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How HaZamir youth choir serves as ‘an on-ramp to Jewish life’
(New York Jewish Week) — All across the country, groups of Jewish teenagers meet each week to rehearse as a choir. In groups as small as two and as large as 18, they gather in synagogue basements, Jewish community centers, senior centers and even churches to sing together. For many, it’s their only involvement with Jewish life.
These 450 young people, who range in age from 13 to 18, are members of HaZamir, an international choir for Jewish high school students. With 26 chapters in the United States and 10 in Israel, they convene each year for a spring concert in New York City.
But this coming concert — to be held on Sunday, March 19, at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall — will be different than most years. This weekend’s celebration, which includes more than 300 student and alumni singers, will commemorate HaZamir’s 30th birthday as well as the 75th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel.
“The idea behind the creation of HaZamir was to give Jewish teenagers the opportunity to have a high-level music experience and to express their Jewish selves and their music selves,” said Mati Lazar, HaZamir’s conductor and founder. “At that point, and even now, [that] is not really a given.”
Sunday’s concert will include performances by the entire ensemble, as well as songs performed by the Israeli cohort and members of the Chamber Choir, an elite group of HaZamir singers. (Students have to audition to join HaZamir, and select singers are invited to audition for the Chamber Choir.) The highlight is always the “senior song” — “Yachad Na’Amod” (“Together We Stand”) — that closes out the concert, said Vivian Lazar, Mati’s wife and the director of HaZamir.
“This is a problem with any high school teacher — you fall in love with your 12th graders,” Vivian told the New York Jewish Week. “They’re adults already. They’re smart, and they’re intuitive and then they leave you. For the last verse, they put their arms around each other. Some of them don’t sing because they’re crying so hard.”
HaZamir singers at the 2013 Gala Concert. (Courtesy HaZamir)
Mati Lazar, who declined to provide his age, founded HaZamir in 1993 as the high school arm of the Zamir Chorale, a professional Hebrew-language choir and Jewish choral performance group in North America that was established in 1960. A native of Brooklyn, he had been a member of Zamir Chorale as a teenager, and wanted to create an opportunity for other young people to have the same experience.
Starting with just one small chapter in New York — which Mati personally ran — he watched it grow, and grow, over the next three decades. “I knew it would be important — I knew it would evolve into what it has evolved into,” Mati said. “The surprise for me was how successful it would be in Israel.” The first Israeli chapter was founded in 2006.
He is also the founder and director of Zamir Choral Foundation, the umbrella organization that operates HaZamir and Zamir Chorale, as well as a choir for middle schoolers and a choir for young adults in their 20s and 30s.
Though HaZamir is an extracurricular activity for these high schoolers, the Lazars place serious demands on their members. “We empower these teenagers,” Vivian Lazar said. “When they go and have free time together, they’re kids. When they’re sitting in rehearsal, we treat them like professionals, and so they behave that way.”
As a result, participating in the choir can often become a lifelong commitment — and sometimes even a family affair. Sophie Lee Landau grew up in New York listening to her mother perform as a member of Zamir Chorale. Landau joined HaZamir in seventh grade and stayed with the group throughout high school. In college, she became a member of Zamir Chorale for a number of years until she moved out of New York in 2015.
For the past six years, Landau, 29, has been the conductor for the Houston-based chapter of HaZamir. “It’s an opportunity to connect with your peers who have come from a similar faith and to connect more to Jewish text,” Landau told the New York Jewish Week. “It’s really special to be able to give [students] an outlet to connect to their heritage and to find peers and friendships with similar interests and similar backgrounds. It’s about not feeling like you’re alone.”
HaZamir singers performed a concert at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh to commemorate the one year anniversary of the deadly shooting that took the lives of 11 synagogue members. (Courtesy HaZamir)
The Lazars see the choir as “an on-ramp to Jewish life” with an emphasis on pluralism, community and Zionism. HaZamir is not designed to be religious, Vivian explained, though she suggested that singing together in harmony is often a spiritual experience.
However, “to be Jewish is to be literate,” Vivian said, adding part of being in the choir and learning to sing the Hebrew music includes learning the texts and their meanings.
“The more you know about your history and your tradition and your culture, the better human being you can be,” Vivian said she tells her students.
For participants, these principles culminate during “Festival,” a Shabbat sleepover that takes place in the days leading up to the annual concert. This year, the group will congregate at the Sleepy Hollow Hotel in Tarrytown, New York.
“Festival” is the first time chapters from around the world meet after having rehearsed the same songs as individual groups throughout the year. “It is a spiritual kind of experience singing music together: You’re breathing together, you’re thinking about the same text at the same time, and you’re making harmony,” Mati Lazar said. “All differences really subside.”
According to Landau, the weekend is especially rewarding for participants who hail from smaller Jewish communities. “This is the one opportunity for the kids to all get together,” she said. “Once you get together and you sing with 300 other kids, the sound is overwhelming. It’s the thing that they look forward to most, after working hard all year they finally get to put it all together and hear what the music can do.”
Over 400 students attended HaZamir’s “Festival” in 2019. (Courtesy HaZamir)
Though it’s meant to be a rehearsal boot camp for the teenagers, Festival also aims to nurture the cross-country and international friendships that are made on Zoom throughout the year. Activities include a Thursday-night jam session, hours of rehearsals during the day and a range of Shabbat services on Friday night and Saturday morning — egalitarian, Orthodox, Reform, and all-women services are among the options. For many participants, Vivian said, it’s the first time they can explore these different types of Jewish religious expression.
For Milo Shaklan, a senior in HaZamir’s Brooklyn chapter, whose ninth and tenth grade concerts were canceled due to COVID-19, going to Festival and the Gala concert for the first time last year was “a moment of understanding,” he said.
“I got to connect with all these other Jews,” Shaklan said. “I had no idea how big the community was. When I’m interacting with people in my synagogue community, I am interacting with people who more or less observe like me. At HaZamir, I’m interacting with Americans who are less observant than me and Americans who are more observant than me, and then Israelis who are both more and less observant than me.”
Landau concurs. “To be able to establish such a network is really incredible, and that’s why this weekend is so important,” she said.
For the Lazars, it’s alumni like Landau — who has maintained a long-term relationship with the choir — who are the biggest reward for the efforts. This year, 14 HaZamir alumni are now conductors of their own chapters, and all HaZamir alumni will be invited on stage to sing during the second half of the two-hour concert.
“It’ll be a very, very beautiful moment,” said Vivian.
The HaZamir 30th Anniversary Concert will take place on March 19 at 3:00 pm. Buy tickets here.
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The post How HaZamir youth choir serves as ‘an on-ramp to Jewish life’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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One of America’s first Jewish farms was nearly lost to history. Now these Brooklyn parents are risking everything to keep their family’s legacy alive.
The 350-square-foot Brooklyn apartment where Malya and William Levin live with their four children is barely big enough for their family, much less their ambitions. From this compressed space, they’re reaching for something vast — the revival of one of America’s first Jewish farms, built by William’s ancestors in rural South Jersey.
Their quixotic quest is larger than acreage; it’s continuity, in a time and place where nothing stays rooted for long. It’s a tight staging ground for an unusually wide dream.
“We aren’t just trying to save land,” Malya said, their toddler Julius perched on her lap. “We are trying to save the story.”
The story she’s referring to reaches back to 1882, when 43 Jewish families fled pogroms in Russia and the Pale of Settlement. They carried what they could — and what they couldn’t bear to leave behind.
Backed by Baron de Hirsch and other Jewish benefactors who believed farming could offer both refuge and respectability, they were sent not to the teeming tenements of Manhattan but to a thousand acres of pine forest and sandy soil.
It was a bold wager: Eastern European Jews, often caricatured in their home countries as “unproductive,” could instead be seen growing their own food as capable, contributing citizens. Those same Jewish immigrants — tailors, peddlers, clerks — could become farmers, rooted and self-reliant, all trying to prove that Jews could stand on American land and make it yield.
“It’s almost a completely different story than we’re used to hearing,” said Adrienne Krone, a religious studies professor at Allegheny College and the author of Free-Range Religion. “We’re used to the Lower East Side and factories and crowded apartments, and what was happening in these farming communities was almost the exact opposite.”
Around the same time, dozens of such Jewish agricultural colonies were established across the United States, including in Louisiana, Utah, and both Dakotas. Yiddish-speaking socialists established a similar settlement, Happyville, in South Carolina.
In New Jersey, they called their 1,000-acre settlement the Alliance Colony.
What began as tents and barracks grew into a rural Jewish community of hundreds of families: homes, vineyards, chicken farms, a school, three synagogues, and a mikvah. The colonists built a tobacco factory that failed, and a button factory that didn’t. Reinvention wasn’t strategy so much as muscle memory.
Among the colony’s early leaders was William’s great-great-grandfather, Moses Bayuk. His generation carved Alliance out of wild ground: clearing land, organizing the community, building the institutions that held it together.
After World War II, a second wave of immigrants arrived in the region — Holocaust survivors who settled in nearby Vineland and Pittsgrove and built successful chicken farms. For decades they sustained a thriving Jewish agricultural center across South Jersey.
But by the 1970s, most families had moved into city jobs. The Jewish presence waned. The land quieted.
What led them back to the farm
For William and Malya, the draw toward Alliance was never just historical. It was personal.
Malya, 41, grew up in New Jersey steeped in Jewish text and memory. She is the daughter of Rabbi Arthur Kurzweil, the noted author whose career has long focused on Jewish continuity. Her childhood was Orthodox, threaded with rituals that made the past feel close enough to touch.
William, 54, arrived at Jewish life differently. He didn’t grow up religious. His first real brush with Judaism came through, of all things, animation: In the early 2000s, before the days of YouTube and social media, he was making viral Jewish videos that somehow found their way across the internet. Several, including a cartoon in which a robot meets 50 Cent and raps about the Ten Plagues, reached millions.
“I didn’t even know what the word frum meant until Frumster hired me,” he said of the Orthodox dating site. “They paid me in a Frumster.com membership.”
It worked.
He met Malya at a Jewish singles event in 2009. They married the next summer, on Tu B’Av, known as the Jewish festival of love.
“We both had a penchant for offbeat stuff,” Malya said. “Neither of us wanted to be accountants and move to the suburbs on Long Island.”
That sensibility carried them to Sukkahfest 2014 at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut, where they witnessed a modern Jewish farming movement that wove land, ritual, ecology and community into a single experience.
“It was beautiful and intoxicating,” William said.
“All these young Jews were so into farming,” Malya added. “And we were like: Wait, we have the first Jewish farm.”
Their cramped apartment in Brooklyn feels like the furthest thing from this expansive ideal. A desk presses into a couch, the couch brushes against the mattress where William and Malya sleep. In the lone bedroom, their four children climb into a handmade Jenga-tower of bunk beds.
William opens a cigar box filled with brittle letters from Alliance’s earliest families — the kind of fragile paper that survives only because someone keeps choosing to protect it. For the couple, preserving the land has always meant preserving the story stitched through it.
The idea gained force. The place that kept resurfacing was the 85 acres William’s extended family still owned in the old Alliance Colony, land that had never fully slipped from their hands.
So the couple, an animator and an elder justice attorney, did something audacious: They spent their life savings to buy it back.
When the vision met reality
Their vision was expansive. They imagined retreats, Shabbatons, Jewish holidays at the farm, a hybrid life where city and country sat side by side. But figuring out what the land could actually do required trying almost everything.
They planted organic vegetables and heirloom crops. Built raised beds. Experimented with fruit trees. Started a micro-vineyard. (“Who doesn’t want wine tasting on a kosher vineyard in a historic Jewish farm?” Malya asked.) They considered raising geese, then heritage chicken breeds with old-sounding names. Partnered with local growers. Applied for grants. Taught programs on Jewish agricultural history.
Some ideas lived a season. Some never made it out of the notebook. They tried all these things because not trying felt like betrayal.
They fielded proposals — some compelling, some outlandish. A solar company wanted to cover their fields with panels. A hemp grower pitched them on the green rush. One man wanted to install cryptocurrency servers in the barn, a futuristic-sounding plan that fizzled when William learned the man was tied to a dubious investment scheme.
The Levins were not just fighting weeds and property taxes. They were fighting the economics that hollowed out rural America; the cultural drift that carried Jews away from small towns; the logistical strain of raising four children while holding two demanding jobs.
“We weren’t trying to be homesteaders,” Malya said. “We were trying to find something sustainable that didn’t require uprooting our whole life in Brooklyn.”
Their approach — try, fail, adjust, try again — echoed the original colonists. “Honestly, it’s what we’re doing,” Malya said. “Throwing these things against the wall and seeing what sticks, just like they did.” Reinvention has always been part of Jewish life here, as it is for many small communities trying to stay alive.
Some things they tried did stick.
Descendants began returning for regular Alliance reunions, gatherings that grew each year. Young Jews from the city arrived curious about Jewish farming. And as activity grew, the synagogue — which has hosted High Holiday services continuously since 1889 — flickered back to life, hosting monthly Shabbat services.
A visit to the farm
Driving to the site of the Alliance Colony 60 miles west of Atlantic City, the landscape dissolves into fields of corn, hay and soybeans. The road straightens, the sky widens, and then the white wooden synagogue appears. Tall, narrow, arched windows, still standing after 136 years.
Howard Jaffe is waiting on the steps.
He is 70, with a long white beard, a ponytail, and a gold hoop earring. He looks like a Jewish Santa Claus who once sold jewelry at Grateful Dead concerts — which, as it happens, he did.
His grandfather prayed in this sanctuary. Howard has made it his mission to maintain it. “This place raised me,” he says, and swings the door open. “I guess now I raise it.”
The building is neither grand nor fragile. It simply persists. Inside, the sanctuary offers the cool hush of old buildings: sunlight slanting across pews, floorboards worn to a soft gloss by generations of feet from farmers, factory workers, and families.
He walks upstairs to the women’s gallery, a reminder of the building’s Orthodox roots. From here, the sanctuary stretches below like a diorama. Then Howard opens a small doorway into the attic, a low, sloping space where traveling rabbis once slept, the rafters forming a rib cage of wood.
The Alliance Cemetery, 20 acres across the road, tells the story more plainly than any archive. The early graves belong to the colonists who cleared the land; the later ones to the survivors who arrived after the war and tried to build something new.
Howard stops to brush leaves from one stone. Names repeat across the rows: Gershal, Shiff, Brotman — the same names that mark the roads nearby. Some headstones tilt like old teeth; others sink into the earth as if tired of holding their stories upright. A few mark children. Many bear Hebrew inscriptions weathered thin by rain and time.
Deeper in, on a small rise, stands the cemetery’s most arresting structure: a large Holocaust memorial carved with the names of camps: Auschwitz. Buchenwald. Dachau. Treblinka.
It was built in the 1990s, by Irving and Esther Raab, who met in Auschwitz and immigrated to the area after the war. It’s where they built a successful kosher poultry business, at one point employing 12 butchers. Howard worked for them for a stretch, managing the killing room.
Its heavy stone rises among wooden farmhouses built by immigrants who had fled an earlier era of violence. It’s a reminder that the colony, like so much of American Jewish life, was shaped both by those who fled Europe in the 1880s and those who survived it in the 1940s.
Today, thanks to the Levins’ efforts and a new documentary about Alliance, Howard finds himself giving more tours than he has in years — to school groups, descendants, even curious Mennonites.
The work of reanimation
To the left of the cemetery stands a bright mural, painted last summer, which retells the colony’s story in bold colors. A shtetl burning. A steamship crowded with families. A wide field waiting for them. The present looking back at the past, asking what it still requires.
The last panel centers on William’s own lineage. In vivid purples stands Moses Bayuk holding a cluster of grapes from the Alliance vineyards — grapes that Welch’s once bought from this very farm.
The mural is not decoration. It is instruction: a reminder of how the story began, painted so it cannot be forgotten by whoever comes next.
Past the mural stands William’s grandparents’ home, which had long sat empty. But the bones were good: the clean lines of midcentury design, a peaceful view of fields, the kind of quiet that city families crave.
So the Levins renovated it.
They’ve now opened it as a kosher Airbnb, a place where Jewish families could spend Shabbat, celebrate holidays, or simply breathe outside the city without worrying about kitchen logistics. It wasn’t the centerpiece of their vision, but it became a steady foothold — a way to bring people onto the land, reconnect them with Alliance, and slowly rebuild around the place.
When the Levins go down to Alliance, they line up events — a tour, a talk, a small gathering — that fold into their monthly visits. The point isn’t profit. It’s presence.
For Krone, the professor who studies Jewish agricultural communities, what the Levins are doing at Alliance is not a resurrection. It’s a reanimation.
“Alliance is unique in that they have this historic connection,” she said. “They’re part of a contemporary movement of Jews reconnecting to agriculture, but they’re doing it in a place where there has been that connection before, and they’re very intentional about that.”
In her view, the Levins have already begun shifting the trajectory.
“I think they’ve reinvigorated it,” she said. “They’re growing food through collaborations, hosting events, drawing descendants back at regular reunions, keeping the synagogue active. The community that’s forming around them — that’s already the project.”
In a world where Jewish stories often end with what was lost, Alliance is a rare one still asking what might yet be found.
When William and Malya talk about Alliance now, they sound like hopeful realists with a mortgage. The early, expansive dream has settled into something steadier — less about rebuilding a vanished colony and more about tending what remains so it can keep growing.
“We really like our life in Brooklyn, but we also really like having this other place that is meaningful,” Malya said. “It’s rare for Jewish kids in America to have a place where their family has six generations of history.”
Alliance has always been an exercise in reinvention: first by the colonists, then by the survivors, and now by a family trying to reconcile two very different forms of Jewish life. The Levins move between the noise of one life and the quiet persistence of another.
They are not trying to rebuild the past. They’re trying to keep it from disappearing. And in doing so, they’ve carved out a place where Jewish life, in all its improvisation and resilience, can still take root.
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Liberal Zionist groups criticize Trump administration’s travel ban on those with Palestinian Authority passports
(JTA) — The Trump administration has extended its travel ban to Palestinian Authority passport holders amid a crackdown on legal immigration and travel.
The White House said the ben was needed because “several U.S.-designated terrorist groups operate actively in the West Bank or Gaza Strip and have murdered American citizens.”
“Also, the recent war in these areas likely resulted in compromised vetting and screening abilities,” the announcement continued. “In light of these factors, and considering the weak or nonexistent control exercised over these areas by the PA, individuals attempting to travel on PA-issued or endorsed travel documents cannot currently be properly vetted and approved for entry into the United States.”
The ban formalizes a practice revealed this fall when the United States declined to issue visas to Palestinian officials, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, to attend the United Nations General Assembly. It includes waivers for certain cases, including athletes traveling to compete in the Olympics or World Cup.
The expansion of the travel ban was condemned by several liberal-leaning Jewish groups, including J Street, a liberal Zionist advocacy and lobby group.
“At a time when the Trump administration claims that it is working to advance the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, its decision to bar Palestinian travel to the US is both deeply damaging and counterproductive,” said Adina Vogel-Ayalon, J Street’s vice president and chief of staff, in a statement. “Rather than advancing stability, this policy further delegitimizes and weakens the Palestinian Authority at the very moment when US policy should be focused on strengthening its capacity to sideline Hamas, improve governance, and help stabilize and secure Gaza and the West Bank.”
Hadar Susskind, the president and CEO of New Jewish Narrative, a progressive Zionist Jewish organization, also criticized the ban.
“We urge the administration to reverse these restrictions and to pursue security policies that are targeted, evidence-based, and consistent with human rights,” said Susskind in a statement. “True security is built through inclusion, engagement, and justice—not through walls or racist bans.”
The White House announced the ban on travelers with P.A. passports on Tuesday along with similar prohibitions on nationals from Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Syria.
The countries join 12 others whose passport-holders were barred from entering the United States starting in June, which included Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
“AMERICA FIRST SECURITY 🇺🇸,” wrote the White House in a post on X. “President Donald J. Trump just signed a new Proclamation, STRENGTHENING our borders & national security with data-driven restrictions on high-risk countries with severe deficiencies in screening & vetting.”
The new additions come as the White House continues to impose severe restrictions on immigration following the shooting of two National Guard members by a suspect who is an Afghan national last month.
Last week, the Trump administration also rolled out new draft regulations that would require travelers from Israel and dozens of other countries to provide five years of social media history for entry to the United States.
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Richmond mayor facing resignation calls over posts calling Sydney massacre ‘false flag’
Bay Area Jewish leaders are calling for the resignation of Richmond Mayor Eduardo Martinez after he re-shared multiple LinkedIn posts that called Sunday’s massacre of Jewish people in Sydney an Israeli “false flag attack.”
Martinez, who was elected by the city just north of Berkeley in 2023, also shared posts claiming that “the root cause of antisemitism is the behavior of Israel and Israelis.”
Martinez has since removed the posts from his account and apologized for sharing them “without thinking” — but he did not disavow the false flag conspiracy theory about the attack. He clarified only that “we know that antisemitism was here before the creation of the state of Israel.”
“As I’ve said many times before, we should not conflate Zionism with Judaism,” Martinez wrote on LinkedIn. “They are two separate beliefs.”
He later added, “I want to assure everyone that these postings are my opinions (or my mistakes) and mine only. They are not statements from my office or the city of Richmond. If I make a mistake, that mistake is mine only. Once again, I apologize for posting in haste without full understanding of the posting.”
He did not discuss the attack, which killed 15 people and injured dozens.
The Jewish Community Relations Council of the Bay Area was outraged by Martinez’s online activity and left cold by his apology. It called for his resignation Thursday in a statement posted to JCRC social media.
“These actions reflect a consistent and deeply troubling disregard for the safety and dignity of Jewish people,” the organization wrote on Instagram. “They erode public trust and send a chilling message to Jewish residents that they are neither protected nor respected by their own mayor.”
The local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, ADL Central Pacific, also condemned the post.
“There’s no excuse for an elected leader to be amplifying warped antisemitic conspiracy theories that seek to blame the victim,” ADL regional director Marc Levine wrote in a statement to J. The Jewish News of Northern California. “The Australian community has already faced enough tragedy over the last few days. We hope Mayor Martinez will reconsider his hurtful words, which have absolutely no place in public discourse.”
The Forward has reached out to Martinez for comment.
Martinez’s LinkedIn posts were the latest in what local leaders say is a slew of antisemitic incidents during the progressive’s tenure. In 2023, just weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, Martinez
Martinez, a former schoolteacher, posts regularly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on LinkedIn, sometimes multiple times per day.
In August, speaking at the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, Martinez likened the Oct. 7 attack to someone snapping after being bullied on the playground, J. reported, adding that whether he supported Hamas was “complicated.”
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