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An amended Conservative Jewish Passover policy taps into the booming gluten-free market
(JTA) — Ahead of Passover 2020 — as life worldwide ground to an abrupt halt in the face of a rapidly spreading pandemic and people faced the specter of empty grocery shelves, or staying confined at home — a range of rabbis tried to make it a little easier to observe the holiday.
Long lists of foods and newly lenient guidelines from Jewish organizations circulated among people who keep kosher for Passover, explaining which foods they could purchase and eat on the holiday, given the year’s extraordinary circumstances. The message — sometimes explicit, sometimes implied — was that these special permissions applied only temporarily.
Now, one rule instituted as a COVID provision by the Conservative movement is becoming permanent: Before Passover begins, Jews may buy certified kosher products that have kosher-for-Passover ingredients and are certified gluten-free and oat-free — even if they aren’t explicitly certified kosher for Passover.
When it first appeared in 2020, that rule was written in a way that suggested it was an emergency measure, using the words “when the situation demands.” This year, that four-word phrase has been removed from the Rabbinical Assembly’s Passover guide, and the guidance has moved from a separate section into the main list of allowable products.
The edit reflects how some shifts in Jewish practice that first appeared at the outset of the pandemic, as stopgap measures, have since been normalized. It also allows — for at least a narrow set of Jews who observe Jewish ritual in accordance with the Conservative movement’s dictates — more robust and potentially less expensive options for keeping kosher during Passover.
Rabbi Aaron Alexander, chair of the Kashrut Subcommittee on the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which issues the movement’s Jewish legal rulings, said the change does not reflect a shift in the movement’s approach to Jewish law, known as halacha. Instead, he said, it reflects confidence that the Food and Drug Administration’s strict rules about how products can be labeled can be trusted when it comes to Passover observance.
“It’s not a significant change in how we understand halacha in general and how we understand the general Passover laws,” Alexander said. “It’s always been the case that there are products you can buy without a KP [symbol] before Passover, when you can be pretty sure that there’s no chametz and that any accidental admixture would be minimal.”
The requirement for foods to be certified gluten-free and oat-free, Alexander said, is “an extra line of defense” for people buying products before Passover that are not explicitly labeled kosher for Passover.
The policy shift opens new doors to kosher-keeping Jews: Rather than seeking out specialty items with Passover kosher certification, often carried only in kosher supermarkets and in major markets, they can observe Passover by taking advantage of the increasing number of products that are labeled kosher, gluten-free and oat-free, as long as the ingredients accord with Passover laws.
The gluten-free marketplace is estimated at $6 billion a year in the United States and is growing by an estimated 10% each year, according to industry trend reports. The marketplace serves people with celiac disease — whose incidence is rising — as well as people who seek to reduce or eliminate their gluten intake for perceived health reasons.
Some people with celiac disease say they look forward to Passover because more products will hit shelves that they can count on to be free of gluten. Now, Jews who follow the Conservative movement’s guidance can benefit from some of the wide array of gluten-free foods that are already available.
On Passover, five types of grain are prohibited (except for when they are used to make matzah): wheat, spelt, barley, oat and rye. By purchasing products that are certified gluten-free and oat-free, consumers can avoid buying food that contain those five ingredients.
“In an effort to definitively alert consumers to the presence of wheat gluten in packaged foods, the FDA mandates that any product including the words ‘gluten-free,’ ‘no gluten,’ ‘free of gluten,’ or ‘without gluten’ must contain less than 20 parts per million of glutinous wheat, spelt, barley, or rye,” a footnote to the guide states. “This eliminates the possibility of a gluten-free packaged food containing 4 of the 5 hametz-derived grains in any quantity that would be viable according to Jewish law.”
Alexander emphasized that the gluten-free and oat-free guidance should be seen as “a good way to figure out whether or not the products you’re getting before Passover could be problematic.” He cautioned that looking at the rest of the ingredients is crucial: Some certified gluten-free products, for example, could still be prohibited for Passover because they contain yeast.
Sarah Chandler, an ordained Hebrew priestess and Jewish educator who used to run a pickle business, already bought food with gluten-free labels during her pre-Passover shopping.
“It’s very practical, and it’s also consistent with other levels of kashrut,” Chandler told JTA regarding her pre-Passover shopping. “The fact that you and I can go to a grocery store and buy eggs — you don’t need a kosher symbol on it. We just know that it’s eggs. We’re not worried that the egg is from a bird of prey and not kosher. We can just assume that [if] it says ‘chicken eggs,’ they’re chicken eggs.”
She added, using a Hebrew term for kosher certification, “We don’t need a hechsher on it. The hechscher just means a certain level of supervision.”
Chandler is a vegetarian and eats a variety of nut butters, which are often expensive. Recently, she bought a jar of gluten-free cashew butter that was on sale for $6 instead of its regular price $12. (A jar of almond butter by a kosher brand marketed for Passover can run around $18.) Because it’s still unopened and the ingredients are kosher for Passover, she plans to eat it during the holiday.
Kosher-keeping Jews with gluten intolerance and celiac disease have especially found a lifeline in the growing marketplace of gluten-free food.
Lisa Goldman, also known as the “Gluten Free Jewish Momma,” is an Orlando-based advocate for the gluten intolerant on behalf of her now-grown daughter, who was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2012.
“My daughter was crying over not being able to have matzah balls because matzah [is] very high in wheat,” Goldman recalled. “So it was so exciting when all of the Jewish brands started to come out with a gluten-free version of many of their products.”
By the Way Bakery, a kosher, gluten-free and dairy-free bakery in New York City founded in 2011 by Helene Godin, may be a destination where Jewish shoppers who abide by the Conservative ruling could get food for the holiday. It is offering multiple Passover items this year, though the menu isn’t certified kosher for Passover.
By the Way Bakery is certified kosher, and its individual products that are sold in Whole Foods are in the process of being certified gluten-free.
“I’m really careful with the word ‘certified,’” Godin told JTA. “We are not certified with respect to Passover. I can tell you what is in [our products]. We’re very transparent. If you go to our website and you go to the FAQ section, there’s a link to our ingredient summary. And we list everything that’s in every product.”
Some of the items on this year’s Passover menu include an orange almond cake that Godin calls “the little black dress of desserts” because it goes with everything, and a chocolate truffle torte. By the Way Bakery’s cakes and cookies are made with wheat flour alternatives, many of which fall into the category of kitniyot, or foods such as legumes, corn, and rice that some Jews, including many Ashkenazim, avoid eating on Passover. Sephardic Jews traditionally eat kitniyot on the holiday and the Conservative Movement began permitting the consumption of kitniyot during Passover in 2016.
“There are people who say, ‘You’re not kosher enough,’” Godin said. “And there are people who say, ‘Oh, I’ll eat that.’”
Another popular gluten-free kosher bakery, Modern Bread and Bagel, is offering non-kitniyot foods for Passover. Like By the Way Bakery, Modern Bread and Bagel is not certified kosher for Passover, but all of its kitchen’s ingredients are kosher for Passover.
Godin says her company gains new customers every Passover, but this year has been an especially busy time. The number of orders for the orange almond cake, which has not been on the menu in several years, was three or four times larger than what she expected.
“Our projections were that we would be up 20% over last year. And we’ve well exceeded that,” she said. “Post-COVID, people just want to celebrate and get together.”
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Is the art world finally ready to celebrate Diana Kurz?
Diana Kurz is on a roll. Last April, the 89-year-old, Viennese-born New York artist had a solo show of her abstract paintings, “Diana Kurz: A Journey of Discovery,” at the Lincoln Glenn Gallery in Chelsea. Motorists on the New York State Thruway can now see “The Hudson River Downtown, Triptych,” her large landscape reproduced as a permanent installation at the Ardsley Service Plaza, the first stop outside Manhattan. The US State Department recently chose two of Kurz’s still-life paintings for the US Embassy in Paraguay. And a series of Instagram reels featuring Kurz explaining aspects of her practice have earned her more than 24,000 followers. Kurz’s work will also be included in Lincoln Glenn’s “American Women Artists and the Century of Change,” opening later this summer.
“This is a time in New York to celebrate women artists of a certain age,” Kurz told me, mentioning that painters Joan Semel, Martha Edelheit, Lois Dodd and Judith Bernstein, all in their eighties and nineties, have been receiving renewed attention. “If you live long enough. But then, the work itself is what keeps you going.”
“Diana has been part of New York’s art culture since the early 1960s,” said Douglas Gold, co-founder of Lincoln Glenn, which focuses on artists who worked in New York between 1940 and 1980. “The women of this era continued painting despite an incredibly misogynistic culture. Dealers wouldn’t handle them or if they did, wouldn’t raise their prices, and the men of the period drank together and networked in downtown bars where women didn’t feel welcome. Historians, museums, people motivated to research this period, have taken note. It’s a moment to recognize the women who kept moving forward no matter what.”
‘One painting leads to another and another’
I first met Kurz in 1995 when I profiled her for the New York Jewish Week. Back then, the loft where she lives and works, a former doll factory in SoHo, had been taken over by a project both personal and enormous: larger-than-life paintings based on photos of men, women and children lost in the Holocaust, many of them her family members. She’d never intended to explore this material, had spent much of her artistic life avoiding the pain of her family’s narrow escape from the Nazis in 1940, when she and her parents boarded the last boat out of Southampton. Her father’s eyewear business had franchises beyond Austria, critical outposts that helped them flee.
When Kurz was growing up in Kew Gardens, Queens, in the 1940s and ‘50s, she was aware of family who’d perished in the concentration camps, but she also wanted to be an ordinary American and fit in. For many years, she denied her European background. Then, in 1989, on a trip to California, an aunt showed her a tiny photo of her uncle holding his baby daughter, both of whom died in the Holocaust (the family never learned the details of their fate) and she decided to make a painting based on the photo. “I never start out saying I’m going to do a big project, but sometimes one painting leads to another and another,” she told me.
A painter with roots in abstract expressionism, Diana is known for her dynamic use of color. “All that I learned painting abstractly, about composition, color, form and space, that’s in my figurative work too. It’s just as important to me as the image itself,” she said.
The luminous vitality of her palette and the depth it creates is what stays with me most in these works. In “Three,” which is nine-feet high, a father stands on crutches. He’s missing a leg, and on the lapel of his suit, he’s wearing the medal he earned in World War I. He holds the hands of his two small children, a little girl and boy each wearing the yellow star. The portrait is based on a photo of Eastern European Jewish war veteran Victor Fanjnzylber, whose heroic status exempted him from wearing the star but didn’t exempt his children. In the end, all three were still deported.
The little girl’s dress is a deep blue that almost glows, the boy’s shirt is apple green with yellow undertones (rhyming disturbingly with bits of the yellow star peeking out from under the suspenders of his short pants). The grey-violet of the father’s suit, with its folds and pleats, is deepened by its proximity to the daughter’s dress.
“Because of all the black-and-white photos we tend to associate with the Holocaust, people don’t realize how often the horrors took place on beautiful days, under clear skies,” said Kurz, “When reading people’s recollections, I was often struck by the irony of the fact that terrible, unspeaking things occurred while the sky was blue, with birds singing.”
‘I had no choice. I had to do that work.’
Kurz told me that she always knew she was an artist. “I remember my father saying to my mother that they’d better start frequenting museums because ‘if she’s going to be an artist we’d better know about it,’” she said. While working towards her MFA at Columbia in the late 1950s, she painted large, classically abstract expressionist paintings, and says she often learned more from her fellow students than from her teachers, who didn’t always take women seriously. Yet she persisted, and in 1966 won a Fulbright to Paris, where she was mentored by painter and art theorist Jean Hélion.
Hélion, a survivor of a German prison camp, encouraged her to try incorporating figures into her abstract work; he was the one who first gave her the photo that would become the painting “Three” two decades later. During residencies at Yaddo in 1968 and ‘69, she met Philip Guston, an important influence, who was remaking himself in those years, moving from the abstract to the tangible. Back in lower Manhattan, she became part of a group that included Mercedes Matter, Philip Pearlstein and Lois Dodd, all of whom were exploring figurative art and drew and painted from live models.
Solo shows followed, including three at the Green Mountain Gallery in the 1970s, and three at the Alex Rosenberg Gallery in the 1980s, highlighting her still life and portraiture. “Then I took on the Holocaust paintings and had no major shows for many years,” she said. “But I had no choice. I had to do that work.”
Kurz said she knew these paintings would be difficult to sell. “These are not portraits to hang over the couch or whatever,” she told me. Thus far, there have been 13 solo shows featuring the work, mostly in college and university galleries. “It’s allowed me to tell the history to newer generations, many of whom don’t know it.”
In 1998, the Bezirksmuseum Josefstadt in Vienna showed the “Remembrance” series in total as it existed then. Wien Museum (formerly known as the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien) purchased two of the paintings. Another small canvas is at Yad Vashem. A major American museum has never done a comprehensive exhibit of all 18 portraits. This would seem the time for it.
Meanwhile Kurz continues to paint. “For me, inspiration comes through working,” she said. “You can’t sit there and wait for it.” Since 2005, she’s been painting a series of “small portrait heads,” mostly of actors, musicians, and dancers, young people from every possible background and ethnicity who are now filling up the same walls where “Remembrance” once dominated. The sitters are mostly under 30, and “I can look at them and see all this potential.” There are 43 so far, though she hopes one day to reach a hundred, and perhaps do an installation.
“I tell the models just to sit and look at me, and everyone puts such different energy into it. I find it fascinating,” said Kurz. “I love painting from life.”
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A Jewish soldier died saving a Christian friend. Eighty years later, a grave reunited their families.
At a cemetery outside Florence, Italy, two families gathered around the grave of a young American soldier. For decades, they were unknown to each other. Yet they had been connected for 80 years.
Private First Class Frank T. Kurzinger was born in Germany and arrived in the United States with his family in 1938 after fleeing Nazi persecution. A few years later, he returned to Europe in an American uniform as a soldier in the 10th Mountain Division.
During training, he became close friends with a soldier from Wisconsin named Del Riley. The two met in 1943.
In February 1945, the division was preparing to assault Mount Belvedere in northern Italy. The attack would take place at night. Soldiers climbed in silence. Even their weapons had been unloaded to prevent an accidental discharge.
Ahead of Riley, a scout stepped on a landmine. The explosion tore through the darkness, severely wounding both men.
Riley called for a medic, and Kurzinger responded. He took several steps toward his friend, stepped on another landmine, and was killed. He was 21. Riley survived.
For the rest of his life, he wondered whether Frank Kurzinger might have survived the war had he never shouted for help.
“It really pained him,” said Shalom Lamm, co-founder and chief historian of Operation Benjamin. According to family accounts, Riley lived with survivor’s guilt for the rest of his life.
For a time, it seemed possible that Kurzinger himself would slowly fade from memory.
His family was small. The Holocaust had left gaps in family memory and silenced many conversations about the past. In remarks delivered at the 2025 dedication of Kurzinger’s new headstone, family member Michael Stern reflected that Frank had become little more than a distant name.
“There were no photographs,” Stern said. “No yahrzeit to observe, no role for him in stirring the longings for the warmth and intimacy of the larger family.” He might have remained, Stern said, “an anonymous stranger.”
Instead, a grave brought his life into relief.
The ceremony at Florence American Cemetery was organized by Operation Benjamin, a nonprofit that identifies Jewish servicemembers and veterans buried beneath incorrect religious markers and helps restore headstones that reflect their faith.
Kurzinger had been buried beneath a Latin Cross. Aware of the danger a German-born Jew would face if captured by the Nazis, he identified as Catholic on his dogtags.
Eight decades after he was buried, a Star of David was placed above his grave.
Yet the headstones are only part of the work. There is also the responsibility of restoring stories before they fade.
Operation Benjamin’s researchers reconstructed Kurzinger’s story. They traced descendants and gathered family memories. They also located the family of Del Riley, the Wisconsin soldier whose life Kurzinger had tried to save. The two families met for the first time in Italy ahead of the ceremony.
The next day they stood together at the cemetery.
For Lamm, Operation Benjamin is not simply about correcting the historical record. It is about zachor, the Jewish obligation to remember. He points to an unexpected moment in the Book of Exodus. As the Israelites leave Egypt, Moses fulfills a promise made generations earlier: “And Moses took with him the bones of Joseph.”
Joseph asked the Israelites to swear that when God redeemed them, they would carry his remains with them.
Lamm sees Operation Benjamin’s work as a series of “Moses moments.”
“No matter what’s going on in the world,” he said, “never forget your heroes.”
The stories beneath the stones
The organization’s work grew from a simple question. In 2014, Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter visited the Normandy American Cemetery and remarked that he expected to see more Stars of David among the graves. The observation led researchers to discover cases in which Jewish servicemembers had been buried beneath crosses because of wartime paperwork errors, mistaken records, or decisions made under extraordinary circumstances.
Since then, Operation Benjamin has reviewed thousands of cases and helped facilitate dozens of headstone corrections.
But a new headstone is only part of the story. Operation Benjamin’s researchers reconstruct lives that might otherwise be forgotten. “We will not forget you,” Lamm said. “We go back. We tell your story.”
In his remarks at the graveside, Stern reflected on what the journey had meant to his family. “Through the unlikely context of death and burial,” he said at the ceremony, “he has become a tangible link to life, to our roots, our history and the lineage from which we come. A second cousin once removed no longer feels as distant or abstract.”
In prepared remarks released by the U.S. Mission in Italy, U.S. Consul General Daniela Ballard noted that Kurzinger’s name was one of 4,392 at the military cemetery.
“Every name represents a young life lost and a family left behind,” she said. “But today, we are all Frank’s family. We are the ones who carry his memory forward.”
In remarks shared by Operation Benjamin after the ceremony, members of the Riley family described climbing Mount Belvedere with a commemorative challenge coin. One side bore Del Riley’s name and a Christian cross. The other bore Frank Kurzinger’s name and a Star of David.
The two men had set out for the mountain together in February 1945. Neither completed the mission. Frank was killed. Del was wounded. Eighty years later, the Riley family carried both men to the summit. They buried the coin at the 10th Mountain Division memorial.
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Israeli citizen Michael Mizrahi killed in Montreal shooting
(JTA) — Michael Mizrahi, an Israeli citizen and longtime member of Montreal’s Jewish community, has been identified as the civilian killed in Monday’s shooting involving a gunman and Canadian police officers in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood.
The suspected gunman was killed during the incident, the investigation of which is ongoing. Police have not publicly released the suspect’s identity or provided details about a possible motive. They also have not confirmed who shot Mizrahi.
The Israeli Consulate in Montreal confirmed Mizrahi’s death, saying in a statement that he was an Israeli citizen and extended condolences to his family “on behalf of the people and the State of Israel.” The consulate said his family “knows all too well the horrors of terror and violence, making this tragic loss even more painful.”
Montreal police Constable Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, 34, was also fatally shot responding to the incident, according to police.
The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal said Benredouane died in the line of duty while protecting the public during an intervention in Côte-des-Neiges, a heavily Jewish neighborhood. He had served with the force since 2021.
A second officer, who is female, was also shot and remains in critical condition, police said.
Quebec’s Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes, the province’s police watchdog, has opened an independent investigation into the use of a firearm by a police officer in a fatal confrontation.The Quebec police watchdog group states that it is “mandated to fully investigate the facts surrounding police interventions. The BEI investigates all cases where a person, other than a police officer on duty, dies, suffers serious injury, or is injured by a firearm used by a police officer during a police intervention or while in police custody.“
A number of Canadian Jewish groups published statements assuring the Jewish community that they were not in danger. The UJA-Federation of Toronto put out two statements explaining that the Jewish community did not appear to be a target.
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the advocacy arm of Canadian Jewish Federations, also put out a statement mourning the loss of a community member.
“We mourn the tragic loss of Michael (Michel) Moshe Mizrahi z”l, a beloved member of Montreal’s Jewish community, an innocent victim of today’s events,” the group posted on X on Monday night. “Our thoughts and our deepest condolences are with his family, friends, and loved ones during this time of unimaginable pain.”
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar wrote on X that he had called the Chabad Rabbi of Montreal Mendel Raskin to extend his “deepest condolences to the families of the victims, to the Jewish community of Montreal, and to all Canadians mourning this terrible loss.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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