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Sophie is 85 and survived the Holocaust. Caroline is 29 and new to NYC. Here’s how they became fast friends.
(New York Jewish Week) – It’s a sunny Wednesday afternoon, and Sophie Turner Zaretsky has laid out a tray of fruit and cookies, eagerly awaiting her friend Caroline Crandell. When Crandell arrives at Zaretsky’s Upper West Side apartment, just a few minutes after their scheduled meeting time of 3 p.m., the two break into smiles and embrace.
The two women have been meeting every few weeks since the fall of 2022. Like any pair of friends, they discuss everything that’s going on in their lives and families, as well as current events and their favorite spots in the city. But unlike most friendships, there’s a 56-year age gap between the two: Zaretsky, a Holocaust survivor and retired radiation oncologist, is 85, while Crandell, a software engineer, is 29.
“We just talk,” Zaretsky told the New York Jewish Week as she poured tea for Crandell and a reporter. “Whatever comes into our head.”
“She knows all about my dating life,” Crandell added. “I get a lot of advice, which is helpful.”
The pair were matched through the “Caring Calls” initiative, a flagship program of the Wechsler Center for Modern Aging at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan on the Upper West Side. The program was created during the pandemic to help seniors combat isolation. It enlists some 130 volunteers to reach out to everyone over 70 who has attended any type of program or event at the JCC in recent years. Most of the check-ins happen over the phone: Volunteers call a few times a year to say hello and offer everything from tech support to grocery shopping assistance.
“We want to be there for our community as folks age,” Susan Lechter, the director of the Wechsler Center, told the New York Jewish Week. “No one should be lonely in this world. If we can make a difference in any way, we want to be there for our community.”
And some of these relationship blossom into something deeper. Seniors can request a “buddy” for regular phone calls; according to the Wechsler Center, there have been 140 “buddy” matches so far.
When Zaretsky first heard from Caring Calls last fall, she had a specific request: She wanted to be matched with a young person as a buddy. “I talk to old people and I’m tired of hearing about all the issues and problems with aging,” Zaretsky quipped. “I have my own issues; I don’t want to hear anybody else’s.”
Given that most of the Caring Calls volunteers are middle-aged or older adults, Lechter knew exactly whom to tap: Crandell, who was living by herself in a fifth-floor walkup on the Upper East Side, having arrived in New York via California during the Omicron wave of January 2022. In order to meet new friends, Crandell had enrolled in intramural soccer at the JCC, and she also had inquired about volunteer opportunities there.
“My family is very far away and I haven’t had any living grandparents for a long time. I didn’t know anyone when I moved here,” Crandell said, explaining her interest in the Caring Calls program. “I think it’s good to have different generations and different perspectives come together.”
Matched by Lechter, the pair first spoke in October of last year and they hit it off immediately. “I think we spoke for like an hour,” Crandell said, recalling how they bonded over their dislike of cooking and exercise. “By the end of the call we said to each other, ‘Let’s not do the call thing. Let’s meet up.’ I came over a few days later and we’ve been getting together every few weeks ever since.”
Turner Zaretsky and Crandell get together every few weeks at Turner Zaretsky’s Upper West Side apartment, pictured here on May 10, 2023. (Julia Gergely)
The particular afternoon of the New York Jewish Week’s visit, Crandell had brought over a new blend of tea to try. Over their beverages, the two women share lipstick and book recommendations, and swap stories about their childhoods — which were, not surprisingly, vastly different from one another’s.
Zaretsky, born Selma Schwarzwald in 1937, had grown up in hiding in Lvov, Poland; she and her mother posed as Catholics in order to avoid deportation to the Belzec killing center. She moved to England with her mother in 1948, when she was 10, and wasn’t told she was Jewish until she was a teenager.
“It was terrible,” she said of moving from Poland to England. “It’s very hard to be a refugee when you don’t know the language. You feel stupid. You don’t have the narrative. I didn’t have the narrative for England and I didn’t have the narrative for being Jewish.”
After attending medical school in England, Zaretsky moved to New York in 1963 for her medical residency at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, and found herself alone in a brand new city. In 1970, she married David Zaretsky.
Though the JCC initiative is the first time either Zaretsky or Crandell have participated in a formal matching program, Zaretsky has a history of “adopting” people who look like they might need it. A number of years ago at a dinner at the United Nations, which she attended in place of her son who often worked with the organization, Zaretsky was seated next to the ambassador from Malta. “He didn’t know people in New York, so being the Jewish mother that I am, I had to introduce him to everyone to make sure he could live a good life here,” she said. They’re still friends to this day, Zaretsky said, and she has been known to advise him on certain geopolitical issues when the General Assembly meets.
“I have found that young people nowadays are so educated and so aware, but they still need a little bit of TLC — at least this one does,” Zaretsky said, nodding towards Crandell. “But I do, too.”
Indeed, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has described a “loneliness epidemic” that peaked, not surprisingly, at the height of the pandemic. Older adults, disproportionately women, have been especially vulnerable, although a Harvard studying 2021 found that older teens and young adults were the hardest hit by the social isolation brought on by the pandemic.
“I feel like in the society we live in right now, isolation and disjointed community is common,” Crandell said. “Everything’s online, every single person has been affected by technology and feeling pretty isolated, no matter what age. Any opportunity to meet people in person or just connect with someone goes a long way.”
This type of relationship is exactly what the program aims to achieve, said Lechter. “We were determined to create more intergenerational opportunities,” she said. “We’re hoping that it becomes more frequent.”
By the time Crandell needs to head to her soccer game, several hours have passed. “I come thinking I’m just stopping by, but it turns out we have hours of things we need to discuss,” Crandell told the New York Jewish Week. “I always lose track of time.”
Like any good Jewish mother, Zaretsky sends her off with a care package of snacks to take home and a plan for when they’ll meet up again — this coming Friday, for Shabbat dinner.
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Argentina’s Jewish gauchos museum vows to stay open amid leadership feud
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES – A museum dedicated to the history of Argentinian Jewish ranchers, farmers and the cowboys known as gauchos remains open and operating despite months of tension between its former director and the local government, the head of the Entre Ríos Jewish community confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
The Villa Domínguez Jewish Museum about the Jewish Colonies drew international attention late last year after visitors reported water damage affecting walls, documents and historical objects. The concerns arose months after the resignation of Osvaldo Quiroga, the local historian who had led the museum for nearly 40 years and was widely associated with its preservation.
In an interview, community head Marina Garber acknowledged the tensions that led to Quiroga’s resignation in January 2025, and that since then a successor has not been named.
“We are resolving the situation with an agreement in which the building belongs to the municipality, while the Jewish community is in charge of safeguarding the objects. The museum is still operating,” Garber told JTA, and the partnership between the local municipality and Jewish community would continue.
Villa Domínguez is a rural town of around 2,000 inhabitants located 225 miles north of Buenos Aires, where international tourism centered on the country’s earliest Jewish agricultural colonies brings considerable visibility to the area.
The fate of the museum matters far beyond Villa Domínguez’s nine remaining Jews. The Jewish agricultural colonies of Entre Ríos are a defining chapter in Argentine Jewish history, tracing how immigrants from Eastern Europe built new lives as farmers and gauchos. Its future is a test of whether a legacy that belongs to Argentine Jewry as a whole can be safeguarded.
Although its director was a municipal employee, the museum itself belongs to the Jewish community. This hybrid arrangement, with no clear responsibilities divided between the two, created tensions when the images of damage were spread online. Suggestions that the Jewish museum had fallen into a state of neglect circulated online as far as Europe.
According to some sources, tensions appear to stem from a combination of the government’s limited attention to the site and the apparent resentment by some government officials that Quiroga had received inordinate media attention.
The Jewish colonies of Entre Ríos, established in the late 1890s by Jewish immigrants mostly from Eastern Europe, represent one of the largest waves of Jewish agricultural settlement in the Americas.
The Jewish Colonies Museum was founded in October 1985 to safeguard the region’s documentary and material heritage. Since 1996, it has been housed in the town’s former pharmacy building.
The museum attracts Argentine and international visitors interested in the stories of the Jewish gauchos — the immigrants who blended their Jewish and Eastern European roots with Argentine ranching culture. Heritage tours, family-history trips, academic researchers and Jewish community groups contribute to a steady flow of visitors exploring the landscapes where the Jewish gauchos built their rural lives, a journey that began more than a century ago.
For the descendants of the gauchos — many now scattered across Argentina, Israel and beyond — the institution serves as a touchstone for genealogical research and family history. Its stability is also of concern to Jewish communal organizations and Argentine officials who have promoted the Jewish colonies circuit as a pillar of religious and cultural tourism in the province.
The first ship carrying Jewish immigrants from Europe to Argentina, the SS Weser, arrived in 1889 after sailing from Hamburg to Buenos Aires. Its arrival inspired Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a German Jewish financier and philanthropist, to recognize the potential of agricultural migration and, in 1891, to create the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) to institutionalize, fund and organize the colonies.
A tourist trail linking the various Jewish settlements has been operating for more than 20 years, made up of four communities: Basavilbaso, Villa Domínguez, Villa Clara and Villaguay. Two- and three-day tours of the area’s main Jewish sites include visits to synagogues, cemeteries, cooperatives, and local museums. Villa Clara — or simply Clara — is a small town founded in 1892 and named after Hirsch’s wife. Its Jewish museum is located inside an old railway station. Another settlement, Lucienville, is named after the couple’s son, Lucien.
The last agricultural colony founded in Entre Ríos by the JCA is Colonia Avigdor, visited regularly by students of Fundación Judaica, a major Buenos Aires network of schools and synagogues, which brings groups there for educational programs, supports local schools, and works on community development.
The national government includes the tourist trail as part of a religious tourism program, and the Buenos Aires Jewish center AMIA has a site dedicated to the colonies’ history in Entre Rios, including Villa Domínguez.
The national government and some local municipalities also include the Jewish colonies among their cultural offerings.
According to Pablo Soskin, the representative in Entre Ríos of the Argentine Jewish political umbrella organization DAIA, the museum’s director stepped down on Jan. 24, but municipal officials initially declined to accept his resignation. He subsequently took an extended leave to use up a large balance of accrued vacation days, with the municipality’s approval. When that time ran out, he was reassigned within the museum to a different, non-directorial role. The director position has remained vacant since then.
“We maintain a close relationship with the government, which has expressed its commitment to making the museum and the Jewish circuit part of the province’s tourist attractions for locals and foreigners,” Soskin told JTA. “We will continue to coordinate community, public, and private mechanisms to ensure the preservation of our heritage sites.
“This is key to understanding the contributions that the Jewish community has made to Argentina,” he added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Argentina’s Jewish gauchos museum vows to stay open amid leadership feud appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli police arrest suspects in Washington Post journalist attack
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israel Police arrested 10 people on Monday on suspicion of involvement in violent acts over the weekend against journalists, foreign diplomats and Palestinians in the West Bank during the annual olive harvest.
The arrests came after international condemnation of the attacks, including by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who is generally supportive of the current Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted it is just a handful of individuals and not representative of Israelis who live in the West Bank settlements.
“Following reports of acts of violence over the weekend, including the suspected assault of a foreign journalist and the suspected assault of foreign diplomats, the Judea and Samaria District and the Israel Security Agency (ISA) carried out a pre-dawn arrest operation as part of the ongoing investigation,” the police said in a statement, referring to the West Bank by its biblical name.
The statement said the suspects were arrested during a special pre-dawn operation conducted by the district’s Central Investigations Unit and transferred to police stations in the area for questioning.
“Following questioning, and subject to the findings of the investigation, they will be brought before a court for a hearing,” the police statement said.
The arrests come after Heidi Levine, a veteran photojournalist for The Washington Post, was attacked on Friday while photographing Palestinians harvesting their olive trees in the West Bank, an annual event that often sees violent clashes between Palestinian farmers and Israeli settlers who have increasingly moved into the same areas.
Video footage from the scene shows a group of masked settlers surrounding and attacking Levine before ripping off her camera and other personal gear. Palestinians can also be seen throwing stones at the settlers before another journalist arrives to help Levine leave the area.
The photographer was taken to a Palestinian hospital near Ramallah and later transferred to Beilinson Hospital near Tel Aviv, which reported that she was in moderate condition with lacerations across her body, a broken rib and four broken vertebrae. She also underwent surgery on her finger, the hospital said.
On Saturday, European diplomats from France, Belgium and Poland came under assault by masked settlers who forced their convoy off the road in the area of Taybeh, near Ramallah. Bernard Baudoux, a leftist mayor of Aulnoye-Aymeries, a town in northern France, was beaten, according to witnesses who spoke to international media.
Data collected by Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din and published on Sunday showed some 538 alleged incidents of settler and soldier violence over the 20-day period from Sept. 27 to Oct. 16, across 181 Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Some 269 of the incidents were directly related to the olive harvest, the organization said.
Israeli right-wing legal-aid organization Honenu confirmed the arrests on Monday and said its criminal law department would be providing the suspects with “initial legal assistance.”
“At this stage, it is unclear what the detainees are suspected of,” the organization said in a statement.
The Israel Police said that “items linking the suspects to the alleged offenses were seized, and several vehicles were confiscated.”
“The law in Judea and Samaria applies to everyone, regardless of identity or affiliation. The Israel Police is committed to professional, equal, and impartial law enforcement, based on evidence and in accordance with the law,” Israel Police Commissioner Daniel Levy said in the statement.
The issue of settler violence in the West Bank falls into a gray area of law enforcement between the Israel Police and the Israeli military, the latter of which is responsible for civilian matters in parts of the territory that are not legally under Israeli sovereignty. Israel’s police force is under the authority of the National Security Ministry headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right nationalist who has not made clamping down on settler violence a priority.
Levy said that the ambiguity over which agency is responsible for what must be addressed.
“At the same time, a distinction must be made between responsibility for preventing incidents in the field and responsibility for investigating and enforcing the law after they occur,” Levy said.
“We will continue to coordinate with all security agencies to strengthen security and the rule of law and ensure that anyone found to have violated the law is brought to justice,” he added.
Huckabee on Saturday called for a full investigation into the attack against Levine and for the perpetrators to be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law.”
“Attacking a female photographer is a despicable act of terror carried out by masked cowards. Dishonorable act of senseless violence,” he wrote on X.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog also condemned the “shocking violence” and said he had called Levine to apologize.
“I expressed my deepest sorrow to Heidi and apologized for what she went through. The despicable behavior of the perpetrators of this attack does not represent the citizens or the values of the State of Israel,” he said in a statement.
Netanyahu, who is in the midst of a closely contested election campaign to retain power, condemned violence generally, but also stated that the circumstances of the attack “remain unclear.”
“We will not allow disputed incidents to be exploited to demonize the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria,” he said in a statement, using the biblical names for the West Bank.
Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter, however, stated on CNN on Friday “unambiguously and unequivocally, that gratuitous violence perpetrated by anyone, be they Jews or Arabs, is completely unacceptable.”
He added, “If we have not yet reached a passing grade to bring Jewish vigilantes to justice, then we’ve got to do a better job. But I’m convinced that we are going to do it. I’ve been in government meetings. I’ve heard the prime minister speak emphatically about putting a stop to this.”
In a statement Monday following the arrests, Defense Minister Israel Katz said that it was time for the Israeli police to handle such crimes.
“The IDF should not and cannot be engaged in civilian law enforcement. Its role is to fight Palestinian terrorism and defend the country’s borders and the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and along the seam line,” he said, adding that he was preparing, in coordination with the prime minister, “a comprehensive plan to regulate civilian law enforcement activities in Judea and Samaria.”
“The plan distinguishes between the IDF’s authority in the field and the transfer of responsibility for carrying out civilian law enforcement in practice to the Israel Police’s Judea and Samaria District,” Katz said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israeli police arrest suspects in Washington Post journalist attack appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli party leader Benny Gantz drops out of race
(JTA) — Benny Gantz said on Monday he is dropping out of the race with just eight days to go until Israelis head to the polls to elect a new parliament.
Gantz, who is a former defense minister and IDF chief of staff, had once been the leading contender to unseat Netanyahu. But in recent months, his party has been polling below the electoral threshold.
In a statement to the press, he said, “I will not run in the upcoming elections – I will continue to fight for unity. This is the only solution that will prevent another disaster and protect Israel against all challenges at home and abroad.”
Gantz argued last month in an op-ed for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that unity among Zionist parties was critical in part to stop the erosion of support for Israel in the international arena.
His Blue and White Party was considered to be one of the parties that could join either the right-wing bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the opposition bloc headed by Gadi Eisenkot of the Yashar Party. In the last election, Gantz and Eisenkot were in the same party.
Gantz’s departure is expected to improve the vote count of bigger parties and could give a boost to the Eisenkot bloc.
This is a developing story.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israeli party leader Benny Gantz drops out of race appeared first on The Forward.
