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A Holocaust survivor and her family saw ‘Leopoldstadt.’ The Broadway play told their story.
(New York Jewish Week) — On a Wednesday evening last month, three generations of a Jewish family made their way to their seats at the Longacre Theater to see “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s epic Broadway play about the tragedies that befall an extended Jewish family in the first half of the 20th century in Vienna.
The date of the family gathering was a significant one: Nov. 9, the 84th anniversary of the Nazi pogroms known as Kristallnacht. And in the audience was Fini Konstat, 96, who lived in the once thriving Jewish neighborhood after which the play is named, and witnessed the horrors it portrays first-hand. Alongside her were her daughter and her son-in-law, Renee and James Akers, and her oldest great-grandchild, Lexi Levin, 23.
When Konstat was a child, she lived in a “nice apartment” in Leopoldstadt. But exactly 84 years to the day of their theater date, “I was running with my father, seeing all the Jewish stores with all their windows broken,” she told Levin in a short video her great-granddaughter filmed before the curtain rose.
“It’s such a blessing for me to be here with you,” Levin said to her great-grandmother in response. “Ninety-six years old, survived a pandemic, at a Broadway show in New York City.”
Left: Fini as a child on the balcony of her apartment in Leopoldstadt. Right: Fini with her three children in front of the very same building, pictured in 2015. (Courtesy)
Since the beginning of its Broadway run in mid-September, “Leopoldstadt,” with its depiction of a prosperous Viennese family on the brink of destruction, has moved audiences to tears and inspired deep reflections on the Holocaust. Based on the celebrated playwright’s own family history — of which he was barely aware while growing up in England — it has provided a stark counterpoint to news about rising antisemitism and the celebrities who have been purveying it.
But for Konstat, the play was much more personal. “When I heard the word ‘Leopoldstadt,’ this alone gave me lots of thrills and memories,” Konstat, who is known in her family as Mimi, told the New York Jewish Week in accented English. She recalled how Levin, who recently moved to the city, invited her to fly to New York to see one of Broadway’s hottest tickets.
“Leopoldstadt,” she repeated, her voice breaking. “The second district. That’s where we lived.”
At the end of Stoppard’s five-act play, audiences learn that most of the Jewish characters had perished under the Nazis — of the four generations in the show, just three cousins survive to carry on the family’s legacy.
For Konstat too, she and her parents were among the very few in their extended family to survive the Holocaust. “Almost all of them went to Auschwitz or other camps,” Konstat said. “My mother was a twin and only the twins remained alive. [My mother’s] five other siblings and my grandmother perished.”
L-R: Renee Akers, James Akers, Lexi Levin and Fini Konstat at the Longacre Theater to see Tom Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt on Broadway,’ Nov. 9, 2022. (Courtesy)
In a Zoom conversation held over Thanksgiving weekend, Konstat, surrounded by two of her daughters, two of her granddaughters and three of her great-granddaughters, shared what the play meant to her — and how her family has restored what she lost.
In the months after Kristallnacht in 1938, Konstat and her parents hid in a neighbor’s apartment; Konstat recalls hiding under the duvet when German soldiers showed up. Eventually the family fled to Turkey, and then to India, before settling down in Mexico City. There, the teenage Fini met her husband David, also a survivor who escaped Poland. The two of them began to write the rest of their story — starting with the birth of the first of their three children in 1948.
Unlike many Holocaust survivors, Fini and David Konstat were open about their experiences during the war, instilling a sense of pride and duty to remember in their children — something that eventually extended to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“They were proud to speak about how they survived this,” said the Konstats’ middle child, Renee Konstat Akers. “Their life was an odyssey. They had the courage to do things that you would never think were possible. We grew up grateful knowing how our family survived in that incredible way.”
Each child moved to different places as they grew up and got married. Manuel, the oldest, stayed in Mexico. Renee married an American and moved to the Midwest, and Denise, the youngest, to Houston. Each became deeply involved in their Jewish communities, sending their children (Konstat’s grandchildren) to Jewish day schools, celebrating Jewish holidays and participating in synagogue life.
“The word ‘miracle’ really does not feel like an understatement in this scenario,” said Sherry Levin, one of Konstat’s grandchildren. “When we think about what it took for my grandmother and grandfather to survive and how they were able to intersect in Mexico, and such an amazing multi-generational family has come to fruition, it feels miraculous.”
Pictured here on their 40th anniversary, Fini and her husband David met in Mexico City after both had fled Europe. They were married 54 years before David died in 2001. (Courtesy)
Reviews of the show have ranged from rhapsodic to resistant, with some critics suggesting the play is simplistic and obvious in its story-telling or that it is less a well-crafted play than a well-meaning lesson on the Holocaust.
But just as the Merz family clashes and argues about everything from antisemitism to intermarriage to socialism in “Leopoldstadt,” each generation of the Konstat family that saw “Leopoldstadt” that night came away with something different — a reaction influenced by their age, their Jewish identity, their nationality and their relationship with their family.
For Konstat, the arc of “Leopoldstadt” was so familiar that it hardly stirred her. “It was just very happy watching it and enjoying it and enjoying my children with me, “ she told the New York Jewish Week. “I didn’t think about anybody else.”
Akers, too, felt an intense familiarity with the story, and, perhaps toughened by her own family history, didn’t experience an intense emotional reaction. Her own parents’ lives gave Akers a sense of purpose in her life — for example, in the 1990s, she was passionate about helping resettle Jews fleeing the former Soviet Union. With her own children, she instilled in them a strong sense of Jewish purpose in their work, their education and their family.
“I was a sandwich in between seeing my mother and my granddaughter,” she said of her “Leopoldstadt” experience. “I was emotional thinking of my mom who went through it, but I was more emotional about seeing my granddaughter be so moved. It really hit her at her core.”
Indeed, it was the youngest member of the family present that night who was most shaken by the play.
“It really felt like a gift to my family and to me, specifically, to be able to see what Mimi’s life looked like before the war,” Lexi Levin said, surmising that, as a fourth-generation survivor, she is among the first in her family to be able to start processing the loss on a grander scale.
“For the first time in my life, I really felt the magnitude of her loss,” she added. “I’ve known her story and I’ve been inspired by her story to be involved with my own Jewish causes, but I have never been able to access and truly empathize with her grief and what it meant that she lost the entire family she had before this one that she created.”
Turning to her great-grandmother, as if trying to make her understand the exact precision of the show, Levin explained, “It’s a play about generations and the family was large and then it was small.”
“You made it large again,” she said, referring to the generations of family that had assembled — in the Broadway theater and again over Thanksgiving weekend. “Look at this room.”
Pictured on her 90th birthday in 2017, Fini Konstat now has three children, ten grandchildren and twenty great-grandchildren. (Courtesy)
There was a coda for the family after the curtain went down. The day after the show, the family wanted to see the 1907 “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” one of Gustav Klimt’s most famous paintings, which currently hangs at the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side. A version of the portrait’s true story — how a painting of a socialite from a prominent Viennese Jewish family was looted by the Nazis and the family’s efforts to get it back — features in the plot of “Leopoldstadt.”
The gallery, however, was closed on the only day the family could visit. After a call to the management at the gallery, which showcases the German and Austrian art collections of Jewish philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder, the gallery’s director arranged a private tour.
“It felt like we were in a puzzle and everything was finally coming together,” said Akers. “It was an emotional, emotional time.”
When the week was over and the emotions were spent, Konstat and the Akers returned home with a reignited passion for their family story. But there was yet another twist: In addition to the whirlwind trip Levin planned for her grandparents and for Mimi, she had been undergoing the laborious process of applying for Austrian citizenship. Six members in Konstat’s large family have undertaken the process over the last two years.
“Part of the motivation was knowing Mimi’s story, and knowing that she survived because her mother had citizenship in Turkey,” Levin said. “That story was just inspirational to me, knowing that dual citizenship was what saved our family.” She convinced her brother and mother to apply for Austrian citizenship as well.
The day after her grandmother and great-grandmother left New York, Levin called them with news from her small apartment in Manhattan: An Austrian passport had arrived in the mail. The curtain was rising on another act.
Konstat was surprised at how interested her family was in getting Austrian citizenship. “I feel very good,” she said. “I’m very happy.”
“Does it make you emotional?” Levin asked her during the Zoom call with the New York Jewish Week.
“It does — of course it does. I used to love Austria,” she said. “I was sad to leave. I was disappointed. We never thought of coming back. I was happy to be able to escape. Thank God we made it out of hell.”
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The PBS series ‘Black and Jewish America’ gets it right — except the Black and Jewish part
The opening scene in the first of four episodes of the PBS series “Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History” captures a truly wonderful event: a Passover Seder led by culinary genius Michael Twitty that also includes his fellow rock-star Jews of Color Jamaica Kincaid and Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, among others. Rabbi Shais Rishon regales the group with a brief accounting of his Black and Jewish ancestry going back to the 1780s — an origin story that would seem to offer a natural entry point into the history of Black and Jewish life in America, at least through the 20th century.
Except we never hear from him again — or any other Jew of Color seated at that table.
What we do get in the four-hour series presented by Harvard historian and “Finding Your Roots” host Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a reductive depiction of the histories of Blacks and Jews as two separate groups. That’s despite the incessant reminder that I, and countless other Jews of Color, including those seated at that Seder table, have been making for decades: “Blacks and Jews” is a misnomer. The two are not mutually exclusive. Jews can be Black and Blacks can be Jews — and you cannot talk about the relationship between the two without acknowledging those who inhabit that intersection and have been influencing each group’s attitudes about the other for millennia.
Someone who has lived in both of those spaces all his life is University of Connecticut philosophy professor Lewis Gordon, who describes the binary as endemic in academia.
“They’re really invested in an ongoing stereotypical discourse, in which Blacks are represented by Christians and Jews are represented by whites,” he said. “Ultimately, they’re always talking about it as ‘Blacks and Jews,’ even when Black Jews are in the room.”
To be sure, there are other Black Jews in the program’s interview rooms, including Rabbi Capers Funnye of Chicago’s Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. But Funnye is one of many luminaries asked to comment on facts, incidents, or dynamics specific to one or both of the communities, rather than on the history of his own: a historically rich congregation that has served as a bridge between largely Black Israelite groups and predominantly white Jewish denominations.
And Funnye aside, Israelites aren’t mentioned at all, even as Israelite communities have crossed paths with mainstream Jewish congregations around the country for more than 150 years — a history the producers told me they were aware of but didn’t have the time or space to address.
“The Hebrew Israelite community is so complicated in and of itself that it felt almost like we could only bite off just the smallest piece of it,” co-producer Sara Wolitzky told me over Zoom. “We didn’t want to get that wrong, because it’s such a complicated set of experiences in its own right.”
That may be, but that’s like saying Jerusalem is claimed by both Jews and Palestinians; let’s talk about Tokyo instead.
As for that binary discussion, the series is competently told and offers deep dives into areas not widely covered in other Blacks-and-Jews works. In particular, it recognizes that Black and Jewish allyship wasn’t always a one-way street, in which more privileged Jews came to the aid of downtrodden Blacks. In the early 20th century, it notes, Black newspapers editorialized against pogroms in Europe and against the rise of Nazism.
The vein continues with the recording of Billie Holiday’s anti-lynching standard, “Strange Fruit,” though in a curious understatement it describes its Jewish songwriter Abel Meeropol — writing as Lewis Allan — as a schoolteacher, rather than as the fiercely progressive adoptive father of the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who also wrote lyrics for Paul Robeson.
A lesser-known story the series does allow room to breathe is that of the other Brown v. Board of Education: Esther Brown, a Jewish housewife in Merriam, Kansas, whose successful school-desegregation efforts in partnership with African American parents helped lay the groundwork for the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case — named, as it happens, for a different Brown.
To each of these peaks of progress and partnership are valleys of dispute and discontent. Jewish support of Black entertainers was often accompanied by economic exploitation; Jews fighting against restrictive covenants were undermined by others building whites-only Levittowns.
The alliance reached its zenith, of course, in the Civil Rights Movement, though the program largely confines that story to the 1960s, omitting crucial Black-Jewish collaborations that preceded it — including that of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Jewish adviser and fundraiser, Stanley Levison. And while it briefly mentions one Black Jewish civil-rights leader, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman Chuck McDew, he’s described as a “Jew by choice” — a moniker not used in reference to Jews in the program void of melanin.
At least he’s included. Sammy Davis Jr., who was also intensely involved in the movement, is nowhere to be found.
“Sammy Davis was a convert, right?” Wolitzky said, suddenly imposing a standard that apparently wasn’t a problem when talking about McDew, whose Judaism very much informed his decision to become a movement leader. “When you’re talking about Black Jews or Jews of African descent, there are so many different versions of that. Highlighting only one example like a Sammy Davis Jr. can misrepresent that.”
I’m sorry. You can laugh at, laugh with, or make one-eyed–Black–Jewish–Nixon-loving jokes all you want about Sammy, but you can hardly deny he was a major force in bringing awareness to the entire world — let alone to Blacks and Jews — that a person could be both, and proud of it. There is no way to deny his existence shaped the attitudes of both Blacks and Jews about the other.
Following the movement came the inevitable breakup, with Civil Rights morphing into Black Power and white activists expelled. A particular flare-up is highlighted in New York’s Ocean Hill–Brownsville school dispute between largely Jewish teachers and Black parents. Yet again, a key figure in that conflict who would later become a Black Jewish darling of mainstream Judaism is missing: Julius Lester, who during the dispute was accused of stoking antisemitic flames on his radio show before his Conservative conversion two decades later.
The series finally does return to Black Jews in the final episode, briefly, to recount Israel’s airlift of Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s, an act presented as if a more than 2,000-year-old community had suddenly been discovered. That segues into the revelation that there are Black Jews in America, and that it is suddenly acceptable to be one — a conversation that is quickly swallowed up by euphoria over the biracial phenomenon of Barack Obama.
If it sounds like I’ve been incessantly harping on where are the Black Jews?, co-producer Phil Bertelsen expressed exactly that.
“Do you have any questions beyond that?” he asked.
I did. I was curious about the mechanics of the production, and whether or not he and Wolitzky had documented how many times they showed the alliance holding hands versus reaching for each other’s throats.
“I didn’t count them,” he said.
Viewers don’t have to either; we get the point. It’s “I love you,” “I never want to see you again!” “I love you…” and on and on. And in that, the series is instructive. What’s missing is a strong summation that countless others who have written about the perpetual Black-Jewish makeup-and-breakup ritual have noted: If the two communities didn’t truly care for each other, they wouldn’t be talking about each other so much.
That’s something nearly every Black Jew I’ve ever met would tell you — including the ones at the Seder table. It’s too bad they didn’t get the chance.
The post The PBS series ‘Black and Jewish America’ gets it right — except the Black and Jewish part appeared first on The Forward.
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Proposed laws aim to test the Supreme Court’s ban on public school-sponsored prayer
Public schools have been barred from sponsoring official prayer since the Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling in Engel v. Vitale, a landmark decision that cemented the principle of church-state separation in American law.
Now, lawmakers in several states are advancing measures that aim to bring prayer back into public schools — with potential to reverse decades of precedent as politicians push for Christian prayer to return as a commonplace part of the school day.
In Tennessee, a bill introduced last month would require public schools to set aside time for voluntary prayer and the reading of “the Bible or other religious text.” Students would opt in to the prayer period by getting their parents to sign a consent form, which also requires participating students to waive their right to sue.
Texas enacted a nearly identical law last year, empowering school boards to institute prayer and Bible-reading periods in schools across their districts by March 1 — a move more than 160 religious leaders urged school boards to reject in an open letter last month.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton encouraged students to use the time to recite the Lord’s Prayer “as taught by Jesus Christ.”
In Florida, a proposed amendment to the state constitution would allow students and teachers to lead prayer over a loudspeaker at school-sponsored events — even though the Supreme Court ruled student-led, student-initiated prayer at football games unconstitutional two decades ago.
Meanwhile, a federal bill introduced by Rep. David Rouzer (R-N.C.) last month would withhold federal funding from public schools that “restrict voluntary school prayer,” and new guidance from the Department of Education released last week allows teachers to pray with students.
Nik Nartowicz, lead policy counsel at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the Supreme Court’s church-state separation precedents like Engel v. Vitale aren’t in immediate jeopardy — but they are steadily being undermined.
“Teachers have a little bit more right to pray in public schools than they did last time. And then it just kind of slowly builds,” Nartowicz said. “The very principles of religious freedom in public school are very clearly under attack.”
A Jewish plaintiff
In 1951, the Board of Regents of New York proposed that public schools start the day with what it called a “non-denominational” prayer. Students were able to opt out with a parent’s signature.
“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country. Amen,” the prayer read.
Five families sued, arguing that the school-organized prayer violated their constitutional rights. They came from a range of religious backgrounds, including Judaism, atheism, Unitarianism and humanism.
But the case quickly took on a Jewish character, as a Jewish parent named Steven Engel became the lead plaintiff, and a broad cross-section of Jewish organizations became involved with the case. The American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith and the Synagogue Council of America — which represented 70 Jewish organizations spanning Orthodox, Conservative and Reform — all filed briefs urging the court to strike down school-sponsored prayer.
According to Bruce Dierenfield, author of The Battle over School Prayer: How Engel v. Vitale Changed America, when the court released its decision the blowback was intense — and, at times, antisemitic.
The Supreme Court received the largest amount of hate mail in its history. Politicians called to amend the Constitution and impeach the justices, and 15 states refused to immediately discontinue prayer and Bible reading in their schools. An angry protester burned a cross in plaintiff Lawrence Roth’s family driveway.
“Some people say this case produced more of a backlash than almost any other case in American history,” Dierenfield said. “It seemed to be the death knell of ‘Christian America.’”
A changing landscape
In the decades after Engel, the Supreme Court repeatedly reinforced the ban on school-sponsored prayer, controversially ruling that even required moments of silence could be unconstitutional if intended to encourage prayer.
That line shifted in 2022. The court sided with Joe Kennedy, a high school football coach in Washington state who had been placed on leave for praying at midfield immediately after games, sometimes joined by players.
The school district’s actions “rested on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. “The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination.”
The Kennedy ruling “was kind of a slap at the absolutism of Engel,” Dierenfield said. “It epitomizes somewhat of a new day.”
The decision also hinged in part on disputed interpretation of facts: The majority argued that Kennedy had engaged in “short, private, personal prayer,” while the dissent said he prayed with students in a setting where they could feel pressured to participate.
The case highlighted the often-blurry line between voluntary and coercive prayer, a tension made more complicated by peer pressure and the authority teachers and coaches hold over students.
According to Nartowicz, teachers and students are free to pray or read religious texts as long as they don’t disrupt or pressure others — but that boundary is crossed when teachers pray with students. Even though new policies make prayer and Bible-reading periods opt-in, he said, the practice can still feel coercive.
“If a teacher’s praying, because teachers have so much control over students, a student might say, Oh, I need to pray in order to make sure I’m in the good favor of so-and-so to get a good grade in their class,” he said.
Rabbi Michael Shulman of Congregation Ohabai Sholom in Nashville, Tennessee, who wrote an op-ed speaking out against his state’s school prayer bill, shares similar concerns.
He said children at his congregation are often the only Jewish students at their schools, and a school-sponsored period for prayer would only worsen their feelings of alienation.
“Anytime religion and government mix, there’s a danger of signaling that this is what the state is promoting — which beliefs are normal, which ones are not,” Shulman told the Forward. “So when public schools, that are state institutions, promote this, it really changes the meaning of what ‘voluntary’ is.”
‘Exactly the right time’
School prayer advocates are explicit about their goal: They want the Supreme Court, which currently has a 6-3 conservative majority, to take up their case.
It’s unclear if the court will choose to weigh in. In November, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in a case where a lower court had upheld a ban on broadcasting a pregame prayer over the loudspeaker at a high school football game.
But proponents of school prayer aren’t giving up. The Tennessee bill states that “the idea of separation of church and state departs from the religious liberty guaranteed by the Constitution of the State of Tennessee” and lists 11 Supreme Court decisions, including Engel, as examples of rulings that it says conflict.
“I think this is exactly the right time to have this issue brought back into the public square, both because our Supreme Court has, I think, more properly aligned in most recent decisions and because I think we just need to have prayer back in our schools,” Rep. Gino Bulso, the bill’s sponsor, told The Tennessee Conservative.
Meanwhile, Paxton has pledged to defend in court any school district that implements a voluntary prayer period.
For those who remember how fiercely Engel divided the country, a new showdown at the Supreme Court feels almost inevitable.
“I sit on tenterhooks all the time about seeing that somebody’s going to bring a suit saying that they have the right to have organized prayer in public schools. I would not be the least bit surprised to see a case — see the Engel case come up again in the Supreme Court,” Jonathan Engel, Steven Engel’s son, said in a 2023 documentary. “So we may have to fight this battle again.”
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Gunmen Kill Three People and Abduct Catholic Priest in Northern Nigeria
A police vehicle of Operation Fushin Kada (Anger of Crocodile) is parked on Yakowa Road, as schools across northern Nigeria reopen nearly two months after closing due to security concerns, following the mass abductions of school children, in Kaduna, Nigeria, January 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Nuhu Gwamna/File Photo
Gunmen killed three people and abducted a Catholic priest and several others during an early morning attack on the clergyman’s residence in northern Nigeria’s Kaduna state, church and police sources said on Sunday.
Saturday’s assault in Kauru district highlights persistent insecurity in the region, and came days after security services rescued all 166 worshippers abducted in attacks by gunmen on two churches elsewhere in Kaduna.
Such attacks have drawn the attention of US President Donald Trump, who has accused Nigeria’s government of failing to protect Christians, a charge Abuja denies. US forces struck what they described as terrorist targets in northwestern Nigeria on December 25.
The Catholic Diocese of Kafanchan named the kidnapped clergyman as Nathaniel Asuwaye, parish priest of Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Karku, and said 10 other people were abducted.
Three residents were killed during the attack, which began at about 3:20 a.m. (0220 GMT), the diocese said in a statement.
A Kaduna police spokesperson confirmed the incident, but said five people had been abducted in total and that the three people killed were members of the security forces.
“Security agents exchanged gunfire with the bandits, killed some of them, and unfortunately two soldiers and a police officer lost their lives,” he said.
Rights group Amnesty International said in a statement on Sunday that Nigeria’s security crisis was “increasingly getting out of hand”. It accused the government of “gross incompetence” and failure to protect civilians as gunmen kill, abduct and terrorize rural communities across several northern states.
A presidency spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment.
Pope Leo, during his weekly address to the faithful in St. Peter’s Square, expressed solidarity with the victims of recent attacks in Nigeria.
“I hope that the competent authorities will continue to act with determination to ensure the security and protection of every citizen’s life,” Leo said.