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Remembering Misha Avramoff, a champion of Jewish education and New York’s poor
(JTA) — When my friend and teacher Misha Avramoff died one year ago at age 83, few in the Jewish media took note of his passing.
It was a glaring omission of someone whose pioneering work with the Jewish poor — as the co-director of Project Ezra, a grassroots organization serving the Jewish elderly on the Lower East Side — and whose innovative teaching in Jewish supplemental high schools was chronicled and celebrated during his lifetime.
I was a student in one of those high schools whose life, like many, was influenced by his dedication to justice and the Jewish people. We usually perform the act of hesped, speaking words of eulogy, at the time of death when memory is immediate and feelings are raw, but we also typically stop kaddish at 11 months and arrive at the first yahrzeit with a new perspective. After a year that has seen renewed antisemitism, with many Jews feeling isolated and confused, the positive example of his life seems newly relevant.
Sharing his story at an unconventional time is appropriate for Misha, whose life defied many conventions. He worked with the poor and with the privileged. He was deeply ambivalent about the organized Jewish community while serving with love the full spectrum of the Jewish world: observant, secular, Zionist, Yekke, ultra-Orthodox, Mizrahi, assimilated, Bundist. I once watched Misha talk to a Karaite watchmaker — in Ladino — at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul and receive an embrace and an invitation to dinner. I attribute this to his open and welcoming nature, informed by a personal history I will summarize briefly.
Menashe Gabriel Avramoff was born in Sophia, Bulgaria, in 1939. The experience of Bulgarian Jews during World War II is unique. The community suffered persecution and relocations during the war but was spared mass deportation and extermination, with the tragic exception of Jews in the regions of Thrace, Piro and Macedonia. Misha’s reluctance to call himself a survivor would become significant when he worked with German and Polish refugees at Project Ezra. His experience is explored as part of the 2021 documentary “A Question of Survival” about the Bulgarian Jewish community in wartime.
When the Communist government came to power, Misha’s family joined an estimated 95% of Bulgaria’s Jews, the majority secular and Zionist, in moving to Israel. He liked Israel and felt at home there, adding Hebrew to the languages he had spoken in Sophia: Ladino with his family, French at his Catholic school and Bulgarian on the street. His father, who had attended university in Vienna, may also have passed on familiarity with German. In 1954, when Misha was turning 16 and his sister Adele was 10, his father moved them to the United States. Misha would later travel to Jewish communities all over the world, but from that time forward, New York was home base.
At first, Misha had trouble finding his way. There were high school years spent at the movies, working odd jobs to earn pocket money and help his family, and diligently not attending classes. He was expelled from one high school for truancy and helped a second earn a soccer championship — two facts that, when selectively disclosed, would impress his conscientious and college-focused students. Although he lived in New York longer than any other location, he never lost his accent when speaking English. It seemed almost a point of pride and provided a whiff of mystery and charm. It also anchored him as an outsider and acted like a passport to the two groups he focused on professionally, also outsiders of sorts: seniors and adolescents.
Misha began his work with adolescents as a youth group leader while earning a degree from Columbia University. He began his work with seniors following graduation, when civil rights leaders adopted a separatist ideology and many Jewish volunteers refocused on the Jewish community, where there was growing recognition of need.
These included the small group of Yeshiva University graduates who in 1973 started Project Ezra, where Misha would find his way. Writing in the Village Voice in 1972, Paul Cowan compared the poverty on the Lower East Side to notoriously poor regions he had seen elsewhere in the United States, including the deep South and inner cities. His essay “Jews Without Money, Revisited” is both tender rendition and social indictment. “Most people think of the Jewish immigration as the most spectacularly successful one in American history, but the 50-year journey from the shtetl to the Space Age left many casualties in its wake,” wrote Cowan.
Gabriel and Victoria Avramoff pose with their son Misha and newborn daughter Adela, 1944-1945, in Bulgaria. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Misha Avramoff)
This is around the time that Misha entered my life, when he added the Judah Nadich Hebrew High School at Park Avenue Synagogue to his teaching schedule. He would start his work days on the Lower East Side and end them on the Upper East Side, condensing the 50-year journey Cowan describes into something like 50 minutes. It is facile to say Misha worked with the Jewish past and the Jewish future; I am not sure he saw them as distinct. Fostering relationships is what mattered most to him. Personal encounters were the antidote to loneliness, ignorance and many forms of prejudice. They mitigated effects of poverty and countered what he saw as the sterility of Jewish institutions. He wanted his seniors to know they were not forgotten and his students to experience the authenticity of a Lower East Side where kosher food was then easier to find than vegan soft serve or seaweed-infused gin. This was both a matter of hesed — loving-kindness — and of Jewish survival.
His work at Ezra included a remarkable partnership with Rabbi Joseph Singer, a pillar of the religiously observant Lower East Side who was descended from the brother-in-law of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. In interviews, Misha described himself as an anti-poverty worker, a vocation he liked to contrast, somewhat unfairly, with social work. He was drawing from Great Society terminology and also from Rabbi Singer, who taught about “poverty of the pocketbook” and “poverty of the spirit.” Misha spoke at Singer’s funeral in 2006.
For decades, Misha’s life followed a comfortable rhythm. He worked at Ezra, taught at supplementary Jewish high schools in New York City and on Long Island, and spent summers traveling the globe with his beloved wife Jacky. There were career highlights. He pushed Ezra in 1983 to become the first American Jewish organization to host a German volunteer through Action Reconciliation Service for Peace. Since Ezra’s seniors included Holocaust survivors, this move was bold and eased by the trust they had in Misha. His recognition by the Covenant Foundation with their excellence in Jewish education award followed in 1995.
Even as funding models for social services changed, Misha persisted in raising money personally, declining offers of support from institutional donors like UJA-Federation that were, in his words, “monolithic” and “removed amcha, the people, our people” from the imperative of tzedakah. (UJA-Federation addresses poverty through its support of at least 11 agencies in the city.)
Following the economic downturn of 2008, the Ezra board proposed a merger with Selfhelp Community Services, a large agency with a different culture and strategic priorities. Although the merger stopped at the 11th hour, things were not the same after that and Misha painfully eased himself out of Ezra in the early 2010s.
Since Misha’s death last Jan. 18, many concerns of his life seem newly relevant. Jewish poverty has been revisited and highlighted on the communal agenda by organizations like TEN: Together Ending Need. Rabbi Rachel Isaacs writes about the Jewish class divide, much as Anne G. Wolfe and Paul Cowan did in the past, focusing on disparities between Jewish life in small towns and urban centers.
And since Oct. 7, other things about American Jewish life recall the early 1970s. There is again a kind of Jewish awakening in reaction to events in American life and Israel, and some Jews are feeling abandoned by fellow-travelers in social justice work. At such times, vigilance can take the form of militance and also creative experimentation. Misha’s life is an example of the second.
“When Stokely Carmichael advised whites to quit [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] and to organize their own communities,” Jack Newfeld wrote in the Village Voice in 1979, when he listed Misha on his annual Honor Roll, “Misha took him at his word.”
Misha dedicated his life to the Jewish world, combining the work of social service with social action. His pursuit of justice sharpened the caring work of Ezra and his dedication to individuals softened the hard edge of activism. These and other qualities were highlighted at his funeral on Jan. 19, 2023, attended by family, friends, students and colleagues of decades. Some work for organizations whose funding Misha declined, and he had embraced them all with a large and welcoming smile.
He is survived by his wife Jacqueline Gutwirth, son Carmi Gutwirth Avramoff, niece Gabrielle Brechner (Daniel Fine) and grand-nephews Harry and Asher.
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The post Remembering Misha Avramoff, a champion of Jewish education and New York’s poor appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram
Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march in front of pro-Israel demonstrators on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect
Meta Platforms, Inc. has banned the infamous Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) anti-Zionist student group from its platforms, a decision that the company says is irrevocable.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD is responsible for spreading pro-Hamas propaganda, assaulting Jewish students, and disrupting academic study at Columbia with unauthorized demonstrations and property destruction. Its behavior, among other factors, drove the Trump administration’s cancellation in March of $400 million in federal contracts and grants awarded to Columbia.
CUAD first reported that Meta shuttered its Instagram account on Monday, denouncing the measure as being part of “a long and concerted effort from corporations and imperial powers to erase the Palestinian people.” Meta later justified the decision to Jewish Insider, explaining that CUAD had forced the company’s hand by ceaselessly transgressing the platform’s terms of use of agreement. Meta forbids groups which advocate violence to operate on Instagram, and CUAD has used its account to call for toppling the Israeli and US governments. Additionally, its Instagram account has been essential for promoting unlawful demonstrations CUAD continues to hold at Columbia University and for sharing resources that have helped its collaborators avoid punishment.
Meta told Jewish Insider that the group won’t be allowed back.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD’s activities have been described as a threat to the civil rights and security of Jewish Columbia University students.
Last April, CUAD members commandeered a section of campus and, after declaring it a “liberated zone,” lit flares and chanted pro-Hamas and anti-American slogans. When the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrived to disperse the unlawful gathering, hundreds of CUAD members and their affiliates reportedly amassed around them to prevent the restoration of order. During ensuing clashes with law enforcement, one student screamed “Yes, we’re all Hamas, pig!” while others shouted, “Long live Hamas!” and filmed themselves praising the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the US-designated terrorist group.
In September, during the university’s convocation ceremony, the group distributed a pamphlet which called on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel. Several sections of the document were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
In February, CUAD committed infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts.
Following two occupations of administrative buildings at Barnard College, Laura Rosenbury, the school’s president, denounced the group as a paranoid hate-organization.
“They [CUAD] operate in the shadows, hiding behind masks and Instagram posts with Molotov cocktails aimed at Barnard buildings, antisemitic tropes about wealth, influence, and ‘Zionist billionaires,’ and calls for violence and disruption at any cost,” Rosenbury wrote in an op-ed published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. “They claim Columbia University’s name, but the truth is, because their members wear masks, no one really knows whose interests they serve.”
Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, March 11, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is set to headline a conference that is also hosting a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization, according to documents obtained by The Algemeiner.
The Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in New Jersey will hold its annual conference, titled “Grounded in Action: Exploring the Power of the Palestinian Diaspora,” from Thursday through Sunday. Wisam Rafeedie, a self-admitted member of the PFLP, will address the conference virtually on the 4th day of the event.
According to PACC’s website, the conference “is a call to recommit ourselves to amplifying and supporting the Palestinian voices and advocates who have long been at the forefront of our struggle.” PACC also calls on members of the Palestinian diaspora “to leverage our unique positions and power” to “push for meaningful action.””
Tlaib is scheduled to headline the event’s “Youth Day,” in which she will host a reading and signing for her new children’s book, Mama in Congress, alongside her son Adam Tlaib. According to Harper Collins, the book’s publisher, Mama in Congress will chronicle Tlaib’s journey from Detroit to the halls of the federal government. The book will also detail Tlaib’s supposed efforts in working toward “justice for all” in Congress.
The conference will include several workshops educating attendees on “resistance,” “solidarity,” and “collective struggle.” The event will also feature a session stressing the importance of “centering Palestinian prisoners.”
This is not the first time that Tlaib has come under scrutiny for attending a pro-Palestinian conference tied to terrorists. Last May, Tlaib came under fire for speaking at the “The People’s Conference for Palestine,” which also hosted Rafeedie among other individuals connected to terrorist groups. During that event, Rafeedie praised Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza and murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023, as a “resistance” against Israel. He defended and downplayed Hamas’s atrocities, saying that “Zionists lie like they breathe.”
“This is not a struggle between Hamas and Israel. Hamas is part of the resistance of the Palestinian people. The core issue is between the Palestinian people and the project of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing,” Rafeedie said.
Rafeedie also called for the complete destruction of Israel and the replacement of the Jewish state with a “democratic” Palestine.
“There is no longer a place for the two-state solution for any Palestinian. The only solution is one democratic Palestinian state on all Palestinian land, which will end the Zionist project in Palestine,” Rafeedie continued.
Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman elected to the US Congress, has positioned herself as a fierce and outspoken critic of Israel. Since entering office, Tlaib has repeatedly accused the Jewish state of implementing an “apartheid” regime in the West Bank and turning Gaza into an “open-air prison.”
In the year following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, Tlaib has sharpened her condemnations of the Jewish state. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, she hesitated to release an official statement acknowledging the mass slaughter, abductions, and rapes perpetrated by Hamas. Less than two weeks after the invasion, Tlaib introduced a “ceasefire” resolution between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group. In November 2023, the House of Representatives voted to censure Tlaib over her anti-Israel rhetoric.
The progressive firebrand has also condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza, accusing the Jewish state of committing a full-scale “genocide” against the civilians of the enclave. She has also peddled the unsubstantiated claim that Israel has purposefully inflicted mass starvation against Palestinian civilians and urged the Biden administration when it was in power to impose an arms embargo on Israel. Simmering with anger over the Biden administration’s support for Israel, she refused to endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid.
Tlaib’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The post Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her
An overturned auto in a car crash flipped on its roof landing on a mother and her three children, killing two children on March 29, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
A Brooklyn woman who was charged for a car crash on Saturday that killed a Jewish woman and her two young daughters has alleged in the past on social media that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is following her, a claim she also made to first responders after the fatal accident.
Miriam Yarimi, 32, is facing multiple charges, including three counts of second-degree manslaughter, three counts of criminal negligent homicide, and four counts of second-degree assault. Yarimi — a Brooklyn resident and wigmaker who is also a Jewish mother herself – was transported to NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn in stable condition. She was then moved to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, according to reports.
The car crash killed Natasha Saada, 32, and her daughters – 8-year-old Diana and 6-year-old Deborah. Saada’s son Philip, 4, was injured in the crash and hospitalized at Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park in critical condition. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested Yarimi, a single mother who has a young daughter, and she is awaiting arraignment in connection to the crash that took place Saturday afternoon at an intersection on Ocean Parkway off Quentin Road in Midwood. Police said she was driving with a suspended license at the time of the crash.
“This was a horrific tragedy caused by someone who shouldn’t have been on the road,” said Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. “A mother and two young children killed, another child fighting for his life, a family and a neighborhood devastated in an instant. The NYPD sends its condolences to the family of the victims.”
Yarimi, who shares custody of her daughter with her ex-husband, reportedly told first responders with the Jewish-led volunteer ambulance service Hatzalah that she was “possessed” and that she believes the CIA was pursing her.
She has made similar claims about the CIA many times on Instagram, a former customer of hers told The Algemeiner on Tuesday. The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, purchased a wig from Yarimi several years ago and has been following her on social media for a number of years. Yarimi has 16,000 followers on Instagram and screenshots of her since-deleted posts, obtained by The Algemeiner, confirm she previously believed that the CIA is tracking her.
“It’s very convenient to plead insanity. But it’s not new. She is actually insane. This is [an] old topic,” the former client told The Algemeiner. “She thinks that she’s been followed by CIA for a long, long time already. She truly believes that CIA is spying on her … But only people who follow her [on social media] and know her for a long time would know this. She’s sick.”
In one since-deleted Instagram post, Yarimi wrote in part about the CIA: “They have control of EVERYONE here in this world BESIDES ME … when I went to Miami, it all clicked … once they knew that I knew, they followed me around the hotel, dressed up as young parents with a doona [stroller] and disco outfits like I was stupid and didn’t know who they were … if anything they stuck out like glue.”
“It was the government, blackjack, and the CIA who manipulated everyone and took control of everyone’s mind but because I was the catalyst and the sacrificial lamb so they did their best to break me,” she wrote in a separate post that has also been deleted. “They experimented (abused) me and that’s when they cloned my daughter and I so when I die, they could reinsert me into the crowd and make me into another person.”
Yarimi previously had a highlight on her Instagram page where she talked about demons and the CIA, but it has since been deleted, her former customer told The Algemeiner. Yarimi also wrote on her Instagram Story once that she believes Hollywood is trying to clone people to look like her.
“Why do you think most of the girls in Hollywood have similar features to me like Rita Ora & Jane the Virgin etc,” Yarimi once wrote on Instagram, as seen in a screenshot shared with The Algemeiner. “Wake up, this is not just happening in Hollywood. This is happening right here in the Jewish community in Brooklyn.”
Not long after she uploaded the Instagram posts, Yarimi was admitted to a psychiatric ward and when she returned to social media, she spoke about the experience, the source told The Algemeiner.
“After the above posts she was locked up for two weeks in a psych ward. She’s very public. She went live when paramedics broke into her house and took her. She came back online two weeks later and spoke about her psych ward experience,” Yarimi’s follower said. “And it was saved in her [Instagram] highlights as well … It was horrible.”
The Algemeiner has seen a copy of Yarimi’s Instagram video that shows police drag her out of bed after she refused their orders to get up by herself. In the clip, three police officers are seen in her bedroom and a fourth is standing by the doorway.
Another longtime Instagram follower of Yamini’s described her as “delusional” when speaking to The Algemeiner, and confirmed that Yamini has spoken online repeatedly in the past about how she believes the CIA is tracking her.
In December 2024, Yarimi won a $2 million settlement from the city of New York after she filed a lawsuit claiming that former NYPD Officer George Mastrokostas repeatedly raped her for several years after falsely arresting her.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Deputy Chief Richie Taylor attended the funeral for Saada and her daughters on Sunday in Brooklyn before their bodies were flown to Israel for burial. Saada is survived by her husband, Sidney Saada, her sons Philip and Jacob, her parents and three siblings. Adams called the crash “a tragic accident of a Shakespearean proportion.”
“A mother going for a simple stroll on a sunny day was struck and killed. As we pray for their families and this entire community, the city mourns this loss,” he added.
Police said Yarimi was driving a blue Audi A3 sedan when she rear-ended a 2023 silver Toyota Camry with TLC plates that was carrying four passengers – a mother and three children. NYPD Commissioner Tisch said the force of the crash caused the Toyota Camry to be pushed aside, while the Audi moved forward, crashing into Saada and her children as they were crossing the street before the car overturned. Saada and her two daughters were pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the Toyota Camry, a 62-year-old man, was hospitalized in stable condition. The four passengers inside his car sustained minor injuries and were also hospitalized, according to Tisch.
Yarimi’s car had 99 parking and camera violations between August 2023 and March 2025, including 21 speed camera tickets and five red light tickets, Eyewitness News ABC 7 reported, citing a website that tracks vehicle violations using city data. She had nearly $10,500 in fines and a car with the same license plate as Yarimi’s still has $1,345 in unpaid fines, the news outlet also revealed.
The post Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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