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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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‘Call for Division’: Australian Muslim Council Sparks Outrage Over Push to Block Israeli President’s Visit
People stand near flowers laid as a tribute at Bondi Beach to honor the victims of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone
The Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) has come under widespread scrutiny after seeking to block Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia to commemorate the victims of the Bondi Beach massacre, a move that Jewish leaders have denounced as a “call for division.”
In a press release, ANIC called on Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to revoke next month’s invitation for the Israeli leader to visit Sydney, where he intends to honor the victims of the deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration that killed 15 people and injured at least 40 others.
ANIC accused Herzog of being “implicated in widespread war crimes and breaches of international law” amid Israel’s defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, adding he should not be “welcomed or afforded legitimacy” in Australia.
“The president is directly implicated in grave war crimes and acts of genocide against the Palestinian people, including the mass killing of civilians, the destruction of Gaza, and the expansion of illegal settlements,” the Islamic body wrote in a post on X.
“While ANIC stands in solidarity with the Jewish community and mourns the victims of the horrific Bondi terrorist attack, accountability and justice must not be compromised,” the statement read.
ANIC Statement on NSW Protest Legislation and Invitation to the President of Israel
The Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) is extremely disappointed and expresses serious concern over the NSW Government’s new legislation introduced following the Bondi terrorist attack,… pic.twitter.com/ZW6MhVnIDc
— Australian National Imams Council (@ImamsCouncil) December 26, 2025
With Herzog having already accepted the invitation, Albanese is now facing growing pressure and criticism from politicians and Jewish leaders to oppose ANIC’s call to block the Israeli leader’s visit, planned for early next year in a show of solidarity with the Jewish community.
David Ossip, president of the New South Wales (NSW) Jewish Board of Deputies, condemned ANIC’s latest statement.
“It’s so disappointing to hear calls for division just as Australians want this to be a time for unity,” Ossip said in a statement.
“Australia has been attacked, and its citizens have been slaughtered on the beach. Many countries, quite rightly, want to show their solidarity with us at this time. Let them,” he continued.
In its statement, ANIC also denounced the NSW government’s new laws that expand police powers and curb protests in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre, describing the demonstrations under scrutiny as “an act of solidarity for Palestinians.”
“There is no evidence to suggest that peaceful protest … has any connection to the Bondi terrorist attack,” the statement read.
“ANIC is concerned that the legislation conflates lawful, peaceful protest with terrorism and acts of violence … increases social division rather than strengthening cohesion, and threatens fundamental democratic freedoms and rights,” it continued.
As the local Jewish community continues to grapple with a shocking surge in violence and targeted attacks, the Australian government has been pursuing a series of firearm reforms, including a national gun buyback and limits on the number of firearms an individual can own.
Last week, NSW passed its own legislation further restricting firearm ownership, granting local police greater powers to limit protests for up to three months, and outlawing the public display of flags and symbols associated with designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas.
In the aftermath of the Bondi beach attack, Australia’s rabbis urged Albanese to establish a federal Royal Commission into antisemitism — a formal public inquiry empowered to investigate, make recommendations, and propose legislative measures to also address the issue.
“We have sat with grieving families. We have visited the injured. We have stood with children who no longer feel safe walking to school. We have watched members of our communities withdraw from public spaces, universities, and civic life out of fear,” the Rabbinical Association of Australia wrote in a letter.
“We are demanding nothing less than the banning of [anti-Israel] marches and demonstrations, and the criminalization of the phrases ‘death to the IDF,’ ‘globalize the intifada,’ and ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ This is not an abstract concern. It is a lived reality,” the letter added, referencing three popular chants among anti-Israel activists that have been widely interpreted as a call for violence against both Jews and Israelis.
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Iran Protests Escalate as Pressure Mounts on Regime
Protesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, Dec. 29, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Iran is again in motion. Four days of strikes and protests have unfolded across the country, from Tehran to Mashhad, from Isfahan to Kermanshah, from Shiraz to Arak, since Sunday.
In Fasa, in Fars province, protesters broke through the gates of the governor’s office on Wednesday and attacked a government building, an act that carries weight in a system built on the choreography of fear. Each day has brought new reports, new cities, new confrontations. Each day has also revived the familiar, painful question: Could this finally be the moment when the Islamic Republic loses its grip?
The protests did not begin as a single ideological uprising. They emerged from economic pressure and daily suffocation. Bazaar merchants, money changers, workers, and ordinary residents reacted to a currency in freefall, to inflation that devours salaries, to a state that extracts obedience while offering little in return. Students have since joined. Chants have hardened. Anger has spread geographically and socially.
These details matter. In Iran, unrest confined to campuses can be isolated. Unrest that reaches bazaars, provincial towns, and state offices strains a different set of nerves.
Even figures within the system acknowledge this fragility. Fatemeh Maghsoudi, a spokesperson for the Economic Committee of the Iranian Parliament, said last week that the collapse of the rial owed less to any concrete economic development than to an atmosphere of fear driven by the prospect of conflict, remarking that when US President Donald Trump so much as tells Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “let’s go and have a coffee,” the exchange rate suddenly collapses. And when Netanyahu makes any statement, Maghsoudi added, prices in the market immediately rise, despite the fact that nothing substantive had changed in Iran’s economy.
Yet the regime, too, is moving. According to the Iran specialist Kasra Aarabi, sources inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) indicate that the state has raised its internal threat posture to a “yellow” level, defined as an abnormal situation within a four-tier (white, yellow, orange, and red) national security system. That architecture, built methodically since 2007, reaches into every province, city, district, and neighborhood.
Under higher threat levels, layers of security are activated: checkpoints, patrols, phone searches, internet restrictions, Basij deployments down to the street and apartment block. When a “red” level is declared, infantry units fold into domestic suppression, and the IRGC’s operational security headquarters assume sweeping authority over provincial life. This apparatus exists for one purpose. It has been used before. It has not yet fractured.
History teaches restraint in moments like this. The 1979 revolution did not triumph because crowds filled streets for a few dramatic days. It succeeded because strikes paralyzed oil production, administrative systems failed, and elite loyalty dissolved under sustained pressure. Today’s thresholds have not yet been crossed. There is no confirmed nationwide shutdown of core industries. There is no evidence of defection within the IRGC or the regular military. There is no alternative authority capable of coordinating power. These absences do not negate the tremendous courage of those protesting. They define the uncertainty of what comes next.
The international environment sharpens that uncertainty. Speaking in Florida alongside Netanyahu this week, Trump warned that Iran may be attempting to rebuild its nuclear program after US strikes in June damaged three nuclear facilities. His language was characteristically blunt. Any renewed nuclear buildup would invite rapid eradication. Missile production, too, was placed under explicit threat. The message was typically blunt. Negotiations remain open. Deadlines, Trump reminded his audience, have consequences.
The last time Trump issued a deadline to Iran, he gave Tehran 60 days to reach an agreement over its nuclear program. When that deadline expired, Israeli strikes followed the very next day, with clear US permission.
Strikingly, this convergence of internal unrest and external pressure has received only limited attention in much of the international media, treated as background noise rather than as a meaningful shift. The result is a failure to register how significant it could be for economic protest, regional spread, and explicit great-power deadlines to coincide in Iran like this.
For Tehran, this external pressure intersects dangerously with internal unrest. The regime faces a population increasingly willing to test red lines and a strategic environment in which miscalculation could invite devastating force. It is within this context that documented evidence from IRGC-linked academic institutions should be noted with great concern: the development of incapacitating chemical agents, including medetomidine and fentanyl derivatives, appear to have been adapted for crowd control munitions. During the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022, demonstrators described effects inconsistent with standard CS gas. The implication is grim: The state has invested not only in batons and bullets, but in yet more insidious, chemical tools of repression.
And still, hope persists. It persists among Iranians chanting on rooftops and in streets. It persists among families who have buried the dead and returned anyway. It persists across the Iranian diaspora, for whom memory and longing blur into expectation. Each cycle of protest carries the belief that this time the accumulation of anger, courage, and exhaustion might finally converge. Each cycle also carries the memory of how brutally that belief has been punished before.
Prediction is a temptation best resisted. Revolutions are legible only in retrospect. While they unfold, they present as disorder, hesitation, advance, and retreat. What can be said is narrower and more honest. The protests of these four days show breadth, persistence, and a willingness to confront symbols of authority. The regime’s response shows preparedness, experience, and an arsenal refined over decades. Between these forces lies a struggle whose outcome remains unwritten.
The future of Iran will be decided neither by foreign speeches nor by analytical frameworks alone. It will be decided by whether pressure can move from streets into the systems that allow the state to function, by whether fear can be transferred from society back to those who govern it, by whether the machinery of repression can be strained beyond its capacity. Those conditions may yet emerge. They may also recede.
For now, Iran stands in that familiar, aching space between possibility and reprisal. The chants rise. The checkpoints loom. The world watches, hoping, doubting, fearing. The question remains suspended, unanswered and unavoidable: How many times can a people rise before rising becomes irreversible?
Jonathan Sacerdoti, a writer and broadcaster, is now a contributor to The Algemeiner.
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Julius Berman, Orthodox rabbi whose influence spanned secular and observant Jewish institutions, dies at 90
Rabbi Julius Berman, who led the Orthodox Union and a myriad of other prominent Jewish communal organizations across the Orthodox and secular Jewish world, has died at 90.
Born in Lithuania in 1935 to Rabbi Henoch and Sarah Berman, Berman immigrated with his family to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1940 where he was among the first graduating class of the Yeshiva of Hartford.
Berman received his bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University in 1956 and his rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University in 1959. In 1960, he graduated first in his class from New York University School of Law.
Berman joined the New York City law firm Kaye Scholer in 1959, where he was a pioneer for observant Jews in the city’s legal world.
But while Berman went on to be an accomplished partner at Kaye Scholer, it was his extensive leadership at some of the largest Jewish communal organizations in the United States that defined his broader legacy.
“Though I am not equipped to psychoanalyze myself, it is very possible that my decision to go into a legal career rather than the Rabbinate had a role to play in my decision to immerse myself into Jewish communal matters,” said Berman in a 2006 interview with the Yeshiva University Commentator. “In any case, I have been heavily involved in communal work my entire adult life.”
Over the span of his career, Berman served in leadership positions at the Orthodox Union, Yeshiva University, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and over a dozen other Jewish communal organizations.
Early in his career, Berman became the president of the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs, or COLPA, a legal group that represents the Orthodox Jewish community.
Dennis Rapps, who was hired as COLPA’s executive director in 1970, described Berman as a personal mentor and a “sought-after participant” in Jewish communal life.
“He was a member and active participant in many of the leading Jewish organizations,” Rapps said. “I think the respect that people had for him cut across a broad swath of the Jewish community, he got along with everybody, and people respected him for his intellect and for his selflessness, and he was a real nice guy.”
Following his work with COLPA, Berman went on to serve as the president of the Orthodox Union from 1978 to 1984, later serving as the longtime chairman of the organization’s Kashrut Commission and OU press. In an obituary for Berman, the Orthodox Union described Berman as “one of the most significant lay leaders of twentieth-century Orthodoxy.”
“He was a gracious, generous person,” Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of the Orthodox Union Kosher Division, told JTA. “Whenever we had a kashrus meeting, or any other kind of meeting, everybody ultimately would defer to Julie Berman.”
Berman was also a longtime devotee of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the spiritual leader of Modern Orthodoxy in the 20th century and longtime lecturer at Yeshiva University who ordained close to 2,000 rabbis.
“He was a devoted disciple of Rabbi Soloveitchik, and Soloveitchik had a very, very high regard for him,” said Genack. “If he had issues, if he wanted to consult someone, amongst them was always Julie Berman.”
In 1982, Berman also was elected as the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. He also served as chairman of the board at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.
“God was good to him in terms of his talent, and he used it,” said Rapps. “He was really, basically one of a kind, extremely bright, I think fearless and very dedicated to doing what he thought had to be done. He was a remarkable guy.”
Berman also served as the longtime chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or Claims Conference, where he was widely credited for expanding restitution for survivors worldwide. His time at the Claims Conference was later shadowed by controversy in 2009 after a $57 million fraud scheme orchestrated by an employee sparked criticism of the organization’s governance.
“Rabbi Julius Berman was a towering moral leader whose life’s work helped shape the global landscape of Holocaust survivor care, restitution, and Jewish communal life,” said Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Claims Conference in a statement. “A brilliant legal mind and widely respected Torah scholar, he was typically the smartest person in the room, while his sharp intellect was always matched by profound compassion. Julie led with unwavering integrity, grounding his leadership in the dignity of survivors, an abiding love for the Jewish people and a profound sense of responsibility to future generations. We are deeply grateful for his guidance, and he will be deeply missed by all who had the privilege to know him.”
Berman also formerly served as the president of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from 1989 until its merger with its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
“I loved and always valued my discussions with Julie Berman, first as a reporter talking (often on background) to a source and later as a CEO seeking sage advice from a former board president,” said Ami Eden, the CEO and executive editor of 70 Faces Media, in a statement. “He was passionate about his beliefs and causes, super sharp and never shy about telling you if and why he disagreed.”
Berman is survived by his wife Dorothy Berman, and his children and their spouses, Zev and Judy Berman, Myra and Simcha Aminsky and Eli and Miriam Berman. His funeral will be held Thursday at Young Israel of Jamaica Estates in Hollis, New York.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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