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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
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Cori Bush promised to bury AIPAC. Her rematch with Wesley Bell in Missouri tests that.
(JTA) — Missouri primary voters will travel back two years when they head to the polls on Tuesday. There they’ll confront a rematch of two candidates whose previous face-off was largely defined by an influx of AIPAC cash that helped oust one of Israel’s most ardent critics in Congress.
In 2024, AIPAC “demonstrated its clout,” in the words of The New York Times, with a massive contribution that knocked out incumbent U.S. Rep. Cori Bush in favor of challenger Wesley Bell. In her concession speech, she promised revenge.
On Tuesday, Bush is seeking to make good on the pledge. But while she is competing against the same candidate, the political landscape around them has changed dramatically.
Since Bush’s loss in the district representing the St. Louis metropolitan region, AIPAC has become a bogeyman in the Democratic Party and Israel a major campaign issue. Other anti-Zionist members of the Democratic Socialists of America have been racking up victories in blue districts across the country throughout the 2026 primary season.
The changing winds might have given Bell incentive to shift to the left instead of leaving himself vulnerable to a challenger whose background and political stances are otherwise similar. But Bell has held firm in his support for Israel, enjoying the backing of mainstream Democrats and a continued financial infusion from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to the tune of more than $1 million this cycle.
As a result, Tuesday’s rematch is one of the most striking tests of whether AIPAC still has traction in Democratic strongholds or whether Bush and other DSA candidates have subdued the once-powerful lobby.
“The war is a lot different today than it was two years ago,” Braxton Payne, a St. Louis-based Democratic strategist, told JTA, referring to the Israel-Gaza conflict that unfolded following Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war. “Sentiment inside the Democratic Party, even among the establishment, has changed.”
In the past few years, the AIPAC has faced growing hostilities from ultra-left-wing politicians, who have denounced Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, particularly in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
“AIPAC is now a household name in Democratic politics,” Payne noted.
But heading into Tuesday’s primaries, it wasn’t clear that the anti-AIPAC activism had moved the needle for St. Louis voters. While the polymarket prediction platform has given Bell a 66% chance of winning, compared to Bush’s 34%, there’s a dearth of nonpartisan polling. Bush’s campaign commissioned one of the few publicly available survey results, an April HIT Strategies poll that declared the candidates “statistically tied,” with Bell in the lead at 44% and Bush at 40%.
On paper, the two candidates have much in common. Born in Missouri in the mid-1970s, Bell and Bush are both Black progressive Democrats who entered politics following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson.
After protests for police reforms surged across the area for about a year, Bell won a seat on the city council and worked on enacting such changes. In a 2018 race for St. Louis County prosecutor, he defeated Bob McCulloch, a 27-year incumbent who had come under national scrutiny for failing to prosecute the officer who had killed Brown. Bell is now serving his first term in Congress.
Bush, meanwhile, first became engaged in politics as a participant in the Ferguson protests. Though she lost Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate and House in 2016 and 2018, success in 2020 led her to serve Missouri’s 1st Congressional District for two terms. But in 2024, Bush fell short, losing in the primaries to Bell by more than 5 percentage points.
The candidates agree on most of their political platforms, both of which prioritize issues like reproductive freedom, gun violence prevention and the dismantling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as reducing the costs of housing, utilities, healthcare and prescriptions. But they diverge when it comes to the Middle East, with Bush’s campaign promising to “stand for justice in Palestine.”
Like other DSA candidates in New York, Colorado, Wisconsin and Michigan, Bush’s campaign accuses Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza with the backing of “U.S. weapons and U.S. dollars.”
Following her loss to Bell in 2024, Bush threatened to tear down AIPAC’s “kingdom” after it spent nearly $9 million on her takedown, in one of the most expensive House races in U.S. history. Federal Election Commission records show that of that total, AIPAC invested about $3.4 million in support of Bell and about $5.2 million in opposition of Bush, through the lobby’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project.
“People are beginning to understand that — much like the crypto industry, AI, Big Oil, and Big Pharma — AIPAC has become yet another way for MAGA-donors to divide the Democratic base by meddling in primaries,” Bush told JTA in a written statement.
“In St. Louis and across the country, people know that our fight against antisemitism means fighting against the far-right’s effort to divide us,” Bush added.
Throughout her current rematch against Bell, Bush has gone after her opponent for his ties to AIPAC.
“Wesley Bell is a former Republican campaign manager who is bought and paid for by AIPAC,” Bush posted last month on X. Bush was referring to a 2006 period when Bell served as campaign manager for a conservative, which he has maintained was no more than a favor for a friend.
“We’re going back to DC, and we’ll do it with no corporate cash or AIPAC funded-trips,” Bush added, referencing Bell’s trip to Israel with the lobby group last year.
Yet compared to 2024, AIPAC has spent much less on the current race. Through its UDP super PAC, the lobby has invested in the neighborhood of $3 million in the rematch, with the vast majority spent opposing Bush, according to FEC data. Overall in this race, the candidates themselves have also raised fewer funds than they did two years ago, according to the FEC. Bell has secured $3.6 million and Bush $1.3 million, as opposed to $5.4 million and $4.2 million, respectively, in 2024.
Deryn Sousa, spokesperson for AIPAC, told JTA in a written statement that his group was proud to support Bell’s campaign.
“Bell is a principled fighter for the people of St. Louis, while Cori Bush spent her time in Congress missing votes and demonizing a key democratic ally,” Sousa added.
Bell did not respond to a request for comment from JTA.
However, on the campaign trail, Bell said he was “proud to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters, and support Israel, particularly in a time that has been very tumultuous,” in a March video posted by AIPAC.
“When we see what has happened in the last few years, I think it’s even more apropos to stand with our friends and one of our greatest allies,” he continued. “Oftentimes, what gets lost is yes, we support Israel, but Israel also supports us.”
And in Congress, Bell voted last month against an amendment that aimed to cut military aid to Israel. He has also previously co-sponsored a bill to increase defense partnerships with Israel, while also voting in favor of legislation that would have sanctioned the International Criminal Court for seeking to arrest U.S. allies, including Israeli officials.
David Cohen, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis, which does not endorse candidates, said the recent Iran war transformed “a national conversation about the Middle East into something more common.”
“The sheer number of conversations on this topic compared to the last race look different,” Cohen said. “The confluence of conspiracy theorists from the left and the right have blown out of proportion since the war started.”
Within these national conversations, which he described as “catchy” talking points and “black and white” discussions about AIPAC and Israel, Cohen warned that certain campaigns are “playing that dangerous game of demonizing Jews.”
Cohen said he believes that Bush’s campaign decided to focus on Israel because “they thought it would get her traction,” as opposed to focusing on the “many issues that people in Missouri care about.” Payne echoed Cohen’s sentiments, stressing that he “wouldn’t consider the Israeli-Hamas conflict as the top issue” at the ballot box amid higher-priority concerns like the “insane” cost of living. He noted that Bush’s “central campaign issue is AIPAC money,” a message that “motivates her base” but might not sway the everyday voter.
Jewish leaders and activists in the state have followed the race closely. Rabbi Ze’ev Smason, president of the Coalition for Jewish Values – Missouri, told JTA in an email that his organization also doesn’t endorse candidates. But the difference between Bell and Bush, he said, was obvious to his regional chapter of a national Orthodox rabbinic group.
While Bell “supports Israel’s right to self-determination” and to exist as a Jewish nation, Bush has “established an adversarial relationship with Israel abroad, as well as with the overwhelming majority of her Missouri constituents,” according to Smason.
“At home in her district, Cori Bush was a ‘no-show’ for her Jewish constituents,” Smason stated. “She regularly refused requests for interviews from the local Jewish press, and was shockingly absent from the dedication ceremony of the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, with no explanation.”
Cohen, whose JCRC branch serves 36 Jewish groups from “liberal to Conservative to Orthodox,” said that “almost none of them believe what Cori Bush believes about Israel.” Jews made up 4.1% of the population in the district as of 2024, according to the Berman Jewish DataBank.
On the other hand, Michael Berg, a volunteer for St. Louis Jewish Voice for Peace, which is not a JCRC member, is among a minority of organized Jewish voices who oppose Bell due in large part to the candidate’s support for Israel. It was upsetting, Berg said, that Bell was “perfectly willing to take $15 million from the interests of a foreign government that’s committing a genocide.”
For Berg, the Israel-Gaza conflict is by no means a fringe concern. He praised Bush for her “unwavering advocacy” for a Gaza ceasefire and support for “multi-ethnic democracy,” as well as her refusal to accept corporate funds, her commitment to fighting climate change and her history of standing up for the interests of St. Louis’s people.
Bush has also earned the support of a second local Jewish group, Progressive Jews of St. Louis, who described her as “a champion for our St. Louis community and a brave leader in the fight for justice and peace for all people, regardless of where they call home.”
Out-of-state Jewish groups have also been vocal about their stances on this race, with the vast majority backing Bell, but some groups, like the IfNotNow movement, advocating for Bush. The Washington, D.C.-based IfNotNow, which calls for “a thriving future for all Israelis and Palestinians,” praised Bush for leading “the call for a ceasefire in Congress.”
In contrast, Jacob Spiegel, communications director of the Washington-based Jewish Democratic Council of America, recounted his organization’s grassroots action in favor of Bell. A network of volunteers, he explained in an email, is working to “elect the candidate we believe aligns with our Jewish values.”
Nonetheless, Berg maintained that even if Bell wins this race, the future “of the Democratic Party is only going in one direction,” which he said is the “direction of Democratic socialism.”
“The United States is increasingly becoming an anti-Zionist country,” Berg said. “The people understand they do not want the United States to continue to fund and support an ethno-national state in the Middle East that oppresses half of its people.”
Regardless of who is victorious, Payne predicted that the outcome would give “fodder” to the triumphant side. Payne, who noted his position as a non-Jewish “outsider,” said he believes that a fear of antisemitism will be motivating many Jewish voters as they head to the polls.
“To be frank, I think it’s a fear that it’s not ill-placed or unfounded,” he added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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The Met’s plan to honor designer John Galliano puts Jewish ideas of repentance to the test
(JTA) — Before the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that it would honor fashion designer John Galliano with a major Costume Institute exhibition next spring, the museum convened at least two unusual meetings: a face-to-face with Galliano and a number of prominent rabbis, and a larger meeting with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, museum officials and several prominent Jewish leaders.
The unusual collision of fashion and Judaism, first reported in The New York Times, reflected the challenge facing the Met as it prepares to celebrate one of fashion’s most influential designers who was also the perpetrator of one of its most notorious scandals. Fifteen years after Galliano was fired as chief designer of Dior for praising Hitler and hurling antisemitic abuse at patrons in a Paris café, the fashion exhibition has become a test of what Judaism means by teshuvah — repentance — and whether genuine accountability can coexist with public redemption.
The Met’s announcement also comes at a time when many Jews see a spike in antisemitism, ostensibly ignited by Israel’s war in Gaza but fanned by anti-Israel rhetoric that is often indistinguishable from antisemitism.
Accordingly, the debate over Galliano’s return to fashion — he recently signed a multi-year deal with the fashion brand Zara — touches on questions that Jewish tradition has wrestled with for centuries: how to repent, and when to forgive.
Jewish thinkers, from the medieval sage Maimonides to the 21st century thinker Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, have emphasized that teshuvah is not a simple apology or a request for forgiveness. It is a demanding process of acknowledgment, repair and transformation. And crucially, they argue, forgiveness is not something the person who caused harm is entitled to receive on demand.
Galliano has been a touchstone in debates like these since 2011, when a video, which that surfaced online, showed the designer, in a lengthy rant, praising Hitler and telling onlookers that they would have been killed by Nazis. Earlier that same year, a Jewish woman and an Asian man accused him of directing slurs at them during an altercation at the same café. A French court later found Galliano guilty of making public insults based on race, religion or ethnicity in the cafe incident and levied a suspended fine.
Dior fired him. His reputation appeared destroyed.
But Galliano’s story did not end there.
After entering treatment for substance abuse, Galliano began a long process of rehabilitation. He released a statement of regret, met with Jewish leaders and spoke publicly about confronting his own ignorance and prejudice. In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League said it believed he had demonstrated “true contrition” and that people could change when they accepted responsibility and worked to understand the harm they had caused.
The late Abraham Foxman, then the national director of the ADL and perhaps the last Jewish leader who could unilaterally grant an accused antisemite absolution, met with Galliano. He arranged for the designer to study with a rabbi and visit Auschwitz, and felt Galliano’s amends were sufficient to even asked retailers to again stock his designs.
“Mr. Galliano has worked arduously in changing his worldview and dedicated a significant amount of time to researching, reading, and learning about the evils of anti-Semitism and bigotry,” Foxman, who died in May, said at the time.
Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the ADL, echoed Foxman’s approval in an email to The New York Times last week that he subsequently posted to X: “We believe John Galliano has genuinely worked through the issues that led to his antisemitic outburst years ago in Paris, and we have long since accepted his apology,” Greenblatt wrote. “His efforts to repair the damage his words caused and to learn from that incident should be applauded.”
Two of the rabbis who attended the May meeting (a third wasn’t named by participants or reporting on the meeting) also accepted the sincerity of Galliano’s contrition, even as they bluntly described to the exhibit organizers the climate in which the exhibit would be appearing.
In an interview with JTA, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said he also met separately with Galliano in the spring. He came away feeling assured that the designer was “an incredible positive model of a guy who did the work to really earn back his position.”
The 2011 “Inspiration Dior” exhibition at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow featured John Galliano’s extravagant 18th-century French court-inspired designs. (Shakko/Wikimedia Commons)
Jacobs said meeting with Galliano reinforced what he considered a persuasive endorsement by Foxman.
“I was compelled by John Galliano and how he addressed his story. He wasn’t sugarcoating it. He wasn’t mouthing something that he was prepped to share,” said Jacobs. “I felt he was really honest and contrite.”
At the same time, Jacobs made clear to the Met team that the exhibit would be a missed opportunity if it didn’t forthrightly acknowledge the harm Galliano had caused.
Like Jacobs, Rabbi Joshua Davidson of the Reform Congregation Emanu-El in New York also said at the May meeting that many Jews may reasonably find the tribute painful, given it comes amid a rise in antisemitic incidents and renewed anxiety about Jewish safety. Like Jacobs, he also suggested that they include not just Galliano’s accomplishments but his failings.
“You have the opportunity to use this as a chance to teach about the dangers of antisemitism, the way it metastasizes, and what can be done to fight it,” Davidson told JTA, characterizing his charge to the organizers. “This is a challenging moment to do this sort of exhibition. I think we all acknowledged that, therefore, it places a greater responsibility upon the shoulders of the museum to do what it can to use this in order to push back against antisemitism.”
The Met appeared to hear that message, and says it intends to make Galliano’s transgressions part of the exhibition rather than gloss over them.
“It will directly address the rupture caused by his antisemitic, racist, and anti-Asian conduct in 2010 and 2011, which resulted in his dismissal from Christian Dior and his eponymous label and his conviction by a Paris court for public insults based on race, religion, ethnicity, or origin,” Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, said in announcing the exhibition. “It will also consider his subsequent treatment for substance addiction and his later public acknowledgment of his actions.”
Not everyone, however, is persuaded that Galliano’s rehabilitation — or the Met’s framing of it — satisfies the demands of teshuvah.
Hen Mazzig, the pro-Israel writer and activist, argued that the museum’s decision reflects a wider culture that has become inured to antisemitism and dismissive of the concerns of the Jewish community. Noting that the Met abandoned plans to honor Galliano in 2024, Mazzig wrote on Substack this weekend that objections from Jewish donors and allies were “a cost the Met was unwilling to pay” at the time. Two years later, he continued, the museum appears to have concluded that the “cost had fallen to roughly zero. That is a market read on how much anyone cares when Jews object.”
Scarlett Johansson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gala in New York City, May 7, 2018. The extravaganza is the kick-off event for each year’s annual Costume Institute exhibit. (Noam Galai/Getty Images for New York Magazine)
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, author of the 2022 book “On Repentance and Repair,” was unconvinced that Galliano has demonstrated the kind of transformation Jewish tradition demands.
She recalled finding Galliano’s original public apology — in which he said he accepted that the accusations had “greatly shocked and upset people” and that “anti-Semitism and racism have no part in our society” — lacking.
“It didn’t appear very sincere or heartfelt or engaged with what he really had done,” she told JTA.
In Jewish tradition, Ruttenberg said, repentance is a multistage process that includes an apology to the harmed party, a sincere and forthright confession and a demonstration in words and deeds that the transgressor has changed for the better.
“The work of teshuvah is the work of humility and the work of care and the work of relationship,” she said. “That’s not what I’m seeing here.”
She also worries that powerful public figures — from President Donald Trump to the comedian Louis C.K. — increasingly earn public absolution in ways unavailable to the average person.
“Our society is delighted to give free passes to people who will give them access to wealth and power,” she said.
Jacobs and Davidson, having spent time with Galliano and being respectful of Foxman’s judgment, said they found the designer to be sincere, and that his example provides a lesson for the Jewish community in how it handles repentance.
“I don’t think you have as many stories of people who were the absolute embodiment of antisemitic behavior and views, who really worked through and took accountability,” said Jacobs. “For the Jewish community, I think it’s an underscoring that there’s not only power to teshuvah, but actually it can really bring someone back from a really dramatic fall from grace.”
Davidson concurred. “I think all of us present [at the meeting] also recognize the value that Judaism places on teshuvah, and when you do the work, that’s pretty significant,” he said.
The fashion world, meanwhile, has already welcomed Galliano back to the literal and metaphorical front row. Wintour, perhaps the most influential figure in fashion, has been one of his strongest champions.
The annual Costume Institute exhibit opens with the Met Gala, a lavish red carpet extravaganza that is one of the highest-profile events in fashion and pop culture. In his statement, Bolton, the curator, said that the show will demonstrate how as a designer for Givenchy and Dior, Galliano “has remapped the world through fashion and how his conduct, its consequences, and changing cultural values have reshaped our understanding of his work.”
Ultimately, Davidson said, there are more important things for the Jewish community to be debating than the rehabilitation of a fashion star.
“I’m certainly immersed in the fight against antisemitism and appreciate the importance of pushing back against it and just the dangers of this moment,” he said. “I think we have bigger issues than what, however bad it was, John Galliano did a decade and a half ago.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post The Met’s plan to honor designer John Galliano puts Jewish ideas of repentance to the test appeared first on The Forward.
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Spike in number of Israelis leaving country may be harmful to security and economy, new study warns
(JTA) — Israelis are exiting the country in high numbers, a trend that could harm the state’s future security and economy, according to a new demography study published Tuesday by Tel Aviv University.
It showed that 268,509 Israelis left the country for a period of at least three consecutive months from 2023 to 2025, part of a spike that began after 2020 during the COVID pandemic.
“Even in 2025, the number of Israelis who left the country for a significant period of time is very worrying,” particularly coming on top of the number from the two prior years, said Itai Ater, one of the authors.
These numbers do not yet pose a risk, he explained. But he added that there is a “growing concern” that “immigration from Israel will increase in a way that will endanger security and the Israeli economy.”
In 2020, only 38,764 Israelis left for a three month period or more, the lowest such number since the start of the study in 2009, when 65,014 Israelis were absent for three consecutive months or more.
The numbers spiked rapidly from 2020, rising to 53,559 in 2021, then up to 66,966 the next year.
The leap was more dramatic in 2023, the year that saw pro-democracy protests sweep the country followed by the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel and wars with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
That year, 86,509 Israelis were absent for three consecutive months or more, a 29.1% [[increase?]] from 2022, with the numbers then beginning to level off, rising to 91,499 in 2024 and then dropping slightly to 90,922 in 2025.
Data collected on those out of the country for 12 consecutive months was similar to the data for the three month periods, albeit with lower numbers. There was the same low drop in 2020 down to 24,400, followed by a rise to 32,036 in 2021, with an additional increase to 35,698 in 2022. The numbers spiked to 49,925 in 2023 and remained high, with 49,677 absent for at least a year in 2024.
The 2025 data won’t be available until 2027, but those conducting the study, professors Ater and Nittai Bergman, along with doctoral student Doron Zamir, said they believe it will remain high.
The researchers explained that the issue of Israeli emigration to countries abroad has long occupied the public discourse in Israel, with specific concern regarding the resulting “brain drain.”
Emigration is an issue for many countries, the researchers acknowledged, but said its impact is felt more keenly in Israel, which lacks abundant natural resources and depends heavily on human intellectual capital to field critical industries such as high tech and health.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Spike in number of Israelis leaving country may be harmful to security and economy, new study warns appeared first on The Forward.
