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Novel about Chinese rescuer of Jews raises questions about facts vs. fiction in Holocaust stories
TAIPEI (JTA) — Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese diplomat stationed in Vienna who helped thousands of Jews escape from Europe during World War II, never met Adolf Eichmann.
But in “Night Angels,” a novel based on his life, Feng-Shan comes face to face with Eichmann several times — and his wife Grace’s Jewish tutor, Lola, tries to kill the architect of the Holocaust.
That detail is one of many that has spurred Ho Manli, Feng-Shan’s daughter, to speak out against “Night Angels,” the fourth novel by the Chinese-American author Weina Dai Randel. Manli says the book distorts elements of her father’s story, which was unknown before she spent decades documenting his heroic efforts to issue visas allowing Jews to escape to Shanghai.
“What I have found in doing this story is it’s very difficult to try to maintain the historical integrity of the facts,” Manli told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Countless people … want to use this for their own means, whether it be commercial like this novelist, whether it be political, or whatever. So over the two decades that I have been doggedly trying to uncover more and more, I’ve been constantly fending off these sorts of opportunistic assaults.”
The dispute is casting a shadow over the novel, released this month, and reinvigorating longstanding debates over the importance of truth in historical fiction — particularly in stories about the Holocaust.
“Night Angels” follows Feng-Shan and his wife, Grace, as they risk their lives by issuing visas that allow thousands of Jews escape Germany and Austria to Shanghai. Grace, one of the novel’s narrators and main characters, is based on Feng-Shan’s real second wife with the same name who was no longer in Vienna after the Anschluss — Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, and the period in which the novel is set. By that time, Feng-Shan had already sent Grace away to Boston. She never witnessed Nazi rule or Feng-Shan’s efforts to save Jews, Manli writes.
Several other events in the book, including Grace’s friendship with a Jewish woman who attempts to assassinate Eichmann and her development of a morphine addiction, are fully fictional.
Manli first took aim at the book in a column last month in China Daily. The novel, she wrote, “exploits real names, real people, real events and places, in what is essentially a Holocaust-themed melodrama.”
“In online reviews, readers say that they are thrilled to learn of my father and this history — except of course, what they have learned is not really history, my father’s, or anyone else’s,” she wrote.
Randel and her publisher, Amazon Publishing, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Randel dedicated the novel to “Ho Feng-Shan, his family, and all the angels in Vienna and beyond.” The book includes a disclaimer disclosing that its contents are a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination.
But that’s not satisfactory to some readers, including Tina Kanagaratnam, co-founder of the heritage group Historic Shanghai, whose book group read a previous Randel story set in Shanghai.
“If you’re talking about a historical character, you have to get the history right. Otherwise, just create a fictional character,” Kanagaratnam told JTA. “This is written for people who don’t know the history, but as Manli said, that’s dangerous, because then that’s what they remember. That’s what they take away.”
Ho Monto, left, and Ho Manli stand in front of the Righteous Among the Nations wall at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Jan. 23, 2001. (Isaac Harari/AFP via Getty Images)
“Night Angels” has accumulated thousands of positive reviews on Amazon and has been promoted by Jewish organizations across the country. On Wednesday, the Jewish Book Council, in collaboration with Tablet Magazine and the Jewish Museum in New York City, will hold an event with Randel and journalist Jonathan Freedland that will explore “fact, fiction, and the sometimes blurred line between them.”
Randel’s book adds to a long list of Holocaust stories occupying that blurry territory, dating from the genre’s early days. Many readers believed, for example, that “The Painted Bird,” the pivotal work of Holocaust fiction from the 1960s, was based on author Jerzy Koszinski’s experience during the Holocaust; it was not. Scholars and booksellers have long agonized over whether to call Elie Wiesel’s “Night” a memoir or a novel, and whether the distinction matters when it is taught in American classrooms.
The fight has extended to questions over who can tell which stories from Holocaust. In 2014, Haaretz journalist Judy Maltz filed a lawsuit against Penguin Canada and author Jenny Witterick alleging that Witterick’s novel, “My Mother’s Secret,” copied Maltz’s documentary film about her family’s rescue during World War II. The court ruled in favor of Witterick on the grounds that copyright protection does not apply to historical events.
“An author is only ever responsible to their own fiction. They have creative license. And fictionalization of other people against their will is part of the history of literature,” said Helen Finch, a professor at the University of Leeds who studies representations of the Holocaust in German literature. “But that doesn’t absolve the writer from criticism.”
Manli — a journalist who has worked for the Boston Globe and helped found the China Daily, a state-backed media outlet, in 1981 — has made it her mission to set the record straight on Feng-Shan’s story. She began researching her father after his death in 1997, while writing his obituary. One line in his memoir from 1990 that recalled “saving who knows how many Jews” piqued her interest and led to a 25-year quest to document the extent of what her father did during the war.
His story of defying both his own government and the government of Germany to write Shanghai visas for thousands of persecuted Jews had been previously unknown, even to the refugees themselves — most of whom never met Feng-Shan.
Manli’s research led to Feng-Shan’s recognition by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum and memorial authority, in 2000 as “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honor given to those who risked their own lives to help Jews during World War II. Since then, greater attention has been paid to his story, and memorials across the world, from Israel to China to Italy, bear his name today.
Manli said Randel reached out to her several times before her book was published but after it had already been written. According to Manli, Randel sought out her blessing on the book by phone and email, saying that “the Holocaust history and your father’s history is now being forgotten” and adding that she wanted to help spread that history. Manli, who is working on a book of her own about her father, said she refused to answer, “just from the tone of her letter and what she wanted.”
“I have been burned before by this,” Manli told JTA. “I knew immediately that this was not something that I wanted to participate in and certainly that I wasn’t going to endorse.”
In an email shared with JTA in response to Manli’s editorial, Randel wrote that she has “great respect for Dr. Ho Fenghan[sic] and his family. I’m surprised to hear such strong negative criticism. I’m puzzled to see my gesture of respect is viewed in such a hostile way. If Ms. Manli Ho wishes to speak to me, I’m here.”
Randel, according to a biography on her website, came to the United States from China at 24 and became “the first Asian American novelist who intertwined Chinese history with the Jewish diaspora in Shanghai during WWII.”
Her previous novel, “The Last Rose of Shanghai,” follows a Chinese woman who falls in love with a German Jewish refugee living in the Shanghai Ghetto, the restricted area in which over 20,000 displaced Jews lived during World War II, under brutal oversight by Japanese officials who occupied the area. In interviews before the book’s 2021 release, Randel recalled hearing about Jewish refugees while she was living near the district that housed the ghetto.
After moving to the United States, she married an American Jew and is raising her children with both cultures in Boston. She has said “The Last Rose of Shanghai” was inspired by her interest in the history she saw in Shanghai and a desire to pay homage to her Jewish side of the family.
“I think it’s apt to say the survival of Shanghai Jews is also a story of how we as different races and as human beings shine and triumph over war and adversity,” she said in a January 2022 interview with World Literature Today.
But other researchers and authors deeply familiar with Feng-Shan’s story and Jewish history in Shanghai told JTA that “The Last Rose of Shanghai” also contained historical inaccuracies, including misrepresentation of real people who appear as characters, such as Victor Sassoon, a Jewish businessman and member of the dynasty known as the “Rothschilds of the East,” and Laura Margolis, the first female Joint Distribution Committee representative.
The book also includes a character named Goya, described as “a shameless Jew … who somehow had won the Japanese’s trust.”
The Jewish character is based on the real Kanoh Ghoya, who was not Jewish, but a notoriously cruel Japanese officer who had dubbed himself “king of the Jews” and “was infamous for his inhumane treatment of ghetto inhabitants,” according to the USC Shoah Foundation.
According to Publisher’s Marketplace, “The Last Rose of Shanghai” was sold to Lake Union Publishing — an imprint of Amazon Publishing — in 2021 as half of a two-book deal worth between $100,000 and $250,000. It was a finalist for a Jewish National Book Award that year. (The Jewish Book Council, which confers those awards, did not respond to multiple requests for comments about the “Night Angels” event.)
Kanagaratnam said Historic Shanghai’s book group read “The Last Rose of Shanghai” in 2021 and hosted Randel for an event. The group was unsatisfied by Randel’s response when factual issues were brought to her attention, particularly the characterization of Ghoya as Jewish, Randel dismissed them, Kanagaratnam said.
Randel’s novel is only part of a growing consciousness among the general public of the Shanghai Jewish refugee story. In recent decades, especially following the normalization of Israel-China relations in 1992 and Feng-Shan’s recognition by Yad Vashem, both governments have promoted the history, sometimes distorting facts to push different narratives about their wartime past.
New books and other media adaptations about the Shanghai Jewish refugee story have proliferated, such as the musical “Shanghai Sonatas” (2022) and the novels “Someday We Will Fly” (2019),“The Lives Before Us” (2019), and “The World and All It Holds” (2023). Other films and books are forthcoming.
“The audience of people who are interested in, if you will, an ‘exotic’ Jewish story, I think has meant that we’re seeing more and more of these. Everyone’s heard the Holocaust story. But now here’s one in an exotic setting,” said Kanagaratnam. “I think authors need to take responsibility. But honestly, I also blame the publishing industry, because where are the fact-checkers? A lot of the stuff in this can be really easily googled.”
Finch said novels that are set during that period are “always a work of fiction about the present.”
“So the question is, why is this author writing this book now? What does that say about the current moment when she’s writing? And what is with Randel trying to reflect either consciously or unconsciously in contemporary politics as well?”
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Tidbits: A huge Jewish dating event through AI and Chabad
Tidbits is a Forverts feature of easy news briefs in Yiddish that you can listen to or read, or both! If you read the article and don’t know a word, just click on it and the translation appears. Listen to the report here:
דעם 9טן אויגוסט וועלן טויזנטער אומבאַפּאָרטע ייִדן איבער דער וועלט אָנשטעלן זייערע עקראַנען און רעדן נײַן מינוט לאַנג מיט אַ פֿרעמדן. בײַ אַ טייל פֿון זיי וועט דאָס אפֿשר, אָן זייער וויסן, זײַן דער ערשטער שמועס מיט זייער זיווג.
אַזוי האָפֿן טאַקע די אָרגאַניזירער פֿונעם ריזיקן ראַנדקע-געשעעניש, Met@Chabad, וואָס זיי זאָגן וועט זײַן די גרעסטע סינכראָניזירטע ייִדישע ראַנדקע־אונטערנעמונג אויף דער וועלט. אין איין נאַכט וועלן אומבאַפּאָרטע ייִדן פֿון מער ווי 30 לענדער און טויזנט קהילות — אַרײַנגערעכנט מעלבורן, בוענאָס־אײַרעס און ניו־יאָרק — צונויפֿגעפּאָרט ווערן מיט פֿינעף מענטשן, אַ דאַנק דער הילף פֿון „איי־אײַ“ און אויך דורך רבנים און רביצינס, וואָס קענען די באַטייליקטע פּערזענלעך. מיט יעדן פֿון די פֿינעף מענטשן וועט דער באַטייליקטער שמועסן נײַן מינוט לאַנג דורך ווידעאָ.
זינט 2021, ווען מע האָט אײַנגעפֿירט די יערלעכע ראַנדקע־אונטערנעמונג, זענען מער ווי 30 פּאָרלעך פֿאַרקנסט געוואָרן דורך דער סיסטעם, און כּמעט בײַ אַלע זענען די פּאָרלעך געווען פֿון אַנדערע שטעט און לענדער. מיט אַנדערע ווערטער, אָן דער אונטערנעמונג וואָלטן זיי זיך קיין מאָל נישט באַקענט.
די יערלעכע אונטערנעמונג איז אָרגאַניזירט געוואָרן צוליב אַ וואַקסנדיקן פֿענאָמען בײַ די חב״ד־שלוחים איבער דער וועלט. יונגע ייִדן וואָס קומען צו זיי אויף שבת־מאָלצײַטן אָדער כּדי זיך צו באַראַטן מיט זיי וועגן אַ קאַריערע אָדער צוליב אַ פּערזענלעכן ענין, האָבן אָפֿט אויך געבעטן הילף בײַם געפֿינען אַ שידוך. אָבער בײַ חב״ד איז פּשוט נישט געווען קיין „שדכנות־ביוראָ“.
נעמענדיק אין באַטראַכט וויפֿל אַמעריקאַנער ייִדן האָבן הײַנט חתונה מיט נישט־ייִדן האָבן די שלוחים שטאַרק געוואָלט העלפֿן די אומבאַפּאָרטע ייִדן וואָס זוכן אַ זיווג. לויטן „פּיו“־פֿאָרשצענטער, האָבן 72% נישט־אָרטאָדאָקסישע ייִדן זינט 2010 חתונה געהאַט מיט עמעצן וואָס איז נישט קיין ייִד. אָבער זינט דעם 7טן אָקטאָבער 2023 האָבן די שלוחים באַמערקט אַ נײַע טענדענץ: מער יונגע ייִדן זאָגן זיי, אַז זיי ווילן חתונה האָבן מיט ייִדן און זוכן הילף ווי צו דערציִען ייִדישע משפּחות.
כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן אויף דעם ראַנדקע־געשעעניש דעם 9טן אויגוסט גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ:
צו לייענען וועגן דעם אויף ענגליש גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ:
To read about this in English click here:
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‘Do not boycott people who dislike us’: Netanyahu challenger Yair Lapid urges AIPAC and J Street to make support for Israel bipartisan again
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday made headlines, but he is not the only Israeli official trying to make inroads in the nation’s capital this week.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid is also in town to get a head start on repairing the U.S.-Israel relationship. On Wednesday, Lapid, who is running on a joint slate with former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to unseat Netanyahu in Israel’s October elections, met with a group of Democratic senators, including a handful who have voted in favor of restricting arms sales to Israel.
“I took advantage of the visit to convince them they were wrong, presenting them with facts on the ground,” Lapid wrote in a post on X translated from Hebrew. “Boycotting those who speak out against you is not the way. In the face of opposition in the Senate, you need to work hard, meticulously, to repair relations with both parties.”
Lapid and Bennett’s priorities are shared by many liberal Israelis who see the bipartisan foundation of the U.S.-Israel alliance falling apart and believe that replacing Netanyahu and winning back Democrats are both key to the survival of the Jewish state.
A recent poll found that nearly half of Americans believe the U.S. should enforce an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for Netanyahu over his actions during Israel’s war in Gaza. Meanwhile, in April, more than three dozen Democratic senators voted in favor of a resolution introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont to block certain arms sales to Israel.
On Wednesday, Lapid met with some of those Democratic senators: Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) Maggie Hassan (D-NH), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), and Cory Booker (D-NJ), all of whom voted to restrict some U.S. arms sales to Israel. Also at the meeting were Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), both of whom have staunchly backed U.S. military support for Israel.
Ahead of those meetings, Lapid outlined the opposition’s plan to bring Israel out of international isolation in a speech Monday evening at the Atlantic Council, an influential DC-based think tank.
First on the “to-do list,” as he called it, was to “restore Israel’s bipartisan standing in the United States” and “firmly encourage AIPAC and J Street to move away from partisanship, remind our friends that to be pro-Israeli is to be bipartisan, and build a broad coalition of support.”
“Do not boycott people who dislike us,” he added. “Insist on meeting them and presenting our case.”
AIPAC has long marketed itself as a bipartisan lobbying organization, though critics argue it has become increasingly aligned with Republicans in recent years. In late 2021, it launched a political action committee that has spent heavily in Democratic primaries against candidates whom it deemed unsupportive of Israel.
Meanwhile, J Street, founded in 2008, has long been closely aligned with Democratic lawmakers, often maintaining a critical position on Israeli policies and advocating for a two-state solution to the conflict.
At present, Lapid and Bennett’s joint party, called Together, is the second-strongest party running against Netanyahu in the polls. Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party is polling ahead of it — and, in some surveys, ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud party
Any coalition capable of ousting Netanyahu would likely require Together and Yashar to join forces, meaning Bennett, Lapid and Eisenkot would likely all hold very senior positions in a future government if they manage to build a coalition.
Lapid also pledged that a new government would “stay out of American politics” and “respect the American people and the leaders they have chosen on both sides of the aisle.”
“Elizabeth Warren, John Ossoff and Tim Kaine are not the enemy,” he said. “The Democratic Party is not the enemy. J.D. Vance is not the enemy.”
Vance has rattled the U.S. Israel relationship in recent weeks by belligerently defending a ceasefire agreement with Iran and lambasting the Netanyahu government. In addition to Kaine, Warren of Massachusetts and Ossoff of Georgia were among the senators in April who voted in favor of restricting arms sales.
The post ‘Do not boycott people who dislike us’: Netanyahu challenger Yair Lapid urges AIPAC and J Street to make support for Israel bipartisan again appeared first on The Forward.
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The most Jewish room in Fremont, Ohio, is in a county history museum
Beneath a mahogany staircase inside the Sandusky County Historical Society hangs a memorial plaque in a place both fitting and strange.
The sanctuary is gone. The Torah scrolls have long since been moved elsewhere. Military exhibits and county memorabilia fill the rooms. But the plaque remains, listing the dead of Temple Beth Israel, a congregation that closed more than four decades ago.
Across Ohio, when small-town synagogues closed, their history did not vanish all at once. Instead, it was scattered to neighboring congregations, local museums, regional archives and descendants who saved whatever they could. A siddur. A stained-glass window. A Star of David rescued before a building was demolished.
The story of Beth Israel’s plaque almost ended when someone proposed melting it down.
“That couldn’t be discarded,” said Dennis Newman, who grew up at the synagogue.
So he and his nephew drove to Sandusky, Ohio, to retrieve it from another closing congregation.
“It was really heavy,” he said.
Now it is back in Fremont, in the same building where Jewish families once gathered for Shabbat, Hebrew lessons, and holiday services, though most visitors do not know that when they walk in.
The building on Birchard Avenue still stands, a red-brick house set slightly back from the street. Inside, rooms that once held a wedding, Sunday school classes, and other scenes from synagogue life now house exhibits on Sandusky County’s past, including industrial history and local life. A Civil War battle flag serves as one centerpiece. The Jewish past is there too, a small exhibit Newman helped to create.
“Most people are surprised,” said Roy Wilhelm, a local volunteer with the historical society.
A congregation’s afterlife
Fremont is not unique. Throughout Ohio and the Midwest, other small-town congregations have closed, raising the same question: what becomes of the objects, records and stories they leave behind?
Toby Brief, executive director of the Columbus Jewish Historical Society, said her organization has increasingly become a repository for that afterlife. “The definition of Central Ohio has grown,” she said. In practice, she added, the society often functions as “much more of a regional archive between Cleveland and Cincinnati.”
That work, she said, is active rather than passive. “We find materials, we identify them.” Sometimes that means typed oral histories or photographs. Sometimes it means relationships with local historical societies. Sometimes it means preserving just one object from a vanished Jewish community. “We are always telling others not to forget to collect the artifacts,” Brief said.
One of those objects came from New Philadelphia, Ohio.
Like Beth Israel, the Tuscarawas County Jewish Center emerged in the 1930s, part of the same era when many small-town Jewish communities across Ohio were growing. The center was dedicated in 1937, two years after Beth Israel first gathered above a clothing store in Fremont. From its earliest days, the center also reached beyond its own members. At the dedication, the Rev. Frank Cody of First Presbyterian Church spoke. In 1938, when Joseph Wagner was installed as the center’s first rabbi, banquet guests included New Philadelphia’s mayor, Arthur Williams, along with the town’s chief of police and two Christian ministers.
But the ending in New Philadelphia was different. By 1967, the Jewish center had become inactive. The following year, the building was sold and razed to create a parking lot for employees of the local newspaper.
Almost nothing physical survived — just a Star of David rescued by a congregant before the building came down. Today it is preserved by the Columbus Jewish Historical Society.
“It is so simple,” Brief said. But “that star represents a synagogue, a Jewish center, it represents families.”
A home of their own
In Fremont, more remained. One artifact is the memorial plaque. But the building itself is an artifact, too.
For decades, Beth Israel sustained Jewish life in a town where Jews were always a small minority. At its peak in the late 1940s and 1950s, Fremont’s Jewish community numbered about 50 families. It was never large, but it had the elements of a full communal life: weekly services, a Sunday school, a Sisterhood, student rabbis traveling in from Cincinnati and New York, and ties to nearby towns like Tiffin, Fostoria, and Norwalk.
Before the congregation had a permanent home, it gathered in the mid-1930s in a rented room above a store on Front Street. On the day of its 1935 dedication, about 300 people crowded into the upstairs space. They sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hatikvah,” and the women of the newly formed auxiliary served a buffet luncheon.
A few years later, in 1942, the congregation purchased a former residence on Birchard Avenue and dedicated it as Temple Beth Israel. More than 200 people attended, including Amer Wrigley, the mayor of Fremont. Beth Israel now had a home of its own.
For the next two decades, Jewish life in Fremont settled into a modest but steady rhythm. The sanctuary seated about 65 people comfortably and filled for major holidays. Children attended Sunday school. The Sisterhood organized holiday events, charitable drives, and community programs. Church youth groups visited to learn about Judaism, and in 1948 Beth Israel hosted an interfaith Shabbat service that drew about 100 people. Local newspapers praised the congregation’s willingness to “cooperate with the other churches of the city and help make Fremont a leader in the pathways of better understanding.”
Jewish life extended beyond the synagogue, too. Families were tied to local businesses, including Joseph’s Department Store, and worked in medicine, jewelry, and scrap metal. The community was not large, but it was woven into the town.
Newman, who grew up in Fremont, remembers both the closeness and the isolation of that world. “I never knew another Jewish kid in Fremont,” he said. “Judaism was a lonely thing.”
“We were not deeply religious,” he said, “but deeply Jewish.”
By the 1960s, the patterns that had sustained small-town Jewish life in Fremont were thinning. Younger people moved away. Services, once weekly, became less frequent. Around 1967, Beth Israel discontinued its Sunday school, and the remaining children were sent to Sandusky or Toledo for Jewish education.
Still, the congregation persisted longer than some might have expected. In 1966, Beth Israel marked its diamond anniversary with a dinner at the Fremont Country Club attended by the mayor, a Catholic monsignor, and a Protestant minister — one more sign that even in decline, the synagogue understood itself as part of Fremont’s wider civic and religious life.
By the late 1970s, though, only about 15 families remained. Services continued once a month and on the High Holidays. In 1980, the trustees decided to close the congregation.
What remains
But closure did not mean immediate disappearance.
Some members joined Oheb Shalom in Sandusky. Torah scrolls and other ritual items were transferred to other synagogues, where they could still be used. A portion of the proceeds from Beth Israel’s sale established a scholarship at Fremont Ross High School for “average students” planning to attend college — an expression of communal values that continued for decades before fading from local records in the 2010s. Small gatherings and holiday observances in Fremont continued in private homes into the 1990s.
Looking back on Oheb Shalom’s closing in 2023, Newman described it less as an end than a transition: “This is not goodbye, just goodbye to the building.”
What remains is often harder to see and more fragile: names on a yahrzeit plaque, ritual items forgotten in a closet, a story carried from one generation to the next.
Brief knows stories from across Ohio. Many people, she said, are surprised by how widespread Jewish life once was in the state’s smaller towns and by how little visible evidence of it remains. Sometimes there was a formal congregation. Sometimes only “one or two families.” But there was still “a presence.” In some places, that presence stretches back earlier than most people assume, into the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s.
“They wanted to be with other Jews,” Brief said. “They wanted a sense of Jewish life.”
In Fremont, memory survives in other ways too. David Detwiler, who grew up in town decades after Beth Israel’s peak, is not Jewish, but he remembers where the synagogue stood. He remembers the Jewish section of Oakwood Cemetery near his elementary school, and the peculiarity, in retrospect, of childhood games unfolding beside graves.
“Looking back, it was odd to have kids playing next to the dead,” he said.
He knew only one Jew growing up, an educator and school administrator who handed him his high school diploma. But a Jewish presence still lingered in the town’s memory and institutions, even after the congregation was gone. His own church, First Presbyterian, stood a block north of the synagogue and closed in 2025.
“You don’t really remember what happened,” he said. “You remember how it made you feel.”
Fremont’s Jewish memory also survives in stories about businesses and local relationships. Christine Burns, whose family owns Burns Iron and Metal, said her grandfather bought a scrapyard from Marcus Michles, a Jewish entrepreneur whose brother, Joseph, was among the leading figures in Temple Beth Israel, including serving as its president. He did so by borrowing money from Jewish community members and later became friends with many of them.
Joe Cheek, who worked for Michles in the 1970s, remembered him as demanding but fair. “He did not expect you to do anything he would not do himself,” Cheek said.
These memories are not always precise. Names fade. Timelines blur. Details collapse into one another.
But they have not vanished.
Back on Birchard Avenue, the former synagogue is open only seasonally, from May through October, for limited hours. Visitors can walk through the building, pausing at exhibits and reading placards about Sandusky County’s past. Few realize what the house once held.
There is no longer a sanctuary in any recognizable sense. No weekly services. No children’s classes. No steady ritual rhythm drawing people through the doors.
And yet the names remain.
The plaque is back in Fremont now, in the lobby of the old synagogue, beneath the staircase. It does not restore the congregation, or make the building a synagogue again. But it keeps the dead from becoming anonymous and the community from disappearing without a trace.
That is how continuity is carried: by a historical society, by a regional archive, or by a man who sees the names from his childhood and decides they cannot be let go.
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