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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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Surge of Antisemitic Incidents Rocks France Amid Growing Security Concerns
The Paris Holocaust Memorial, three synagogues, and a Jewish restaurant were all vandalized with green paint last weekend. Photo: Screenshot
France has been hit by a wave of antisemitic incidents in recent days, despite increased security at Jewish sites nationwide following last month’s antisemitic shooting in Washington, DC — prompting urgent calls from the country’s Jewish community for stronger government action amid growing fears of escalating violence.
On Friday, a French rabbi was violently assaulted by three drunken individuals in the town of Deauville, located in the Normandy region of northwestern France.
According to local police, Rabbi Eli Lemel — a prominent figure in French Jewry — was attacked around 3:30 pm by three men who approached him, repeatedly punched him in the stomach, and shouted antisemitic slurs.
French authorities have launched an investigation into the assault, but no arrests have been made so far.
After the incident, Lemel called on the Jewish community to draw spiritual strength amid the increasing hostility that Jews are facing across France.
“I’m deeply moved by the outpouring of support following the attack. Thank God, I’m okay,” the Jewish leader wrote in a post on X. “I was struck and verbally abused in a language I didn’t understand.”
In a separate incident, a 21-year-old man was arrested on Saturday after climbing a synagogue in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in north-central France, removing an Israeli flag from its façade, and attempting to set it on fire.
According to local media, the suspect — who was already known to authorities for prior offenses — confessed to committing the attack and admitted to being intoxicated at the time.
French police confirmed that the man is being charged with trespassing in a place of worship, theft by climbing, and causing damage to property on religious grounds.
The local Jewish community has voiced deep concern following this incident, viewing it as part of a broader surge in hostility targeting Jewish institutions across France.
Sandrine Dos Santos, the city’s mayor, expressed “[her] solidarity, as well as that of the city, toward the Jewish community directly targeted by these unacceptable antisemitic acts.”
“Faced with the increase in violence, our commitment against discrimination remains unwavering and will not waver. We repeat it loud and clear: no form of racism or rejection of others has a place in Poissy,” the French leader said.
In a separate incident on Saturday, three Serbs were arrested near Antibes in southeastern France, suspected of painting several Jewish community buildings green in Paris — an act currently under investigation as possible foreign interference.
Last weekend, the Paris Holocaust Memorial, three synagogues, and a Jewish restaurant were all vandalized with green paint in an incident denounced by the French government.
On Monday, an elementary school in Lyon, east-central France, was set on fire and defaced with antisemitic and pro-Palestinian slogans, as well as swastikas, marking one of the latest antisemitic incidents to impact France in recent days.
As the school had no direct connections to the Jewish community, local police have launched an investigation to determine the motive behind the attack.
French authorities reported that the fire was limited to the outdoor bathrooms, causing no significant damage to the school. They also found antisemitic graffiti and swastikas in three classrooms.
Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), denounced the attack, saying that “the Palestinian cause is used as justification for burning down a school” and that the “Nazification of Israel serves as fuel for crass antisemitism.”
“When a populist pro-Palestinian narrative is allowed to take hold, it is French Jews who ultimately pay the price,” Arfi wrote in a post on X. “The twisted use of the Palestinian cause is turning into a rallying cry of hatred against both Jews and the Republic itself.”
Voilà où nous en sommes !
La cause palestinienne sert de justification pour incendier une école
Quand on laisse gagner un discours populiste propalestinien, ce sont les Français juifs qui en paient le prix.… https://t.co/dMaQBnbfqi
— Yonathan Arfi (@Yonathan_Arfi) June 1, 2025
Beyond France, other European countries have also experienced a surge in antisemitic incidents in recent weeks.
On Monday, several headstones were vandalized at a Jewish cemetery in a suburb of Belgrade, located in north-central Serbia, marking the second such incident in the country in recent weeks.
The post Surge of Antisemitic Incidents Rocks France Amid Growing Security Concerns first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Vetoes UN Security Council Demand for Gaza Ceasefire
Smoke rises from Gaza after an explosion, as seen from Israel, June 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
The United States vetoed a UN Security Council demand on Wednesday for an “immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire” between Israel and Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza and unhindered aid access across the enclave.
“The United States has been clear we would not support any measure that fails to condemn Hamas and does not call for Hamas to disarm and leave Gaza,” Acting US Ambassador to the UN Dorothy Shea told the council before the vote.
“This resolution would undermine diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire that reflects the realities on the ground, and embolden Hamas,” she said of the text that was put forward by 10 countries on the 15-member council.
The remaining 14 council members voted in favor of the draft resolution.
Israel has rejected calls for an unconditional or permanent ceasefire, saying Hamas cannot stay in Gaza. It has renewed its military offensive in Gaza – also seeking to free hostages held by Hamas – since ending a two-month ceasefire in March.
The war in Gaza has raged since 2023 after Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 people in Israel in an Oct. 7 attack and took some 250 hostages back to the enclave.
The post US Vetoes UN Security Council Demand for Gaza Ceasefire first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Picks Lawyer Who Called Oct. 7 Attack a ‘Psyop’ to Lead Federal Watchdog Agency
Paul Ingrassia. Photo: Screenshot
Paul Ingrassia, a 29-year-old lawyer who was recently nominated by US President Donald Trump to lead a federal agency dedicated to combating corruption and protecting whistleblowers, seemingly dismissed the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2o23, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel as a “psyop,” or “psychological operation, in resurfaced social media posts.
“This ‘war’ is yet another psyop to distract Americans from celebrating Columbus Day,” Ingrassia wrote on X/Twitter on Oct. 8, 2023.
“I think we could all admit at this stage that Israel/Palestine, much like Ukraine before it, and BLM before that, and covid/vaccine before that, was another psyop,” he posted a week later. “But sadly, people fell for it. And they’ll fall for the next one too.”
On the actual day of the Oct. 7 massacre, Ingrassia compared illegal immigration into the US to the Hamas-led onslaught.
“The amount of energy everyone has put into condemning Hamas (and prior to that, the Ukraine conflict) over the past 24 hours should be the same amount of energy we put into condemning our wide open border, which is a war comparable to the attack on Israel in terms of bloodshed — but made worse by the fact that it’s occurring in our very own backyard,” he posted. “We shouldn’t be beating the war drum, however tragic the events may be overseas, until we resolve our domestic problems first.”
Trump announced last week that he picked Ingrassia to serve as head of the US Office of Special Counsel, a position that requires confirmation by the Senate.
The Office of Special Counsel is an independent federal ethics agency that works to ensure fairness and accountability within the government. Ingrassia’s role, if he is confirmed, would involve investigating claims of wrongdoing, such as retaliation against whistleblowers or improper political activity in the workplace. The official can recommend disciplinary action and reports serious findings to Congress, helping to protect federal employees and uphold the integrity of the civil service system.
Ingrassia also maintains a relationship with and defends alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate, who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media. Tate wrote on X/Twitter that he refuses to “listen to women, Mexicans, or Jews” and that Jewish people are “subverting Western populations into mass genetic suicide” by advancing what he described as misguided immigration policy. Tate has also accused Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza against Palestinians and engaged in Holocaust denialism.
The furor surrounding Ingrassia is the latest dustup the Trump administration has had regarding controversial personnel and antisemitism.
The Trump administration’s appointment of Kingsley Wilson as deputy press secretary at the Department of Defense also sparked widespread criticism due to her history of promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and extremist views. Wilson, formerly associated with the Center for Renewing America, has a documented history of social media posts endorsing white supremacist ideologies, including claims about the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank — a Jewish man whose wrongful conviction and subsequent murder galvanized the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. In 2023, she tweeted that Frank “raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl,” a statement aligning with neo-Nazi narratives.
Late last month, the Pentagon announced that Wilson will be promoted and serve as the department’s new press secretary.
The post Trump Picks Lawyer Who Called Oct. 7 Attack a ‘Psyop’ to Lead Federal Watchdog Agency first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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