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From ‘how to’ to ‘why bother?’: Michael Strassfeld writes a new guide to being Jewish
(JTA) — “What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.” That’s known as Hansen’s Law, named for the historian Marcus Lee Hansen, who observed that while the children of immigrants tend to run away from their ethnicity in order to join the mainstream, the third generation often wants to learn the “old ways” of their grandparents.
In 1973, “The Jewish Catalog” turned Hansen’s Law into a “do-it-yourself kit” for young Jews who wanted to practice the traditions of their grandparents but weren’t exactly sure how. Imagine “The Joy of Cooking,” but instead of recipes the guide to Jewish living had friendly instructions for hosting Shabbat, building a sukkah and taking part in Jewish rituals from birth to death. Co-edited by Michael Strassfeld, Sharon Strassfeld and the late Richard Siegel, it went on to sell 300,000 copies and remains in print today.
Fifty years later, Rabbi Michael Strassfeld has written a new book that he calls a “bookend” to “The Jewish Catalog.” If the first book is a Jewish “how to,” the latest asks, he says, “why bother?” “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century” asserts that an open society and egalitarian ethics leave most Jews skeptical of the rituals and beliefs of Jewish tradition. In the face of this resistance, he argues that the purpose of Judaism is not obedience to Torah and its rituals for their own sake or mere “continuity,” but to “encourage and remind us to strive to live a life of compassion, loving relationships, and devotion to our ideals.”
Strassfeld, 73, grew up in an Orthodox home in Boston and got his master’s degree in Jewish studies at Brandeis University. Coming to doubt the “faith claims” of Orthodoxy, he became a regular at nearby Havurat Shalom, an “intentional community” that pioneered the havurah movement’s liberal, hands-on approach to traditional practice. He earned rabbinical ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College when he was 41 and went on to serve as the rabbi of Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side and later the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the Manhattan flagship of Reconstructionist Judaism.
“To be disrupted is to experience a break with the past and simultaneously reconnect in a new way to that past,” writes Strassfeld, who retired from the pulpit in 2015. This week, we spoke about why people might find Jewish ritual empty, how he thinks Jewish practices can enrich their lives and how Passover — which begins Wednesday night — could be the key to unlocking the central idea of Judaism.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: I wanted to start with the 50th anniversary of the “Jewish Catalog.” What connects the new book with the work you did back then on the “Catalog,” which was a do-it-yourself guide for Jews who were trying to reclaim the stuff they either did or didn’t learn in Hebrew school?
Michael Strassfeld: I see them as bookends. Basically, I keep on writing the same book over and over again. [Laughs] Except no, I’m different and the world is different. I’m always trying to make Judaism accessible to people. In the “Catalog” I was providing the resources on how to live a Jewish life when the resources weren’t easily accessible.
The new book is less about “how to” than “why bother?” That’s the challenge. I think a lot of people take pride in being Jewish, but it’s a small part of their identity because it doesn’t feel relevant. I want to say to people like that that Judaism is about living a life with meaning and purpose. It’s not about doing what I call the “Jewishly Jewish” things, like keeping kosher and going to synagogue. Judaism is wisdom and practices to live life with meaning and purpose. The purpose of Judaism isn’t to be a good Jew, despite all the surveys that give you 10 points for, you know, lighting Shabbat candles. It’s about being a good person.
So that brings up your relationship to the commandments and mitzvot, the traditional acts and behaviors that an Orthodox Jew or a committed Conservative Jew feels commanded to do, from prayer to keeping kosher to observing the Sabbath and the holidays. They might argue that doing these things is what makes you Jewish, but you’re arguing something different. If someone doesn’t feel bound by these obligations, why do them at all?
I don’t have the faith or beliefs that underlie such an attitude [of obligation]. Halacha, or Jewish law, is not in reality law. It’s really unlike American law where you know that if you’re violating it, you could be prosecuted. What I’m trying to do in the book is reframe rituals as an awareness practice, that is, bringing awareness to various aspects of our lives. So it could be paying attention to food, or cultivating attitudes of gratitude, or generosity, or satisfaction. My broad understanding of the festival cycle, for example, is that you can focus on those attitudes all year long, but the festivals provide a period of time once in the year to really focus on, in the case of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, for example, saying sorry and repairing relationships.
In “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century,” Michael Strassfeld argues that the challenge of each generation’s Jews is to create the Judaism that is needed in their time. (Ben Yehuda Press)
Passover is coming. Probably no holiday asks its practitioners to do so much stuff in preparation, from cleaning the house of every trace of unleavened food to hosting, in many homes, two different catered seminars on Jewish history. Describe how Passover cultivates awareness, especially of the idea of freedom, which plays an important part thematically in your boo
The Sefat Emet [a 19th-century Hasidic master] says Torah is all about one thing: freedom. But there’s a variety of obstacles in the way. There are temptations. There’s the inner issues that you struggle with, and the bad things that are out of your control. The Sefat Emet says the 613 commandments are 613 etzot, or advice, that teach us how to live a life of freedom. The focus of Passover is trying to free yourself from the chains of the things that hold you back from being the person that you could be, not getting caught up in materiality or envy, free from unnecessary anxieties — all these things that distract us or keep us from being who we could be.
The Passover seder is one of the great rituals of Judaism. We’re trying to do a very ambitious thing by saying, not, like, “let’s remember when our ancestors were freed from Egypt,” but rather that we were slaves in Egypt and we went free. And at the seder we actually ingest that. We experience the bitterness by eating maror, the bitter herb. We experience the freedom by drinking wine. We don’t want it just to be an intellectual exercise.
Unfortunately the seder has become rote. But Passover is about this huge theme of freedom that is central to Judaism.
I think some people bristle against ritual because they find it empty. But you’re saying there’s another way to approach rituals which is to think of them as tools or instruments that can help you focus on core principles — you actually list 11 — which include finding holiness everywhere, caring for the planet and engaging in social justice, to name a few. But that invites the criticism, which I think was also leveled at the “Catalog,” that Judaism shouldn’t be instrumental, because if you treat it as a means to an end that’s self-serving and individualistic.
Certainly rituals are tools, but tools in the best sense of the word. They help us pay attention to things in our lives and things in the world that need repair. And people use them not to get ahead in the world, but because they want to be a somewhat better person. I talk a lot these days about having a brief morning practice, and in the book I write about the mezuzah. For most Jews it’s become wallpaper, but what if you take the moment that you leave in the morning, and there’s a transition from home to the outside and to work perhaps, and take a moment at the doorpost to spiritually frame your day? What are the major principles that you want to keep in your mind when you know you’re gonna be stuck in traffic or a difficult meeting?
And a lot of traditional rituals are instrumental. Saying a blessing before you eat is a gratitude practice.
But why do I need a particular Jewish ritual or practice to help me feel gratitude or order my day? Aren’t there other traditions I can use to accomplish the same things?
Anybody who is a pluralist, which I am, knows that the Jewish way is not the only way. If I grew up in India or Indonesia and my parents were locals I probably wouldn’t be a rabbi and writing these books.
But a partial answer to your question is that Judaism is one of the oldest wisdom traditions in the world, and that there has been a 3,000-year conversation by the Jewish people about what it means to live in this tradition and to live in the world. And so I think there’s a lot of wisdom there.
So much in Jewish tradition says boundaries are good, and that it’s important to draw distinctions between what’s Jewish behavior and what’s not Jewish behavior, between the holy and the mundane, and that making those distinctions is a value in itself. But you argue strongly in an early chapter that that kind of binary thinking is not Judaism as you see it.
Underlying the book is the notion that Rabbinic Judaism carried the Jewish people for 2,000 years or so. But we’re living in a very different context, and the binaries, the dualities — too often they lead to hierarchy, so that, for example, men matter more than women in Jewish life. And we’ve tried to change that. We are living in an open society where we want to be more inclusive, not less inclusive. We don’t want to live in ghettos. Now, the ultra-Orthodox say, “No, we realize the danger of trying to live like that. We don’t think there’s anything of value in that modern world. And it’s all to be rejected.” And it would be foolish not to admit that in this very open world the Jews, as a minority, could kind of disappear. But I think that Judaism has so much value and wisdom and practices to offer to people that Judaism will continue to be part of the fabric of this world — the way, for example, we have given Shabbat as a concept to the world.
You know, in the first 11 chapters of the Torah, there are no Jews. So clearly, Jews and Judaism are not essential for the world to exist. And that’s a good, humbling message.
OK, but one could argue that while Jews aren’t necessary for the world to exist, Judaism is necessary for Jews to exist. And you write in your book, “If the Jewish people is to be a people, we need to have a commonly held tradition.” I think the pushback to the kind of openness and permeability you describe is that Jews can be so open and so permeable that they just fall through the holes.
It certainly is a possibility. And it’s also a possibility that the only Jews who will be around will be ultra-Orthodox Jews.
But if Judaism can only survive by being separatist, then I question whether it’s really worthwhile. That becomes a distorted vision of Judaism, and withdrawing is not what it’s meant to be. I think we’re meant to be in the world.
Your book is called “Judaism Disrupted.” What is disruptive about the Judaism that you’re proposing?
I meant it in two ways. First, Judaism is being disrupted by this very different world we’re living in. The contents of the ocean we swim in is very different than in the Middle Ages. But I’m also using it to say that Judaism is meant to disrupt our lives in a positive way, which is to say, “Wake up, pay attention.” You are here to live a life of meaning and purpose, and to continue as co-creators with God of the universe. You’re here to make the world better, to be kind and compassionate to people, to work on yourself. In my mind it is a shofar, “Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep!” “Judaism Disrupted” says you have to pay attention to issues like food, and justice, and teshuva [repentance].
You were ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi. Do you think your book falls neatly into any of our current denominational categories?
[Reconstructionist founder] Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s notion of Judaism as an evolving religious civilization is the one that I feel closest to. But I feel that the denominational structure isn’t particularly useful anymore. There’s basically two categories, Orthodox and the various kinds of liberal Judaism, within a spectrum. The modern world is so fundamentally different in its relationship to Jews and Judaism that what we’re seeing is a variety of attempts to figure out how to respond. And that will then become the Judaism for the next millennium. It’s time for a lot of experimentation. I think that’s required and out of that will come a new “Minhag America,” to use Isaac Mayer Wise’s phrase for the emerging custom of American Jews [Wise was a Reform rabbi in the late 19th century]. And we don’t need to have everybody doing it one way. As long as people feel committed to Judaism, the Jewish tradition, even if they’re doing it very differently than the Jews of the past, they will be writing themselves into the conversation.
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In the Southwest, public libraries are becoming Yiddish hubs
Think of Yiddish today and you might picture Hasidic Brooklyn, Haredi neighborhoods in Israel or scholars working to preserve a language too often falsely written off as “dead” or “dying.”
But Texas? Ikh ken es nisht gleybn! (I can’t believe it!)
Sebastian Shulman, director of partnerships at the Yiddish Book Center, has spent the past year traveling around the U.S. and working with communities interested in Yiddish. Through the program, public libraries establish reading groups focused on English translations of Yiddish literature. Libraries in small towns across the Southwest, the Deep South and rural Michigan and Illinois have participated.
In Dallas, one library organized a daylong Yiddish festival that drew more than 500 people.
In Austin, Shulman gave a talk about Yiddish history during the city’s huge annual event, South by Southwest. The room for his lecture filled up, in spite of having to compete with the popular festival.
“There were young people and old people and Jewish people and non-Jewish people,” Shulman said. “It was such a deep hunger and a deep interest.”
At the end of the talk, a young Indigenous woman approached him and described similarities she saw between Yiddish and the culture and storytelling tradition of her own Cherokee Native American Nation. He was moved by the encounter, which served as a testament to the bridges forged by Yiddish literature and history.
“Yiddish kind of blows apart the concept of the unexpected place,” Shulman said, calling it “a language of everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time.”
In a Santa Fe, New Mexico public library, Yiddish literature and history is preserved by those who didn’t necessarily inherit the language from their grandparents. Many of them aren’t even Jewish and encountered it for the first time in libraries, archives, classrooms, festivals and books.
Yiddish culture in New Mexico got even more of a boost last year when Jordan Wax, a Santa Fe-based composer and performer of Yiddish and New Mexican regional music, released an album of original secular Yiddish children’s songs.
Letters from history
David Katz, a longtime Texas resident who has spent years collecting and translating Yiddish archival material from the state, said he’s found a life-long mission of preserving not only the language and idioms – but also the human stories of Yiddish-speaking Jews who immigrated to towns across Texas.
Katz regularly receives requests from families around Texas, asking him to translate Yiddish letters and documents that are between 70 and 150 years old. He’s also assisted in translating materials donated to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. Some contain ordinary family news. Others document poverty, illness, migration and the desperate search by Jews in Europe for a way out, as antisemitism intensified in the 1930s.
One letter from Germany from the early 1930s particularly stayed with him. The family wrote to relatives who’d already resettled in the U.S. about trying to obtain a visa to settle elsewhere, debating whether Canada, the United States or somewhere in South America might be the best destination.
Katz found it distressing that the family who wrote the letter seemed, ironically, to be unaware of the dangers facing them under the Nazis.“They’re debating about which climate might be better,” Katz recalled. “From their standpoint, they don’t know how bad things are about to get; it’s tragic to read that history so intimately.”
For Katz, translating these letters creates a connection to their senders and recipients.
“You read them, and even though the letters are maybe 100 years old, 80 years old, they very much make an impression on you that this is very understandable or approachable, because it’s Jewish life, not that different from today,” he said.
But that preservation work is only part of the story.
Susan Bronson, president of the Yiddish Book Center, said the center has increasingly worked with public libraries and Jewish communities around the country, and was inspired by the cross-generational and interfaith excitement to engage with Yiddish.
Many people attending these programs don’t speak the language. But translated literature, music, theater and lectures can provide an entry point.
Bronson has seen this among younger people through the Yiddish Book Center’s Great Jewish Books program, which introduces high school students to Jewish literature, including Yiddish works. Some students have said the experience helped them feel closer to a grandparent or better understand their family’s background.
The Yiddish Book Center’s oral history work has found Yiddish speakers in places people don’t typically associate with the language, including towns across the South and among Jewish farmers in New Jersey.
“It’s unexpected only because our perception of Yiddish became, in some ways, so narrow, but reality is more complicated and this narrow image obscures the breadth of Jewish life in America,” Bronson said.
Back in Texas, Katz is excited about the future possibility for Yiddish in the state, in the form of thousands of letters that remain untranslated and the old Texas Yiddish newspapers sitting on microfilm at university libraries.
“There are stories still waiting to be read,” he said, building on the state’s rich history.
Jewish immigrants spoke mame-loshen in homes and synagogues in Galveston, Dallas and San Antonio. They published newspapers in it, built community institutions around it and gathered to hear visiting writers and Jewish leaders speak the language.
In 1921, the Russian-born Yiddish literary critic Shmuel Niger traveled to Dallas and delivered a lecture in Yiddish to hundreds of people. A few years earlier, David Grün — better known as David Ben-Gurion, the future first prime minister of Israel — visited San Antonio, Texas twice where he addressed a packed room in Yiddish. He was meeting members of the Texas Labor Zionist chapter of Poale Zion (the Socialist Zionist movement), advocating for a sovereign Jewish state and raising money for Jewish immigrants to settle in Eretz Yisroel (The Land of Israel),
A lesser known historic Jewish community, deep in the “Bible Belt”, Waco, Texas had its first Jewish immigrants arrive in the mid-19th century. The first wave was Sepahardic, the second — Ashenazi. They built an Orthodox synagogue and later established an active chapter of the Jewish Workmen’s Circle, holding meetings in Yiddish.
A century after Ben-Gurion addressed Texan Jews in Yiddish, the language is still moving through the state — and far beyond it— not simply as a relic, but as a phenomenon people can continue to discover.
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These college students have favorable views of Israel. They also think it’s committing genocide.
A quarter of college students who view Israel favorably also believe its government is committing genocide.
That’s according to a Brandeis study published earlier this month, which surveyed nearly 4,000 students across 303 colleges in fall 2025 about their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and concluded views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more nuanced than often portrayed.
So how do students reconcile those views?
Researchers can’t say for sure, but one possibility is that students are distinguishing between supporting Israel’s existence and the actions of its current government.
The fact that many of the same students who say Israel is committing genocide also affirm its right to exist is not a contradiction, according to the Nexus Project, a watchdog group that works to combat antisemitism and protect open debate. In an Instagram post referring to the Brandeis study, the group lauded the nuance of the report.
“Collapsing both views into a single all-encompassing camp of ‘anti-Israel sentiment’ erases the gray area where most students actually live,” the post said.
Another explanation, the study says, is that the “genocide” label has less to do with actual views on Israel than political affiliation. Respondents who identified as liberal were much more likely to agree that Israel was committing genocide than those who identified as moderate or conservative. In fact, political ideology was a better predictor of whether someone said Israel was committing genocide than their stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, the study found.
Overall, condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza is the more popular position on campus. Close to three-quarters of all students agreed with the statement that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.
Students may also have different interpretations of the term “genocide,” said Graham Wright, first author on the study and an associate research scientist at Brandeis.
“It’s possible that some of them think, ‘I do generally support the Israeli government, but I don’t like some of the things they’re doing,’” Wright said. “The word genocide is just a stand-in for, ‘I don’t think they’re doing a good thing.’”
The very word genocide has also been a subject of debate.
Some Jewish groups, such as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, have argued genocide is an accurate term to describe what they see as the deliberate destruction of Palestinian society.
Meanwhile, many pro-Israel advocates loathe the word genocide, legally defined as the intentional destruction of any national, racial, ethnic, or religious group, to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza following Oct. 7, 2023. They argue that Israel is seeking the destruction of Hamas, a terror group that states its intent to destroy the Jewish state.
Here are two other key takeaways from the study.
1. Most students differentiate between governments and their citizens — but not all
The study divided students into four groups based on their stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The largest group, 49% of students, supported civilians on both sides of the conflict.
Those students viewed both the Israeli and Palestinian people positively, while they expressed disdain toward the Israeli government, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
“This suggests that most people are able to make that distinction and have fairly nuanced views about a lot of these conflicts,” Wright said.
The vast majority of students, 85% of those surveyed, had unfavorable views of the Israeli government. But those views did not always extend to hostility toward the Israeli people. Students were split about half and half between favorable and unfavorable views of Israeli citizens.
Out of the 20% of students who held strong anti-Israel views — meaning they were likely to view both the Israeli government and its people unfavorably — half also viewed Hamas favorably.
“Certainly, I think that’s concerning,” Wright said. “You have a relatively small number of students who have very extreme views on Jews in Israel, and that seems to be contributing to a lot of the hostility that Jewish students are experiencing.”
Those students may make headlines, Wright said, but most undergraduates aren’t thinking about Israel day-to-day. In fact, 56% of surveyed students said they had low knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the topic was of low to moderate personal importance to them.
2. Jewish students have diverse views on the conflict, but they were also more likely to view Israel favorably than their non-Jewish peers
The survey included responses from 743 Jewish students. About 29% of those respondents viewed Israel favorably, the largest share of any ethno-religious identity surveyed.
That higher support for Israel among Jewish students held across political divides. Both politically liberal and politically conservative Jews were less likely to hold anti-Israel views than their non-Jewish peers, the study found.
The largest proportion of Jewish students, 56%, were “civilian sympathizers” — the group that views both Israeli and Palestinian civilians favorably while disliking both governments.
A minority of Jewish students, 9%, held unfavorable views of both the Israeli government and its people and favorable views of Palestinians.
Overall, the results show subtleties in how college students view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the media rarely captures, Wright said. “You only detect the nuance if you ask about it specifically.”
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In a forest where Jews fought the Nazis, a German military base and Lithuanian politics encroach on memory
(JTA) — Rūdninkai, LITHUANIA — Deep in the trees and swampy thickets of Lithuania’s Rūdninkai Forest, a series of makeshift forts is sinking into the earth.
These represent the remains of underground bunkers where Jewish partisans resisted their annihilation in the Holocaust. Under German occupation, some 400 Jews escaped the Vilnius ghetto to this forest and organized attacks against the Nazis.
After World War II, the story of these partisans was folded into Soviet propaganda, leaving a shroud of mystery over the bunkers. Now, construction of a new German military base in the area is throwing into question the fate of the forts — and the memory of their fighters.
Jewish former partisans and their descendants have traveled for decades to visit the bunkers, which mark the only memorial to their resistance in Lithuania. But in recent months, new obstacles have appeared: Signs forbidding entry and demarcating a “dangerous area” are installed on the road to the forest and pinned on trees approaching the forts.
Lithuania is nearing the final stage of constructing a military base for German troops in Rūdninkai Forest, nestled about 27 miles south of Vilnius. The training ground near the former partisan camps was planned after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to shore up NATO’s eastern flank. Strategically located some 12 miles from the border with Moscow-allied Belarus and east of Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, the troops will be Germany’s first permanent deployment abroad since World War II. About 5,000 German soldiers will begin arriving this fall.
“You cannot easily find the forts, so those who know how to get there, we just go,” Aušra Mikulskienė, a Jewish history tour guide from Vilnius, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But now, there are ‘don’t enter’ stickers and stop signs. It’s becoming impossible to get there because they are closing all of the forest.”
Mikulskienė has brought the children and grandchildren of Jewish partisans to Rūdninkai for 10 years. They need her guidance to find eight standing forts, covered in logs and soil, which are not marked on maps and GPS systems. In such remote corners of the forest, partisans planned to ambush their enemies, lay explosives on German trains and equipment and sabotage telephone lines and infrastructure in Vilnius.
The bunkers are not protected by the Lithuanian government as cultural heritage sites, and they have deteriorated over years of neglect. But as the German base is completed and military training begins, Mikulskienė worries that prohibitory signs related to construction will turn into more serious barriers to the forts, and visitors could lose access altogether.
Twists of history over decades plunged the forts into obscurity. Lithuania was occupied from 1944 to 1990 by the Soviet Union, which honored hundreds of Soviet partisans who went to Rūdninkai Forest to battle the Germans. The Jewish partisans who joined them, and who helped Russian forces liberate Vilnius from the Nazis in 1944, were not part of this narrative.
The Lithuanian Soviet Republic, or Lithuanian SSR, began to commemorate Soviet partisans on the site of the Rūdninkai forts in the 1970s. Soviet and Jewish fighters only had access to wood and soil to build their bunkers. But the forts standing today are reinforced with concrete, an indication that the Soviet government fortified the structures to serve as memorials, said Mikulskienė. She remembers visiting the site on a school trip in the 1980s and listening to lessons about how the forebears of Soviet citizens resisted the fascists.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, researchers have debated how much of the structures is original, and how much was reconstructed by the Soviet government for propaganda purposes. The first sign memorializing Jews was installed in the area by Bildungswerk Stanisław Hantz, a German educational group, in 2024. A small silver plaque reads, “In memory of the Jewish partisans who fought out of these forests against the Nazi occupiers and their helpers.”
The legacy of the forts — and the memory of Jewish partisans — is now mired in Lithuania’s repudiation of its Soviet past. Thousands of Lithuanian intellectuals, dissidents and other citizens were arrested, deported to Gulags and executed under Soviet rule. Once Lithuania gained independence in 1990, the stench of Soviet repression overpowered that of the Nazi occupation for many Lithuanians.
Lithuania was for centuries a center of rich Jewish thought, religious life and secular culture; Vilna, as the capital was known in Yiddish, was nicknamed the “Jerusalem of the North.” But after more than 90% of Lithuanian Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, few remained to commemorate the Holocaust.
“The collective memory of Lithuanians basically sees only one occupation: the Soviet occupation,” said Ilya Lempertas, a researcher and editor of books on the Holocaust in Lithuania. “Soviet partisans, in Lithuanian memory, are those who deported Lithuanians to Siberia.”
That means the Jewish partisans of Rūdninkai Forest are often viewed not as heroes, but as traitors, according to Mikulskienė. “They are not considered as fighting against Nazis, these Jews,” she said. “They are considered to be fighting with the Soviets.”
Fania Brantsovsky, the last living Jewish resistance fighter of Rūdninkai Forest, died in 2024 at 102. She joined a Jewish partisan unit under the command of the writer Abba Kovner, known as the Nokmim, or Avengers. On Sept. 23, 1943, the same night she was smuggled out of the Vilnius ghetto, the Nazis began their final liquidation of the ghetto. None of her family survived.
Brantsovsky led tours to the forest bunkers in the 2000s. Until her death, she advocated for the structures to be preserved and protected as a site of learning about the Jewish partisans’ struggle.
Dovid Katz, a Brooklyn-born, Vilnius-based scholar of Yiddish and the Holocaust who runs the online journal “Defending History,” was a friend of Brantsovsky’s. “Her one last request was, ‘Dovid, please, never stop reminding Jews around the world to speak up for the existence of the forts,’” said Katz. “‘Let our grandchildren be able to come to this place in the forest and see wooden forts in the ground, which were the only postwar physical remnant of Jewish resistance.’”
Germany’s federal government has signaled that it will not disturb the site. In response to a parliamentary inquiry, the Bundestag announced in July that it was “committed to preserving the former World War II partisan camp in Rūdninkai Forest, located on the training grounds of Panzer Brigade 45 stationed in Lithuania, as a place of learning and remembrance.”
The government added that the former partisan bunkers were not part of Germany’s training facilities and would not be affected by construction, but it was in Lithuania’s hands to manage the site’s preservation and access.
“The Lithuanian government has been asked to examine whether the area in question merits protection and to take this into account in further planning,” said the Bundestag.
Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture told JTA that the bunkers do not have protected status as cultural heritage sites because they “are not authentic and are not located at their original sites.” Instead of being linked to Jewish fighters, the ministry said the forts were “associated with Soviet partisans.”
“During the Soviet era, they were included in the list of historical monuments of the Lithuanian SSR, while a significant proportion of such ‘monuments’ were intended to reinforce Soviet ideology and historical narratives,” the ministry said in a statement.
The area will be maintained in the future with an information board installed nearby, according to the ministry, which said the content of that information has yet to be decided. Visiting the forts won’t be prohibited altogether, but those who wish to go will have to comply with military rules and obtain advance approval from the Rūdninkai Training Area Command, the ministry said.
Katz believes nationalist factions in the Lithuanian government are revising the history of a site that hosts genuine remnants of Jewish bunkers. He views the government’s resistance to protecting the site as an outgrowth of the “double genocide” theory, a nationalist narrative that emerged in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union. This theory equates World War II atrocities committed by the Soviets, who occupied Lithuania in 1940-1941 following a non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler, with those of the Nazis, who took control after Hitler broke the agreement and invaded the Soviet Union. (The Soviets reoccupied Lithuania in 1944.)
In this framework, the Soviets committed genocide against Lithuanians through mass deportations — with the complicity, some add, of Jewish communists — and only afterwards came the killing of Jews by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.
“The Soviets and their Jewish friends, as the narrative has it, committed the first genocide, and then came the reaction, the tragic second genocide,” which was the Holocaust, said Katz.
The equating of Soviet deportations with the Holocaust has been widely rejected by international scholars and Jewish institutions. The Soviet regime deported some 17,500 Lithuanians in 1941 to remote parts of Siberia and northern Russia. While individual Lithuanian Jews served in the Soviet administration, Jews were also disproportionately targeted in the deportations.
Lempertas, who like Katz is Jewish, does not believe the forts standing in Rūdninkai Forest include genuine remains of Jewish partisan bunkers. He supports the government’s view that the structures were built entirely as Soviet propaganda — but even so, he believes they should be protected.
“It has to be saved, from my point of view, for those who are coming there because of family,” said Lempertas. “It serves as an exhibition.”
Mikulskienė said the forts are deeply important to the families of Jewish fighters. She watches visitors stand before them, recite memories of war and sing partisan songs passed down through generations.
Yet in recent years, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked security threats and surging anti-Russian sentiment in Lithuania, Mikulskienė has found it increasingly difficult to advocate for the memory of Jews who fought alongside Soviets.
“You are seen as a follower of Soviet propaganda, and also now Putin’s propaganda,” she said. “That’s a bit dangerous, being this person in Lithuania.”
Anna Avidan, who was born in Vilnius to Holocaust survivors and founded the Jewish history nonprofit Jerusalem of the North, said the bunkers should be treated as a memorial site with educational opportunities.
“There is a strong stereotype here that Jews were communists and they deserved the killings — this simplified worldview,” she said. Dispelling such stereotypes “is a good case for explaining why it has to be commemorated.”
One the eve of World War II, about 4 in 10 people in Vilnius were Jewish. But decades after the end of the Soviet Union, Avidan said the city has yet to fully recognize the Jewish world that vanished from Lithuania’s cities, towns and forests.
“Lithuania has been independent for more than 35 years already,” said Avidan. “Still, we have no clear memorial in this city to the victims of the Holocaust, and for me, that’s a message.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In a forest where Jews fought the Nazis, a German military base and Lithuanian politics encroach on memory appeared first on The Forward.
