Uncategorized
American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?
(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.
The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.
“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.
“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”
The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.
Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.
“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”
Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)
We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?
Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.
I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.
Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.
What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.
I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?
I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.
If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.
But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.
So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?
First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.
There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.
It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.
One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.
What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?
I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.
It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.
There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?
Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.
But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.
So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.
The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.
There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.
I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?
Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.
I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.
And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.
But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.
And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.
Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.
The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?
Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.
So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.
—
The post American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Israel’s opposition has the numbers to defeat Netanyahu. Will it let him survive anyway?
According to exit polls, Israel’s opposition appears to have achieved something remarkable: a parliamentary majority of up to 70 seats, including the Arab parties, over Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies. In almost any other parliamentary democracy, such a result would be understood as a decisive victory for the forces seeking a change of government. Yet Israel may be heading toward the extraordinary spectacle of an opposition that wins a commanding majority and nevertheless allows the incumbent to remain in power.
The reason is a political taboo: several opposition leaders have promised not to form a government dependent on the support of Arab parties, even though virtually every plausible path to replacing Netanyahu requires precisely that.
And if the exit polls are right, those Arab parties have almost doubled their Knesset representation, to perhaps 18 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. This happened because of a huge increase in voter turnout among the 20 percent of Israelis who are Arabs.
In past elections, almost half the Arabs stayed home on election day, compared to participation levels of around 80 percent among Jews. The surge appears to have been driven by despair over the perceived hostility of the Netanyahu government, and anger over ultranationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has displayed inaction and indifference about the lawlessness that bedevils the Arab sector.
The two Arab parties – Ra’am and the United Arab List – have already offered to back Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief who heads the largest opposition party, Yashar.
This landscape presents the wider opposition with a real dilemma. Its leaders may end up breaking their most important promise to voters — to remove Netanyahu from office — in order to honor a secondary promise not to form a governing coalition with Arab parties and depend on the safety net they offer. That promise should have been no more than a white lie to reassure wavering Jewish voters who in the past supported the right. Sticking to it would be a spectacular case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
In his speech to supporters after polls closed Tuesday, Eisenkot promised to use the results to set up a government. “The Israeli public voted to end Netanyahu’s rule as the prime minister of Israel,” he said. “It’s my personal duty to do everything to bring about the will of the people.”
If Eisenkot and the rest of the opposition now show resolve, a minority government supported from outside by Arab lawmakers is one possibility. A coalition that includes at least Ra’am, the pragmatic Islamist party that participated in Israel’s 2021 governing coalition, is another. Defections from the right could also help assemble a government. These also should be considered, as long as those joining it are not given the power to block essential reforms or perpetuate the policies that voters sought to reject.
None of the options are clean and simple. But the notion that Arab parliamentary support renders a government illegitimate is neither a democratic principle nor a reflection of Israel’s political history.
Indeed, a look at that history reveals something that Netanyahu’s long dominance has helped obscure. Since the political upheaval of 1977, Likud victories have generally depended on ultra-Orthodox support, while victories by the non-Likud camp have repeatedly depended on Arab votes.
In 1984, Shimon Peres managed to force a parliamentary tie with the help of six seats held by Arab parties. In 1992, Yitzhak Rabin’s victory yielded a majority of 61 seats only when five Arab lawmakers were counted. In 1999, Ehud Barak won a landslide in the direct election for prime minister, but his reliable parliamentary bloc numbered only 60 seats, including 10 Arab lawmakers. The addition of right wing parties enabled him to govern.
The pattern continued in 2006, when Kadima’s victory was widely perceived as decisive, even though its assured parliamentary bloc numbered just 60 seats without additional Arab support. And in 2021, Yair Lapid’s success in assembling a government that ended Netanyahu’s 12 consecutive years in power depended on a parliamentary alignment of 61 lawmakers opposed to Netanyahu, including 10 Arab representatives.
With the notable exception of Ra’am in 2021, Arab parties generally did not become formal coalition partners. Peres formed a national unity government with Likud – and Rabin, his majority secured via the Arab parties, formally brought in the religious party Shas. In all these cases the Arabs’ parliamentary support for the opposition helped prevent Likud from forming a government and made alternative coalitions possible. In some cases, Arab lawmakers then supported the government from outside, while politicians from the traditional right-wing camp eventually crossed political lines to join the governing arrangement.
Against that historical background, the 2026 result should be understood as an extraordinary opportunity for Israel’s liberal and anti-Netanyahu forces. The central question is whether their leaders will recognize it or miss the opportunity.
Netanyahu remains the prime minister under whose watch the catastrophe of Oct. 7 occurred. His government has resisted the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding the attack. His coalition has advanced measures widely criticized as threats to democratic institutions, while presiding over an increasingly polarized society.
Another term for Netanyahu and his present allies could deepen Israel’s institutional deterioration, social divisions and strategic vulnerability. For critics who believe the country is already approaching a dangerous democratic and societal crossroads, the stakes are difficult to overstate.
There is also a striking inconsistency in the argument that relying on Arab support is somehow beyond the bounds of legitimate politics.
Netanyahu himself explored the possibility of forming a government with the support of Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, in 2021. That possibility collapsed largely because Bezalel Smotrich, now one of Netanyahu’s most prominent far-right partners, refused to accept it.
The time has come for Israel to show some appreciation for its Arab citizens, who constitute roughly one-fifth of Israel’s population. They work, study, pay taxes and participate in the country’s civic and economic life. They vote in national elections and elect representatives to the Knesset. There is no coherent democratic justification for treating those representatives’ mandates as inherently less legitimate than those of Jewish lawmakers.
To be sure, Arab political parties hold positions, particularly on the Palestinian question, that many Jewish Israelis find deeply objectionable. Some of those disagreements are profound, and coalition negotiations involving Arab parties inevitably raise difficult questions about national identity, security and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But ultra-Orthodox parties also hold positions that many secular Israelis regard as fundamentally incompatible with their vision of the country, including on religious authority, military service and civil liberties. Far-right parties in Netanyahu’s coalition have promoted policies that critics see as far more damaging to democratic norms than anything the Arabs might do.
There will undoubtedly be pressure for a national unity government, possibly from Washington. President Donald Trump, who endorsed Netanyahu, seems likely to pressure Eisenkot to agree. The machinations might include restarting the war with Iran. Eisenkot should resist it all.
Israel’s declaration of independence promised equality. Israel’s opposition has a golden opportunity to keep that promise.
The post Israel’s opposition has the numbers to defeat Netanyahu. Will it let him survive anyway? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
A watch party without Netanyahu? Supporters tried to project cheer
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Forty-five minutes after Israeli channels released their first exit polls, a silence had washed over the Likud election watch party held at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem.
Supporters had waited in anticipation for the exit polls to appear on the screen. When Channel 14 — which had a broadcast desk stationed in the corner of the room — first showed its poll, a cheer circulated through those in attendance. But as everyone looked down at their phones to track the results from the other channels, the mood became increasingly subdued.
Supporters hoping for a strong Netanyahu victory were disappointed by polls showing that his Likud party did not have enough support to form a governing coalition.
They had hoped to celebrate the moment with Netanyahu, who, in the end, did not show up.
The initial exit polls, released at 10 p.m. as polling stations closed, showed Likud as the largest party. However, neither it nor its committed coalition partners had gained enough seats for a parliamentary majority that would allow it to form the next government. Channel 12 had Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc, which at its height had 68 seats in the outgoing Knesset, dropping to 50, with the opposition parties at 53 across the network projections.
The Central Elections Committee hopes to finish counting the votes by Thursday. By law, the official results have to be published by Nov. 4.
The historic turnout in the election, billed by many as the most consequential in Israel’s history, stood in stark contrast to the empty convention center hall. It appeared that only the most dedicated of Bibi fans had decided to make the trip to the watch party. Three hardcore supporters held up a blue and white Likud flag while chanting “Malach Bibi,” meaning “King Bibi,” with a crowd of journalists pushing past each other to get footage.
Every two minutes, the Likud jingle echoed through the hall on a loop, and a string of AI-generated Likud election videos played on the screen. The lectern sat empty, and Netanyahu had not issued a statement in the wake of the first results. Netanyahu, along with Likud MKs, had been expected to address supporters in the hall had there been a clearer mandate; instead, journalists gathered, snacking on refreshments while waiting for more Likud supporters to show up.
Yossi Levi, 71, a pensioner from Eilat, made the long drive to Jerusalem to show his support. He said that for his entire tenure as prime minister, Netanyahu has had to fight the 120 members of the Knesset for his survival, and that he “thankfully” had so far always come out on top.
Levi recalled his time working on the Likud security team when Netanyahu first began his career and paused the interview to shake hands with Netanyahu’s head of security before returning to his story. Whether or not Netanyahu was able to form a coalition, he said, his support would remain unwavering.
That appeared to describe the crowd on Tuesday night: those who had stood by Netanyahu as he ascended to the heights of Israeli electoral power, and who were standing by him now, as his bloc appeared to shed 18 seats in the Knesset.
Boaz, who lives in the city center of Jerusalem, described the mood as not exactly disappointment “but something in the middle,” as the results did not yet indicate a clear winner or loser and adding that it was now time for coalition politics to begin.
Holding a blue-and-white Likud flag and milling about the lobby alone, he did not project confidence but insisted that he would stay at the event in case any of the party’s parliamentary members decided to show up.
With few audience members in attendance, the event center gave the appearance of something of a crashed party. By 11 p.m. Jerusalem time, the hall had begun to empty, with both supporters and those there to cover the event deciding to leave the scene.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A watch party without Netanyahu? Supporters tried to project cheer appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Jewish treasures stolen by Nazis 88 years ago come home, thanks to an Arizona synagogue
(JTA) — What could one purchase with boxes of Crisco, bags of coffee and cartons of cigarettes in chaotic postwar Germany?
For Moishe Saksenhaus, a young Holocaust survivor from Belarus, the answer was: two Jewish ritual textiles, hundreds of years old.
The seller said he’d stolen them himself from a burning Berlin synagogue on Nov. 9, 1938 — the November Pogrom, commonly called Kristallnacht.
Moishe brought those two items — a Torah wimple, or sash, and a parochet, or Torah ark curtain — with him to America, taking them out of their suitcase only on special occasions. After Moishe’s death in 1993, his family donated them to his synagogue, Temple Chai in Phoenix, Arizona. They remained on display there until the building was deconsecrated in 2026. The congregation moved to a new location in nearby Scottsdale this spring.
Last week, nearly 88 years after Kristallnacht the two items made their way back to Berlin.
In a ceremony at the site of the New Synagogue Berlin Foundation-Centrum Judaicum museum and archive, on Oranienburger Strasse, Associate Rabbi Bonnie Koppell of Temple Chai handed them over to Berlin Jewish Community president Gideon Joffe.
“There were people who felt individually attached to the items” in Phoenix, Koppell told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a phone interview before her trip. “But ultimately, I think everyone realized that they belonged in their home. If the people from whom they were stolen wanted them back, that was where they belong.”
The handover took place Oct. 22 in the presence of Joffe, Rabbi Gesa Ederberg, historian Rabbi Andreas Nachama, members of the Berlin community and 29 visitors from Arizona.
“It’s been a very moving and touching journey, for both our guests from the United States and for these historical items,” said Nickolai Todorov, a Berlin Jew who accompanied the U.S. visitors as a tour guide. “It was just a special thing to be an eyewitness to.”
Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, left, and Sandy Koppell examine the Torah curtain (parochet) and Torah wimple during the handover ceremony at the New Synagogue Berlin–Centrum Judaicum, Oct. 22, 2026. (Nicolai Froundjian)
The large parochet is embroidered with the text of the Kiddush, the Jewish blessing over wine, in versions for the Sabbath and holidays. Along the lower edge of the text is what might be the signature of the artist, in Hebrew: “This handiwork of mine is not to bring me honor, rather to bring merit for the multitudes in accord [with the biblical verse] ‘And Yitzchak went out to pray at the field’ — Yitzchak Itzik ben C’harad Yehuda Leib z“l [of blessed memory] from Rivnitz,” a town in Moldova whose small Jewish community dated back to at least 1800.
The highly decorated wimple, which would have been used to bind a Torah scroll, bears a blessing for a child named Yitzchak “Itzik” ben Kavod Ha-rav Gistori, likely embroidered in honor of his brit milah, or ritual circumcision.
A spokesperson for the Berlin Jewish community, an umbrella for several congregations of various denominations, told JTA in an email that its experts had been unable to confirm which pre-World War II synagogue the Torah curtain came from, but that it would be added to the Centrum Judaicum collection. There are plans to display the wimple at the community center on the site of the former Fasanenstrasse synagogue.
Sol Saksenhaus, 72, a retired special-ed teacher, is one of those Arizona congregants who felt sad to let the objects go. It was his father who had bought them, protected and carried them across the ocean to his new home in America. Sol and his brother had grown up with these objects, which had taken on an aura of sacredness.
But they are “being given back as a sign of love from our community, to light them up again,” he told JTA in a telephone interview from Phoenix. “I can live with that, and I know my parents in heaven can live with that, too.”
Sol’s parents, Moishe and Rosa Saksenhaus, had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto through the sewers, and joined with partisans to commit acts of sabotage against the Germans. The Soviets eventually deported them to Siberia, where their first child died. After the war, Moishe and Rosa made their way back west, following American army lines and ending up in a Displaced Persons camp in the town of Feldafing, Germany.
Moishe, street-smart and multilingual, got a job translating for the U.S. military in Traunstein, Sol related. His father told him he became involved with black market activities, such as collecting British Army bicycles and having them sent to Palestine.
“My dad may have had a little bit of a reputation as one of the go-to guys, that if you wanted something, my dad knew how to get it,” Sol said.
Which may be why this particular German man approached him one day.
“He said he was a medical doctor. He kept approaching my dad with pictures” of the Jewish objects, Sol recounted. His father recalled the man’s name as “Ahgar.” He’d complained about conditions under American occupation: “’We don’t get anything; we’re on limited rations,’” the man told Sol’s father. “My dad said he was arrogant, and that he wanted the stuff he used to have from before.”
“He threatened my dad: He says, ‘I was part of the patrol that went into the temple’” on Fasanenstrasse in Berlin. He claimed to have taken the two items during the raid, and threatened to destroy them if Moishe did not procure Crisco, coffee, flour, cigarettes and cigars.
“My dad pretty much told him to ‘get the f–k away. I can’t look at you.’ But the guy was persistent. And the trade happened.”
Moishe Saksenhaus brought the objects to the U.S. when he and Rosa emigrated. “He cherished them, but he didn’t know what he was going to do with them,” said Sol. On rare occasions his father would show them to the family. “When that thing came out, it was like opening the holy ark… I kind of like froze, and just watched the emotions” on the family’s faces.
Sol’s father died in late 1993. There was a rise in Holocaust denial at the same time, Sol recalled; Deborah Lipstadt’s book, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,” was published that June. It was also the year that Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film “Schindler’s List” came out, sparking new interest in the Holocaust and its legacy. His mother and aunt decided to donate the tapestry and wimple to Temple Chai, to help with Holocaust education. Before handing the tapestry over to Rabbi William Berk, then the temple’s spiritual leader, Rosa Saksenhaus tore the swastika off an old tag on the tapestry. “This is not going into a temple like this,” she told her son.
The centuries-old Jewish ritual textiles, stolen during Kristallnacht in 1938 and traded after the war to a survivor for coffee and tobacco, are returned to the Berlin Jewish community during a ceremony at the New Synagogue Berlin–Centrum Judaicum, Oct. 22, 2026. (Nicolai Freundjian)
Sol recalled that Berk sent the items to an expert at the University of California in Los Angeles, who determined they were from the 16th century. Berk, who moved to Israel with his family in 2007 after more than two decades with the congregation, could not be reached for comment.
And so the tapestry remained hanging on the synagogue’s north wall. Rosa died in 1999. In 2006, Bonnie Koppell was installed as associate rabbi. In 2022, Rabbi Emily Segal took on the role of senior rabbi.
Two years ago, Sol brought a friend to see the wimple and the tapestry.
“I had seen these objects in our sanctuary for 30 years, knowing only that they had been ‘rescued’ during Kristallnacht,” recalled Joan Neer, assistant to Koppell, who heard Sol’s story for the first time that day. “In reality they were brutally taken,” she said.
The encounter “ignited my curiosity and set me on a journey to uncover their story,” Neer told JTA in an email. The more she learned, the more she became convinced: “It would be great if we could return them to the Jewish community in Berlin,” she wrote to Koppell and synagogue president Debbie Berkowitz.
“What began as a simple conversation in my office has become a journey of discovery, connection, and restoration,” she said.
Once the Berlin community said yes, the task of packing and transporting the objects began. The large tapestry was wrapped in artisanal paper and shipped.
“We had an AirTag on it, so we watched it sitting in the Cologne airport,” said Koppell. “And then it got moved to the customs building.”
“Then we got word that they wanted €5,000 [$5,567] in [customs] tax. And that if we didn’t pay it, they were sending it back in five days.”
The German Jewish community stepped in and used its tax-exempt status to get the package released, she said, adding that she carried the wimple in her hand luggage.
“We have come to remember, to learn and to return something that has traveled a very long road,” she told the Berlin Jewish community on Oct. 22. “This time, they are going home.”
The post Jewish treasures stolen by Nazis 88 years ago come home, thanks to an Arizona synagogue appeared first on The Forward.
