Uncategorized
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.
—
The post How HaZamir youth choir serves as ‘an on-ramp to Jewish life’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Meet Matt Turner, the only Jewish player on Team USA in the World Cup
(JTA) — When the U.S. squad suits up Friday night to face off against Paraguay in its opening contest in the 2026 World Cup, one Jewish player will be in the mix.
Goalkeeper Matt Turner is not only the lone Jew on the U.S. team but he could well be the only Jewish player in the entire tournament, which is being jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada starting on Thursday. It’s the first edition of the tournament to be hosted by three countries, and the first to feature 48 teams.
Israel did not qualify for the World Cup and hasn’t since 1970 — due, in part, to geopolitics that pushed its soccer federation to compete in the talented European body, not in Asia.
Jewish players DeAndre Yedlin and Daniel Edelman, who both play in the MLS and have previously played for the national team, are not on the roster this summer. Yedlin played with Turner in the ‘22 tournament in Qatar, where Turner, 31, was a star.
Turner, a New Jersey native, discovered his Jewish heritage by finding his paternal great-grandmother’s emigration papers that had allowed her to flee Lithuania during the Holocaust.
“Once I found the documents, I was certainly very, very excited,” Turner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2023. “America, in general, it’s a melting pot, and everybody has those roots elsewhere. So to understand your story, your history, a little bit is really nice.”
The revelation allowed him to obtain a Lithuanian passport, which made it easier for the goalie to pursue soccer opportunities in Europe. It also changed his relationship to his Jewish identity.
“The more my father and I dug, the more we learned, the more connected I felt to my Jewish side, the Jewish culture of my family,” Turner said at the time. “It really changed a lot of me.”
Turner, who now plays for the New England Revolution in MLS, started all four matches in 2022 for an American club that advanced to the Round of 16. He was the first American goalie with back-to-back shutouts in a World Cup since 1930.
Turner has 53 career appearances with the national team, with a 29-16-8 overall record, including 27 matches in which the opposing team did not score at all. He has also played in the Premier League and was the 2021 MLS Goalkeeper of the Year.
This time around, he is seen as less likely to start, following the ascent of a teammate to the top goalie slot. Still, he says he is moved to be part of the national team once more.
“I’ll probably cry when the national anthem goes,” he told FOX Sports. “It’s just such a huge honor — overwhelming honor — to be granted that responsibility to be on this team to do our best in those roles and ultimately, change soccer here forever.”
Although there are few Jews on the field during the 39-day tournament that ends July 19, one familiar Jewish face — or more accurately, voice — will return this year. Legendary Argentine broadcaster Andres Cantor, whose famous “Goooooooal” calls have helped popularize the sport in the United States, will be calling his 12th consecutive World Cup.
Cantor was born in Buenos Aires to a Romania-born mother and a father whose family fled the Nazis in Poland. He moved to the United States as a teenager and has publicly embraced his Jewish identity.
The post Meet Matt Turner, the only Jewish player on Team USA in the World Cup appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Their nickname is the Red Crosses, but these World Cup challengers practice at a Jewish day school
For years, San Diego Jewish Academy had been preparing for the World Cup. The school, serving students from pre-K through 12th grade, has one of the best soccer fields in California, and tournament organizer FIFA had approved the site to serve as a national team’s base camp — if any visiting countries were interested.
When the school looked at the World Cup’s qualifying nations, they wondered if their plans might be for naught.
“You have Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Iran — teams that wouldn’t necessarily choose the Jewish Academy,” said Adam Benmoise, SDJA’s director of auxiliary programs. “We were nervous.”
To their relief, the World Cup schedule delivered a stroke of luck. The four teams playing group-stage games on the West Coast did include Qatar. But one the others was a country famous for its neutrality. Switzerland began practicing at the Jewish day school June 2.
Both sides have found the arrangement a winning one. For Switzerland, San Diego Jewish Academy is more than just a practice field. It’s also a gym, a media center and an office space. (Or a synagogue, if they needed one.) And for SDJA, a pluralist school with about 500 students, the rental arrangement doesn’t just pay the bills: it also connects the local Jewish community to the world’s biggest sporting event.
The partnership is the culmination of four years of planning for Benmoise, a lifelong soccer fan whose job is to drum up outside revenue for the school. Recognizing the unusual quality of the SDJA field — real grass, not turf — he pitched the school’s CFO and athletic director on the idea of renting it out to pro teams with an eye on the 2026 World Cup.
His first move was to bring San Diego tourism officials for a site visit. They were shocked — and word got around about the 56-acre hillside campus.
“It’s a true gem,” Benmoise said. “It’s built properly, it’s manicured properly, it’s mowed properly, we have the proper irrigation. It has all of the footprints of a professional-grade soccer field, but was built for a school.”
The field was used for practices during the Gold Cup, a biennial international soccer tournament, then by Major League Soccer and touring European clubs, and finally by the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams — whose rave reviews of the campus put San Diego Jewish Academy on FIFA’s radar.
To be added to FIFA’s official site catalogue for the World Cup, though, the vetting was more rigorous. The international soccer governing body has strict pitch standards, and it employs a phalanx of inspectors and groundskeeping experts to ensure fields are up to par and consistent with one another. Benmoise also had to prove that SDJA’s facilities could accommodate the wide-ranging needs of a national team program.
In response, the school expanded the playing area by covering an unused softball diamond with 16,000 square feet of sod — a project funded by school donors. (SDJA hasn’t fielded a softball team for over a decade, Benmoise said.) The school also rented and installed a 4,500 square foot tent with tile flooring to set up a gym alongside the pitch — a temporary construction that will be paid for by the Swiss. Benmoise is hopeful the school will get to keep the workout equipment.
Sergio Affuso, a press officer for the team, said in an email that Switzerland was “very happy” with the base camp. “It is great to see how enthusiastic everyone is about hosting us here, included the kids of the school, and the facilities are very well prepared,” Affuso said.
Per FIFA rules, each of the 48 countries playing in the World Cup has to host a public community day at their base camp to locals during one of its first five days of practice. But because school was still in session those days, FIFA allowed SDJA to invite only the internal school community to the event.
That day — June 3 — the SDJA student body, faculty and a few dozen parents filled the bleachers to watch the “Red Crosses” practice. Then the team set up some mini games to play with the kids — shooting on the goalies, passing and dribbling drills, and the crowd-pleaser known as “three Swiss players against 45 fourth graders.”
A pair of journalism-interested SDJA students are getting another special perk: the Swiss federation hired them as media interns for the duration of their stay in San Diego.
Benmoise didn’t want to share how much FIFA is paying to use the field, but said the compensation is “very generous.”
“Let’s just say we’re not charging FIFA the same that I would charge, like, a youth team,” he said.
SDJA isn’t the only Jewish school whose facilities rate professional use. A pair of Orthodox high schools in Los Angeles rent their basketball gyms to NBA players for off-season workouts. The all-star roster that uses those courts appreciate not only their quality, but also the schools’ privacy and security.
Benmoise said the Swiss team — which kicks off against Qatar on Saturday in San Francisco — was thus far too focused on game prep to explore the rest of the campus. But a social media post from the team’s Instagram account about their practice field did cause a stir back home.
The post was an overhead map of the practice facility, showing the dressing area, the play area, the goalkeeper area and — on the next slide of the carousel — the hills beyond the field, labeled “snake area.”
“Watch out for the snakes 🐍 👀,” the caption read.
An alarmed Swiss media published a number of stories about the threat of serpentine pitch invasions, forcing Affuso clarify that the post was an attempt at humor.
“People in Switzerland understood the joke,” he told The Athletic. “But maybe, abroad, they didn’t.” (Benmoise said snakes had “never been an issue” on the campus.)
The post Their nickname is the Red Crosses, but these World Cup challengers practice at a Jewish day school appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Mamdani was set to meet Colombian president known for inflammatory Israel rhetoric
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had planned to meet this week with Colombian President Gustavo Petro — who has compared Israel’s leaders to Nazis and recently defended his use of the phrase “Heil Hitler” on social media — during the South American leader’s visit to New York, a source familiar with the mayor’s schedule plans confirmed.
The meeting — set to be Mamdani’s first with a foreign leader — was reportedly canceled after the Trump administration intervened, directing Colombian officials to call it off, arguing that it would violate the terms of Petro’s entry into the United States for a United Nations Security Council session on Wednesday.
The State Department revoked Petro’s visa last fall after he appeared at a pro-Palestinian rally in Manhattan, calling on U.S. soldiers to disobey presidential orders over its support for Israel’s war in Gaza and urging an armed response to counter Israel’s action against the Palestinians. Petro was granted a limited waiver this week to attend the U.N. meeting on the Middle East.
A former member of Colombia’s M-19 guerrilla movement and elected in 2022 as the country’s first socialist president in decades, Petro has repeatedly drawn condemnation from Jewish and Israeli leaders since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks for comparing Israel’s military actions to those of Nazi Germany. In 2024, he severed diplomatic ties with Israel, accusing the Jewish state of committing genocide in Gaza, an allegation Israel has strongly rejected.
This week, Petro came under fire after posting the phrase “Heil Hitler” on X in response to an op-ed supporting the right-wing presidential candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, ahead of Colombia’s June 21 presidential runoff. Petro defended the post, saying he was criticizing what he described as the author’s “fascist” rhetoric rather than endorsing the Nazi slogan itself. In his UN remarks, Petro again compared Israel to the Nazis.
A City Hall spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.
The mayor’s canceled sit-down with Petro is the latest flashpoint in his fraught alliances with inflammatory critics of Israel.
Mamdani has faced scrutiny from Jewish leaders and Zionist organizations over his sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism that is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest population of Jews outside Israel. During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and said he wouldn’t travel to the country and called for divestments in Israel’s economy. Recently, the mayor skipped the annual Israel Day parade.
In congressional races in New York City, Mamdani has actively been campaigning for candidates who have made inflammatory statements on Israel, including challenging U.S. military aid to the country and accusing the Jewish state of genocide. In particular, Mamdani has thrown his support behind former Columbia University Gaza War encampment activist Daraliza Avila Chevalier, who is challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat with the incumbent’s support for Israel front and center. Avila Chevalier, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s NYC chapter, attended the Oct. 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square, which was broadly condemned for celebrating the Hamas attacks on Israel. She has continued to defend her participation, saying that she showed up in anticipation of Israel’s “outsized reaction.”
Mamdani reignited tensions with many Jewish communities by posting a Nakba Day video produced by his City Hall media team commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948. That was followed by what was perceived as a delayed and ultimately supportive response to pro-Palestinian protesters who descended on a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood where a synagogue was hosting a real estate sale that included West Bank properties.
The head of Mamdani’s office of international affairs, tasked with interacting with the United Nations and handling diplomatic relations, is Ana Maria Archila, the past co-chair of the Working Families Party who led campaigns critical of Israel. On his first visit to the U.N. headquarters in March, Mamdani met with Secretary-General António Guterres, whom Israeli officials have criticized for his statements about the war in Gaza, accusing him of failing to sufficiently condemn Hamas. Israel recently cut ties with Guterres and barred him from entering the country following the blacklisting of Israeli authorities in a UN report regarding sexual violence in conflict zones.
The post Mamdani was set to meet Colombian president known for inflammatory Israel rhetoric appeared first on The Forward.
