(JTA) — The Jewish Theological Seminary community is in mourning after three revered scholars long associated with the Conservative movement flagship died within days of each other.

Israel Francus, who died Nov. 15 at age 96, and Rabbi Avraham Holtz, who died the same day at age 89, were both professors emeritus at the seminary — Francus as a longtime professor of Talmudic and Holtz in Hebrew literature.

Samuel Klagsbrun, who died Nov. 11 at age 91, was a psychiatrist and medical director of a private psychiatric hospital who for many years taught pastoral psychiatry to JTS students, and was instrumental in the creation, in 2009, of the seminary’s Center for Pastoral Education.

“Together, these three individuals reflect the breadth and depth of a JTS education,” Shuly Rubin Schwartz, the chancellor of JTS, said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. She noted that the three represented “the importance JTS attaches to educating not only the texts, history, and ideas of our people but also ensuring that future clergy were attuned to the heart, soul, and emotional lives of the Jews they would serve.”

Klagsbrun was perhaps the best known of the three outside of the seminary. The founder and executive medical director of Four Winds Hospitals in Katonah and Saratoga Springs, New York, he sought to reconcile the sometimes competing claims of religion and psychiatry, telling the New York Times in 2002, ”Psychiatrists were not paying any attention to religion or the spiritual aspects of life. And religion and religious values and backgrounds and spiritual dimensions are extremely important to people’s dynamics.”

He was also known for his work on psychological challenges facing cancer patients, his approaches to the ethics of death and dying, and a devotion to improving hospice care.

Born in Antwerp, Belgium, Klagsbrun emigrated with his parents to Manhattan, where he attended the Ramaz school, Yeshiva High School and City College. He received a Seminary College degree from JTS in 1954 before earning a medical degree from Chicago Medical School.

Klagsbrun was a founding member of Or Zarua, a Conservative congregation on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He and his wife, the writer Francine Klagsbrun, a longtime columnist for the New York Jewish Week and the author of a recent biography of Golda Meir, met at Camp Ramah in the Poconos. She survives him, as does his daughter Sarah and son-in-law Eric Weinstein, and three grandchildren.

Holtz, the Simon H. Fabian Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Literature at JTS, was an authority on the Nobel-prize winning Israeli author S.Y. Agnon, producing, in 1995, a fully annotated and illustrated edition of Agnon’s masterwork “Hakhnasat Kallah,” or “The Bridal Canopy.”

In an interview with fellow Agnon scholar Jeffrey Saks in 2016, he explained why he modeled the annotated edition on the “Mikraot Gedolot,” a collection of classic rabbinic commentaries of the Bible — a decision that drew the scorn of traditionalists. “You can understand the whole attack by the fact that I came from [the] Jewish Theological Seminary,” said Holtz. “Only somebody coming from the Seminary would do such a sinful thing.”

Holtz was ordained and received his doctorate at JTS, where he also taught and served as chair of its department of Hebrew Literature and as dean of Academic Development. In a eulogy, Schwartz described Holtz as “part of a cadre of younger, native-born scholars teaching at JTS in the 1960s who in retrospect proved to be harbingers of the explosion of Jewish studies in higher education in the United States.”

Schwartz also quoted professor emeritus Judith Hauptman, who remembered him as having a command of Hebrew that was “so excellent and fluent that it could make your jaw drop. It was a privilege to read any text with him — whether it was a classic poem, a midrash, or an Agnon story. For Avraham the literature was his life’s blood.”

Holtz is survived by Toby Esther Berger, a retired senior lecture in chemistry at Barnard College, four children — Shalom Eliezer Holtz, Razelle Weinstein, Mordecai Yehiel Holtz and Miriam Malka Craime — their spouses and and numerous grandchildren.

A native of Poland and survivor of Auschwitz, Israel Francus was the Judge Abraham Lieberman Distinguished Service Professor of Talmudic Exegesis at JTS, where he taught generations of students in the close reading of the rabbinic literature at the heart of a rabbi’s education. Among the many tributes shared on social media following his death, Rabbi Josh Gruenberg of Baltimore’s Chizuk Amuno Congregation spoke about the “joy” of taking Francus’ class.

“In the span of just one class, he could make you laugh to your core with is lightning-fast quips, remind you of the great care rabbis have always taken in understanding our tradition, lift you up with a compliment that inspired you to work harder, and make you cry as he shared heartfelt stories and lessons on the occasions of his teachers’ yahrzeits,” said Gruenberg.

Francus received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from both Columbia University and JTS as one of the first two graduates of JTS’s joint program with Columbia. He was also ordained at JTS.

His published works include an analysis of a commentary on a Talmudic tractate by the 16th-century rabbi Elazar Azikri, as well as over 40 articles published in Israeli journals. An article on how to interpret a sugya — the essential literary unit of the Talmud — will be published posthumously in the journal Sinai.

“My father was modest about his accomplishments,” Francus’ son Yitzchak, an attorney living in Pittsburgh, said at his father’s funeral, held Nov. 15 at JTS. “Not modest in the sense of self-abnegation, or in the showy sense of conceit internalized, but modest in the perspectival sense. He stood in awe of the Talmud. For him, simply participating in its eternal discourse was an almost unimaginable honor.”

Francus is is survived by his wife, Tova (Shulzinger) Francus, an immunologist; his sons Yoseff, Yitzchak and Yaacov Francus; 10 grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.

Holtz and Francus were both buried in Israel.

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The post Conservative Judaism’s flagship in mourning after death of 3 influential scholars appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), a school division in Northern Virginia, has been sharply criticized for allegedly suspending an Asian-American student who exposed antisemitism at his high school.

School officials accused a student at Langley High School of leaking to the public a photograph of other students drawing and holding for display a US flag in which its stars were replaced with 25 swastikas and the words “Free Palestine” were written in between the stripes, the Fairfax County Times reported. The image had been drawn during a meeting of the Muslim Students Association.

The image was shared across the school, as anti-Israel students staged a “walkout” earlier this month, carrying another sign with swastikas on it and chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — a slogan widely interpreted to be a call for the destruction of Israel, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Langley school administrators reportedly suspended two students: the Muslim student who drew the swastikas on the US flag and an Asian-American student whom school officials said had publicized the photo that was widely circulated on social media.

Parents and local leaders expressed outrage at the school for disciplining a student for reporting antisemitism, arguing it will deter others from coming forward to expose such bigotry. On Friday, parents held a demonstration outside FCPS’s administrative building in Falls Church, Virginia, to protest both the student’s suspension and what they described as unheeded concerns about rising antisemitism in FCPS schools going back several years.

“What really has upset me about this is that the only way that they can prove that there is something is to take a picture, and then the student got suspended for taking a picture,” one parent of a student attending Langley High School told a local CBS affiliate covering the protest. “There’s a history of trying to silence or not allowing these images to come to fruition to show that we have a problem here.

FCPS has denied suspending the student for exposing an act of antisemitism.

“No student at Langley High School was suspended for reporting an incident of antisemitism to school administrators,” FCPS superintendent Dr. Michelle Reid told WUSA. “We will continue to denounce all acts of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and hatred in any form.”

Speaking to WUSA9, Eric Rozenman, a Jewish activist and writer, alleged that the country can plausibly deny suspending a student for reporting antisemitism because its student code of conduct is a mammoth document comprising vague rules and regulations, many of which can be cited as sufficient cause for sending a student home.

“They can make that claim because they have a long list of bureaucratic regulations in the student handbook about what is and isn’t permitted,” Rozenman said, explaining that the incident is an example of the FCPS’ allegedly insufficient approach to addressing antisemitism, an issue that is currently being probed by the federal government.

In Nov. 2022, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) launched an investigation into a complaint, filed by the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), alleging that Jewish students in the county continually face harassment and a hostile learning environment. Chants of “Heil Hitler,” swastika graffiti, and scheduling of important tests on Jewish holidays are some of the indignities Jewish students have endured without recourse to school officials, the complaint said.

The complaint also alleged that antisemites work for the school board, hampering FCPS’s ability to confront the scope of the problem and enact meaningful reforms. In May 2021, during Israel’s last conflict with Hamas, FCPS official Abrar Omeish tweeted, “Israel kills Palestinians & desecrates the Holy Land…apartheid & colonization were wrong yesterday and will be today, here and there.”

“We want [FCPS] to be able to recognize what is antisemitic and anti-Jewish in the first place,” Rozenman said during Friday’s demonstration. “Take it just as seriously as they would take something that was anti-Black, anti-gay, or anti-Muslim. This is the thing they’re not doing. They can’t recognize it or don’t want to act.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Virginia Student Suspended After Reporting Antisemitic Incident at School, Parents Say first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

The Saskatchewan government announced Nov. 20 that Holocaust education will be mandatory in the province’s high schools, starting in the 2025-26 school year. Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario have already included Holocaust education as a mandatory part of their curriculum. Manitoba has said it is considering a similar move. “Antisemitism, unfortunately, is a prejudice that […]

The post Saskatchewan becomes the fourth Canadian province to make Holocaust education mandatory—while Manitoba is still considering the move appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.