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A Jewish-Muslim art show builds ‘little bridges’ of coexistence
Hannah Finkelshteyn and Aakef Khan spent a lot of time in the same building even before they met. Khan’s filmmaking classes at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts often met on the same floor where Finkelshteyn, a drawing major, had her studio.
But their paths wouldn’t cross in earnest until after Oct. 7 — when they would become unlikely friends and later co-curators of an exhibition bringing together Jewish and Muslim artists. The result is “Open Archways: by the light of the same moon,” opening Thursday at the Bowery Art Collective in Metuchen, New Jersey.
Finkelshteyn, 23, was born in Brooklyn and raised in East Brunswick, New Jersey, in the Modern Orthodox community, attending Jewish schools up until college.
“Oct. 7 and the reaction to Oct. 7 completely shifted my entire experience of college and my ability to learn and my ability to be a part of the Rutgers community,” she told me at a coffee shop in Manhattan. She and Khan took the train into the city together when we met before Thanksgiving.
The first several days after the attacks went by in a haze, Finkelshteyn recalled. She scrolled through articles, and texted and called her many family members and friends in Israel, where she spent a gap year, to ask, “Are you okay?” and “Are you alive?”
“Grief was palpable” among the Jewish community on campus, she said. But as the days went by, she became increasingly aware of responses and social media posts from other classmates that left her feeling confused and isolated. She even dropped a small group course in part because of what she saw her peers saying online.
“I can’t be sitting here being terrified for my family while this person who’s sitting across from me thinks Oct. 7 was a good thing,” Finkelshteyn said.
The only one in that room who she felt she could have an actual conversation with was a Palestinian classmate. “I asked her if her family was okay, and she asked if my family was okay,” she said. “And we both talked about just not being able to focus on anything.”
Finkelshteyn, who graduated last spring, wanted to talk and to listen, to understand and be understood. But there didn’t seem to be a space for that on campus — until a friend of her then-boyfriend (now husband) suggested they start an “Open Dialogue Table” like one he’d seen elsewhere.
The three of them, along with other like-minded students, began setting up a table on campus in shifts with a sign inviting passersby to come talk about Israel and more. “Once a week, every week, we sat at this table, and we had conversations. And honestly, it made things feel a lot less foggy,” she said.
One day, Khan came over and sat down.
Becoming friends and co-curators
Raised in a religious Muslim family of Pakistani descent, Khan, 22, went to public school during the week and to Saturday school at the mosque in South Brunswick, New Jersey, where he grew up. He first heard news not about the Hamas attacks on the Gaza envelope, he said, but about Israel cutting off water and electricity to Gaza. He and Finkelshteyn were on the same campus, but ensconced in their own communities and vastly different news ecosystems. Khan’s conversations and group chats afterward were full of talk about boycotts and encampments.
“It felt like a big gray cloud was over Rutgers for months,” Khan, who is currently a senior, told me. But as someone who had always felt the urge to ask, “Why?” and challenge his own beliefs, he said he found it unsettling to be surrounded by only one slice of opinions. So he began actively searching for others. “I was looking for a place to feel like I can belong and speak without feeling like I had to censor myself,” he said.
“I need to stand somewhere where I can see both perspectives,” he said he realized, which led him through the doors of Hillel and steered him toward the Open Dialogue Table.
When Khan first sat down, he started chatting with Finkelshteyn’s boyfriend, who quickly made the connection that both Khan and Finkelshteyn were art students. And then the two artists were off, chatting about filmmakers and LiDAR camera technology.
“It started with me trying to be like, ‘All right, like, what is up with Israel?’” Khan said. “But it ended up being, ‘Wow, I just made two new friends.’ And I think once I started to look at it that way, things became a lot less scary.”
He began carving time out to go to Shabbat dinners. It was uncomfortable at first to walk into such an explicitly Jewish space, Khan recalled, but it helped to hear Finkelshteyn or her boyfriend shout his name from across the room and enthusiastically motion him over to sit with them and meet their friends.
Khan and Finkelshteyn kept talking — about art, religion, language, community and current events. “Once we can talk about other things that we’re passionate about, now we can sort of hear each other out on Israel-Palestine and all those things, and be willing to see each other’s perspectives as valid, even if ultimately we don’t align,” Khan said.
They became artistic collaborators and genuine friends. “I never expected that I would invite someone I met at the Open Dialogue Table to my wedding,” said Finkelshteyn, who got married this past summer. But she did, and Khan came out to celebrate the special day — his first Jewish wedding — with his new friends.
In the months since, Khan and Finkelshteyn have been hard at work pulling together a larger group of Jewish and Muslim artists around them from Rutgers and beyond to meet, talk, create and show their work together.
“Open Archways” is their small way of trying to lift the heavy fog of tension and misunderstanding that marked their college experiences post-Oct. 7. “I believe that starts with grassroots work like this of creating spaces where Muslim and Jewish people can intermingle and create friendships,” Khan said. “They may not agree on everything, but at least they can see the other side as human.”
Living ‘by the light of the same moon’
Khalid Khashoggi has always had Jewish friends, he said. He was born in Beirut in 1965, but hasn’t returned to Lebanon since he was 10, when the civil war broke out and his family left for Europe.
At the English and Swiss boarding schools he attended, he found it easier to bond with Jewish students than the other boys. Reflecting back decades later, he said he thinks it’s because “there is more in common between Jewish and Muslim/Arab cultures than with any Anglo-Saxon culture.” He’s remained close ever since with two of those friends, who he said treated him like a brother.
“I just want other members of my culture to experience that warmth,” Khashoggi, who moved to the U.S. for college and settled here afterward, told me on a video call. He’s been running an SAT prep school for 25 years and, more recently, working with young artists and curators as founder and director of the Bowery Art Collective. The latter began right before the pandemic, when Khashoggi noticed all the art portfolios the test prep students were carrying around and suggested they use the school’s space to have an exhibition.
When the war threatened to make connections like his boarding school friendships all the more improbable, and as he witnessed “scary” incidents of antisemitism that were more “mean and violent” than he’d ever seen before, he came up with the idea of a joint exhibition.
“I could tell that both sides were getting pushed apart,” he said, recoiling at the idea of being placed in a stance of immutable opposition against people he considered friends. As he put it: “Don’t tell us who we need to hate.”
“Let’s use the magic of art to reconnect these communities, even if it’s just 10 people,” he said. “There’s no way we can solve the world’s problems,” he added. “But at least if we can make some friends while we’re doing this — across two communities that have been told not to be friends — then that would be great.”
“There’s nothing like friendship to dispel stereotypes,” Khashoggi said.
He and Arianna Astuni, his co-CEO at the test-prep company and BAC’s executive director, quickly found Finkelshteyn, at the recommendation of another student who’d worked with BAC. She was in, without hesitation. But their first call for a Muslim co-curator was met with a lot of opinions and no applications.
“We got some backlash at first,” Astuni told me on a joint video call with Khashoggi. “People get so caught up in the largeness of political issues, and then they’re yelling large things that they really don’t know and they really couldn’t possibly feel.”
For Astuni, who said she was used to watching connections being cultivated in their small gallery and community, the response was surprising. And for her longtime test prep and art collective colleague, it was dispiriting.
“I remember having conversations with friends and saying, I don’t know. I think I’m insane,” Khashoggi said. “Everyone’s telling me that what I’m trying to do is not doable. Or they would be like, yeah, it’s a beautiful idea, but it’s just not the time to do that. It’s not the time to normalize relationships.”
Instead of giving up or waiting for some elusive right time in the distant future, they reworked the ad for a Muslim curator and tried again. This time, applications came in for them to consider. Among them was one from Khan, whom Finkelshteyn had encouraged to submit.
Ultimately, Khashoggi felt, “Aakef was the best applicant. It also helped that he had worked with Hannah before, and knew her, and they had a good dynamic,” he said. “That was really important.”
Together, Finkelshteyn and Khan came up with the exhibition’s subtitle: “by the light of the same moon.” In an environment that tends to emphasize only the differences and tensions between the Muslim and Jewish communities, they wanted to speak honestly about the difficulties while also illuminating points of intersection and understanding.
One of those intersections is the lunar calendar, which both religions follow. “The moon governs when we fast,” Khan said, and determines when Jews and Muslims celebrate holidays and perform certain rituals. More than that, Finkelshteyn added, “it’s something that Muslims and Jews have in common that general American culture does not.”
“The waxing and waning of the moon has welcomed Ramadans and Yom Kippurs, Mawlids and Passover Seders. Its cycle has determined which day we gather in the synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, and which nights we fill the mosque for Taraweeh,” reads the exhibition description they developed. The artists, it says, are exploring “the intersections between Muslim and Jewish culture that begin with the use of the moon as our clock.”
Showing up
“Open Archways” isn’t like most exhibitions, in part because it brings together supposed arch-enemies. That presented a challenge, even among artists interested in interfaith collaborations. “People get worried like, ‘Oh, is there a specific political agenda? If I sign up for this, am I signing my name next to a certain thing that I don’t want to sign my name next to?’” Finkelshteyn said.
But the project veers from a more typical format in other ways, too. Group shows often come together behind the scenes, with curators putting out a call, artists submitting pre-existing work and the selected pieces being presented side-by-side without their creators ever speaking, save for maybe a quick hello at the opening reception. Here, the goal was to facilitate artist meetups as a fundamental part of the process and for these interactions to build little bridges across communities and help inspire the work on display. In practical terms, this meant artists had to be willing to engage and able to make the time commitment.
The curators ultimately assembled a group of 15 Muslim and Jewish artists with diverse religious and geographic backgrounds. The Muslim artists have roots in Pakistan, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Burma and Bangladesh, and their Jewish counterparts in Poland, Austria, Romania, Russia, Azerbaijan, Yemen, Israel and more.
They met as a group twice this fall, first in October at the BAC space in Metuchen with a structured agenda — Khan and Finkelshteyn had everyone sit in a circle, introduce themselves, and share something about their culture that they love, before letting everyone mingle and explore the gallery. The second meetup, at a non-alcoholic “anti-bar” and cafe in the East Village in November, was a little more casual, and allowed the conversations about identity, religion, diaspora, gender and art to expand.
“A lot of it was really oriented around, like, what has your experience been? What is your identity to you? What does it mean?” Miki Belenkov, a participating artist, told me on a video call. One of the themes that emerged in the discussion, they recalled, was around “how do we balance our deep emotional and historical connections to these identities, while also navigating being modern people.”
Belenkov, 28, a queer Jewish artist and art therapist in New York City whose parents were refugees from the Soviet Union — their father is from Muslim-majority Azerbaijan — was raised on ideas of “coexistence and mutual respect and appreciation and sharing of traditions,” they said. “It was exciting to see that here there are people trying to build conversation and space for Muslim and Jewish artists.”
After Oct. 7, which happened while Belenkov was in grad school, “I had to make entirely new friends,” they said. “Pretty much just everyone that I had built a community with did not see me as a community member anymore, because of my identity.” They’ve since focused on attending events that “create joy” and forming “community connections with equally peace-loving people.”
Their large-scale textile work in the exhibition, a tablecloth, references both the struggles of the last couple years — including mezuzahs stolen off doorposts and formerly close friends who’ve blocked them on Instagram — but also focuses on “being able to come together in the midst of all of this and still find joy and light.”
Another Jewish artist, Micah Steinerman, 22, is a senior at Rutgers studying drawing and animation whose family’s roots are in Eastern Europe and Yemen. He created a small triptych depicting the holy sites of Jerusalem, foregrounded by a blossoming fruit tree in the center. This is flanked by smaller canvases on either side: One says shalom, as in peace, and the other adapts a quote from his namesake book in the Bible: “Every person will sit under their own fruit tree, and no one will make them afraid.”
But perhaps the highlight of his experience was a collaboration with Khashoggi that melded Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy. “I had become more closed off about my Jewish identity,” he told me on Zoom. Over the course of several sessions with Khashoggi, who taught him some Arabic and oil painting basics, he realized they both related to “having to feel hidden.”
“The painting experience with Micah reconnected me to my own religion, my own culture, my own language. It was something I’d shoved in a box” after leaving Lebanon as a kid, Khashoggi said. “Micah said, ‘Hey, no, let me look in that box, it’s cool.’” That genuine display of interest by someone from another culture, he said, was “healing.”
Building little bridges
On a recent tour to pick up everyone’s finished artwork for installation, Khashoggi was heartened to see a small sign of the project’s success. One of the Muslim artists came along to assist with pickup, and Khashoggi watched as she greeted one of her Jewish colleagues. You can see “the strength of the connection from the way they hug each other,” Khashoggi said.
“I don’t imagine all of a sudden that all Arabs and Muslims and Jews around the world will start hugging each other the way our artists are,” he said. Still, he said, “we have 15 little bridges that we built.”
Khashoggi’s hope, he said, is that “one or two of the people coming to visit will have the wherewithal, the influence, to allow us to open up another show;” he dreams of another “Open Archways” in New York or Paris or Tel Aviv that would expand the circle of Muslim and Jewish artists who are meeting, talking and collaborating.
The BAC gallery where the exhibition is currently installed is dotted with couches and chairs. On opening night, there will be tea and other refreshments and, the curators hope, an opportunity for people to start conversations — maybe a little bit like the one Finkelshteyn and Khan had at the Open Dialogue Table. The art might help.
“You’re looking at the same thing, and you can talk about that thing,” Finkelshteyn said. “I hope there are a few people who come to this exhibit, who come to this reception, or even who just hear about this reception, and think, ‘Oh, people can talk to each other.’”
That doesn’t mean they’ll always be on the same page. She and Khan aren’t, and they said that was scary at first, as they navigated their fledgling friendship. The first time they didn’t agree, Khan recalled, “it felt like the whole place was burning down.” But they soon realized they can still talk and be friends, while also disagreeing.
They, along with Khashoggi, Astuni, and the participating artists, appear clear-eyed about the scale of change this one show is likely to make. But that micro-movement in the right direction seems to be exhilarating to them all the same.
Ali Saracoglu, 30, a New York City–based Muslim artist who moved to the U.S. from Turkey, put it most poetically. “When we check the news, it doesn’t look good,” said Saracoglu, who works in Ebru art, a traditional Turkish form of paper marbling. “In those moments, I remind myself, for a room to be dark, darkness needs to surround everywhere. But if light finds a tiny crack to come in, that’s usually good enough to illuminate the whole room.”
“This exhibit,” he said, “is a step toward finding that crack, or opening that crack ourselves, for the light to come in.”
The post A Jewish-Muslim art show builds ‘little bridges’ of coexistence appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani orders review of whether New York can arrest Netanyahu when he visits this fall
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has revived one of his most controversial election promises, raising once again the prospect of arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he comes to New York in September for the United Nations General Assembly. It’s a move that legal experts say Mamdani is unlikely to be able to carry out.
In a video interview with The New York Times published Saturday, Mamdani said he ordered a review by the city’s Law Department to consider his options to comply with an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. “Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do. But we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” Mamdani said, remarks that drew a strong online reaction.
In a post to social media on Sunday, Netanyahu’s office dismissed concerns of a possible arrest, calling the ICC a “kangaroo court” and saying that “Mamdani should focus on fixing the damage his policies have caused New York.” In an interview last week, Netanyahu said Mamdani “hates America.”
The United States does not recognize the court’s authority over American citizens or foreign nationals on U.S. soil, and the federal government could likely challenge the legitimacy of such an order.
Mamdani’s statement reflects the tension that has defined his first months in office: balancing the activist politics that propelled him to City Hall with the legal constraints and governing responsibilities of the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
A political gift to Netanyahu
Mamdani’s actions could have unintended consequences abroad.
Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, who has frequently criticized Netanyahu, warned that even a failed attempt to arrest the prime minister would likely strengthen Netanyahu politically in a tough reelection bid, set for Oct. 27.
“Many Israelis are sick of him and hope to vote him out,” Shapiro wrote on X. “The only possible outcome of a fruitless attempt to arrest him in NYC would be to give him a political boost at home. That would be an own goal.”
Recent polls show that Netanyahu, seeking a seventh term in office, is trailing an opposition bloc led by two contenders — former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot.
A confrontation with New York’s outspoken anti-Zionist mayor could allow Netanyahu to cast himself once again as Israel’s defender against international efforts to isolate and punish the country. Netanyahu already labeled Mamdani as someone who “champions” Hamas and “apologizes” for Iran.
That message could resonate even with Israelis who oppose him. American Jewish opinion illustrates the same complexity. While recent polling shows many American Jews view Netanyahu unfavorably, and that Mamdani is more popular with that group, that has not translated into support for an attempt to arrest Israel’s elected leader.
A Honan Strategy Group poll in December found that although 40% of New York City voters believed Mamdani had a moral obligation to uphold international human rights standards by ordering Netanyahu’s arrest, seven in 10 of the 131 Jewish respondents said doing so would damage New York’s global standing.
In the end, Mamdani may be able to avoid acting at all by pointing to the legal opinion that New York City lacks the authority to arrest Netanyahu.
The law is not on Mamdani’s side
The ICC, based in The Hague, issued arrest warrants in Nov. 2024 for Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the Israel-Hamas war. Hamas confirmed in Jan. 2025 that Deif was assassinated in July 2024 by an Israeli strike on Gaza.
But even if Mamdani wanted to enforce the warrant, New York City has little authority to do so.
Because the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court, the NYPD has no legal authority to arrest Netanyahu based on an ICC warrant. Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched a sweeping campaign of sanctions, visa bans and diplomatic pressure to “systematically disable” the ICC “brick by brick.”
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, in a post on X, also pointed to the 1947 U.N. Headquarters Agreement, which requires the United States to allow accredited foreign representatives to attend U.N. meetings, as well as the customary international law doctrine that grants immunity to sitting heads of government traveling on official business. Netanyahu would also arrive in New York under Secret Service protection afforded to foreign leaders.
Even carrying out such an order would appear unlikely.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, has repeatedly kept a distance from the mayor on Israel-related issues. Her public statements on Israel have been unequivocal. In June, Tisch served as grand marshal of the annual Celebrate Israel Parade, which Mamdani skipped. “I understand that for many of you, having a Jewish police commissioner is deeply comforting,” she told Jewish leaders in May.
Mamdani’s foreign policy reach has already been limited. Last month, the U.S. State Department blocked a planned meeting between Mamdani and Colombian President Gustavo Petro in New York, a fierce Israel critic, who had his visa revoked last fall after he appeared at a pro-Palestinian rally in Manhattan and was attending a UN Security Council session under strict terms. Earlier this month, the Trump administration stopped a meeting between Ana María Archila, Mamdani’s commissioner for international affairs, and Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Why does Mamdani keep talking about it?
While the legal answer is largely settled, the political one is not.
By keeping the question open, Mamdani signals support to the pro-Palestinian movement that fueled his rise, while acknowledging the institutional limits of his office.
Targeting Netanyahu was central to Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. After leading chants of “Netanyahu, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” during a protest in Oct. 2023, Mamdani first pledged to arrest Netanyahu shortly after he declared his candidacy. He later repeated the pledge, including in front of Jewish audiences, arguing that he did not want New York to be a place where leaders accused of war crimes felt welcome.
The approach follows a similar pattern Mamdani confronted with a politically charged issue earlier this year. As anti-Jewish incidents continue to make up a majority of reported hate crimes, the city considered placing buffer zones around houses of worship, spurred in part by a November protest outside the Park East Synagogue that included antisemitic slogans.
After expressing reservations about the legislation, Mamdani referred the bill to the city’s Law Department before ultimately allowing it to become law without his signature, only after the City Council passed it with a veto-proof majority.
Mamdani vetoed a companion bill that would potentially limit pro-Palestinian demonstrations, particularly on campuses. (The council later passed a modified version, and the state passed a 50-foot buffer zone bill that equally applies to all community centers and schools being used for services, education and religious observance across the state.)
Mamdani’s real test
Whether Mamdani’s careful balancing act satisfies either side may become clear when Netanyahu arrives in New York this September.
While the mayor cannot dictate U.S. foreign policy or enforce ICC warrants, City Hall still plays an important role in coordinating logistics, demonstrations and municipal services during the annual gathering of world leaders.
Mamdani can influence how unwelcoming New York feels to the Israeli leader.
The Israeli prime minister’s appearance at the United Nations is expected to draw massive demonstrations, putting City Hall’s handling of protests and policing under intense scrutiny.
History suggests that symbolism matters.
In 1995, Mayor Rudy Giuliani triggered a diplomatic dispute after ejecting Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat from a United Nations anniversary concert at Lincoln Center. President Bill Clinton, protesting the move, invited the Palestinian leader to a White House reception.
For all the attention given to Netanyahu’s return to New York, he may not arrive alone. During a White House meeting last year, Netanyahu laughed off the threat as “silly” and quipped that he might travel to New York “with President Trump.” Trump responded: “I’ll get him out.”
Now, that exchange may prove to have been less a joke than a preview of where the real power lies.
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A Jewish couple fell in love with rural Oklahoma. Then they built a cemetery there.
Linda Fitzerman did not want her children making burial decisions through tears.
For years, she and her husband, Todd Boone Fitzerman, told each other they needed to settle the question. They were not interested in cremation. They wanted a traditional Jewish burial. And they did not want their children, someday, to face the cost and pressure of deciding where that burial should take place.
“They just need to show up and cry,” Linda said. “They don’t need the additional pain of having to make financial decisions.”
The answer, when it came, was not one they had expected. They created a small Jewish burial ground in Sulphur, Oklahoma, a city of about 5,000 people in the Bible Belt, near the ranch the Fitzermans bought during the pandemic and had come to love.
At Oak Lawn Cemetery, a city-owned burial ground with green grass, rolling terrain and ponds, the Fitzermans purchased a group of plots to create a circular family burial section. Four corner pillars crowned with Stars of David mark the site. Beneath the grass, the pillars are connected by buried rebar, creating a distinct boundary around the section. Linda designed the stainless steel Stars of David, which a friend welded into place.
Nearby, five young trees are taking root: two Chinese pistache trees and three Autumn Blaze maples. The Fitzermans planted them with the city’s permission and have been carefully tending them for the past year, using large water barrels to help them through the early seasons.
“We are babysitting them for at least two years,” Linda said.
The burial section was dedicated in 2025. Todd’s brother, Rabbi Marc Boone Fitzerman of Tulsa, advised them on how to create a designated Jewish space within a public cemetery. Psalms and other prayers were recited at the site. There was no minyan, Todd said, but “spiritually we are there.”
To the Fitzermans’ knowledge, no other Jew is buried in Oak Lawn Cemetery.
A pandemic, and a plan
The cemetery project grew out of a life they did not plan to build in Oklahoma. Todd, 67, and Linda, 65, are both from the Detroit area and were raised in Conservative families. They met in Dallas when their children were young and have been married for 24 years. Dallas remains home. The couple still runs a business there, Local Oven, a gluten-free baking company.
But during the long uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, they began thinking about land.
“We felt so bottled up, and we wanted to get out,” Linda said.
They first responded to an advertisement for 10 acres near water in Texas. The search widened. Todd’s son suggested that 50 acres would be enough room to shoot on the property. Eventually, Todd found 158 acres outside Davis, Oklahoma, about two hours north of Dallas. They began building a working ranch. Todd’s son keeps cattle there. The Fitzermans now divide their time between Dallas and Oklahoma, spending roughly half the week in each place.
“It is a beautiful ranch,” Linda said. “It’s very calming to be out here, really beautiful, nothing like the city.”
Todd described hearing coyotes at night, watching the cattle roam, and the pleasure of “playing cowboy” for part of the week. Linda said she had not known, when they bought the land in 2021, “how important Oklahoma was going to be.”
“It was never a plan,” she said. “It just sort of evolved.”
Their relationship with the area deepened through the people they met there. Todd and Linda said one local friend, who lives across from Oak Lawn Cemetery and owns a large construction company, helped introduce them around Sulphur when they were new. He had also acquired plots in the cemetery through a trade arrangement for excavation work. Seeing what he had done opened a possibility they had not considered.
For years, Linda said, they had found “nothing intriguing” in Dallas cemeteries. Many Jewish plots cost $7,000 or $8,000. One cemetery with a Jewish section had plots priced around $36,000.
“Why would I spend money like that?” Linda said.
In Sulphur, plots were $300 each. For $4,500 total, they could create a family burial place tailored to them.
“We finally had an opportunity that just presented itself,” Linda said.
The circle layout itself came from her memory. In Michigan, she said, part of her family is buried in an older Jewish cemetery arranged not in straight rows, but in a circular shape.
“I thought that was really nice,” she said. “I liked it.”
So Linda and Todd approached the city and asked whether they could create a Jewish cemetery section in Oak Lawn. The response, they said, was strikingly easy.
“We shared that with the city and they said, ‘Yeah, sure,’” Linda said. “I’ve never seen any place give me the green light on every question.”
The city’s one practical concern was that everything remain level enough for its crews to mow. It allowed the Fitzermans to select the location, a corner where two cemetery roads meet. It also permitted them to plant the trees on easement land beside the plots.
“The city is 100% accepting,” Linda said.
Todd put it similarly. “The city could not have been more accommodating,” he said.
The Fitzermans say their religion has never been a problem. “It is the Baptist Bible Belt,” Linda said. “Everyone here has been so willing to accept us. They are inquisitive and curious. Our religion has not been an issue for anyone.”
Todd said that not everyone in Sulphur knows they are Jewish, “but lots of people know we are Jews.” When Todd’s son held his Jewish wedding on the ranch, he said, many non-Jewish guests had never attended one before. Friends asked questions. Guests wore kippot or cowboy hats. Tallitot belonging to Todd, his father and his son’s other grandfather formed the wedding canopy.
“There were more Jews in Sulphur for my son’s wedding than ever before,” Todd said.
Peace of mind
For Linda, the cemetery’s Jewish symbols were important. She wanted the pillars to be easy to find. More than that, she wanted them to say plainly what the site was.
“When we see the pillars, they reflect what we are doing, which is our religion,” she said. “Nothing is more stately than the Jewish star.”
“Our little decor, to me, sends a really beautiful statement,” she added. “I’ve always been proud to be Jewish. I wouldn’t want to be buried any other way.”
The Fitzermans have tried to spare their children as much uncertainty as possible. They have assigned the burial titles to their children and their children’s partners, while making clear that use of the plots will remain their choice. They have also documented the practical steps to follow when the time comes, including where a body could be prepared for Jewish burial in Dallas or Oklahoma City.
“You don’t think about it until a family member is going through it,” Linda said.
She views the cemetery as a natural extension of family care. “You are always, always part of your family,” she said. “If you want these, they are there for you.”
Todd described the burial ground in similar terms. It offers “peace of mind,” he said: a final resting place in a community they love and want to be part of.
The trees, Linda noted, will eventually grow large. The Chinese pistache trees can grow to over 25 feet with age. The maples, she said, will be especially beautiful in the fall.
They hope it will be many years before the cemetery is needed.
But the question that had lingered for so long has now been answered. Their children will not have to find a plot, compare prices, choose a cemetery, or wonder whether their parents’ burial wishes were honored.
They will only have to come.
And cry.
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Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time
(JTA) — For many Orthodox Jews, a typical winter weekday begins early: head to synagogue, gather in a minyan for morning prayers, then rush off to work.
Orthodox Jewish groups say a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent could upend that routine by pushing winter sunrises — and the earliest permissible time for some prayers — an hour later.
Agudath Israel of America is among the groups urging the Senate to reject legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, arguing that the change would create both public safety risks and significant challenges for Orthodox Jewish religious life.
The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday by a wide bipartisan margin. In a statement issued after the vote, Agudath Israel said it understood the appeal of ending the twice-yearly clock changes but opposed making daylight saving time permanent.
The Orthodox advocacy organization warned that permanent daylight saving time would push winter sunrises past 9 a.m. in some parts of the country, forcing many children to travel to school before dawn. It also said the later sunrise would make it difficult for observant Jews to attend morning synagogue services and still arrive at work or school on time, because Jewish law prohibits reciting key morning prayers before prescribed times tied to sunrise.
“The extension of DST will create an extreme hardship on observant Jews,” the organization said. “It would be extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible — to arrive on time for a job and will affect the start time of our schools.”
The Orthodox Union and the Coalition for Jewish Values have also come out against the measure.
In a column for Chabad.org that didn’t take a position on the bill, Menachem Posner also wrote that the change would present a challenge in parts of the country for morning minyan, the 10-person prayer quorum. But he also noted an upside to the extension of daylight saving: a later start time for Shabbat on short winter Fridays.
Shabbat begins at sundown, which during the winter can fall before 4:00 p.m. in parts of the country. “With DST, however, this will be shifted one hour later, so that even on the darkest day of winter, Jews will have one more hour to prepare for Shabbat,” Posner wrote.
Orthodox parties in Israel have also made an issue of changes to the daylight saving calendar. In 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet unanimously approved extending daylight saving time until the first Sunday after Oct. 1, despite objections from haredi parties. The change brought Israel’s clock closer to European practice while still acknowledging Orthodox concerns about morning prayer and a later start time to Yom Kippur that they argued would make the fast more difficult.
This week Agudath Israel also pointed to the brief U.S. experiment with year-round daylight saving time during the 1970s energy crisis, when Congress repealed the policy after widespread public dissatisfaction over dark winter mornings.
The organization said it hoped the Senate would weigh the broader consequences of permanent daylight saving time, including alternatives such as permanent standard time or retaining the current system of seasonal clock changes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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