experienced two record-breaking events. The first was that the city’s temperature hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit, forcing tourist sites like the Eiffel Tower and Louvre to close early. The second occurred at the Panthéon, which remained open to welcome the coffin of Marc Bloch, the first historian to enter this hallowed site.
The event was literally momentous. The massive 18th century structure, dedicated as the Church of Saint Geneviève, was rebranded by French revolutionaries in 1791 as the Panthéon, the monument for those “grands hommes” who devoted their lives to the French Republic. But in a time of relentless racist and antisemitic rhetoric, it was symbolically momentous, as well.
Bloch was born into a French Jewish family that chose to leave Strasbourg for Paris when Germany annexed their native Alsace in 1871. An adolescent during the Dreyfus Affair, Bloch interrupted a promising academic career in 1914, volunteering to serve in World War I. He spent four years in the infantry, then served as an intelligence officer; by war’s end, he had earned two wounds as well as four citations for bravery along with France’s most prestigious medal, the Croix de guerre.
Between the two world wars, Bloch and his friend Lucien Febvre founded Annales d’histoire et économique, a history journal that revolutionized the practice of history, turning away from the focus on great figures and events and towards the mundane and material lives of peoples. Bloch developed the influential, though elusive notion of mentalités: the term he gave to the intellectual and emotional structures that, no less certainly than was the case with material factors, shaped how past generations experienced their world. This theme informed his early book, Les Rois thaumaturges, or The Royal Touch, which examined the relationship between the myth of the king’s healing touch and the powers he was thought to embody.
The persistence of this myth was revealed in the wake of Nazi Germany’s defeat of France in 1940 and the nearly divine prestige bestowed on the nation’s new leader Philippe Pétain. The elderly hero of Verdun led a collaborationist regime whose first order of business was to pass a salvo of antisemitic legislation in late 1940 that stripped French Jews of their legal and civil rights. These laws forced Bloch out of his teaching position at the Sorbonne, despite the fact that, though 54 years old, hobbled by arthritis and father of six children, he insisted on rejoining the army in 1938.
Forced to abandon the family apartment in Paris, along with his library of 5,000 books, Bloch and his wife Simonne settled in the southern “Free Zone.” Stripped of his post, he nevertheless continued to practice the metier of historian. But he turned his critical gaze to the present rather than the past, holding fast to his claim—one as relevant now as then — that “when a widely held opinion is glaringly at odds with the truth, we are bound in honesty, I think, to attack it.”
The result was L’Étrange Défaite, or Strange Defeat, a searing account of how France’s military and political leaders managed to lose this war in a matter of weeks. Written in what Bloch described as a “white heat of rage,” he applied the same approach to these events as he did to those in medieval France, one “concerned with the task of seeking the solid and concrete behind the empty and abstract.” The principal reason for the debacle, he wrote, was that while the German strategists were fighting the present war, their French counterparts were fighting the last one. With poetic insight, Bloch observed that “thoughts of the last war clung to them because they were the thoughts of their youth. Those days long past had all the brilliance of things seen.”
By 1942, Bloch had come to see that, as a French patriot, he was duty-bound, despite his age, to join the Resistance where he assumed code names ranging from the majestic Narbonne to the mundane Monsieur Blanchard. His good fortune lasted nearly two years when, in the late spring of 1944, he was captured in Lyon, then imprisoned and tortured in its notorious prison Mount Luc. On June 16, he was taken in a truck with two dozen other résistants to an empty field outside the city and summarily shot to death. His buried remains were discovered shortly after the war, as was the manuscript for Strange Defeat.
Inevitably and rightfully, Strange Defeat provided much of the script for the evening ceremony at the Panthéon, which somehow managed to be both severe and stylish. Actors read passages from the book while military guards carried Marc and his wife Simonne’s empty caskets . (Bloch’s family did not want his remains to be removed from the cemetery where he is buried, while Simonne’s remains were never found.) Tellingly, when the caskets were set down inside the vast hall of the monument, an army officer recited, according to Bloch’s wishes, the several military citations for bravery he had received.
In his address, given while standing in front of a column which carried Bloch’s epitaph— dilexit veritatem (“He loved the truth”) — President Emmanuel Macron underscored the tragic relevance of the historian’s life to our own era. Referring to recent efforts made by figures on the extreme rightwing to reclaim Bloch as one of their own, Macron warned against “those who declare themselves more French than you…and yet are always the first to sell out France to hostile powers.” (Among the conditions Bloch’s descendants insisted upon was that representatives from the extreme-rightwing National Rally party could not attend the ceremony.)
But the words written by Bloch, in the introduction to Strange Defeat, are the most powerful evocation of who he was and what he represents. “By birth I am a Jew, though not by religion, for I have never professed any creed, whether Hebrew or Christian. I feel neither pride nor shame in my origins. I am, I hope, a sufficiently good historian to know that racial qualities are a myth, and that the whole notion of Race is an absurdity.” “I try never to stress my heredity save when I find myself in the presence of an antisemite.” Bloch concludes, simply and beautifully, “I was born in France. I have drunk of the waters of her culture. I have made her past my own. I breathe freely only in her climate, and I have done my best, with others, to defend her interests.”
In the other book he wrote during this period, The Historian’s Craft, Bloch quotes one of his sons who, when still a child, asked him what historians do. (The good historian, Bloch writes, “is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.”)
As Bloch would have wished, he will always stand as an exemplar of what, in fact, historians do. And in the life he lived and values he died for, Marc Bloch will always stand as a reminder of what true patriots do.
The post Long after he was murdered by the Nazis, Marc Bloch enters the Panthéon appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Why Israel’s soccer team competes in Europe rather than Asia
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — More than five decades after Israel’s only World Cup appearance, the Israel Football Association says it has no intention of trying to leave Europe for the Asian regional qualifying system that once took the country to the tournament, before Arab-led boycotts helped force it out.
The launch this month of the tournament hosted by the United States has renewed attention to Israel’s absence from the World Cup. Despite a thriving local soccer scene and success in competition abroad, the only time the country appeared in the tournament was in Mexico in 1970.
That’s because Israel seeks to qualify through the Union of European Football Associations, whose ranks are so strong that even a solid campaign can become a long shot for the World Cup. Even titans like four-time World Cup winner Italy failed to qualify this year.
Israel is the only non-European country trying to reach the tournament through UEFA, while most of its neighbors seek places through the Asian Football Confederation. Israel was ousted from the Asian soccer body in 1974. It bounced around the qualifying zones for a few years — it played in the Oceania qualifiers ahead of the 1986 and 1990 World Cups — before settling in the European grouping in 1991.
Shlomi Barzel, head of communications for the Israel Football Association, said a return to Asia is not on the table, both because Israel does not want to leave European soccer, where it has built a standing, and because he does not believe the Asian confederation would accept it back.
The only upside to such a move, he joked, would be if Israel’s opponents boycotted matches against it: “Israel would automatically qualify.”
A boycott of Israel did affect the team’s path to the 1970 World Cup. North Korea was ejected from the Asian qualifying tournament after refusing to play in Israel. As a result, Israel advanced to the final round after winning only two games against New Zealand. In the finals, Israel faced an Australian team already exhausted after fending off South Korea, Japan and Rhodesia (itself in the Asian tournament after being banned in Africa over its white governing regime).
In the tournament in Mexico, Israel’s all-amateur team defied expectations, losing 0-2 to Uruguay but notching draws against Sweden and Italy before being eliminated.
Four years later, Israel was effectively ejected from the Asian Football Confederation following a resolution introduced by Kuwait that passed 17 to 13, with six abstentions. The vote came a day before a high-profile Israel-Iran game in Tehran that Iran won 1-0 on an Israeli own goal.
Today, Barzel rejects the premise that rejoining the AFC would guarantee Israel a place in the World Cup going forward.
“It would be a little patronizing and arrogant for me to say that,” he said, adding that he was not sure Israel would beat teams such as Jordan or Qatar.
Barzel also cited Israel’s place inside UEFA’s institutions as a benefit for sticking with the current arrangement. Current IFA chairman Moshe “Shino” Zuaretz was elected to UEFA’s Executive Committee in April 2025, despite the war in Gaza and growing calls to sanction Israeli soccer, while former IFA chairman Avi Luzon previously served in a senior role on the same body.
Institutional backing has extended beyond Europe, Barzel said, pointing to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where Israeli fans were allowed to attend despite the absence of diplomatic ties. He also cited the global soccer body FIFA’s decision to move the 2023 under-20s World Cup from Indonesia to Argentina after Indonesia objected to hosting Israel’s team. Israel went on to finish third.
Still, Israel’s formal place in international soccer has done little to shield its teams and supporters from hostility. Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were attacked in Amsterdam after a match against Ajax in November 2024, and the club’s supporters were later barred from attending an Aston Villa match in a decision that became a political and policing scandal in Britain.
Despite its absence from the World Cup, Israel has remained a political flashpoint around the event, which U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to make “an unprecedented success.” Speculation that Trump’s hopes for a World Cup untainted by war spurred his push for a ceasefire with Iran prompted a denial from the top White House official dealing with the World Cup.
That didn’t keep the conflict from seeping into the events.
In Boston on June 19, kilt-clad Scotland fans waiting in blocks-long lines to board shuttles to the stadium where their team would face Morocco accepted Palestinian flags from activists lining the route.
Hours before Canada’s opening match on June 12, activists draped a “Kick Israel out of FIFA” banner over a World Cup logo near one of Toronto’s busiest highways.
Days later, a viral video from Iran’s match against New Zealand in Los Angeles showed security guards confiscating an Israeli flag from a fan — who was told they were acting on orders from their superiors — while other spectators behind him held Palestinian flags.
Trump’s special envoy for global partnerships, Paolo Zampolli, told Israel’s Kan public broadcaster he was “very disturbed” by the incident in Los Angeles, adding that there was “no place for antisemitism or double standards in sports.” Zampolli, who had previously urged FIFA to replace Iran with Italy at the World Cup, called on the soccer body to treat the episode seriously.
Barzel drew a distinction between the flag incident, which he said was likely a poor decision by stadium staff, and any official FIFA policy against Israel, noting that Israel’s flag is displayed alongside those of other member associations at official FIFA and UEFA events. FIFA generally discourages flags of teams not playing in a given match, he said, and added that Israeli teams have grown used to seeing Palestinian flags in soccer stadiums.
“Personally, I don’t get worked up by flags — they don’t scare me,” he said.
Yoav Borowitz, head of sports at Kan, said FIFA appeared wary of flags being used as protest symbols, pointing to the Iranian lion-and-sun flag, the country’s flag before the 1979 revolution installed the current theocratic regime, which some fans waved at the same match. FIFA’s failure to clarify whether Israeli flags were allowed in stadiums in the days after the incident, he said, “shows where Israel stands at the moment.”
“There were official FIFA stewards there,” he said, “and if the fan was effectively forced to remove the flag, then I would have expected FIFA to have issued a response by now and said that Israeli flags are allowed into stadiums, just as Palestinian flags are allowed into stadiums, just as the flag of any country is allowed into stadiums.”
Any limits placed on Israel’s soccer association have been imposed solely on security grounds, Barzel said, though in October UEFA came close to holding an emergency vote on whether to suspend Israel over the war in Gaza.
At FIFA’s congress in Vancouver in April, when Palestinian Football Association president Jibril Rajoub refused to shake hands with Israel FA Vice President Basim Sheikh Suliman despite repeated appeals from FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who called on the sides to “give hope to the children.”
Despite such gestures, Israel continues to compete as usual — almost. It has been unable to host matches at home for close to three years because of war and has had to play its home World Cup qualifiers in neutral third countries. It is hosting several contests this fall in Moldova, which last year gained an Israeli embassy, and direct El Al routes, for the first time. (Russia, by contrast, has had its national teams and clubs suspended from FIFA and UEFA competitions since its invasion of Ukraine.)
Despite the controversies, FIFA has kept pressing ahead with its vision of soccer as “a force for unity, peace and hope,” including reported discussions about opening a new under-15’s tournament in the United States in September with a symbolic match between Israeli and Palestinian youth teams.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why Israel’s soccer team competes in Europe rather than Asia appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
A klezmer virtuoso, Joseph Moskowitz was a cymbalist of Jewish progress in America
The restaurant occupies a long narrow basement on the Lower East Side. It is packed with a hundred Jews who fill the air with a fog of blue tobacco smoke as steak and lamb grills over charcoal. Everyone, it seems, has a glass of red Romanian wine, including the cymbalom player who is banging out a sad peasant ballad. The whole room sings along.
The scene is from the early 1900’s in Jews Without Money, Michael Gold’s 1930 novel about the poor of the Jewish Lower East Side. The mustachioed man at the cymbalom is not a fictional character, though. He is Joseph Moskowitz, a Romanian-born Jew who ran the restaurant with his wife.
One of the first klezmer virtuosos in America, Moskowitz had a hand in several of the city’s restaurants, including a wildly successful Second Avenue establishment frequented by underworld figures, politicians and showbiz royalty. The Kardashians would envy his shrewdness in garnering publicity for his multifaceted career.
In April 1908, just four months after Moskowitz came to Amerike, he landed on to the front-page of The New York Times in a review headlined “CHAMPION CYMBALIST IS PLAYING HERE NOW.” The story noted his strange instrument, a hammered dulcimer popular in Eastern Europe, looked like “a baby grand piano with the top off.” The newspaper reported that Moskowitz’s performance was greeted with cries of “Bravo!”
Nixon was here
Moskowitz’s career as a musician met with great success but his life as a restaurateur had its ups and downs. He ran a number of eateries in New York, including one in the Bronx and another in what is now referred to as the East Village with three waiters as partners. Then, after a performance in Akron, Ohio, he ran a restaurant there called The Romany.
The Moskowitz family lived above the joint. Its clientele included members of the Firestone and Goodrich families but the patronage of the rubber barons was not enough to sustain the restaurant, so Moskowitz moved to Washington, D.C. There, he performed at Michel’s, a restaurant started by a violinist he played with. Legend has it that among the regulars at Michel’s was congressman Richard Nixon who would bring in a brown paper bag concealing a fermented beverage.
“I would like to point out that one of Nixon’s first foreign trips as president was actually to Romania, where he was photographed dancing the hora at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant with Nikolai Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator,” said Pete Rushefsky, a widely esteemed cymbalist who is also executive director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York.
The triumphs and travails of Moskowitz’s life are recounted in his unpublished and untitled memoir, which is now part of the Joseph Moskowitz Archive, acquired earlier this year by the Music Division at the Library of Congress. The archive was established after a box of artifacts was discovered in the home of one of Moskowitz’s descendants in Cleveland.
An affair to remember
In the early 1900’s there were dozens of Romanian Jewish restaurants on the Lower East Side, which was home to so many Romanian Jews it was known as Little Romania. The neighborhood was also distinguished by a large number of dance halls and libraries.
The Moskowitz memoir, which was written in Romanian, makes clear that his restaurants did not always attract the cream of the crop. One became the headquarters for some Russians gangsters, most of them pickpockets.
At Lupowitz & Moskowitz, which moved from its original location to Second Avenue and 2nd Street, dinners started at 85 cents. In Moskowitz’s telling, business was going great until his partner Sam Lupowitz, stole money with the assistance of Moskowitz’s wife Rebecca with whom he was having an affair.
According to Moskowitz, the affair went on for nine years. It all started, he writes, when Lupowitz took Mrs. Moskowitz to a party and got her “totally drunk,” after which they proceeded to the kitchen to burn off some calories. Mr. Moskowitz put an end to the affair when he came home one night and caught his partner leaving Mrs. Moskowitz’s bedroom.
In the old country, Moskowitz himself had not been exactly celibate. He recounts an affair with a Romanian widow he describes as a grifter. For nine months, he wrote, they made love every day. This feat was apparently an exhausting endeavor because Moskowitz decided to depart abruptly, leaving a letter informing the widow that he could no longer “carry on in this manner.” The widow had other ideas and asked a local magistrate to arrest Moskowitz who managed to avoid incarceration by hiding.
A heavy lift
Joseph Moskowitz’s real superpower was performing on the cymbalom, which he started playing at the age of eight, taught by his father on a small folk version of the instrument. One of his first gigs was playing on the ferries that travelled the Danube. Eventually he learned how to play the large concert version of the cymbalom, which was developed in the late 19th Century and became a major orchestral instrument in Eastern Europe.
“He was an absolute virtuoso,” said Rushefsky. “His technical competence on the instrument was just incredible.”
Moskowitz was recorded playing a wide range of music on the instrument, including ragtime, classical, as well as Turkish, Russian and Greek music.
His cymbalom weighed 150 pounds and was not an easy instrument to schlep around, which made performing at restaurants appealing, since he could just leave the instrument there, though he did perform from time to time in concert venues, including Town Hall.
Rushefsky told me he was impressed with Moskowitz’s savvy at drumming up publicity for both his performances and restaurants. Moskowitz deftly cultivated relationships with media figures and other bold-faced names of the day. His memoir notes that among the celebrities who came to hear him play were Theodore Dreiser, Chaim Weitzman and Jascha Heifetz.
“He had a meticulously curated scrapbook filled with articles about his restaurant and reviews of his performances. You can tell that was really important to him,” Rushefsky said.
In Around The World In New York, a book about the city’s ethnic neighborhoods published in 1924, the immigrant newspaperman Konrad Bercovici described Moskowitz’s restaurant as a place with “haunting melodies, tripping dances” and spicy food. “At Moskowitz’s on Houston Street the Rumanian Jews sing at the top of their voices the songs of the country they left,” Bercovici wrote.
A klezpirational figure
Many of the old scratchy 78 rpm vinyl disks that were vital to the first wave of the klezmer revival in the 1970’s and 80’s featured a clarinet-centric sound but the earliest recordings we have of klezmer, from circa 1908, the violin is the main instrument, often accompanied by cymbalom.
Moskowitz’s recordings are widely available on YouTube.
“His repertoire is performed by klezmer bands around the world,” Pete Rushefsky told me. “His recordings continue to be an inspiration for a small but dedicated group of musicians working to revitalize the cimbalom as an essential part of klezmer’s sound.”
The post A klezmer virtuoso, Joseph Moskowitz was a cymbalist of Jewish progress in America appeared first on The Forward.
