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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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Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger
(JTA) — The pro-Israel mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, lost his reelection campaign Wednesday to a progressive pro-Palestinian challenger in the latest demonstration of how Israel politics are seeping into local U.S. elections.
Incumbent Brett Smiley, who converted to Judaism in 2024 while in office, was bested by state Sen. David Morales in the Democratic primary in this deep blue city. Morales, a democratic socialist, carried endorsements from leading progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna. With 99% of ballots counted, Morales had garnered 52.5% of the vote to Smiley’s 47.5%.
During the campaign, pro-Smiley flyers were defaced with Hitler mustaches and devil horns, acts which his opponent condemned.
The city’s Democratic primary also serves as a preview for a significant general election vote on divestment. In November, Providence will become the largest American city to cast a vote on a measure that, despite not naming Israel directly, could stop the city from investing in companies linked to Israel.
Morales supports the binding divestment vote, while Smiley and local Jewish and pro-Israel groups have opposed it. The mayor called the ordinance “both unenforceable and likely in violation of existing state law” in a statement to Jewish Insider.
During the campaign, Morales criticized Smiley for participating in a mayoral summit run by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, in which Smiley serves in a leadership capacity. Morales accused the group of suppressing pro-Palestinian speech and not being transparent about its funders.
The Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative, which promotes business ties between the state and Israel, opposes both the ballot initiative and Morales. Avi Nevel, the group’s founder, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency prior to the primary that Morales was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.”
It was a night of overthrowing incumbents in the state, as Rhode Island’s sitting governor also lost his primary to an intra-party challenger. That race, however, did not pivot on Israel: Gov. Daniel McKee’s popularity in the state has sunk following a scandal involving the closure of a major bridge.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Attacks on Mamdani test Jewish efforts to confront Islamophobia as 9/11 anniversary nears
The image was vintage AI slopcraft: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his trademark black suit, holding a sealed cardboard package labeled 9/11 MEMORIAL.
“Honey,” the cartoon Mamdani calls, “where’s my box cutter?”
The cartoon, shared Sunday on social media by the Orthodox Jewish comedy account Heimish Humor and referencing the weapon used in the 9/11 hijackings, reflected an increasingly caustic attitude toward Mamdani, Muslim elected officials and Islam itself in some Jewish spaces as the 25th anniversary of the attacks approaches — with much of the charged rhetoric tied to Sept. 11.
Jewish groups that staged an anti-Mamdani protest in downtown Manhattan Tuesday invoked the mayor’s religion on a flyer for the event, which was sponsored by the Lawfare Project, the Israeli-American Council and a slew of other Jewish groups. The flyer depicted Mamdani with his eyes blotted out and read, “Islamist ideology was not defeated. It was normalized. In 2001 they needed planes. Today the DSA hands them a platform.” One speaker at the event said Mamdani believed law enforcement was “haram,” Arabic for forbidden.
To some who saw it, the poster — and many of the Jewish attacks against Mamdani — contained anti-Muslim dog whistling, if not downright Islamophobia.
“This is coded language to smear all Muslim leaders as terrorists to hold them accountable for 9/11,” said Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “The same way that we as a community rightfully push back when we hear people using ‘Zionist’ as a pejorative — that’s what’s happening here. We should be calling it out if we expect people to call it out when it happens to us.”
The wave of antagonism in the Jewish community comes amid a broader Republican backlash to high-profile victories for Muslim elected leaders. Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, called incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is Catholic, “tone deaf” for wearing a hijab at a mosque so close to the 9/11 anniversary. Islamophobic posts targeting Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, surfaced by The Washington Post, found copious 9/11 references.
But no politician has attracted as much vitriol as Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor. His antagonism toward the Israeli government and his leftist politics have made him a target for many pro-Israel New Yorkers. Some have used his religion as a cudgel in joining calls for him to skip Friday’s memorial service at Ground Zero.
Spitalnick said such rhetoric was coming from a small, non-representative portion of the Jewish world that wanted to advance a conservative political agenda — but that Jews “should be concerned that this is ostensibly being done in our name.”
“We can be concerned for multiple reasons,” she added. “One, bigotry is wrong regardless, and two, it actually makes our work to fight the real and rising antisemitism our community is facing that much harder.”
Yet posts like the cartoon also revealed the resistance to growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Jewish spaces. Heimish Humor’s post drew a number of critical replies from Jewish accounts. “Incredibly racist, you should delete this,” wrote one. “Not funny,” said another. As anti-Muslim rhetoric escalates, Jewish voices are among those fighting hardest to combat it.
Echoes of history
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the rise in Islamophobic rhetoric has resurfaced old memories of its aftermath.
The end of 2001 was a dangerous time for Muslim Americans, who faced being conflated with the Al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the hijackings. Despite President George W. Bush’s admonition that the attacks were committed by extremists who did not represent the religion, anti-Muslim violence spiked across the U.S. A number of mosques were burned in arson fires, and eight Arabs or Muslims were killed in the three months following 9/11 in what some believed to be Islamophobic murders.
Relations between Jewish and Muslim American communities, already strained by the Second Intifada, bottomed out in some places after 9/11. But in the ensuing years, Jewish-Muslim relations took a surprising turn. By 2006, news media were describing an “unprecedented swell of interfaith activities” — including dialogue groups, “peace walks” and joint Israel trips — even as agreement on Middle East politics remained elusive.
And while the 2010 proposal for a mosque and Muslim community center at Ground Zero reignited some old tensions — with the Anti-Defamation League headlining the opposition — broader trends of Muslim-Jewish mutual aid held: When a St. Louis Jewish cemetery was defaced in 2017, Muslim groups raised tens of thousands of dollars to repair it. Jewish groups anchored the opposition to President Donald Trump’s 2017 immigration ban targeting Muslim countries. And in 2021, the ADL apologized for its earlier stance on the mosque near Ground Zero.
The day everything changed
The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, however, caused many Jewish-Muslim partnerships to collapse. Israel’s response in Gaza only deepened resentments, as opposition to the war on college campuses and in public protests coincided with an increase in antisemitic incidents.
Then in 2025, Mamdani rode into office on the back of the pro-Palestinian movement. Mamdani vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was reluctant to disavow the slogan “globalize the intifada” — a phrase many see as calling for violence against Jews. Though Mamdani has repeatedly condemned antisemitic violence in the city, some Jewish New Yorkers say his anti-Israel invective has nevertheless exacerbated a dangerous environment for the city’s Jews.
“The DSA is a movement of hate, pro-terror anti-American and anti-minority ideology,” said Brooke Goldstein, the founding director of the Lawfare Project, which organized Tuesday’s anti-Mamdani protest. She said it was the DSA and the mayor who were promoting division, extremism and racism — not groups like hers, who were holding the mayor accountable.
The prominence of the Democratic Socialists of America is one key difference between today’s political environment and that of late 2001.
But the environment around Israel has also changed. “The response to 9/11, including from most Jewish organizations, was an American response,” said Jonathan Jacoby, president of the Nexus Project, a nonprofit that combats antisemitism — whereas the response to Mamdani today, he said, is “coming from a quote-unquote ‘pro-Israel’ space.”
Jacoby said Mamdani’s election in particular had elicited an unprecedented level of panic among some pro-Israel groups. He pointed to the ADL’s Mamdani Monitor as an example, saying that there was a throughline between the efforts to undermine his candidacy and the calls for him to not attend the 9/11 ceremony. (The ADL has not commented on whether Mamdani should participate, and declined to comment for this story.)
Some of the people who have pushed back against the anti-Mamdani rhetoric consider themselves among the mayor’s critics.
“I’m not happy with the atmosphere he’s brought into New York City since being elected,” Avital Levene, a Jewish influencer who called the Mamdani cartoon “not funny,” said in an interview. “However, he’s stood with the Jewish people since taking office. People literally call him a terrorist and use terms like ‘yemach shemo’ (may his name be erased). There’s a way to criticize someone’s political views without using racist slurs.”
Like Levene and Spitalnick, Jacoby said he disagreed with some of the mayor’s beliefs about Israel. But he said those disagreements “pale in the face of the danger of authoritarianism, neo-fascism and white nationalism in this country.”
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Argentine court orders return of Nazi-looted painting to Jewish collector’s heir
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES – A Dutch journalist hunting for art treasures belonging to an Amsterdam Jewish art dealer spent years trying to get answers from Patricia Kadgien, the daughter of the Nazi financier who had made off with some of them, with no luck. So last year he went to her house in Mar del Plata, a resort city on Argentina’s Atlantic coast.
No one was home, but the journalist, Peter Schouten, noticed a “for sale” sign outside the property from Robles Casas & Campos, a local real estate agency.
Schoten went to the agency’s website, where the house was listed for $265,000. As he scrolled through the listing, he noticed something in a photograph of the living room. Schouten recognized the painting hanging above a sofa: “Portrait of a Lady,” most likely the work of the 18th-century northern Italian painter known as Il Pitocchetto.
On Friday, Argentine federal judge Santiago Inchausti authorized the restitution of “Portrait of a Lady,” which belonged to the collection of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, to his daughter-in-law and sole heir, Marei von Saher.
“The property had been listed for sale on a real estate agency’s website, and one of the photographs showed a painting in the living room that matched one of the works from Goudstikker’s collection that had been sought for years,” Inchausti wrote in his ruling.
Goudstikker was one of Holland’s most prominent Jewish art dealers before World War II. In 1940, he fled the Nazi-occupied Netherlands with his wife and son, carrying a black notebook listing some 1,400 artworks. After his death during the voyage, his widow preserved it, and the notebook later became key evidence in the family’s restitution efforts.
His gallery and collection fell under Nazi control. Hermann Goering, a powerful deputy to Adolf Hitler, acquired hundreds of paintings from Goudstikker’s collection in a forced sale that Dutch authorities later determined was directly linked to Nazi persecution.
Herberto Robinson, von Saher’s lawyer who specializes in estate planning and asset protection, described what happened after Schoten’s sleuthing in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“At that point, the journalist contacted attorney Yael Weitz in Freedman Normand Friedland of New York where she specializes in art and cultural property law,” he said “She then contacted us and asked us to take on the case. The family’s sole intention was to recover the painting. They were not interested in pursuing those who had possessed it or in seeking financial compensation, they wanted the artwork returned.”
Kadgien is the daughter of Friedrich Kadgien, a German financial official who worked for the Nazi regime and later escaped to South America. The elder Kadgien, who had close ties to Goering, fled Germany in 1945 to Switzerland, eventually making his way to Argentina, where he started a business and raised a family. He died in 1978.
Kadgien and her husband at first did not cooperate. The realtor’s listing was removed after the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad published its report. Argentine authorities then searched the property on Aug. 26, 2025, but the painting had been removed and replaced with another artwork, while an outline matching its dimensions remained visible on the wall.
Kadgien and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, were placed under house arrest for 72 hours while authorities searched the family’s other properties. They subsequently turned the artwork over to federal prosecutors and were charged with aggravated concealment.
Experts from Argentina’s National Academy of Fine Arts attributed the work to Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti, known as Il Pitocchetto, and valued it at approximately €250,000. The local and national Jewish communities took a keen interest in the case.
“We are very pleased and hope this marks the beginning of many more restitutions, as we know there are undoubtedly other works out there that rightfully belong to families who suffered this tragic fate,” Clauda Beatriz Malamud, the president of Sociedad Union Israelita Marplatense, the local Jewish community body, told JTA.
Under an agreement Inchausti approved, the criminal proceedings against the couple were suspended for two years, subject to a set of conditions. They irrevocably renounce any right or claim to the artwork, clearing the way for its restitution. The painting will remain in the custody of Argentina’s Supreme Court until the restitution is carried out. They also agreed to pay 4.8 million Argentine pesos — approximately $3,180 — in 24 monthly installments to the support association of Mar del Plata’s Interzonal Specialized Maternal and Child Hospital.
According to well-placed sources at the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum, von Saher has expressed interest in lending the painting to the museum for a temporary exhibition, possibly for one or two years. The exhibition would help raise awareness of the systematic theft of Jewish-owned art under the Nazi regime and the continuing international effort to return such works to their rightful owners. No final agreement about this has been announced.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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