Uncategorized
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.
—
The post Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
After my dad died, I discovered a lost history of Iranian Jews in the US
I was a freshman in college when my dad died. An Iranian Jew who came to the United States four years before the Islamic Revolution to study at the University of Missouri, he went both by Farzad and by his Hebrew name, David. Eventually, he became a traveling jeweler — or, as he put it, a “merchant,” a word evoking an image of independence, shrewdness and valor on the Silk Road. After each business trip, he’d return home with stories of how nice people were in Raleigh, how cold it was in Minneapolis, and how beautiful the Florida Keys were.
Growing up in an Iranian Jewish community in Great Neck, a suburb on the North Shore of Long Island, I had spent my life mostly surrounded by people just like me, and rarely ever boarded a plane. The contrast between my dad’s cosmopolitanism and my provincialism mirrored another contrast, between his capability and my incapability. These differences made me distrust and worship him.
I knew my dad was getting older. The pace of his hair growth had slowed down, making his insistence on monthly haircuts a regular source of ridicule. But he was only 62; he wasn’t supposed to die. In 2019, he had a fatal heart attack on a flight to Key West — while he was in the air.
It seemed fitting that he — a cosmopolitan who had always seemed separate from the rest of my more provincial family — would die several hundred miles away from where we all lived. In the wake of his death, my desire to better understand his life led me to discover a forgotten chapter of Iranian Jewish history.
My community’s identity, like all identities, reflects a series of choices we’ve made about which parts of our experiences we wish to keep, and which we wish to throw away in the name of self-preservation. But despite our better efforts, the things we try to discard tend to remain with us, sometimes without us even knowing it.
Roots in Mashhad
My Iranian Jewish community traces its roots back to Mashhad, a city in northeastern Iran. In 1839, a mob of Muslim Mashadis raided the Jewish ghetto and killed more than 30 people. They seized and married Jewish women, selling others into slavery. Some Jews converted to Islam to escape death; others fled the country.
My ancestors appeared to convert to Islam. But community lore goes that when no one was watching, they wore tiny tefillin, prayed in basements and kept kosher as best they could. On Saturdays, Jewish shopkeepers kept their stores open so as not to be seen keeping Shabbat — but jacked up prices so high no one would buy anything. Jewish parents arranged their children’s engagements at young ages, so that if a non-Jew came requesting their daughter’s hand in marriage, they could honestly say she was taken.
Decades later, under a new government, my ancestors slowly began practicing Judaism openly again. In the mid-20th century, my grandparents and other Mashadi Jews left the city and moved to Iran’s capital, Tehran. But they remained insular. In Tehran’s much larger Jewish community, Mashadis separated themselves, praying in Mashadi synagogues and marrying fellow Mashadis.
They did the same in the U.S., where they first settled in Queens, then later helped form the ethnic enclave where I grew up.
As a child, I learned that being Mashadi made me different from all the other Iranian Jews in Great Neck, whom we called Tehrani even though many of their families came from other cities. So, when I learned that my parents were actually born in Tehran, I was scandalized. If my parents came from Tehran, didn’t that make us Tehrani?
“Why are we Mashadi?” I asked my dad one night, a year before he died: Why was I defined by this city, and not the other Iranian cities where my ancestors lived? Why weren’t we just Iranian?
Unable to explain, my dad laughed off the question. But I know now why Mashadis are Mashadi. It’s because pretending to be Muslim while secretly continuing to practice Judaism was a defining experience, one that taught my ancestors ugly ways to survive.
“To omr-e mani,” my dad would tell me in Farsi, in lieu of a simple “I love you.” Translation: “You are my life.” He always had a flair for hyperbole. And though he didn’t intend it this way, my teenage brain twisted his words to mean: “It will kill me if you aren’t a good Mashadi girl.”
Going to Missouri
When I was little, my mom told me a version of the Mashadi immigration story that matched her own experience: It began in Tehran and ended in Forest Hills, Queens. But when my dad died, I became more invested in piecing together the parts of his life that my mom’s story didn’t capture.
I got his yearbook and attendance records from the University of Missouri; obtained his immigration records from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; pored over more than 100 old newspapers, magazines and other archival documents; read academic articles and history books; and spoke to about a dozen people who I thought might have relevant intel, including extended family members, scholars and people who attended or worked at my dad’s college.
Arriving in 1974, my dad was one of tens of thousands of Iranians who came to the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s for college. In Iran, as in other major oil-exporting countries, economic development had led to increasing demand for skilled workers — but there weren’t enough colleges to meet this demand. So the Iranian government gave scholarships to students studying abroad.
Determined to develop allies during the Cold War, the U.S. government doled out scholarships, too. The idea was that students in Iran’s expanding middle class could study engineering in the U.S., then bring that expertise back to their home country, which needed it.
Many of these college students, seeking a lower cost of living, wound up in the Midwest. Plus, in the logic of a tight-knit ethnic community, where one person goes, others follow.
My dad followed a small group of Mashadi men to the University of Missouri in Columbia. His older brother, Behzad, had gone there for graduate school and still lived nearby. In Tehran, both he and my dad had attended an elite boys’ prep school called Alborz, named for the mountain range that stretches along the coast of the Caspian Sea. Historically run by American Christian missionaries, Alborz was considered the best high school in Iran, and American colleges knew it. Plus, if my dad’s kitchen-table bragging is to be believed, he was among Alborz’s top students in math.
Protest and persecution
By the time my dad arrived in Missouri, the tensions that would give way to the Islamic Revolution in 1979 had already emerged. Many Iranians protested the country’s then-leader, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, over restrictions he placed on democratic institutions, torture against political opponents under his leadership, and his significant expansion of the military.
The Iranian community in the U.S. — then disproportionately composed of college students — leaned into the opportunity this country gave them to express themselves politically. Articles from the Columbia Missourian, once my dad’s local paper, show that at one point in the mid-’70s, anti-Shah protests took place at least once a month at local colleges.
The protesters were embracing an American freedom: The Iranian secret police couldn’t get them, at least not while they were in the U.S. But American authorities had issues of their own.
In October 1975, police maced then arrested protesters at an anti-Shah rally at Lincoln University in Missouri. The protesters were denied food and prevented from calling lawyers because, a spokesperson for the Iranian Students Association said, “they were foreigners and had no rights.” The mayor sent the student-protesters’ names and photos to the Shah, even though students said that could get them executed or imprisoned for life.
At the University of Missouri, letters to the editor in the student newspaper, as well as classified ads, called for Iranian students to go back to where they came from. Graffiti on bathroom walls spread a similar message. Some people simply told their Iranian classmates face-to-face to return to the very place whose government they were protesting.
Many Iranian Jewish students liked the Shah, because he believed in secular government and undertook westernizing reforms. But 2,500 years of living as a minority had taught them to keep quiet. “Normally, Jews would stay out of politics,” mom’s brother Bahram, who studied in the Midwest beginning in 1969, told me. “If you were pro-Shah, you had a lot of students against you. If you were against, you had the embassy that would come after you.”
Two people I interviewed — Bahram and one of my dad’s cousins — both said something I can envision my dad also saying: that being Jewish protected them from anti-Iranian hostility on campus.
My dad’s cousin Sohrab, who went to New York’s Queens College, said that when encountering potentially hostile people, he made sure to emphasize being Jewish. “We feel like somebody’s uncomfortable, we made sure we told them first, ‘I am Jewish. I ran away from Iran,’” Sohrab said.
“We are first Jewish, then Iranian.”
What my dad and I never talked about
When my dad was 22, and a senior at the University of Missouri, his native country erupted into violence.
More than 40 years after the revolution, I sat in my college dorm, reading back issues of the Columbia Missourian, imagining my dad as a young, longish-haired man following the news from afar.
December 1978: “2 million protesters hit Tehran.” February 1979: “10,000 dead in Iran’s crisis.” March: “Firing squads execute 13 in Iran.” As the revolution took place, so did frequent earthquakes, which also claimed thousands of lives.
The college students who’d risked it all in order to advocate against the Shah seemingly got their way when he fled Iran in January 1979. But they were blindsided by the zealotry of the man who took his place: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shi’ite Muslim cleric who established an Islamic theocracy. He offered a foil to Pahlavi’s friendliness with the West by preaching against the U.S., Israel and imperialism.
After the revolution, the new government tried to assure Iranian Jews that they’d be safe, yet some were executed on trumped-up charges of spying for Israel. My dad’s parents were quick enough to leave by air, landing in Queens. Those who waited too long to emigrate had to pay smugglers to help them over mountainous borders.
When the Mashadi community followed in the footsteps of its sons and immigrated en masse to the U.S., American-educated Mashadi men — now in their 20s and 30s — became informal secretaries, translators, immigration consultants, financial advisors, business consultants, and advocates for higher education, for their own families and for the wider community.
Despite what Sohrab said, de-emphasizing their Iranian origins didn’t always protect the new immigrants from bigotry. Mohsen Mobasher, an anthropologist at the University of Houston-Downtown, told me that because of anti-Iranian hostility that later grew rampant, “some Iranians developed deep feelings of anxiety, suspicion, insecurity and inferiority.”
Once, I asked my dad whether he ever experienced antisemitism or anti-Iranian hostility. He let out a hearty laugh, as though it was ridiculous for me to imagine that he had.
If the question was ridiculous, it was only because I asked it so casually; just as I might ask him to do my laundry or cut me a pineapple. It was as if I’d asked him to synthesize his whole experience of identity into some set of words that might satisfy me. My dad did not see fit to tell me, a girl he was charged with protecting, about times in his life when he may have felt small.
Singled out by the federal government
In November 1979, months after my dad graduated, a group of Iranian militant college students took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 66 Americans hostage. The hostage crisis gave way to unprecedented levels of anti-Iranian sentiment in the U.S., and the animus fell hardest on college students. Members of Congress introduced resolutions calling for all Iranian students to be deported. At Mizzou, one professor announced that he would no longer advise Iranian students.
On Nov. 10, President Jimmy Carter ordered immigration checks on all Iranian college students in the U.S., saying that anyone found to be violating the terms of their student visa would be deported. More than 200 Mizzou students were told to report to an immigration office in Kansas City. To some of these students, the visa checks felt wrong, and they refused to participate.
“I would feel like a criminal,” an Iranian student who did not report told the Missourian.
“This is discrimination — singling out one nationality and investigating them,” said another, who also refused to participate in the check.
By this time, my dad had moved to St. Louis, where he was working for the chemical manufacturer Olin Corporation. But he still had to report for the visa checks. He had a visa for students and recent graduates who were gaining practical training in their field of study. In December, he received a frantic letter from Carl Leistner, the international student program coordinator at Mizzou, telling him to report to Kansas City the following week.
“I regret this delayed notice,” Leistner wrote in the letter. “However, we simply overlooked our practical training students in the rush associated with the registration of our 258 currently enrolled students from Iran.”
My dad traveled more than 200 miles for his interview, but when he arrived, he was sent home. A federal judge had ruled the visa checks were unconstitutional. If that ruling was overturned, my father was told, he might have to come back for an interview later.
Back on the Mizzou campus, some 600 students held a protest where some students advocated “deporting all Iranians from the United States.” “Deport, deport,” the crowd chanted at one point.
By being away from campus, my dad managed to evade these sorts of protests, plus other horrors that befell his collegiate counterparts. Abe Manzour, an Iranian American Jew who was my dad’s classmate at the University of Missouri, was still earning his degree.
“Sometimes, we were scared to go outside,” Abe told me over Zoom in 2021. “I almost got beat up by some guys on the street because they knew I was Iranian.”
Scared to go outside? Almost got beat up? Despite everything I had already read about anti-Iranian hostility, I was still surprised. What Abe was describing seemed a world apart from tales my dad used to tell — stories of beer, women and football games, which would’ve taken place just months beforehand.
“My dad always talked about his time in college,” I said. “He made it sound like the best thing ever.”
“For me it was, too,” Abe said.
A conservative enclave
Growing up in Great Neck, I lived a life very different from my dad’s. Our suburb was full of Iranian Jews, and until I was 18, I rarely ever left it. He was worldly; I was provincial, and in my senior year of high school, as I applied for college, I could no longer contain my jealousy.
“Can I apply to UC Berkeley?” I asked him one Sunday afternoon during my senior year, while he was making “early-bird breakfast.” I knew he’d say no, but wanted to see him squirm.
“I don’t see! I don’t see!”
“Dad!”
“Bache nazaideem ke befresteemesh Ca-lee-forn-yaw!” — “We didn’t have a child so that we could ship her off to California!”
“I know two people who sent their son to college on a different continent!”
“That was over 10 years ago!” At 61, my dad enjoyed describing events of his youth as having taken place “over 10 years ago.”
I never applied to Berkeley; instead, I stayed close to home and went to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan. For better or worse, my life would be different from my dad’s, in ways that were tied up with the increasingly conservative nature of our community.
In Tehran, Mashadi Jews lived scattered around the city. In Great Neck, Mashadis are neighbors and attend a set of synagogues all within a mile of each other. And many Mashadi Jews in Great Neck have become more religious than their ancestors in Tehran were.
When most people think of assimilation, they envision people becoming more secular and better educated. But most Jewish people in Great Neck — Mashadi and otherwise — have assimilated into a different yet equally compelling idea of America, one that emphasizes religious freedom over other aspects of American culture.
In the Midwest, Mashadi men learned the valuable lesson that Abe Manzour expressed: that it’s possible to experience happiness and personal growth in the midst of a hostile environment. Years later, when they moved to Great Neck, their environment rendered that wisdom useless, like a vestigial organ at risk of evolutionary disappearance.
To the men who’d left Iran to study abroad, we, their children, must have at times seemed narrow-minded and irredeemably young. Especially when I think about my dad’s life, I sometimes resent that I wasn’t allowed to go to California and feel embarrassed to have attended a commuter school.
What made me want to study his life was a binary I imagined between him — worldly — and me — ignorant. But actually, I don’t really believe that a binary between cosmopolitanism and provincialism captures the nuances entailed in our father-daughter relationship. And I don’t believe that being poorly traveled is the same as being ignorant.
Regardless of where one lives or visits, there are many different ways to be ignorant, and many different ways to learn something new.
The post After my dad died, I discovered a lost history of Iranian Jews in the US appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The stepchildren in the upcoming Israeli elections
דעם 27סטן אָקטאָבער וועלן פֿאָרקומען די וואַלן אין ישׂראל. 38 פּאָליטישע פּאַרטייען האָבן זיך פֿאַרשריבן צו פּרובירן געווינען וואָס מער פֿון די 120 מעגלעכע ערטער אין דער כּנסת. אין די פֿריערדיקע וואַלן, האָבן קאַנדידירט 40 פּאַרטייען. לויט דעם געזעץ, מוז מען געווינען גענוג וואַלן אויף כאָטש פֿיר (4) דעפּוטאַטן — דאָס הייסט 3.25% פֿון דעם סך־הכּל פֿון אַלע מענטשן וואָס האָבן אָנגעגעבן „כּשרע“ שטימעס.
אין די פֿריערדיקע וואַלן האָבן 70.83% פֿון אַלע בירגער אין לאַנד מיט שטימרעכט (4,764,742 פֿון 6,788,804) דערמעגלעכט 10 פֿון 40 פּאַרטייען אַרײַנצוטרעטן אין דער כּנסת. דעמאָלט האָט מען געדאַרפֿט האָבן בערך 153,000 שטימען כּדי אַ פּאַרטיי זאָל קענען אַרײַנפֿירן זייערע ערשטע פֿיר דעפּוטאַטן אין דער כּנסת. הײַנט, מיט 4 יאָר שפּעטער, וועט מען מסתּמא דאַרפֿן באַקומען נעענטער צו 200,000 שטימען.
ווי עס זאָל ניט זײַן, קעמפֿן די גרויסע פּאַרטייען פֿאַר יעדער שטימע, און באַמיען זיך פּטור צו ווערן און דערשטיקן די מעגלעכקייטן פֿון יענע קלענערע פּאַרטייען וואָס וועלן אפֿשר ניט דערגיין צו דעם מינימום פֿון 3.75% — און דערבײַ ׳אַוועקפּטרן׳ שטימען פֿון זייערע טראַדיציאָנעלע, סעקטאָריאַלע שטיצערס (למשל פֿרומע-פֿרײַע, רעכטע-לינקע, ייִדן-ניט-ייִדן).
הײַ-יאָר איז בכלל אַ גרויסער מיש-מאַש פֿון פּאַרטייען. פֿאַראַן נײַע שפּילערס וואָס ענדערן דאָס דעמאָגראַפֿישע און סעקטאָריאַלע פּנים פֿון געוויסע טראַדיציאָנאַלע פּאַרטייען, אָדער פֿון נײַע פּאַרטייען וואָס זײַנען ערשט אויפֿגעקומען. למשל, צו דער אַראַבישער/איסלאַמישער פּאַרטיי „רע׳ם“ האָט זיך צוגעשטעלט אַ ייִד — יואבֿ סגלוביץ (סעגאַלאָוויטש) — וואָס איז אַ געוועזענער הויפּט פֿון דער ישׂראל־פּאָליציי, אַ פֿיגור מיט וויכטיקע דערגרייכונגען.
„עמך ישראל“ – שטיפֿקינד פֿון די רעכטע
אויף דער רעכטער זײַט פֿון דער פּאָליטישער מאַפּע איז אַנטשטאַנען אַ נײַע פּאַרטיי, „עמך ישראל“, פֿון עופֿר ווינטער, אַ געוועזענער גענעראַל־בריגאַדיר. זײַן שותּף, דער צווייטער אין זײַן רשימה, איז יוסוף חדד (כאַדאַד), אַ קריסטלעכער אַראַבער וואָס איז אין דער צײַט פֿון דער צווייטער לבֿנון־מלחמה פֿון 2006, געווען אַן אָפֿיציר אין דער גולני דיוויזיע פֿון צה״ל. קעמפֿנדיק פֿאַר ישׂראל, איז ער שטאַרק פֿאַרוווּנדיקט געוואָרן. ער איז אויך באַקאַנט אויף דער סאָציאַלער מעדיאַ בײַם העלדיש פֿאַרטיידיקן מדינת־ישׂראל קעגן אַנטי-ציוניסטן און אַנטיסעמיטן. ווינטערס ציל איז, אַרײַנברענגען פֿרישע בלוט אין די רייען פֿון די רעכט-געשטימטע פּאַרטייען.
די פּאַרטיי ווערט פּראָיעקטירט צוצונעמען שטימען פֿון דער גרעסערער „ליכּוד“־פּאַרטיי, געפֿירט פֿון בנימין נתּניהו. לויט די מערסטע שטים־אַנטקעטעס ביז הײַנט, וועט „עמך ישראל“ ניט דערגרייכן די געהעריקע 3.75% און אַלע שטימען וועלן דערפֿאַר פֿאַרלוירן גיין. עס ווערט דעריבער איצט געפֿירט אַ גאָר שטאַרקע אַקציע פֿון דער ליכּוד פּאַרטיי אַז „עמך ישראל“ (און אויך נאָך עטלעכע קליינע רעכט-געשטימטע פּאַרטייען) זאָל זיך אָפּזאָגן פֿון אָנטיילנעמען אין די וואַלן. עופר ווינטערס קעגנערס האָבן שוין מצליח געווען אָפּצושרעקן איינעם פֿון די 4 וויכטיקסטע קאַנדידאַטן פֿון „עמך ישראל“, וואָס האָט זיך די טעג אָפּגעזאָגט פֿון קאַנדידירן.
„מילואימניקים„ (רעזערוויסטן) מיט „כּלכּלית„ (עקאָנאָמיע) – „וואָס“, ניט „ווער“
ווען מע קוקט אויף אַ גראַפֿיש בילד פֿון ווי די 120 כּנסת־ערטער ווערן אײַנגעטיילט צווישן די פֿאַרשיידענע פּאַרטייען — לויט די טעגלעכע שטים־אַנטקעטעס — זעט מען דאָס אײַנגעטיילט אויף דרײַ חלקים. פֿון איין זײַט, זעט מען די מעגלעכע צאָל קאַנדידאַטן פֿון דער איצטיקער קאָאַליציע (וואָס נעמט אַרײַן „ליכּוד„ צוזאַמען מיט די חרדישע און אַנדערע רעכט־געשטימטע פּאַרטייען). פֿון דער אַנדערער זײַט, זעט מען די צאָל מעגלעכע קעגנער (סײַ צענטריסטישע, סײַ לינקע, סײַ רעכטע פּאַרטייען) וואָס ווילן פֿאַרבײַטן די איצטיקע רעגירונג פֿון נתּניהון. דער דריטער בלאָק באַשטייט פֿון די אַראַבישע פּאַרטייען. פֿאַראַן אָבער — אין געוויסע פֿון די דיאַגראַמעס — אַ פֿערטע גרופּע, וואָס געהערט צו אַ ספּעציפֿישער פּאַרטיי וואָס פֿירט גאָר אַן אַנדערע פּאָליטיק פֿון די אַנדערע.
צוויי נײַע פּאַרטייען לייגן אָבער פֿאָר עפּעס גאָר אַנדערש פֿון די טראַדיציאָנאַלע רעכטע און לינקע פּאַרטייען: יועז הנדל (יאָאַז הענדל) פֿון דער „המילואימניקים“ (רעזערוויסטן) פּאַרטיי בשותפֿות מיט ירון זליכה (זאַליכאַ) פֿון דער „הכּלכּלית„ (עקאָנאָמיע) פּאַרטיי. זיי וואַרפֿן אָפּ די פּאָלאַריזירטע געדאַנקען און האָבן אֶ פּלאַטפֿאָרמע וועלכע שטעלט דעם טראָפּ אויף „וואָס“ מע דאַרף טאָן. דעם „ווער“ עס דאַרף דאָס אַדורכפֿירן איז ווייניקער וויכטיק – ספּעציעל וואָס אין דער הײַנטיקער פּאָליטיק איז שוין ניט קלאָר ווער עס איז אויף וועלכער זײַט פֿונעם פּאָליטישן ספּעקטרום.
די פּאַרטיי האָט זיך פֿון אָנהייב געוואַקלט בײַ 3.75%, אָבער אין די לעצטע וואַל-אַנקעטעס זעט אויס אַז זיי וועלן ניט נאָר דערגרייכן די געוווּנטשענע פֿיר דעפּוטאַטן, נאָר זיי שטרעבן אויף אַפֿילו נאָך מער. דאָס קען גוט זײַן דערפֿאַר, וואָס צו דער רעזערוויסטן־פּאַרטיי איז צוגעשטאַנען עינת ווילף — אַ באַגאַבטע פֿיגור וואָס איז זייער אָפֿן־האַרציק מיט אירע געדאַנקען. (מע קען זי אָפֿט טרעפֿן אויף דער סאָציאַלער מעדיאַ פאַרטיידיקנדיק מדינת־ישׂראל קעגן אונדזערע שׂונאים).
ווילף האָט אַליין געשאַפֿן אַ פּאָליטישע פּאַרטיי „עוֹז“ וואָס איז זייער ציוניסטיש געשטימט, און וועמענס אידעאָלאָגיע פּאַסט זיך גוט צו צו די פֿון אירע שותּפים הענדל און זליכה. יעדער ישׂראלדיקער בירגער דאַרף דורכמאַכן אַ מדינה־דינסט (ניט דווקא אַ מיליטערישע): מענער און פֿרויען, ייִדן, און ניט-ייִדן. זי דריקט אויך אויס אַנדערע געדאַנקען ווי אַזוי צו פֿאַרבעסערן דעם מצב סײַ וואָס שײַך דער זיכערקייט, סײַ דערציִונג, סײַ דער ישׂראלדיקער עקאָנאָמיע. איר פּאַרטייס נאָמען, „עוֹז“, איז אינספּירירט פֿון די ווערטער „יהוה עוז לעמו יתן יהוה יברך את עמו בשלום“ (ספֿר תּהילים) …
און נאָך אַ זאַך: יועז הענדלס פּאַרטיי, „די פֿאַראייניקטע ליסטע“, איז די איינציקע, אויף וויפֿל מיר ווייסן, וואָס האָט אַ לאָזונג אויף ייִדיש. אין אַ געוויסן זינען קלינגט עס ווי עפּעס, וואָס דער אַמעריקאַנער פּרעזידענט דזשאָן עף. קענעדי וואָלט געזאָגט: „פֿרעגט ניט ׳ווער׳, נאָר ׳וואָס׳ מע מוז טאָן פאַר דער מדינה.“
The post The stepchildren in the upcoming Israeli elections appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
In Oct. 7 blame game, former Shin Bet chief sues Netanyahu ahead of elections
(JTA) — The bitter battle that has raged between Israel’s security and political establishments over who bears responsibility for the failures ahead of the Oct. 7 attacks is kicking into high gear as Israel prepares to hold its first election since the Hamas invasion in 2023.
This week, former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar upped the stakes by filing a defamation lawsuit against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The premier has blamed the intelligence head for the failures leading up to the attack even as many in the security establishment have pointed the finger at Netanyahu. Bar in his lawsuit lists a litany of occasions Netanyahu allegedly ignored or rejected advice that might have prevented the attacks.
In the run-up to the national vote on Oct. 27, Israeli media have been preoccupied with reports of intelligence that was purportedly shared with top government officials ahead of the attacks. What Netanyahu knew about the Hamas threat before the invasion — and when he knew it — has become a central issue in the campaign and a line of attack for his political rivals.
Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the Yashar party and Netanyahu’s leading challenger, said in response to the lawsuit that “Netanyahu was warned and did not act,” and that he would not allow Netanyahu to “evade the truth.” Opposition leader Yair Lapid said that “Netanyahu can no longer claim that he didn’t know,” while Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing “The Democrats” party, said Netanyahu’s responsibility for “the worst massacre in Israel’s history is direct and clear.”
A range of political and security leaders who were in charge at the time have assumed responsibility and left their posts: Among them are Bar, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and military intelligence chief Aharon Haliva.
Not Netanyahu. He has rejected accusations that he is responsible for the failures even as he has prevented the establishment of a state commission of inquiry to investigate those responsible. He has argued that such a commission, whose members would be appointed by the president of the Supreme Court, as is traditionally the case in Israel, would be biased and would not enjoy public trust.
Beyond blaming the security establishment, Netanyahu has also sought to shift responsibility onto political rivals and previous governments. He has pointed to the actions, or failure to act, of political opponents, including Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett and Benny Gantz, when they held senior positions, as well as Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, as factors that contributed to the Oct. 7 massacre.
In the lawsuit itself, Bar accuses Netanyahu of “trying to rewrite history and completely evade his responsibility for the events of Oct. 7.” The filing sets out a series of alleged warnings Bar gave Netanyahu before the attack, as well as Netanyahu’s alleged refusal to adopt Bar’s recommendations for offensive action in the months leading up to the massacre.
The lawsuit details more than a dozen instances in which Bar allegedly warned of Hamas’ growing strength and its intentions to attack Israel, alongside repeated recommendations that Netanyahu take more aggressive action against the group.
Among the warnings cited in the lawsuit, Bar said he presented Netanyahu in January of 2023 with his assessment that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar wanted a multifront campaign against Israel.
In February, Bar allegedly sent Netanyahu a personal letter warning that terrorist organizations saw an opportunity to act and that the combination of Israel’s internal divisions and instability in the Palestinian arena could bring the country closer to a “perfect storm.”
In July, Bar said he told Netanyahu directly that he was conveying a strategic warning of war.
In September, he allegedly warned that Hamas wanted to escalate the conflict during October.
Netanyahu responded to the lawsuit in a post on X, addressing one specific claim in the filing: that he had never given Bar his personal phone number.
“Ronen, are you serious? You had my red phone number and could have called me immediately, as all heads of the security establishment do,” Netanyahu wrote. “How many lives could we have saved if only you had called in time.” Netanyahu has claimed recently that had security officials awoken him earlier on Oct. 7, he would have somehow stemmed the attack.
Bar’s suit also alleges that he consistently recommended initiating offensive operations against Hamas, including a “preemptive strike” and targeted killings. According to the lawsuit, Netanyahu strongly opposed those recommendations because he wanted to keep Hamas as a secondary concern. Bar also said Netanyahu reprimanded him for dealing with “strategy.”
“The defendant had been in a state of slumber for many long months beforehand and refused to wake up despite the alarm bells the plaintiff sounded in his ears incessantly,” the lawsuit alleges, alluding to Netanyahu’s plaints that he was not awoken early on Oct. 7. “The gap between the professional warnings and recommendations the plaintiff presented to the defendant and the response the defendant gave them is beyond comprehension.”
The defamation claim focuses in particular on a post Netanyahu published on X late last month, in which he claimed that Bar “knew about the real danger” in the early hours of Oct. 7 but chose not to wake him or take other preventive measures. Netanyahu accused Bar of trying to shift responsibility for “all of Ronen Bar’s failures and crimes” onto him.
In a press statement after filing the suit Wednesday, Bar called Netanyahu’s post a “blood libel” and announced that he was suing for 3 million shekels ($968,500) in damages and seeking a correction of Netanyahu’s statements.
Bar repeatedly emphasized in the lawsuit that he was not seeking to absolve himself or the Shin Bet of responsibility for the failures that led to the Oct. 7 massacre. Rather, he said, the suit was a response to Netanyahu’s attempt to “shift the responsibility exclusively onto Bar.”
“I waited quietly for three years for the establishment of a commission of inquiry that would finally expose the Shin Bet’s work, alongside its failures, in the face of an ongoing blood libel,” Bar said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In Oct. 7 blame game, former Shin Bet chief sues Netanyahu ahead of elections appeared first on The Forward.
