American Jewry is reeling following the sudden death of Rabbi Moshe Hauer, the executive vice president of the Orthodox Union who was widely known and admired across denominations.

Hauer, the O.U.’s public face since 2020, died of a heart attack at his Baltimore home on Tuesday, the holiday of Shemini Atzeret. He was 60. His death was not announced until Wednesday night, the end of the Simchat Torah holiday.

“Rabbi Hauer was a true talmid chacham, a master teacher and communicator, the voice of Torah to the Orthodox community and the voice of Orthodoxy to the world,” the Orthodox Union said in a statement announcing his death. “He personified what it means to be a Torah Jew and took nothing more seriously than his role of sharing the joy of Jewish life with our community and beyond.”

A levaya, or funeral service, took place Thursday morning at Bnai Jacob Shaarei Zion Congregation, the Orthodox congregation Hauer led for 26 years before taking the O.U. position five years ago.

“You taught us with such clarity, you taught us with such force, with such conviction, you taught us who you want us to be,” said Rabbi Daniel Rose, Hauer’s successor at the synagogue, in a speech he said was short because Hauer’s body and family were due on a flight to Israel for his burial. Pausing to cry, he went on, “I can’t ask you anymore. I think you taught us well enough that we don’t need to ask you.”

Hauer was an exemplar of Modern Orthodoxy’s historical blend of religious and secular expertise. After being ordained at Ner Israel, an Orthodox yeshiva in Baltimore, he earned a master’s degree in engineering from Johns Hopkins University. He was the founding editor of Klal Perspectives, an online journal elevating Orthodox perspectives on contemporary issues.

In 2023, Hauer testified about antisemitism on American college campuses at a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The hearing prompted investigations of several universities for allegedly failing to protect students from antisemitic harassment.

Sen. Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican who in 2023 worked with the O.U. to pass a Senate resolution condemning Hamas and campus antisemitism, issued a statement saying he was “deeply grieved by the death of my friend.”

Hawley said: “His sudden death is a tremendous loss to America and to friends of Israel everywhere. Rabbi Moshe was a man of remarkable integrity and kindness, and also foresighted leadership. He was a true and dear friend to me.”

Hauer also sometimes was required to speak hard truths to his community. In 2020, he met with Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in forming the O.U.’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hauer then urged congregations to exceed the government’s reopening guidelines. In 2023, he denounced a rampage by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, saying, “We cannot understand or accept this.”

A wide array of Jewish voices mourned Hauer and expressed shock at his sudden death.

“We just spoke this past Friday and texted on Monday, when he was overflowing with joy at the miracle of the hostages’ freedom and the unmistakable hand of Hashem in it,” tweeted William Daroff, president of the Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “Rabbi Hauer was a trusted advisor, cherished colleague, and wise counselor to me, a bridge-builder whose faith, humility, and moral clarity inspired all who knew him. His loss leaves a deep void for all who loved and learned from him.”

Rabbi Shlomo Peles of the Jewish Relief Network Ukraine, a Chabad organization, praised Hauer’s willingness to work with his movement.

“Rabbi Hauer constantly mobilized on behalf of the Rebbe’s Shluchim [emissaries], and especially for those in Ukraine,” Peles said in a statement. “Rabbi Hauer acted with genuine care, a broad heart, and a shining countenance.”

“Klal Yisroel has lost a leader who was universally respected as a talmid chochom of stature, a man of integrity, humility, vision, wisdom and depth,” Agudath Israel, an advocacy group representing haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, Jews, said in a statement. “Rabbi Hauer created Kiddush Hashem in all of his encounters with the outside world, and he leaves behind an impressive list of significant accomplishments. The loss to our community is incalculable.”

“The Jewish people has lost a sage,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, in a Facebook post that included a photograph of himself sitting with Hauer in the official residence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog during a communal mission in July.

Jacobs recalled that Herzog had noted with some surprise that the president of the Reform movement was sitting next to a leader of the Orthodox Union. “I told President Herzog that it was completely natural for me to sit next to my friend and cherished colleague,” he wrote. “Yes, we disagreed on so many issues but shared a profound respect and love for one another. …. Rabbi Hauer’s humble leadership helped point the way for a more respectful and mutually responsible future for the Jewish people grounded in Torah.”

When he was tapped as its new executive vice president in 2020, succeeding Allen Fagin, Hauer pledged to address the rising costs of the Orthodox lifestyle — the O.U. supports federal “school choice” policies in order to offset the high costs of day school tuition — and expressed his commitment to Modern Orthodoxy, which in contrast to haredi Judaism seeks to balance a strict adherence to Jewish law, or halacha, with a deeper engagement with modernity. 

“Our community expresses this commitment by engaging with the world around us, as well as with all members of Klal Yisrael and by addressing every modern issue and contemporary challenge from within the value system of Torah,” he told the New York Jewish Week at the time. “We undertake all of these responsibilities while also completely dedicating ourselves to a growing engagement in Torah study, prayer and halachic observance.” 

To that point, he added, the O.U. “is completely committed to maximizing — within the framework of halacha — the engagement of Jewish women in every aspect of Jewish life. This is an organizational and communal priority.” 

Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday night that she had been so shocked to hear of her friend’s death that she texted him hoping that it was not true. She said she had just spoken to him last week, in the latest installment of an ongoing conversation that transcended their differences.

“Our very different realities came up over and over again. I loved learning how he lived his life, and he seemed to love learning how I lived mine. Difference, but mutual respect, was at the core of our deep friendship,” Katz wrote.

In the Jewish Week interview, Hauer pledged to improve “relationships beyond the confines of our community.”

That was also the message of one of his last public statements, shared on Oct. 3. In it he described the upcoming Sukkot holiday as an opportunity for connection among Jews from “ideologically diverse places.”

“Even those who usually live separately must seize opportunities for contact and connection,” he said.

Hauer’s survivors include his mother, Miriam Hauer; his wife, Mindi Hauer; their sons Yissachar, Yehuda Leib and Shalom; daughters Devorah Walfish, Batsheva Neuberger, Chana Schneiweiss and Rachel Hauer, and their spouses and numerous grandchildren.

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The post Rabbi Moshe Hauer, OU leader admired across Jewish world, is dead at 60 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Boom and Chains
by Hanan Ayalti, translated by Adi Mahalel
Wayne State University Press, 312 pages, $34.99

 

Boom and Chains, by the Yiddish writer Hanan Ayalti, is a sweeping, morally urgent novel of Mandate-era Palestine that marries socialist ambition, Zionist dreams and the lived terrain of Arab dispossession.

First serialized in Warsaw in 1940 and now translated into English by Adi Mahalel, the book reads less like a period curiosity than a dispatch from the very core of 20th-century Jewish history. Its cadences are elegiac and insurgent at once, never letting the reader forget that every utopian project is built on contested soil.

This edition includes a prologue — reprinted at the back as an appendix — that looks back at kibbutz life in Poland and traces how Ayalti’s characters first took shape ideologically. The prologue is not essential to the plot, but it frames the psychic foundation of utopian commitment: how a generation could inherit the dream of community, sacrifice and labor long before setting foot in Palestine. The translator’s glossary and notes guide readers through dense terms of socialist-Zionist vocabulary, from halutzim, which means pioneers, to the nuanced phrase, “building through work.”

The main narrative unfolds in three parts: “Kibbutz,” “Land and Work” and “God and Money.” These sections map not only the external struggles of settlement but also the inner fractures of its pioneers. When Zalmen, the central figure, lands in Jaffa, the novel enacts collision immediately — Arab boatmen unloading cargo, British officials announcing strikes, Jewish pioneers hammering tents into soggy terrain.

Every logistical failure becomes a metaphor: each collapsing tent points to the wider chasm between idealism and ground. The storm sequence in the early kibbutz chapters — especially “Lying in the Mud and Barking at the Moon,”  where the settlement nearly washes away — dramatizes that elemental struggle. You feel the land itself resisting its would-be redeemers.

By the time the narrative moves into Part II, the Arab perspective emerges not as backdrop, but as voice. Mustafa, once a peripheral figure, becomes a frustrated agitator whose sermons — half economic, half prophetic — speak of debt, dignity and land. His words register with painful clarity, even if the pioneers cannot or will not hear them.

The 1929 riots arrive with terrible inevitability. In one of the most wrenching scenes, Moshe Milner, a Jewish pioneer from Poland, is beaten for trying to raise funds for both Jewish and Arab victims. Solidarity itself is punished. In moments like this, Ayalti insists that the reader confront the impossibility of innocence.

Part III takes the novel toward collapse. Ideological certainties falter, comrades turn on one another, and even the land that promised redemption becomes charged with betrayal.

Comrade Gamzu, part zealot and part tragic figure, embodies this unraveling. At one point, he sits in his office writing an article for the Hebrew socialist newspaper — a small moment that crystallizes the novel’s insight: Labor is fought not only in fields and factories, but in words. The stormy conclusion leaves characters battered and arrested, and gives readers the sense that history itself has not yet chosen its verdict.

Ayalti’s place in Yiddish literature is unusual. While contemporaries often looked back at the shtetl or outward to immigrant life, he brought Yiddish to the frontier of Palestine. The result is a language of tension, where sacred vocabulary intermingles with slogans of socialist struggle.

It’s a reminder that Yiddish was not only a vehicle for memory but also for imagining futures — even ones later suppressed. (After moving to the United States, Ayalti set the novel aside for years, only completing Boom and Chains after returning to Israel.) In its ambition, Boom and Chains recalls the scope of the Soviet-Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson and the ideological searching of I. L. Peretz, but it’s more direct, more politically uncompromising.

The translation is mostly smooth, though a few idioms fall flatter than the Yiddish likely sounded. For instance, a phrase like “to break one’s back for the land” feels more awkward in English than the fierce irony it probably carried in the original. Still, the glossary is a gift: Terms like Shomrim (guards, or members of the Labor Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair) and shekhine — the Yiddish form of Shekhinah, the Divine Presence) — are defined in ways that illuminate not just vocabulary, but the ideals behind it. You can feel, even without direct citation, how carefully Mahalel has rebuilt the novel’s world for English readers.

One recurring weakness is that some characters lapse into long ideological speeches. Ayalti, at times, can’t resist the pamphleteer’s impulse. Yet even these stretches reveal the emotional urgency of an age when politics was lived from the trenches when the modern State of Israel was still years from being founded.  The heaviness that results is, paradoxically, part of the book’s honesty.

What makes Boom and Chains remarkable is how current it still feels. The struggle over land and labor, the ethical crisis of building renewal at another’s expense, the oscillation between hope and despair — all of it reads less like distant history than like a mirror. The book refuses the easy consolation that redemption can be clean. Instead it presses its readers: No soil is free of debt, no vision immune to fracture.

For Jewish readers today, this translation is a gift. It restores a lost voice of Yiddish modernism and places before us a stark question: Can a dream of justice survive when its ground is contested from the start? Boom and Chains doesn’t settle the question, but it forces us to live with it. And perhaps that is the deepest service a novel can offer.

 

The post A glimpse of the Jewish left in 1920s Palestine appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Hamas returned the bodies of two more hostages late Wednesday and said it had released all of the remains it is able to access, leaving 19 people unaccounted for.

The two hostages returned Wednesday, DNA analysis showed, were Muhammad Al-Atarash and Inbar Hayman.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum announced in December 2023 that Hayman, 27, had been killed in Gaza after being abducted from the Nova festival. And the Israeli army announced in July 2024 that Al-Atarash, 39, a Bedouin father of 13, had been killed in combat while responding to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.

Their return leaves 19 hostages unaccounted for and deepening tensions over their return. The ceasefire deal struck last week required Hamas to release all hostages, living and dead, within 72 hours. It met the deadline for the 20 living hostages, who were freed on Monday, but has not for the deceased ones.

Israel reportedly believes that Hamas knows where additional hostages’ remains are located, following reports from freed hostages that they were sometimes held alongside bodies. President Donald Trump, who brokered the deal between Israel and Hamas, said on Wednesday that he believed further efforts were being made to locate the hostages, who were killed on and after Oct. 7.

“It’s a gruesome process,” he said. “But they’re digging. They’re actually digging. There are areas where they’re digging, and they’re finding a lot of bodies. Then they have to separate the bodies. You wouldn’t believe this. And some of those bodies have been in there a long time, and some of them are under rubble. They have to remove rubble.”

Turkey has reportedly offered to send teams of searchers who have expertise developed through responding to earthquakes in their country. The country’s relations with Israel deteriorated sharply during the Gaza war as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly supported Hamas.

The status of the remaining hostages has left Jews around the world torn over how deeply to celebrate the living hostages’ release and the end of fighting. Some say it is inappropriate to celebrate when there are still 19 people abducted from Israel who have not been returned for a proper burial.

The post 2 more deceased hostages, including only woman, returned to Israel as Hamas says it has freed all it can appeared first on The Forward.