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How Arnold Horween, an unsung Jewish Harvard hero, changed American sports
(JTA) — Decades before Sandy Koufax sat out the first game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, and 18 years before Greenberg chased Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record in the late 1930s, a college athlete made some overlooked Jewish sports history.
Arnold Horween, a burly Chicagoan, became the first Jewish captain of the Harvard University football team in 1920 — an achievement that sent ripples through American culture.
Horween, who would later play and coach in the early years of what would become the NFL, was born to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He became a star player at Harvard, helping the Crimson go undefeated in both 1919 and 1920 after returning from serving in World War I. (His brother Ralph also played at Harvard and in the NFL, and they were the first and only Jewish brothers to play in the NFL until Geoff and Mitchell Schwartz.)
But it was Horween’s unanimous selection as the team’s captain, and more importantly, his appointment in 1926 as the team’s coach, that would prove unprecedented.
“In American Jewish culture, the only thing greater than being the captain of the Harvard Crimson, the only higher station in American culture might have been the president, or the coach of Harvard, which he eventually becomes,” said Zev Eleff, the president of Gratz College and a scholar of American Jewish history.
Eleff explores Horween’s story and its impact in his recent book, “Dyed in Crimson: Football, Faith, and Remaking Harvard’s America,” released earlier this year. He traces the history of Harvard athletics in the early 1900s, exploring how Horween, along with Harvard’s first athletic director, Bill Bingham, altered the landscape of America’s most prestigious college.
Horween’s ascendance came at a time when Harvard instituted quotas to limit the number of Jewish and other minority students it accepted — a practice the school would employ throughout the 1920s and 30s. His story also took place amid a political landscape that featured the rise of Father Charles Coughlin, the antisemitic “radio priest,” and the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan.
As Eleff underscores in the book, Horween did not fit the model of a “Boston Brahmin,” the class of elite, Christian, aspirationally manly men whose supremacy was unquestioned at Harvard Yard. Horween broke that mold, instead instilling a team culture where a love of the sport was almost as important as winning — the Ted Lasso effect, if you will.
“Dyed in Crimson” also uses early 20th century Harvard as an allegory for the broader theme of how sports can change society.
“The theme of the book, something that’s uniquely American, is how the periphery can influence the mainstream,” said Eleff. “How people on the sidelines can really make an influence.”
Eleff spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about how Horween’s story fits into the pantheon of Jewish American sports legends and what it says about Jews’ ability to succeed in America.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s dig into Horween’s story. I liked the idea of him as like an earlier version of Koufax or a Greenberg, but to be honest, I had never heard of him. Why do you think his story isn’t as well known as other Jewish athletes?
I think it has everything to do with the emergence of Major League Baseball. College football was America’s sport in the 1910s and 1920s. It was a big money sport, when there was very little money outside of the New York Yankees. And I think that Horween’s star started to sort of decline with Harvard football, but also the emergence of other sports.
The other reason is because the idea of the Jewish ballplayer loomed large. The New York Giants, for decades, tried to identify a Jewish superstar. They actually passed on Greenberg. There was a thought after Greenberg that there was Jewish DNA for baseball, and the signing of Koufax was directly linked to this notion. It was this eugenics-like link that you need a Jewish ballplayer. For the Giants, it was ticket sales. So the commotion about Greenberg and Koufax is more about Jewish identity. And baseball is, as a professional sport in New York, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, different than college football, particularly in New England at this time. Frankly, Jews lived near the Polo Grounds, they didn’t live near Harvard Yard.
Arnold Horween shown in The Baltimore Sun on November 16, 1927. (Wikimedia Commons)
For Horween, obviously he’s not at the level of a Greenberg or Koufax talent-wise, but he also didn’t seem to care as much personally about his Jewish identity. You write in the book that there were some Jews who took issue with the fact that Horween was not practicing, but there were also many Jews who were simply proud he was Jewish. What do you think about that dynamic?
There becomes a sort of disconnect between lived religion and the perception and what they come to represent — the mantle that they wear almost towers above the practice. Horween eschewed the opportunity to claim the mantle of Jewish leadership, Jewish celebrity. But we do see in its moment that he is the topic of rabbinic sermons, that The American Hebrew and other Jewish press are reporting on him. They are elated. In American Jewish culture, the only thing greater than being the captain of the Harvard Crimson — it’s hard for people to realize, but in the moment when they were part of the big three [alongside Princeton and Yale] — the only higher station in American culture might have been the president, or the coach of Harvard, which he eventually becomes.
One of the parts of this book that I enjoyed learning about is the extent to which college football in the early 20th century was all about honor, masculinity, gentlemanliness. And at the time, that kind of stands in contrast to how Jews were viewed — that Jews were not masculine, Jews couldn’t fit into that mold of the “Harvard man.”
Being on the sports team, that was probably far beyond Jewish expectations. Not to say that Jews could not be athletic, but very often the varsity players weren’t picked for their talent but rather their surnames. What the sea change at Harvard is, [within] gentlemanly culture — in which “gentlemanly” is a Protestant, Christian masculinity — Horween is not Protestant. What allows him a pathway into that elite group is that drive to win. And as a player, he’s good luck. He never loses. He becomes a signature player for victory who even wins the Rose Bowl.
But as a coach, he subverts that. What he and Bill Bingham do is their campaign isn’t necessarily for winning, it’s for having fun, it’s for enjoying the game.
In the 1910s and 20s, college football was the peak of American sports, but that’s certainly not the case anymore. What do you think would be the modern comparison for someone like Horween?
Is Becky Hammon with the Spurs, the first woman [to act as] head coach in basketball, something like that? Or the very important discussions about people of color as coaches in the NFL? Sports and education are, for some reason or another, where change is made in American life. Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 ends, at least officially, segregation. Title IV, what is basically American law for anti-discrimination based on sex, is based on women’s college sports. You have the breaking down of color barriers and Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Vietnam. You have the first [openly] gay athletes, you have questions of breaking the glass ceiling for women and Serena Williams.
It’s absolutely 100% true that sports doesn’t matter. Who wins the World Series is of no great consequence to most people’s lives. Although it’s interesting, if you drive up I-95 on a Sunday, you will see that the bumper stickers and the flags change. There is some sort of passion, obviously, about sport. But it’s absolutely true that for some reason or another in the 20th century and 21st century in American sport, really important social and cultural decisions, and political decisions, are made in American sport.
Zev Eleff, president of Gratz College and author of “Dyed in Crimson.” (Courtesy)
Another main topic in the book is that the goal for immigrants, especially Jews, was Americanization, assimilation — that to become part of the mainstream was the marker of success. But that seems to be the case for Jews in a very different sense than it is for Catholics and for Blacks.
The major contribution of this book to American Jewish history beyond telling this story is to complicate notions of Americanization. Jews and Catholics in particular view Americanization very, very differently. The Catholic experience is to create parallel systems. If you’re a good Catholic boy with immense football talent, play for Notre Dame, play for Boston College. Don’t play for the Protestant mainstream. Cream them on the football field. Create parallel systems.
The Jewish experience is not so. Outside of Orthodox day schools in the early 20th century, it was anathema, it was considered almost heretical, for American Jews to [go] to private schools. To the contrary, the so-called golden citadels of the public schools — that is the agent of Americanization. Jews don’t establish their own educational systems. They somehow Americanize and acculturate into the mainstream. We don’t compete with Harvard, we get into Harvard.
Thinking about the antisemitism of that time — the quotas, Father Coughlin, all of that — how do you think that compares to what we’re seeing today?
Historians disagree about the 1920s. Was it a time of great prominence of American Jews? There was affluence in the roaring ’20s. There were institutions that were created, there was creativity, from the Orthodox and Mordecai Kaplan certainly, across the board, the Jewish Theological Seminary. American Judaism was at a certain high point in the 1920s. At the same time, there were quotas, and there was rising antisemitism. I think today we also have to deal with the tension of, on the one hand, there are great opportunities for Jews in the United States; at the same time, there is antisemitism. And so from the 1920s to the 2020s, 100 years later, you see a model for how to grapple with those tensions.
What do you hope, more than anything else, someone takes away or learns from your book?
It’s a book that begins like a punch line: a working class Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew walk into a football field. But it ends with something I think a lot more pronounced, which is, it’s a story about change. As a historian, I study change, particularly in American Judaism, broadly in American religion and Jewish Studies. Change is the best asset that a historian has to study. I wasn’t interested in just finding another Sandy Koufax story, replicating that story. This is a story that isn’t just about a Jew who happened for his moment to become quite successful and quite famous, or a Catholic or a former mill hand turned first athletic director in college history. It’s really about how people on the periphery influence the mainstream.
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The post How Arnold Horween, an unsung Jewish Harvard hero, changed American sports appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘All of us have to bring down violence wherever we see it,’ El-Sayed says following address to Jewish Democrats
(JTA) — BIRMINGHAM – Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said he wished he could retract his past comments regarding a synagogue attack, speaking with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency minutes after he issued his second apology in as many days to the Jewish community in the Wolverine State.
“If I had the opportunity to take it back, I would take it all the way back,” he said.
“There is never a justification for a terrorist act, period,” El-Sayed added. “What I was trying to say is that there is a broader question of the responsibility I think all of us have to bring down violence wherever we see it and however we see it.”
He added, “I understand and heard that people felt like it was justifying the attack, and I didn’t intend to justify it.”
El-Sayed addressed around 300 Michigan Jewish Democrats at the caucus’s annual “Summer Simcha” fundraiser in suburban Detroit on Sunday, one day after he spoke to the caucus at the state Democratic nominating convention. At both events, he sought forgiveness for his earlier comments that had linked the March attack at Temple Israel, in West Bloomfield Township, to Israel’s war in Lebanon.
In his Sunday speech he referenced the Jewish “value of tikkun olam, to repair the world,” and he affirmed the synagogue preschool had been “attacked by a terrorist.” To the gathered Jewish Democrats, the candidate added he hoped to “earn your trust.”
His outreach to Jewish voters will soon become even more pronounced. The campaign intends to hire a Jewish liaison and is in the midst of an interview process for the role, which includes talking with Jewish community leaders, a person familiar with the campaign told JTA.
With El-Sayed’s narrow primary victory, and Michigan’s increasing centrality in the fight for control of the Senate, the state’s approximately 100,000 Jewish voters — the majority of whom have historically voted Democrat — find themselves under the microscope as they weigh voting for a candidate who supports zeroing out all aid to Israel. Following his Summer Simcha speech, El-Sayed stayed to speak with a long line of Jews who came up to share their concerns.
Asked later what he’s heard from the Jews who speak to him, he told JTA, “I hear a lot about safety, and folks want to know that they’re going to be safe.”
He added, “The prerequisite of Jewish safety is never in question to me, and I just want to make that very, very clear.”
The event, at which JTA was the only media outlet given permission to attend, underscored the tension that has become increasingly difficult for Jewish Democrats, in Michigan and beyond, to reconcile: whether party candidates have earned the vote of their Jewish constituents when those candidates won’t commit to supporting Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, or haven’t taken what community members feel is a strong enough stance against antisemitism.
El-Sayed’s Jewish liaison will likely have their work cut out for them. In both of his spoken apologies this weekend, the candidate had insisted the main problem was with the timing of his attempt to apply “context” to the situation, not with the substance of what he said. Yet many Jews then and now objected to the idea that bringing up Israel’s war in Lebanon was appropriate context when discussing a synagogue attack.
Rabbi Paul Yedwab, a member of Temple Israel’s clergy who was not in attendance at the event, declined to comment to JTA on El-Sayed’s apologies, citing the synagogue board’s recent reaffirmation of a federal law prohibiting houses of worship from commenting on electoral politics.
Asked about which “context” he had been referring to in his apologies, El-Sayed told JTA he meant “violence in all of its forms, in all circumstances.”
El-Sayed shared the room with some party figures who have sharply opposed him, and who the state’s Jewish Democrats hold in high esteem. The caucus event honored state Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish and who has had public disagreements with El-Sayed over his handling of Jewish communal issues.
In her own speech, Nessel acknowledged that Jews were being forced into a “stark choice” thanks to “members of our own party who seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and place the Jewish diaspora in jeopardy.”
Yet the attorney general stressed that the election was bigger than Israel, and, invoking Purim’s Queen Esther, urged Jewish voters to put their own feelings of personal safety aside.
“We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival,” she told the crowd.
Nessel said that other societal concerns – climate change, artificial intelligence, the threat of nuclear warfare – loom larger than support for Israel alone and would worsen under continued GOP rule. “What is defending the historic homeland of our ancestors and demanding that candidates acknowledge its right to exist, if the planet upon which it rests is no longer inhabitable?” she asked.
“I think it’s so easy for people to lash out at what they perceive are direct attacks on their faith, on their cultural beliefs, on their historical ancestry,” Nessel told JTA following her speech. “It’s very easy for people to be mad and to say, ‘I reject that.’ I just hope that people will consider that there are many other factors at play.”
Even among caucus leadership, though, there were deep divisions over the right Jewish approach to take in the election.
“I’m a Mike Rogers supporter,” Troy Zukowski-Serlin, a Kalamazoo-based member of the Michigan Jewish Democrats board, told JTA on Sunday before El-Sayed’s speech. Despite his board position, Zukowski-Serlin said nothing would change his mind about voting for the Republican candidate: “It’s signed, sealed and delivered with me.”
His wife Michelle, who attended the event wearing a dress with an Israeli flag imprint, said she would be writing in Nessel, “my hero,” on the ballot.
Jewish Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who is running for Congress in a heavily Jewish suburban Detroit district and whose own disagreements with El-Sayed have spilled into public view, told JTA that the event was “a step in the right direction” for the candidate.
“It has lingered in the Jewish community for the last six months,” Moss said, of El-Sayed’s initial comments about the Temple Israel attack in his district. “And I appreciate that this is something that he recognized there needed to be a reckoning with, and amends toward.”
Some Jewish communal leaders in attendance, though, said he wasn’t there yet.
“He is moving, and I’m hopeful about that. And it’s making me feel more secure in his leadership,” Rabbi Josh Whinston of Temple Beth Emeth, a Reform synagogue in Ann Arbor, told JTA. “There’s still work to do.”
Whinston said he would also like to see El-Sayed address other comments he has made, including having referred to the Israeli government as “bloodthirsty.” Such language, the rabbi said, “puts us in harm’s way.”
The event’s organizers were also skeptical that El-Sayed had changed many minds.
“I think that people are pretty well set in what they want to do,” Joan Lowenstein, another caucus board member, told JTA. “But I think they still want to hear words that make them feel that someone else is thinking about what they’re concerned about.”
Liz Fried, of Ann Arbor, was one of the attendees who went up to speak to El-Sayed afterwards. She told him that her children were soon to fly to Israel, and asked if he would support funding for the Iron Dome defensive system.
He wouldn’t, she recalled to JTA — a position he has held in public.
“I was upset,” Fried said. “He doesn’t care about the safety of my children.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘All of us have to bring down violence wherever we see it,’ El-Sayed says following address to Jewish Democrats appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu wants his far-right allies to unite. One of them is betting on a bigger prize: replacing Netanyahu himself.
Israel’s right-wing firebrand Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, has spent the past several days under intense pressure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do something he plainly does not want to do: join forces in the coming election with his far-right rival, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Netanyahu has good reason to be worried. Israel elects its 120-member parliament through nationwide proportional representation, but a party must win at least 3.25% of the vote to enter the Knesset. If it falls short, its votes are effectively wasted.
That is precisely the danger facing Smotrich. Recent polls ahead of the Oct. 27 election have repeatedly placed his Religious Zionism party near or below the threshold. Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party, by contrast, is comfortably above it. Netanyahu has therefore been pressing the two men to run together, ensuring that neither party’s votes are lost. Over the weekend, Ben-Gvir’s party issued a statement saying it would not run with Smotrich.
On its face, this looks extraordinarily irresponsible.
Israel has seen what happens when parties gamble with the threshold. In 2022, the left-wing Meretz and Arab nationalist Balad parties together won roughly 6% of the vote, but because each fell below the threshold, neither entered parliament. The result helped Netanyahu secure a comfortable Knesset majority. In 1992, wasted votes for small right-wing parties similarly contributed to Yitzhak Rabin’s narrow victory.
So why would Ben-Gvir risk helping defeat his own political camp?
The obvious explanation is ego. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich dislike each other and compete for many of the same voters.
But there is another possibility: Perhaps Ben-Gvir has already concluded that Netanyahu is going to lose. If so, what looks like recklessness may be perfectly rational.
The parties opposed to Netanyahu currently lead his bloc by roughly 20 seats or more in most serious polling. And it would be naive to assume they would refuse to rely, directly or indirectly, on Israel’s Arab parties if the alternative were another Netanyahu government, an outcome they regard as catastrophic.
If Ben-Gvir believes defeat is coming anyway, preserving every possible seat for Netanyahu’s current bloc becomes a secondary concern. His real contest begins the morning after Netanyahu loses: Who inherits the Israeli right?
Running separately allows Ben-Gvir to preserve his identity, weaken Smotrich and emerge as the undisputed leader of Israel’s radical right, even if the entire Netanyahu camp ends up in opposition.
That possibility would have sounded absurd only a few years ago.
From pariah to power broker
In 2019, Ben-Gvir could not even get elected to the Knesset. For years he inhabited the outer fringes of Israeli politics, a disciple of the racist extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane whose political tradition was considered so toxic that even Netanyahu once treated him as an embarrassment.
By 2022, Ben-Gvir had become one of the most prominent figures on the Israeli right. Netanyahu made him national security minister. The question is no longer whether Ben-Gvir belongs to mainstream Israeli politics. It is whether he might someday lead a substantial part of it.
Imagine Likud going into opposition with 19 seats and Ben-Gvir emerging with 13 – roughly the current polling. Suddenly the distance between them does not look enormous, especially after Likud has spent decades becoming almost inseparable from Netanyahu. Ben-Gvir would possess a substantial parliamentary faction, a fiercely motivated base, enormous public visibility and a powerful argument to right-wing voters: I represent what comes next. Likud represents an exhausted past.
There is no law saying Likud must remain the dominant party of the Israeli right forever. Political parties survive as dominant institutions only as long as voters believe they represent something they want. Once that bond breaks, decades of accumulated political capital can disappear remarkably quickly.
Which raises the question: What exactly is Likud without Netanyahu? The party machinery will remain, along with more than 100,000 members and a formidable institutional legacy. But after three decades of Netanyahu’s dominance, separating Likud’s identity from his own has become increasingly difficult.
Many of its most independent and impressive figures have left or been pushed aside over those decades, among them Tzipi Livni, Dan Meridor, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Benny Begin. The cumulative exodus says something about the transformation of a once broader political movement.
The cost of Netanyahu’s compromises
Netanyahu’s dependence on Israel’s Haredi parties has surely done further damage. For decades, Likud could present itself as the natural home of Israel’s secular and traditional right: nationalist voters with strong Jewish identities who nevertheless expected the basic obligations of citizenship to be shared.
That compact is under enormous strain over military service. Most Haredi men have historically been exempted from Israel’s compulsory military service while studying full-time in religious seminaries. The arrangement has become vastly more problematic explosive since Oct. 7 and the wars that followed, which have imposed extraordinary burdens on soldiers and reservists.
The Haredim want their exemptions codified into law, and Netanyahu has attempted to comply. The issue is one of the main ones in the election. A party asking non-Haredi Israelis and their children to shoulder an ever-heavier military burden while protecting broad exemptions for the rapidly growing Haredi population should expect to pay a political price.
Here lies one of the ironies of Ben-Gvir’s rise. He represents an even more extreme version of the religious nationalism that has alienated some traditional Likud voters. Yet precisely because he is more extreme, his claim to the future right may become stronger.
Likud’s concessions to the Haredi parties can be understood as transactional politics — bargains Netanyahu needs to remain in power. Ben-Gvir’s religious radicalism is more authentic. He offers a coherent worldview in which Jewish nationalism, religious authority, territorial maximalism and hostility toward the institutions and restraints of liberal democracy reinforce one another. What Likud has adopted gradually, sometimes for reasons of political survival, Ben-Gvir offers as a complete ideological package. In that sense, he offers the product in its purest form.
Consider the Palestinian question. Much of the Israeli right wants permanent Israeli control of the West Bank. But millions of Palestinians live there, and permanent Israeli sovereignty ultimately requires an answer to their political status. If Israel permanently governs millions of Palestinians without equal political rights, its claim to liberal democracy becomes impossible to sustain. Grant them equal rights, and maintaining a decisive Jewish majority is impossible.
The mainstream right has never produced a convincing answer to this dilemma. Its effective policy has largely been to manage the contradiction indefinitely. It looks foolish in this regard. Meanwhile, the extreme right does have an answer: Palestinian submission and, ultimately, though this is whispered and not shouted, expulsion.
That answer is immoral and would carry enormous strategic consequences. It has never represented the clear majority position in Israeli society. But politically it possesses one advantage: clarity. Part of Ben-Gvir’s appeal comes from his willingness to say openly what much of the right prefers to leave unresolved.
Where the numbers are headed
Demography may strengthen him further. Israel’s secular population has lower birth rates than its Haredi and religious-Zionist populations. For decades, Likud was broad enough to accommodate secular nationalists, traditional Jews, religious voters and conservatives who wanted a strongly Jewish state while retaining some attachment to liberal democratic norms. As the right becomes more religious and culturally radical, that coalition becomes harder to maintain. Increasingly, the right will become the religious bloc, and its former secular adherents will move across the aisle.
The nationalist-religious Ben-Gvir consequently begins to look less like an aberration from the Israeli right and more like one possible expression of where it is heading.
That is why his refusal to reunite with Smotrich may be more consequential than another round of ego and rivalry. It may reflect a cold calculation: Netanyahu’s era is approaching its end, his camp may be headed for opposition, and the real prize is no longer merely a place in the next government.
It is the inheritance of the Israeli right.
Ben-Gvir has traveled an extraordinary distance already. Prior to being elected, he was convicted of offenses including supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism. As a young Kahanist activist in 1995, he brandished an emblem torn from Yitzhak Rabin’s Cadillac and declared, weeks before Rabin’s assassination: “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too.”
That man is now Israel’s national security minister.
He may not be wrong about the calculation he appears to be making.
And if Ben-Gvir is positioning himself not merely to survive Netanyahu but to inherit a large part of the movement Netanyahu leaves behind, it is worth understanding that possibility now. Disasters should at least be approached with eyes wide open.
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As Nepal’s flood toll climbs, Jewish aid groups mobilize to help survivors recover
Two Jewish humanitarian groups — IsraAID and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, widely known as “the Joint” — have sent emergency aid to Nepal’s border with Tibet where flash floods and landslides have killed at least 800 people and more than 3,000 are still missing.
Triggered by a landslide that tore through the mountainous Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts on Aug. 26, the flooding has destroyed roads, bridges and entire villages and displaced tens of thousands of people.
IsraAID’s four-person emergency team landed in Kathmandu Friday evening. Mai Leshem, who is currently serving as head of mission for the Nepal response, said most of the team are the same people who worked in Nepal between 2015 and 2019, when IsraAID ran a long-term recovery program there after an earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people and injured 22,000.
“It’s a place that’s very deeply connected to us,” she said. A fifth team member, a health specialist, is expected within days.
While the Nepali government and local responders handle search and rescue efforts, Leshem said, IsraAID’s team is focused on supporting communities and first responders once the immediate danger passes — handing out hygiene and dignity kits, running stress-relief programs for kids, and working with overwhelmed hospitals to offer burnout-prevention support to staff. Those hospital workers, Leshem said, are dealing with more than the injured; families of the missing keep showing up looking for loved ones.
One moment from the team’s first days stuck with her. At a shelter in Kathmandu housing displaced residents from a hard-hit community near the Tibet-Nepal border, hand-lettered signs read “no photos, no journalists.” Leshem spoke there with a man in his mid-30s who said he wasn’t as worried about himself as he was about the teenagers and young adults around him — kids, he told her, who’d lost everything and were starting to grow angry.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been on a mission where I heard someone focus so intently on this age group,” Leshem said. “It really moved me to hear him speak with such empathy.”
A mission rooted in memory
The Joint is also coordinating its response through the local Nepali organizations it trained in disaster preparedness after the 2015 earthquake — a strategy Avital Sandler-Loeff, executive director of JDC’s Disaster Relief and Development Unit, described as central to how the organization operates. The Joint reached out to its Nepali partners within hours of the flood because those relationships were already in place.
The organization’s immediate focus is preventing a public health crisis, she said. Standing water and damaged sanitation systems have left officials worried about waterborne disease outbreaks, on top of a housing crisis for the tens of thousands who have no shelter. Some families were swept as far as 25 miles from home, she said, and can’t get back because roads and bridges are still buried in mud.
The Joint is funding hygiene kits, tents, blankets and clothing, buying locally where possible. It expects its focus to shift toward helping people rebuild their livelihoods, many of whom depend on farm fields that were destroyed. Sandler-Loeff and Mickey Noam-Alon, the unit’s director of disaster response, said they hope to travel to Nepal themselves within days, though they’re watching the same renewed flood risk that has kept rescue crews on alert.
Both Sandler-Loeff and Noam-Alon said the organization is in direct contact with other Jewish groups responding to the floods, including IsraAID and World Jewish Relief, to avoid duplicating efforts. The Joint leads the Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief (JCDR), comprising 49 mostly North American Jewish organizations that address disasters and development challenges worldwide, but Sandler-Loeff said coordination often comes down to something simpler: “We pick up the phone and talk to our friends.”
Asked why this work matters, Sandler-Loeff pointed to her ancestors who lived through the Holocaust.“I wish more organizations had been there for them,” she said.
Noam-Alon said assisting communities in crisis carries extra weight now, at a moment of rising antisemitism worldwide. “Today,” he said, “it’s even more important to show up.”
Both IsraAID and the Joint say they expect to be in Nepal for weeks, if not longer, as the scale of what’s needed becomes clearer.
The post As Nepal’s flood toll climbs, Jewish aid groups mobilize to help survivors recover appeared first on The Forward.
