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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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UNRWA Meets the Spanish Inquisition
View of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90.
JNS.org – The collaboration between UNRWA, the U.N. agency solely dedicated to Palestinian refugees and their descendants, and the Hamas rulers of Gaza continues unabated.
Two episodes over the last week underscore that claim. On May 14, Israeli jets carried out a precision strike against a Hamas war room and weapons depot that was concealed beneath an UNRWA school in Nuseirat. Fifteen terrorists—10 of them members of Hamas’s elite Nukhba Force—were killed in the strike. Meanwhile, three days earlier, the Israelis released aerial surveillance footage of armed Palestinians in an UNRWA compound in the southern city of Rafah, where the IDF is facing off against four Hamas battalions. The video showed the gun-toting Palestinians milling inside the compound, from where they launched attacks on the gathering Israeli forces.
The intermingling of UNRWA facilities and personnel with Hamas and its nefarious aims has been a constant theme of Israeli messaging throughout the current war in the Gaza Strip. At the beginning of this year, it seemed as if other Western countries shared Israel’s concerns, with 18 of them, among them the United States, suspending funding to UNRWA. However, as the NGO UN Watch has documented, in the intervening period, nine of them have quietly restored their fiscal support. One of these countries was Germany, whose foreign ministry declared in an April 24 statement that UNRWA’s verbal willingness to implement the recommendations of an independent commission headed by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna was enough to turn the money faucet back on. Israel’s vociferous objections—pointing out that Colonna had elided Jerusalem’s claim that more than 2,000 UNRWA staff members retain ties with Hamas—made no difference to the Germans, nor to the Japanese, or the Canadians or the other six nations who resumed financial assistance to the agency.
In the midst of all this, UNRWA received an award from the government of Spain—one of the countries that has maintained its funding throughout the conflict triggered by the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on Oct. 7. The spectacle of a U.N. agency that indulges a terrorist group, whose tactics include the mass murder and rape of civilians for the crime of being Jews, being feted like this is, of course, deeply regrettable. But looked at from another angle, it is highly appropriate.
The award presented to UNRWA director general Philippe Lazzarini by Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares during his visit to New York on April 19 inducted him into the “Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic.” The “Isabella” referred to here is Queen Isabella I of Castile, who ruled Spain alongside her husband, King Ferdinand II, from 1474 until her death 30 years later. In 1492, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, Isabella and Ferdinand issued an order for the ejection of Spain’s Jewish population, estimated to have been 300,000-strong.
The king and queen’s announcement of the expulsion—known as the Alhambra Decree—is on display, fittingly, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Spanish Jews were given four months to pack up their belongings and settle their affairs, a chaotic and painful process that left Spain as a country economically and culturally impoverished. Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire, who offered shelter to some of these Jews (among them my own family, who lived for centuries under Turkish rule in the Balkans), poked fun at the Spanish monarchs, questioning the judgment of those who would degrade their own kingdom only to “enrich ours.” In making that observation, Bayezid inadvertently grasped one of the more curious aspects of Jew-hatred—that its advocates will push for it relentlessly, even when it doesn’t suit their own interests to do so.
One of the more curious aspects of Jew-hatred is that its advocates will push for it relentlessly, even when it doesn’t suit their own interests.
Few institutions would be as receptive as UNRWA when it comes to Spain expressing pride in a monarch who deservedly has the reputation as one of the worst persecutors of Jews in their history. The history of antisemitism has been captured in a simple formula: You have no right to live among us as Jews; you have no right to live among us; you have no right to live. Queen Isabella’s place on this spectrum is evident and unarguable. Equally, Hamas belongs there no less. The Iranian-backed organization doesn’t like Jews, doesn’t like Jews living among Muslims and doesn’t like Jews being alive at all. They may be separated by seven centuries, but Isabella and UNRWA, which has actively promoted Hamas-style antisemitism in its schools, have a huge amount in common when it comes to the Jewish people.
Were Hamas to succeed in its goal of eliminating Israel as a sovereign state, we might well expect an announcement to that end not dissimilar to the Alhambra Declaration. Those Jews who survived the destruction of their only state would, if they were lucky, be given four months to liquidate their assets, hand over their properties to “returning” Palestinian refugees and make their way out of the country. No doubt some would figure out a way to stay—probably by hiding their Jewish identities and attempting to integrate with the rest of the population, as those Jews who remained in Spain after the expulsion did. UNRWA, by a twist of historical irony, might even offer to shepherd their exit within parameters set by Hamas that would prevent forever any possibility of returning. While such a scenario may seem improbable today, if history has taught us anything, it’s that it’s not improbable tomorrow.
The history of antisemitism has been captured in a simple formula: You have no right to live among us as Jews; you have no right to live among us; you have no right to live.
Fundamentally, the problem here is that too many states—not just Turkey, Iran, Russia, North Korea, China and other citadels of authoritarian rule, but democracies as well—believe that the way to convince the Palestinians to accept peace is by kowtowing to their jealously guarded victimhood status.
By the end of this month, it’s likely that several European Union member states, including Spain and also Ireland, Malta, Slovenia and Belgium, will have unilaterally recognized an independent Palestinian state. Albares is one of the foreign ministers actively promoting the fiction that such a move will bolster, rather than undermine, the prospects for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel that will coexist peacefully.
Deep down, you have to believe that Albares knows that’s simply not true—that most Palestinians, as successive opinion polls since Oct. 7 have borne out, regard a state alongside Israel not as a final settlement but a step towards conquering the entire land “from the river to the sea.” These are the stakes that Israel has to contend with when it deals with diplomats and other foreign officials quietly sympathetic to the idea that the Jewish state shouldn’t be there in the first place.
Isabella the Catholic would be proud.
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The UN’s World of the Absurd
Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, delivers a speech remotely at the UN General Assembly 76th session General Debate in UN General Assembly Hall at the United Nations Headquarters on Friday, September 24, 2021 in New York City. Photo by John Angelillo/UPI Pool via REUTERS
JNS.org – Only in the world of the absurd can a despicable purveyor of terror, Hamas, carry out a brutal massacre, killing over a thousand innocent people, torturing, murdering and carrying out sadistic mass rape, over a space of just a few hours, and then run home to Gaza taking with them hundreds of hostages.
Only in the world of the absurd can the Palestinian representative organization that encourages, finances, supports and represents such murderers be feted and upgraded by the majority of member states in the international community.
Only in the world of the absurd can a group of non-democratic, terror-supporting states oblige the United Nations General Assembly by proposing a resolution that indulges in pampering a terror-supporting entity in a misguided and surreal demonstration of naïveté, skewed political correctness and acute hypocrisy.
Only in the same world of the absurd can 143 states parrot their support for what they blindly proclaim to be a “two-state solution” without really understanding what they are talking about out of ignorance and stupidity.
Only in the world of the absurd can the majority of the international community deliberately ignore the openly declared genocidal intentions of Iran, Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in their efforts to eliminate the Jewish state and kill all Jews. And this, while at the same time upgrading the Palestinian representation in the United Nations.
Lastly, only in the world of the absurd can all this happen at the same time as incited and handsomely financed and organized groups of violent, hysterical, antisemitic demonstrators occupy campuses and town centers in U.S. and European cities, calling for the elimination of the only Jewish state.
Shooting blanks for statehood
Despite the artificial hype surrounding this resolution, the bottom line is that this upgrade does not grant the Palestinians the status of statehood or U.N. membership that they wished to receive. The U.N. General Assembly has neither authority nor jurisdiction to establish states and grant membership status without Security Council sanction.
The sad naïveté and hypocrisy of those states that proposed and voted in favor of this abnormal new General Assembly resolution are evident in their stated determination in the body of the resolution to the effect that “the State of Palestine is qualified for membership in the U.N. in accordance with article 4 of the U.N. Charter.”
But the U.N. Charter article 4 requires that United Nations membership be open to “all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter.”
One may legitimately ask if the self-respecting states voting in favor of this resolution, including Russia, China, Norway, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, and E.U. member states Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain, genuinely believe that the Palestinians are, or could be a “peace-loving state,” or is this just self-delusion, artificial political correctness or naive wishful thinking?
International law requires the fulfillment of universally accepted criteria for statehood, including control of a defined population and territory and enforcement of the rule of law, none of which the Palestinian Authority has ever fulfilled. This is in addition to the Charter requirement of being a peace-loving state, assuming responsible governance and the capability of respecting international obligations. Therefore, it is clear that this resolution is nothing more than a sad and miserable fiction, a sham.
Clearly, no element of the Palestinian political existence—neither the infamous and brutal terror organization Hamas nor the terror-supporting PLO and its Palestinian Authority—can seriously claim to fulfill such criteria.
Like all General Assembly resolutions, the resolution is not binding, only recommendatory. It does not represent international law and only reflects the political views of those states that proposed and supported it.
The various modalities listed in the resolution for improving the seating, establishing a speaking order of the Palestinian delegates in the General Assembly’s chamber and other U.N. bodies, and upgrading their participation in meetings and conferences are cosmetic, symbolic lip-service.
Despite its call for full Palestinian membership, the resolution distinctly denies and negates any notion of full membership in the United Nations. As such, the Palestinian delegation remains nothing more than an observer delegation, wherever and however they may be seated.
The resolution stresses that they have no entitlement to vote and have no right to membership in U.N. organs, including the Security Council.
The violations inherent in the resolutions
However, in the context of the Palestinian obligations set out in the Oslo Accords, this attempted change of status constitutes a serious and fundamental violation of the agreed obligation not to change the status of the territories pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.
The Palestinian leadership and Israel agreed that all outstanding issues, including the permanent status of the territories, must be resolved through negotiations and cannot be determined by unilateral action, whether in the United Nations or anywhere else.
Even the United Nations itself, in several resolutions, has given its endorsement to the Oslo Accords as the only agreed-upon means to resolve the Israel-Palestinian dispute.
Similarly, the European Union, Russia, Egypt and Norway, together with the United States, are signatories to the Oslo Accords as witnesses. A vote in favor of this new resolution by these witnesses undermines the Oslo Accords and is contrary to the accepted obligations of states and organizations that witness international agreements.
Indeed, by supporting this new resolution, they seek to bypass the requirements in the Oslo Accords for the negotiation of the permanent status of the territories and attempt to prejudge the outcome of any such negotiations unilaterally.
Despite this resolution’s artificial and ineffectual symbolic and cosmetic aspects, the overall result of the exercise is nevertheless grave and unfortunate. It will be seen by Hamas and the Palestinian leadership as a green light from the international community for them to continue to support and conduct terrorism.
The regrettable message emanating from this resolution is that the international community is not just ignoring Palestinian terror against a fellow U.N. member state; it is encouraging it.
Originally published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
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Is God Protecting Us?
Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (1659), by Rembrandt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – It’s been a tumultuous, emotional roller coaster of a week in Israel and around the Jewish world: Memorials, moments of silence and then celebrations, albeit muted and rather subdued under our current difficult circumstances.
In this week’s parsha, Emor, we read about the required standards of behavior of the Kohanim, the Priestly tribe. They are not permitted to come into contact with the dead and their marriage choices are more limited than the average Israelite.
We also find the commandment of Kiddush Hashem. Every Jew, not only a Kohen, is expected to sanctify the name of God. Sometimes, this means actually giving up one’s life for the faith, as millions of our brethren have done throughout the ages. For most of us, however, it means behaving in a way that will bring praise to the God of Israel. When we act morally, ethically and righteously, people generally respect us, and this brings credit to our God and our faith.
Way back at this very first revelation at the Burning Bush, Moses was told by God that we were expected to become a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” When we have lived up to that calling, we have indeed been a “light unto the nations.”
Today, Israel is confronted with a world in which hypocrisy has reached proportions unheard of in the annals of history. The whole planet seems to have lost its moral bearings, and frankly, its senses. Even our friends are pressuring us, and now threatening and extorting us, too.
Yet we must do what we must do. Will all the hundreds of precious, young lives snuffed out be in vain if we don’t finish the job in Gaza?
Things seem very confusing. On the one hand, we recently witnessed the incredibly miraculous hand of God protecting us from a 300-plus missile and drone attack by Iran. The 99.9% success rate of our defenses simply cannot be explained militarily or scientifically. On the other hand, we have lost hundreds of our best brave defenders. Where was God there? Is there a contradiction here?
This is shaping up to be nothing less than an existential war for our very survival. The question is: Are we safe or not? Is God protecting us or not?
My mind goes back to 1991 and the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein of unblessed memory was threatening Israel with his lethal Scud missiles and even chemical weapons. Israel was distributing gas masks to every citizen in case of a chemical attack by the vicious dictator.
Iraq had invaded Kuwait. The United States warned Iraq to get out and gave it a deadline. It was not our battle. Israel has no border with Iraq and the war had nothing to do with Israel. Yet Saddam was threatening us and America provided Israel with the Patriot missile-defense system and asked us to stay out of it. The United States would deal with Iraq.
So they did, but not before Iraq had fired dozens of Scud missiles at Israel. Miraculously, there was not a single fatality.
I remember clearly how the whole Jewish world was petrified at the time. There were prayer meetings and emergency fundraisers for Israel in Jewish communities around the world, including ours.
There was one lone voice in the wilderness, however, who declared that Israel was safe and would be safe from any such attacks. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, went further and advised the Israeli government that gas masks would not be needed. How right he was.
Here in South Africa, the Zionist Federation was organizing a solidarity mission to Israel. The Rebbe encouraged us to join and several of my Chabad colleagues went with me, along with the late Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris. I even took along my 12-year-old daughter, Zeesy. She was the youngest member of the mission.
It is my personal belief that Israel was miraculously protected by God from the Iraqi Scuds because Israel was simply minding its own business. It was attacked for no reason whatsoever. We had done nothing to compromise our security. The heavenly Guardian of Israel responded accordingly.
Similarly, in the recent Iranian attack, we were completely innocent targets. We have no border with Iran and they have zero justification for being involved. So, we suffered not one fatality. Again, God watched over us miraculously.
But when we make strategic mistakes in our approach to Hamas; when we allow international pressure and public opinion to endanger the lives of our valiant young soldiers; when we refrain from bombing and instead send them into booby-trapped buildings; then, tragically, we suffer fatalities.
It’s one thing to boast about being the most moral army in the world (and we are), but is it wise to tell our enemies in advance when and where we are coming for them? We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Our unprecedented noble gestures have been completely ignored by the world, and we are still being accused of genocide. So shouldn’t we be sparing our innocent, precious boys from harm instead?
I am fond of quoting Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who once said, “It doesn’t matter what the world says. It matters what the Jews do.” How true.
I believe that when we do what we must do, then God does what He must do. May we merit His Divine protection now and always and may our defenders be completely safe and successful.
Please God, we will practice Kiddush Hashem by behaving as noble examples of humanity rather than as martyrs in a war in which, sometimes, we seem to be fighting with our hands tied behind our backs. Six million was enough martyrs. Not one more, please God.
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