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‘Fleishman is in Trouble’ hits FX Thursday. Just don’t call it a Jewish series, says its creator.
(JTA) — From Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s point of view, her best-selling 2019 novel “Fleishman Is in Trouble” wasn’t all that Jewish. She’s a little perplexed by the deluge of press junket questions about its Jewish essence.
“It’s funny: I don’t think of it as a Jewish book. I know people do,” she said.
Brodesser-Akner, a journalist famous for her sharp celebrity profiles, is now the showrunner of the book’s star-studded TV adaptation, an 8-episode FX series that debuts on Hulu on Thursday. In the story, Toby Fleishman (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is a 41-year-old Jewish hepatologist who has recently divorced Rachel (Claire Danes), his ambitious, icy, blonde theater agent wife. Early on in the story, Rachel disappears in the middle of the night, leaving Toby with their two children and a truckload of resentment. Toby, who had a nebbishy and romantically insecure youth before marrying Rachel, is now drowning in the sexual bounty of dating apps.
On Zoom, Brodesser-Akner was speaking a few days after the show’s blowout bash at Carnegie Hall and Tavern on the Green, an iconic Central Park restaurant. “I’ve never been to an event like that. It was 600 people,” she said. It sounded like a scene that could have been plucked right from “Fleishman,” which is set on the extremely wealthy Upper East Side, and in which the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood are at odds with the ambitions and personal longings of its middle-aged characters.
Brodesser-Akner, 47, who was both adrenalized and a little frazzled, had to balance the premiere with parenting duties — she’s a mother of two boys, ages 15 and 12. “I’m still picking sequins from my teeth.”
As a writer, Brodesser-Akner likes to play with the power of subjectivity, and she built “Fleishman” on it. Though the story begins as Toby’s, it eventually morphs into a “Rashomon”-esque take on the divorce and what really went wrong in the Fleishmans’ marriage. The story is narrated by Libby (Lizzy Caplan), Toby’s friend from their year abroad in Israel. A former men’s magazine writer, Libby is now a lost and frustrated stay-at-home mom in suburban New Jersey (and a stand-in for Brodesser-Akner). Adam Brody steals scenes as Seth, an immature finance bro and another year-in-Israel friend with whom Toby reconnects after the divorce. (His presence is a homecoming of sorts for those of us who spent our tween years watching him play a different Seth in “The O.C.”)
“I don’t think of it as a Jewish book,” says Taffy Brodesser-Akner.
Brodesser-Akner pieced together the story’s Jewish elements: a doctor named Fleishman, a bat mitzvah, Friday night dinners, a year abroad in Israel, a few jokes about Jews being bad at home repairs (which is the subject of a very funny scene in episode six between Toby and Seth). There are a few insidery details that she fails to mention, like a fake Jewish sleepaway camp called Camp Marah, which sounds like the real Camp Ramah but roughly translates to “Camp Bitter” in Hebrew. Does all this add up to a “Jewish” story?
“I read ‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen, and it mentions Christmas I think 47 times. I read ‘Crossroads’ and it’s about the family of a youth minister. But neither of those is ever called a Christian book. This is called a Jewish book. I don’t object to it being called a Jewish book. But to me it’s mostly an American story. As a writer and as an observer of the culture, I think that calling this a Jewish book is proof of the answer to an old question: are Jews considered Americans? And the answer is no.” She threw in her characteristic meta analysis: “So now you have a very Jewish profile. How Jewish is that, Sarah?”
The self-aware comment is a good reminder that although her responses may be unguarded, she has not forgotten that she’s on the record. A name in New York media, Brodesser-Akner wrote for GQ and is now a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, having profiled Gwyneth Paltrow, Ethan Hawke and Tom Hanks and written about the Joshua Cohen novel “The Netanyahus,” the television show “Thirtysomething” and much more. She inserts herself often into her writing, not to make it about herself, but to remind the reader that every profile is by nature filtered through the lens of the writer crafting it. Her writing is searing, self-deprecating — so raw it’s still bleeding and often quite funny.
“I wrote the book the way I would write a profile, just like I always do. But this man doesn’t exist,” she said.
RELATED: 5 Jewish places that inspired Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’
We had tried to meet in person near her home on the Upper West Side, but by the time she was available, I was in Tel Aviv, placing us along the Israel-New York axis on which “Fleishman” is set. When Toby suddenly calls Libby to tell her he’s getting divorced, he catapults her into memories of their early twenties in Jerusalem. Those thoughts make Libby miss the possibilities of her youth, the ones time has ruthlessly and inevitably extinguished. Eventually her longing for her past becomes so overwhelming that it threatens her marriage to her menschy and patient husband, played by Josh Radnor. (For more longing-for-younger-days while in Israel content, Brodesser-Akner wrote a Saveur essay about vegetable soup in Jerusalem — her Proustian madeleine. Interviewing Brodesser-Akner from my friend’s apartment in Tel Aviv, a city where I lived in my twenties, I found the theme of longing for the past hit almost too close to home.)
Part of the reason Brodesser-Akner doesn’t think the “Fleishman” story is all that Jewish is that she doesn’t feel all that Jewish — at least not relative to her mother and sisters, who are aligned with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement and live within a few blocks of each other in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
“I don’t think any writer has ever gotten it right,” she says of her Jewish background. “They say I was raised Orthodox. It’s interesting because it always makes me look like the black sheep in my family, when really they are. I’m exactly how I was raised to be until I was 12.”
After her mother, a secular Israeli, and her father, a Conservative Long Islander, divorced, her mother put Brodesser-Akner and her sisters in Jewish school. Some Jewish observance trickled back to her mother, who ended up going the Chabad route.
“My mom had never been inside a synagogue until the day she married my father. Now that is what we call ironic,” Brodesser-Akner said.
Brodesser-Akner’s two sisters followed, and her mother eventually remarried and had another child, the only sibling born into a religious household.
“The thing that made me a journalist was being raised in a home where, at age 12, I was relegated to observer. I had to learn how to understand other people’s points of view. And now that’s what I do,” she said.
Despite their religious differences — Brodesser-Akner attends an Orthodox synagogue but sends her children to an unaffiliated Jewish school and says she wakes up “every morning with new ideas” — the author is very close with her family, and her sisters were at the “Fleishman” premiere.
“They were at the premiere of my perverted sex show,” she joked with a laugh referring to the Hulu series, which features some sexual content as Toby explores the post-divorce New York dating scene. “They show up for me and I show up for them. I have my challenges with it, but I think their challenges must be greater. They never say this to me, but they must think that my life is comparatively…” She looked away thoughtfully, trying to find the right words. “They must think my lifestyle is comparatively less worthwhile. But we really love each other.”
To Brodesser-Akner, the most Jewish show on television is “The Patient,” which she calls “the best show I have seen in 100 years.” And that’s not because it (like “Fleishman”) is on FX. “I’m not that kind of interview!” she said.
Lizzy Caplan plays Toby’s friend Libby. (FX Networks)
“It’s the most Jewish show in all of the Jewish ways. It grapples with a Jewish prisoner; with the difference between a Conservative Jewish female cantor whose son becomes ultra-Orthodox — I’d never seen that on screen. It was kind of the only relatable Jewish matter I’ve ever seen. People ask me if I’ve watched ‘Shtisel.’ And I always say, I’m in the 47th season of an ultra-Orthodox family drama myself and not really interested!” She laughed. “But also I think of the other Jewish matters on television, which are adapted memoirs of people who were ultra-Orthodox and now aren’t. It’s like no one can imagine religious people being happy in their lives. And that’s really shocking to me. My family is very happy.”
Brodesser-Akner wound up with her dream cast: she had a list of five actors — Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Danes, Josh Radnor and Adam Brody — and no backup plan. She noted the fact that viewers have seen them grow up on screen as one reason they were right for the roles. For many, watching Caplan, Eisenberg and Brody sit across from each other in a diner will feel like a camp reunion, the fulfillment of a Jewish television fantasy they never knew they had.
“One thing that we were trying to get across is ‘how could it be that I am this old when I was once this young?’ And the fact that you have a memory of Claire from ‘My So-Called Life,’ or Jesse from ‘The Squid and the Whale’ — that does so much of the work of the show without writing a word,” Brodesser-Akner said.
Besides Danes (who plays the only main character with a non-Jewish parent, whom the book makes clear she resembles) the lead actors are all Jewish — a notable fact in a time when Jewish representation on screen, and who should be allowed to play Jewish characters, is the subject of continued debate.
Last month, New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum, who is Jewish, tweeted, “There is a simple solution to the question of whether various non-Jewish actors are allowed to play Jews & that is to ask me.” Brodesser-Akner responded to the tweet, writing “[Non-Jew] Oscar Isaac in Scenes from a Marriage is the best ex-ortho I ever saw on screen!”
About casting Jewish actors, Brodesser-Akner noted a legal issue rarely mentioned in the representation debate: one can cast based on looks, but it’s illegal in the United States to cast based on religion. She took this very seriously.
“I spoke to [‘The Plot Against America’ director] David Simon about it and he said, ‘They’re actors. You let them act.’ And I agree with that. The question that I asked myself was who was perfect for it?” she said.
Even if Brodesser-Akner rejects the claim that “Fleishman” is a definitively Jewish story, wasn’t she consciously playing with some Philip Roth-inspired Jewish archetypes? Toby the nice Jewish doctor, the devoted, idealistic dad who’s also self-righteous, horny and insecure.
No, she insists she wasn’t. But also Philip Roth is so ingrained in her that who’s to say? And isn’t the question flawed in the first place?
“All I can say is that I am made out of Philip Roth. I’m so formed by his books. I actually would say that you have a bias in the asking of your question, in that you’re Jewish too. And you also are made out of Philip Roth books since you’re a writer. Again, that goes back to the same question as ‘are we American?’ To me, Toby is not ‘a Jewish guy.’ He’s just a guy! He’s the kind of guy I know! I was just trying to be myself.”
“Fleishman is in Trouble” premieres its first two episodes on Hulu on Nov. 17. It will release each of its six remaining episodes weekly on Thursdays.
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The post ‘Fleishman is in Trouble’ hits FX Thursday. Just don’t call it a Jewish series, says its creator. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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ICE targets an anti-Israel protester — this time, a Hasidic Jew
(JTA) — Yehonatan Ovadia, an Orthodox Jew from the anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic sect, has joined a number of protests around New York and New Jersey against Israel.
Now, he’s at risk of being deported there.
Ovadia, 35, is originally from Israel and moved to the U.S. on a temporary religious worker visa in 2022, according to the text of a lawsuit requesting Ovadia’s release. His legal status in the U.S. was revoked earlier this year in connection with a November 2023 protest that he attended during which an Israeli flag was taken down from the town hall of Ramapo, New York. Ovadia said he was there but did not tear down the flag, and hate crimes charges against him were dropped.
But after a request to extend his stay in the United States was denied on the grounds of that protest, according to government documents shared with JTA, Ovadia was detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in August, and remains in ICE custody in New York.
“In violation of our nation’s laws, he overstayed his welcome and refused to depart,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “He will receive due process and remain in ICE custody pending the outcome of his immigration proceedings.”
ICE’s nationwide surge affected the area’s Jewish community earlier this year when the agency detained Ari Ladino, a Jewish bridal shop owner in Teaneck, New Jersey, and his mother. Both are originally from Bogota, Colombia.
Ovadia’s arrest by ICE comes as President Donald Trump’s administration has cracked down on pro-Palestinian activism, including with last year’s high-profile detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent pro-Palestinian protest leader at Columbia University. The administration has accused Khalil and other pro-Palestinian activists and campus protesters of antisemitism.
Such an accusation would be particularly fraught against Ovadia, who is Jewish and holds anti-Israel views for religious reasons. Satmar Jews believe that a state of Israel cannot be established before the arrival of the Messiah.
In a lawsuit filed in August requesting Ovadia’s release, his lawyers argued that the Trump administration was penalizing him for protected speech motivated by religious beliefs. The government took “an official position,” Ovadia’s lawyers wrote, by preferring “one religious position within Judaism and [penalizing] an adherent of another.”
Unlike many Satmar Jews, who oppose Israel but are not active in political pro-Palestinian spaces, Ovadia has protested against Israel a number of times, including alongside members of the pro-Palestinian Hasidic group Neturei Karta.
His lawyer, Eric Lee, shared a statement from Ovadia on Wednesday after The New York Times broke the story of his detention: “From the Jewish people to our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank and all over occupied Palestine! We didn’t forget from you! We are following you and we know that you are facing genocide! Please be strong and continue to believe!
“We know that the Zionist criminal war machine [is] torturing you every day and they want to silence you!” Ovadia said in his statement. “BUT we will be your voice! We will SHOUT AND DEMONSTRATE for you from New York, Washington, Canada, London and from every place that we can be free in the world!”
Chris Godshall-Bennet, another lawyer representing Ovadia, told JTA that the timeline on his client’s possible deportation is unclear, but the government designated Israel as “the location to which they would try to deport him” during a hearing on Wednesday morning.
Ovadia was one of two Hasidic men arrested in 2023 after a larger group protested outside Ramapo’s town hall, where an Israeli flag had been mounted a month earlier, shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. Surveillance footage showed at least four men removing the flag and then cutting it up with scissors, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s notice of denial to Ovadia. He denied having any role in removing the Israeli flag or knowing ahead of time that his companions would do so.
He was arrested and charged with criminal mischief, petit larceny and conspiracy, all as hate crimes. The hate crime charges were dropped and in February 2024 he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, according to his lawsuit, resulting in a $200 fine plus an additional $125 charge.
“I said, ‘You know, I don’t have power, I’m out of money, I have no time, I am a teacher, I need to teach students every day,’” he told the Times. “‘Let’s end this with disorderly conduct.’”
With his religious worker visa set to expire in November 2025, Ovadia applied for a new visa in September, sponsored by Congregation Bnai Yoel in New York’s Orange County, according to USCIS denial notice. USCIS did not deny the request for the work visa, and said that Ovadia was not found to be “inadmissible” for a “conviction or commission of a crime involving moral turpitude.” But the federal agency did not approve the request either, and denied Ovadia an “extension of stay” in the country “as a matter of discretion,” citing the 2023 protest; without an extension of stay, Ovadia had no legal status in the U.S. following his visa’s November expiration.
The DHS said that it is “a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live in the United States of America.”
“The Trump Administration acted well within its statutory and constitutional authority, as it does with any alien who advocates for violence, glorifies and supports terrorists, harasses Jews, and steals property,” DHS wrote.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ICE targets an anti-Israel protester — this time, a Hasidic Jew appeared first on The Forward.
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French far-right leader accused of antisemitism, defended by Israeli minister
(JTA) — A French far-right leader is battling antisemitism allegations days after his party made historic gains in the country’s Senate elections — and an Israeli cabinet minister has come to his defense.
Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s nationalist, anti-immigration National Rally, came under fire this week for accusations that he made antisemitic remarks in private messages.
The controversy arose after the National Rally, whose leaders have sought to distance the party from the antisemitic roots of its founders, jumped to at least 14 seats in the French Senate elections on Sunday. The results meant the party and its allies surpassed the 10-seat threshold to form a parliamentary group in the upper house for the first time.
The Senate will remain controlled by a traditional conservative and center-right alliance, though that bloc lost several seats. The National Rally’s progress will give it more funding and better representation in leadership roles and committees.
Mediapart, a left-leaning French investigative outlet, reported on Monday that Bardella years ago allegedly sent antisemitic statements, including messages that said “all the banks are owned by Jews” and “the Jew must dominated (sic) other peoples, crush them and rob them, a Zionist is necessarily and profoundly Jewish.”
The messages were allegedly sent between 2013 and 2015, during Bardella’s early years in the party, then called the National Front. He joined the party in 2012 at age 16.
Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, who invited Bardella to a Jerusalem conference on antisemitism in 2025, defended him against the allegations. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he knows Bardella personally and that they are in regular contact.
Even if the quotes attributed to Bardella were authenticated, Chikli said, “a man is not sealed at 17. What matters is the 15 years that followed, and the man he became.”
Chikli referenced Bardella’s visit to the sites where Hamas killed Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. He said that Bardella spoke in Jerusalem “against antisemitism and against anti-Zionism” and opposed President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state.
“No one will convince me that Jordan Bardella hates the Jewish people or the Jewish state,” said Chikli. “Just as no one will convince me that Emmanuel Macron respects them.”
Mediapart, which has a history of exposing political scandals, said it independently authenticated Bardella’s alleged conversations and drew them from a larger base of evidence corroborated by witness accounts. JTA has not independently verified the messages.
Bardella said on X that the alleged conversations were “blatant falsehoods” designed to undermine the National Rally ahead of France’s presidential election in April 2027. Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s presidential candidate, is polling in first place as Macron prepares to step down because of term limits.
Mediapart, which has a history of exposing political scandals, said it independently authenticated Bardella’s alleged conversations and drew them from a larger base of evidence corroborated by witness accounts. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has not independently verified the messages.
Bardella said on X that the alleged conversations were “blatant falsehoods” designed to undermine the National Rally ahead of France’s presidential election in April 2027. Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s presidential candidate, is polling in first place as Emmanuel Macron prepares to step down because of term limits. Le Pen and Bardella have led the National Rally as a duo, and Bardella was set to be the party’s candidate until a July court ruling, which upheld criminal financial charges against Le Pen while also lifting a ban on her seeking public office. She has said she would name Bardella prime minister if she wins.
Bardella also said at a parliamentary meeting on Tuesday that he plans to take legal action against Mediapart, including possible complaints for forgery and forged documents, and accused the outlet of waging “total war” against his party. Le Pen, sitting next to Bardella, said that she had “absolute confidence” in him.
Israel’s Chikli said on social media that he and Bardella had common enemies. “Like the leftists in Israel, the leftists in France are experts at character assassination,” he said in his post, sharing a photo of himself shaking hands with Bardella at the Nova massacre site.
Chikli has cultivated ties between the Israeli government and European far-right parties, including others that have been criticized for histories of antisemitic and neo-Nazi figures in their ranks, such as Vox in Spain and the Sweden Democrats in Sweden.
Bardella, the National Rally and Chikli did not immediately respond to JTA requests for comment.
Chikli and Bardella both also accused Mediapart of a left-wing agenda. They each noted that the outlet’s co-founder, Edy Plenel, expressed sympathy in 1972 for the Palestinian militant group Black September, which killed 11 Israelis in a terrorist attack at the Munich Olympic Games that year. Plenel later disavowed those comments, which he said he made when he was 20.
Michel Wieviorka, a Jewish French sociologist who researches racism and extremism, told JTA that the antisemitism allegations strike at the heart of the National Rally’s aim to prove their “respectability.”
Le Pen has sought for over a decade to detoxify the party’s image. In 2015, she expelled from the party her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, a co-founder of the National Rally in 1972 who was repeatedly convicted of hate speech and Holocaust denial. Another founder and early leader of the party was Pierre Bousquet, who formerly served in the Nazi Waffen-SS.
Today, support for Israel has become key to the National Rally’s avowed renunciation of its antisemitic past.
“The strategy of [Bardella’s] party is to appear as the best friend of Jews, and Israel,” said Wieviorka.
Bardella invoked his visit to Israel in his denial of the alleged antisemitic messages.
“Since I began my political engagement, I have never had any ambiguity on the subject of the fight against antisemitism, to the point of being received, in 2025, by the Israeli government,” he said on X.
Meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on X that the accusations against Bardella revealed “the true face of the far right.”
“To all those with short memories: antisemitism is not a slip-up for the [National Rally], it is the history of this party,” said Barrot.
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In a time of uncertainty, European Jews renovate synagogues and dedicate Torah scrolls
(JTA) —
Getting a “200-year-old lady” ready for a major debut is quite a task. But in Vienna, the Jewish community’s historic main synagogue made it just in time for the Jewish New Year.
The “lady” — Vienna’s stately Stadttempel synagogue, or City Temple — has been rededicated after more than a year of top-to-bottom renovations, from floors to windows, to the heating and cooling systems, from safety features to restroom facilities. The job cost more than 10 million euros, or $11.3 million.
The synagogue was “still beautiful but has its signs of age,” Rabbi Jaron Engelmayer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a phone interview. “And it wasn’t adequate for some matters of today.”
“The whole concept was sticking to what it was and still is, but it has a new face,” said Engelmayer, who has been chief rabbi of Vienna’s Jewish community since 2020. The Orthodox congregation also inaugurated a new Torah scroll in ceremonies Sept. 15. Parts of it incorporated earlier manuscripts “written in the old synagogue of the Middle Ages in Vienna,” making it a bridge to history, he said.
Large and small, Jewish communities in Europe are marking the season of renewal in concrete ways at a time of uncertainty seeded by antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. In Budapest, the historic Rákospalota synagogue — used as a library warehouse for decades — recently held its first service in its renovated premises. And a 15-member Jewish prayer group in Leipzig has welcomed its first Torah scroll, on a 99-year loan.
All are looking to the future, whether fixing a hole in the roof or dedicating a holy book.
“Jews by definition have to be optimistic,” said Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, head of the Munich-based Conference of European Rabbis, which represents some 800 Orthodox Jewish communities.
“They have no other choice. And having said that, if in the past there was a tendency to say, ‘okay, the situation is bad over here, let’s go somewhere else,’ today, wherever you look, the situation is not good,” he said.
Taking action is more constructive than regretting current circumstances, said Rabbi Elisa Klapheck, head of Germany’s non-Orthodox General Rabbinical Assembly, which has 45 member rabbis. “We can lament antisemitism, we can lament attacks on Jewish communities, but that doesn’t help us,” she said. “So I think on a smaller scale, but maybe a much more resilient scale, the chagim [holidays] have shown that there was a positive atmosphere.”
Ruth Ellen Gruber, developer of the Jewish Heritage Europe portal, a project of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, expressed amazement at the pace of the rehabilitations.
“Despite increasing incidents of antisemitism, there are so many synagogue restoration projects that I cannot keep up,” said Gruber. Whether maintenance or preservation, all are “sign[s] of resilience among Jewish communities, volunteers, researchers, NGOs, civic bodies, and others,” she said in an email to JTA.
Examples include the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue in Constanta, Romania; the grand synagogue in Metz, France; the domed synagogue in Trencin, Slovakia; the Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Larissa, Greece; and the historic Yanbol synagogue in Istanbul.
“Some will serve as museums or cultural centers that usually house Jewish heritage exhibitions; others will serve as venues for both Jewish worship and cultural events,” she said.
In Leipzig, Rabbi Esther Jonas-Maerten doesn’t actually have a synagogue building for her Beth Ez Chaim “Lehrhaus,” a study group that meets in private homes. But she now has a Torah scroll for participants in the program, which is open to all who wish to learn more about Judaism.
The scroll, on a 99-year-loan from the Kehilat Shalom synagogue in Gaithersburg, Maryland, will be formally dedicated in ceremonies on Oct. 4. “That will be the first public event with our new Torah,” Jonas-Maerten, a Conservative rabbi, told JTA in a phone interview.
After a long and fruitless search for a scroll her group could afford, she asked Washington, D.C.-based Rabbi Lauren Tuchman to share her appeal: “I wrote a letter basically saying, ‘Most wanted! A sefer Torah!” Jonas-Maerten recalled. “Within two weeks, I got a response.”
The U.S.-Europe connection has been a fruitful one, when it comes to Torahs.
Last year, the Conservative congregation Ki Tov in Warsaw received the gift of a scroll from New Jersey sister congregation B’nai Sholom/Fair Lawn Jewish Center. The scroll, originally from Europe, was donated in memory of Holocaust survivors.
The independent Berlin-Brandenburg congregation Ohel Hachidush received its first scroll in 2008 from Shir Tikvah in Troy, Michigan, and purchased a second scroll in 2024 from retiring Rabbi Moshe Halfon of Mount Sinai Synagogue in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Both needed repair, especially the first one, Cantor Jalda Rebling, a Jewish Renewal movement ordainee who co-founded Ohel Hachidush with Anna Adam, told JTA.
“Its brokenness is also a symbol, I always say, for our Jewish history here in Europe,” said Rebling, “because all our Jewish lives are broken, and we all love this Torah.”
Vienna’s Jewish community currently has about 12,000 members. Before World War II, it numbered close to 200,000, according to the community’s website. Many fled, and about 47,000 Austrian Jews, most of them from Vienna, were murdered in the Holocaust.
Today’s community is “quite small in numbers, but very highly active and diverse in its traditions,” said Engelmayer, whose mother’s family came from Switzerland and father’s from Poland. “It goes from Ashkenazi to Sephardi, from secular to ultra-Orthodox, and it’s a whole range between. And it feels like a family.”
During Engelmayer’s tenure, “there was the COVID crisis and afterwards the war in Ukraine, which brought a lot of fugitives and refugees to Vienna – also Jews. And of course, the 7th of October, which brought a big rise in antisemitism, which is still being dealt with today.”
Nevertheless, celebrants went “through the streets of Vienna with high hats and proudly Jewish, bringing the new Torah scroll into the restored synagogue,” Engelmayer said: All those challenges led to “an increase of inner strength, of holding together, of answering to the crisis by much more Jewish life and being more active and more visible.”
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