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A new book made me appreciate Jewish Sunday schools — and the volunteer women who have powered them
(JTA) — As a kid I went to Sunday school at our Reform synagogue. I didn’t hate it as much as my peers did, but let’s just say there were literally dozens of other things I would have preferred to do on a weekend morning.
As a Jewish adult, I had a vague understanding that Sunday school was a post-World War II invention, part of the assimilation and suburbanization of American Jews (my synagogue was actually called Suburban Temple). With our parents committed to public schools and having moved away from the dense urban enclaves where they were raised, our Jewish education was relegated to Sunday mornings and perhaps a weekday afternoon. The Protestant and Catholic kids went to their own religious supplementary schools, and we Jewish kids went to ours.
In her new book “Jewish Sunday Schools,” Laura Yares backdates this story by over a century. Subtitled “Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” the book describes how Sunday schools were the invention of pioneering educators such as Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children in Philadelphia in 1838. As such, they were responses by a tiny minority to distinctly 19th-century challenges — namely, how to raise their children to be Jews in a country dominated by a Protestant majority, and how to express their Judaism in a way compatible with America’s idea of religious freedom.
Although Sunday schools would become the “principal educational organization” of the Reform movement, Yares shows that the model was adopted by traditionalists as well. And she also argues that 20th-century historians, in focusing on the failures of Sunday schools to promote Jewish “continuity,” discounted the contributions of the mostly volunteer corps of women educators who made them run. Meanwhile, the supplementary school remains the dominant model for Jewish education among non-Orthodox American Jews, despite recent research showing its precipitous decline.
I picked up “Jewish Sunday Schools” hoping to find out who gets the blame for ruining my Sunday mornings. I came away with a new appreciation for the women whose “important and influential work,” Yares writes, “extended far beyond the classrooms in which they worked.”
Yares is assistant professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in the MSU Program for Jewish Studies. Raised in Birmingham, England, she has degrees from Oxford University and a doctorate from Georgetown University.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Tell me how your book came to be about the 19th century as opposed to the common 20th-century story of suburbanization.
There’s a real gap in American Jewish history when it comes to the 19th century, chiefly because so many American Jews today trace their origins back to the generation who arrived between 1881 and 1924, the mass migration of Jews from from Eastern Europe. So there’s a sense that that’s when American Jewish history began. Of course, that’s not true at all.
The American Jewish community dates back to the 17th century and there was much innovation that laid the foundations for what would become institutionalized in the 20th century.
Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism. If they’ve treated it at all, they tend to be dismissive — you know, there was no substance, they just taught kids the 10 Commandments, it was run by these unprofessional volunteer female teachers, so it was feminized and feminine.
But there’s also a lot of celebration of Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children.
That’s the first indication I had that there might be more of a story here. Rebecca Gratz is lionized as being such a visionary and being so inventive in developing this incredible volunteer model for Jewish education for an immigrant generation that was mostly from Western Europe. And yet, by the beginning of the 20th century, [Jewish historians] say it has no value. So what’s the story there?
Two other things led me on the path to thinking that there was more of a story in this 19th-century moment. I did my Ph.D in Washington, D.C. And as I was searching through the holdings of the Library of Congress, there were tons and tons of Jewish catechisms.
“Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism,” says Dr. Laura Yares, author of the new book, “Jewish Sunday Schools.” (Courtesy of the author)
A catechism is a kind of creed, right? It’s a statement of religious beliefs. “These are things we believe as Jews.”
So Jewish catechisms had that, but they were also philosophical meditations in many ways. Typically, the first question of the catechism was, what is religion? And then the second question is, what is Jewish religion?
And then I started reading them. They were question-and-answer summaries of the whole of Judaism: belief, practices, holidays, Bible, you name it, that the children were expected to memorize. This idea that you’ve got to cram these kids with knowledge went against this historiographic dismissal of this period as being very thin and that kids were not really learning anything. The idea that children had a lot to learn is something that Sunday school educators actually really wrestle with during this period.
What was the other thing that led you to pursue this subject?
When I was beginning to research my dissertation, I was working as a Hebrew school teacher in a large Reform Hebrew school in Washington, D.C. And I remember very distinctively the rabbi coming in and addressing the teachers at the start of the school year. He said, “I don’t care if a student comes through this Hebrew school and they don’t remember anything that they learned. But I care that at the end of the year they feel like the temple is a place that they want to be, that they feel like they have relationships there and they have an (he didn’t use this word) ‘affective’ [emotional] connection.”
And so I’m sitting there by day at the Library of Congress, reading these catechisms that are saying, “Cram their heads with knowledge.” What is the relationship between Jewish education as a place where one is supposed to acquire knowledge and a place where one is supposed to feel something and to develop affective relationships? The swing between those two poles was happening as far back as the 19th century.
You write that owing to gaps in the archives, it was really hard to get an idea of the classroom experience. But to the degree that there’s a typical classroom experience in the 1860s, 1870s and you’re the daughter or grandchild of probably German-speaking Jewish immigrants, maybe working or lower middle class, what would Sunday school be like? I’m guessing the teacher would be a woman. Are you reading the Bible in English or Hebrew?
You are probably going for an hour or two on a Sunday morning. It’s a big room, and your particular class would have a corner of the room. It’s quite chaotic. Most of the teachers were female volunteers. They were either young and unmarried, or older women whose children had grown. Except for the students who are preparing for confirmation — the grand kind of graduation ritual for Sunday schools. Those classes were typically taught by the rabbi, if there was a rabbi associated with the school.
There would be a lot of reading out loud to the students with students being expected to repeat back what they had heard or write it down so they had a copy for themselves. Often the day would begin with prayers said in English, and often the reading of the Torah portion, typically in English, although in many Sunday schools, we do have children reporting they learned bits of Hebrew by rote memorization. Or they memorized the first chapters of the book of Genesis, for example, but I’m not sure that they quite understood what they memorized. “Ein Keloheinu” is a song that often children tell us [in archival materials] that they had memorized in Hebrew. They probably would have learned at least Hebrew script, and a little bit of Hebrew decoding. But it is fair to say that if they were reading the Bible, they were reading it mostly in English, because you have to remember that most of the women who were volunteering to teach in these schools came of age in a generation where Hebrew education wasn’t extended to women.
What’s the goal of these Sunday schools?
The Sunday school movement arose because there was a whole generation of immigrant children who did not have access to Jewish education, because their parents didn’t have either the economic capital or the social capital to become part of the established Jewish community. They couldn’t afford a seat in the synagogue, they couldn’t afford to send their children to congregational all-day or every-afternoon schools [which were among the few options for Jewish education when Gratz opened the Philadelphia Sunday school]. Sunday schools are really a very innovative solution to a problem of a lack of resources.
You also write that the founders of these supplementary schools want to defend children against “predatory evangelists.”
That was how Rebecca Gratz described her goal when she created the first Sunday school. She was very, very worried about the Jewish kids who were not receiving any kind of Hebrew school education. She talks about Protestant missionaries and teachers who would go out onto the street ringing the bell for Sunday school and offering various kinds of trinkets, and Jewish kids would get kind of swept into their Sunday schools. There was a very concrete need to give Jewish children somewhere else to go.
So Gratz and the people who created the first Hebrew Sunday school in Philadelphia looked at what the Protestants were doing and they saw that Protestant Sunday schools were providing very accessible places where kids could go and get a basic primer in their religious tradition.
The approach was to teach Judaism as a religion, as opposed to Judaism as a people or culture, to demonstrate that being Jewish was as compatible as Protestantism with being wholly American.
That is certainly part of it. It’s a demonstration that Judaism is compatible with American public life. But I think there’s actually a much bigger claim that the Sunday schools are making. The claim is not only that Judaism is as good as Protestantism, but that Judaism does religion better than Protestantism. These rabbis who were writing catechisms and teaching confirmation classes were saying that Judaism does liberal religion better than liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics and other kinds of liberal denominations. You see the same sentiment in the Pittsburgh Platform as well, which is the foundational platform of the Reform movement written in the 1880s. Sunday schools take that idea and bring it down to a grassroots level.
There are many, many fewer Jews in America in much of the 19th century, before the waves of Eastern European immigrants arrived beginning in the 1880s They didn’t really have strength in numbers, or the kind of self-confidence to have a system of day schools, yeshivas or heders, the elementary schools for all-day or every day Jewish instruction.
And this is also a community that has grown up at the same time as the birth of public education in America, independent of churches. That really emerged beginning on the East Coast in the 1840s.This generation of Americans really believes in the power of public education to craft an American public. It’s a project that 19th-century American Jews believe in and want to sustain. So Sunday schools don’t just become the preferred Jewish model because of lack of resources, but because American Jews really believe in the idea of public education.
What happens at the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Eastern Europeans with different models for Jewish education?
A new generation tries to reform Jewish education, led by a young educator from Palestine named Samson Benderly, who leads the new New York Bureau of Jewish Education. He tries to change American Jewish education to make it more professionalized, but to bring more traditionally inclined Jews on board he has to convince them that he doesn’t want to make more Sunday schools, because Sunday schools by the end of the 20th century had become very much associated with the Reform movement in a way that they weren’t when they were founded and for much of the 19th century.
A painting of Philadelphia philanthropist and Jewish education activist Rebecca Gratz by Thomas Sully. (The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia)
Benderly is surveying the scene of recent immigrants living in New York City [tenements] and other kinds of downtown environments, and his proposal is to create these community institutions for these dense communities, where children can be taught Hebrew in Hebrew. His disciples also created Jewish camps as a way to get children out of the inner cities and develop the muscular Zionist ideal of healthy bodies and a robust sense of Jewish collectivity.
You write that Benderly’s vision is a sort of masculine response to the “feminizing” perception of the Sunday schools.
These women teachers are recognizing that they’re being criticized for the kind of thinness of the Jewish education that they’re teaching in comparison to other models, but in periodicals like The American Jewess women are writing back and saying, “But you didn’t teach us Hebrew! I didn’t get that opportunity as a woman, so what do you expect?” It’s really important to note that the women did the best that they could in the time that they had available, and that they were the product of opportunities that were denied to them.
What lessons did you learn about Sunday school and Hebrew school education in the 20th century that relate to your research into the 19th century?
The move that is so decisive for shaping American Jewish education is suburbanization. Rather than having a large immigrant generation who are living in these tight ethnic enclaves, you have American Jewish children who are predominantly growing up in the suburbs, and socializing with children from all sorts of different backgrounds who are attending public schools. The place that you go to get your Jewish education is the synagogue supplemental school, which becomes the dominant model for American Jewish education up until today. Benderly might reflect that it looks a lot more like the Sunday school movement of the 19th century than his vision.
Today’s model is really a religious model. And by that I mean that students go to Hebrew school primarily to kind of check a religious box, to learn about the thing that makes them distinctive religiously, and to achieve a religious coming-of-age marker, which is the bar, bat or b mitzvah. Certainly the curriculum today is more diverse, embracing more aspects of traditional Judaism then you would have seen in a 19th-century Sunday school: more Hebrew, more of a sense of Jewish peoplehood, ethnic identity and Zionism of course. But the question that American Jews are increasingly asking themselves is, is this a model that they still want? So you may have seen that the Jewish Education Project published a report recently on supplemental schools, which saw that enrollment has really, really declined.
Sunday schools are based on a vision of Judaism as a set of a religious commitments that American Jews actualize through belonging to a synagogue and sending their children to a synagogue or a religious school, where they will learn primarily a set of religious skills: the ability to read from the Torah, the ability to decode Hebrew, the ability to navigate the siddur.
Is that still the vision that most American Jews have for what Judaism means to them? I think increasingly the answer seems to be no.
How else did experience in a Hebrew school classroom influence you? Did you access anything else when you were writing the book?
I think about the number of college kids and graduate students and empty nesters who are either volunteering or earning minimum wage, working at Hebrew schools, all over the country. That’s the labor force of American Judaism. These people also bring so much to the table. There are a lot of skills, dispositions and knowledge that don’t tend to get taken very seriously because this is a workforce that just gets kind of put into the category of “oh, they’re part time.” That made me look really closely in the historical archives to see if I could find anything out about the women who are volunteering to teach in Sunday schools. And what I found out was that [many] were public school teachers. And they brought a lot to the table. It was women in fact who were really pushing to make the Sunday school curriculum more experiential and to move away from rote memorization.
As a historian formed by feminist methods, I find it really important to recognize that these women were giving over what they had, as opposed to critiquing them for not teaching in a more traditional way. I think we need to pay attention when women are being scapegoated for problems that are described as problems of Jewish continuity. It blinds us to the role that women’s volunteerism has played in American Jewish life. This whole Sunday school movement was possible only because these women volunteered their time and largely were not paid.
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These college students have favorable views of Israel. They also think it’s committing genocide.
A quarter of college students who view Israel favorably also believe its government is committing genocide.
That’s according to a Brandeis study published earlier this month, which surveyed nearly 4,000 students across 303 colleges in fall 2025 about their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and concluded views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more nuanced than often portrayed.
So how do students reconcile those views?
Researchers can’t say for sure, but one possibility is that students are distinguishing between supporting Israel’s existence and the actions of its current government.
The fact that many of the same students who say Israel is committing genocide also affirm its right to exist is not a contradiction, according to the Nexus Project, a watchdog group that works to combat antisemitism and protect open debate. In an Instagram post referring to the Brandeis study, the group lauded the nuance of the report.
“Collapsing both views into a single all-encompassing camp of ‘anti-Israel sentiment’ erases the gray area where most students actually live,” the post said.
Another explanation, the study says, is that the “genocide” label has less to do with actual views on Israel than political affiliation. Respondents who identified as liberal were much more likely to agree that Israel was committing genocide than those who identified as moderate or conservative. In fact, political ideology was a better predictor of whether someone said Israel was committing genocide than their stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, the study found.
Overall, condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza is the more popular position on campus. Close to three-quarters of all students agreed with the statement that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.
Students may also have different interpretations of the term “genocide,” said Graham Wright, first author on the study and an associate research scientist at Brandeis.
“It’s possible that some of them think, ‘I do generally support the Israeli government, but I don’t like some of the things they’re doing,’” Wright said. “The word genocide is just a stand-in for, ‘I don’t think they’re doing a good thing.’”
The very word genocide has also been a subject of debate.
Some Jewish groups, such as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, have argued genocide is an accurate term to describe what they see as the deliberate destruction of Palestinian society.
Meanwhile, many pro-Israel advocates loathe the word genocide, legally defined as the intentional destruction of any national, racial, ethnic, or religious group, to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza following Oct. 7, 2023. They argue that Israel is seeking the destruction of Hamas, a terror group that states its intent to destroy the Jewish state.
Here are two other key takeaways from the study.
1. Most students differentiate between governments and their citizens — but not all
The study divided students into four groups based on their stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The largest group, 49% of students, supported civilians on both sides of the conflict.
Those students viewed both the Israeli and Palestinian people positively, while they expressed disdain toward the Israeli government, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
“This suggests that most people are able to make that distinction and have fairly nuanced views about a lot of these conflicts,” Wright said.
The vast majority of students, 85% of those surveyed, had unfavorable views of the Israeli government. But those views did not always extend to hostility toward the Israeli people. Students were split about half and half between favorable and unfavorable views of Israeli citizens.
Out of the 20% of students who held strong anti-Israel views — meaning they were likely to view both the Israeli government and its people unfavorably — half also viewed Hamas favorably.
“Certainly, I think that’s concerning,” Wright said. “You have a relatively small number of students who have very extreme views on Jews in Israel, and that seems to be contributing to a lot of the hostility that Jewish students are experiencing.”
Those students may make headlines, Wright said, but most undergraduates aren’t thinking about Israel day-to-day. In fact, 56% of surveyed students said they had low knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the topic was of low to moderate personal importance to them.
2. Jewish students have diverse views on the conflict, but they were also more likely to view Israel favorably than their non-Jewish peers
The survey included responses from 743 Jewish students. About 29% of those respondents viewed Israel favorably, the largest share of any ethno-religious identity surveyed.
That higher support for Israel among Jewish students held across political divides. Both politically liberal and politically conservative Jews were less likely to hold anti-Israel views than their non-Jewish peers, the study found.
The largest proportion of Jewish students, 56%, were “civilian sympathizers” — the group that views both Israeli and Palestinian civilians favorably while disliking both governments.
A minority of Jewish students, 9%, held unfavorable views of both the Israeli government and its people and favorable views of Palestinians.
Overall, the results show subtleties in how college students view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the media rarely captures, Wright said. “You only detect the nuance if you ask about it specifically.”
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In a forest where Jews fought the Nazis, a German military base and Lithuanian politics encroach on memory
(JTA) — Rūdninkai, LITHUANIA — Deep in the trees and swampy thickets of Lithuania’s Rūdninkai Forest, a series of makeshift forts is sinking into the earth.
These represent the remains of underground bunkers where Jewish partisans resisted their annihilation in the Holocaust. Under German occupation, some 400 Jews escaped the Vilnius ghetto to this forest and organized attacks against the Nazis.
After World War II, the story of these partisans was folded into Soviet propaganda, leaving a shroud of mystery over the bunkers. Now, construction of a new German military base in the area is throwing into question the fate of the forts — and the memory of their fighters.
Jewish former partisans and their descendants have traveled for decades to visit the bunkers, which mark the only memorial to their resistance in Lithuania. But in recent months, new obstacles have appeared: Signs forbidding entry and demarcating a “dangerous area” are installed on the road to the forest and pinned on trees approaching the forts.
Lithuania is nearing the final stage of constructing a military base for German troops in Rūdninkai Forest, nestled about 27 miles south of Vilnius. The training ground near the former partisan camps was planned after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to shore up NATO’s eastern flank. Strategically located some 12 miles from the border with Moscow-allied Belarus and east of Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, the troops will be Germany’s first permanent deployment abroad since World War II. About 5,000 German soldiers will begin arriving this fall.
“You cannot easily find the forts, so those who know how to get there, we just go,” Aušra Mikulskienė, a Jewish history tour guide from Vilnius, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But now, there are ‘don’t enter’ stickers and stop signs. It’s becoming impossible to get there because they are closing all of the forest.”
Mikulskienė has brought the children and grandchildren of Jewish partisans to Rūdninkai for 10 years. They need her guidance to find eight standing forts, covered in logs and soil, which are not marked on maps and GPS systems. In such remote corners of the forest, partisans planned to ambush their enemies, lay explosives on German trains and equipment and sabotage telephone lines and infrastructure in Vilnius.
The bunkers are not protected by the Lithuanian government as cultural heritage sites, and they have deteriorated over years of neglect. But as the German base is completed and military training begins, Mikulskienė worries that prohibitory signs related to construction will turn into more serious barriers to the forts, and visitors could lose access altogether.
Twists of history over decades plunged the forts into obscurity. Lithuania was occupied from 1944 to 1990 by the Soviet Union, which honored hundreds of Soviet partisans who went to Rūdninkai Forest to battle the Germans. The Jewish partisans who joined them, and who helped Russian forces liberate Vilnius from the Nazis in 1944, were not part of this narrative.
The Lithuanian Soviet Republic, or Lithuanian SSR, began to commemorate Soviet partisans on the site of the Rūdninkai forts in the 1970s. Soviet and Jewish fighters only had access to wood and soil to build their bunkers. But the forts standing today are reinforced with concrete, an indication that the Soviet government fortified the structures to serve as memorials, said Mikulskienė. She remembers visiting the site on a school trip in the 1980s and listening to lessons about how the forebears of Soviet citizens resisted the fascists.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, researchers have debated how much of the structures is original, and how much was reconstructed by the Soviet government for propaganda purposes. The first sign memorializing Jews was installed in the area by Bildungswerk Stanisław Hantz, a German educational group, in 2024. A small silver plaque reads, “In memory of the Jewish partisans who fought out of these forests against the Nazi occupiers and their helpers.”
The legacy of the forts — and the memory of Jewish partisans — is now mired in Lithuania’s repudiation of its Soviet past. Thousands of Lithuanian intellectuals, dissidents and other citizens were arrested, deported to Gulags and executed under Soviet rule. Once Lithuania gained independence in 1990, the stench of Soviet repression overpowered that of the Nazi occupation for many Lithuanians.
Lithuania was for centuries a center of rich Jewish thought, religious life and secular culture; Vilna, as the capital was known in Yiddish, was nicknamed the “Jerusalem of the North.” But after more than 90% of Lithuanian Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, few remained to commemorate the Holocaust.
“The collective memory of Lithuanians basically sees only one occupation: the Soviet occupation,” said Ilya Lempertas, a researcher and editor of books on the Holocaust in Lithuania. “Soviet partisans, in Lithuanian memory, are those who deported Lithuanians to Siberia.”
That means the Jewish partisans of Rūdninkai Forest are often viewed not as heroes, but as traitors, according to Mikulskienė. “They are not considered as fighting against Nazis, these Jews,” she said. “They are considered to be fighting with the Soviets.”
Fania Brantsovsky, the last living Jewish resistance fighter of Rūdninkai Forest, died in 2024 at 102. She joined a Jewish partisan unit under the command of the writer Abba Kovner, known as the Nokmim, or Avengers. On Sept. 23, 1943, the same night she was smuggled out of the Vilnius ghetto, the Nazis began their final liquidation of the ghetto. None of her family survived.
Brantsovsky led tours to the forest bunkers in the 2000s. Until her death, she advocated for the structures to be preserved and protected as a site of learning about the Jewish partisans’ struggle.
Dovid Katz, a Brooklyn-born, Vilnius-based scholar of Yiddish and the Holocaust who runs the online journal “Defending History,” was a friend of Brantsovsky’s. “Her one last request was, ‘Dovid, please, never stop reminding Jews around the world to speak up for the existence of the forts,’” said Katz. “‘Let our grandchildren be able to come to this place in the forest and see wooden forts in the ground, which were the only postwar physical remnant of Jewish resistance.’”
Germany’s federal government has signaled that it will not disturb the site. In response to a parliamentary inquiry, the Bundestag announced in July that it was “committed to preserving the former World War II partisan camp in Rūdninkai Forest, located on the training grounds of Panzer Brigade 45 stationed in Lithuania, as a place of learning and remembrance.”
The government added that the former partisan bunkers were not part of Germany’s training facilities and would not be affected by construction, but it was in Lithuania’s hands to manage the site’s preservation and access.
“The Lithuanian government has been asked to examine whether the area in question merits protection and to take this into account in further planning,” said the Bundestag.
Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture told JTA that the bunkers do not have protected status as cultural heritage sites because they “are not authentic and are not located at their original sites.” Instead of being linked to Jewish fighters, the ministry said the forts were “associated with Soviet partisans.”
“During the Soviet era, they were included in the list of historical monuments of the Lithuanian SSR, while a significant proportion of such ‘monuments’ were intended to reinforce Soviet ideology and historical narratives,” the ministry said in a statement.
The area will be maintained in the future with an information board installed nearby, according to the ministry, which said the content of that information has yet to be decided. Visiting the forts won’t be prohibited altogether, but those who wish to go will have to comply with military rules and obtain advance approval from the Rūdninkai Training Area Command, the ministry said.
Katz believes nationalist factions in the Lithuanian government are revising the history of a site that hosts genuine remnants of Jewish bunkers. He views the government’s resistance to protecting the site as an outgrowth of the “double genocide” theory, a nationalist narrative that emerged in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union. This theory equates World War II atrocities committed by the Soviets, who occupied Lithuania in 1940-1941 following a non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler, with those of the Nazis, who took control after Hitler broke the agreement and invaded the Soviet Union. (The Soviets reoccupied Lithuania in 1944.)
In this framework, the Soviets committed genocide against Lithuanians through mass deportations — with the complicity, some add, of Jewish communists — and only afterwards came the killing of Jews by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.
“The Soviets and their Jewish friends, as the narrative has it, committed the first genocide, and then came the reaction, the tragic second genocide,” which was the Holocaust, said Katz.
The equating of Soviet deportations with the Holocaust has been widely rejected by international scholars and Jewish institutions. The Soviet regime deported some 17,500 Lithuanians in 1941 to remote parts of Siberia and northern Russia. While individual Lithuanian Jews served in the Soviet administration, Jews were also disproportionately targeted in the deportations.
Lempertas, who like Katz is Jewish, does not believe the forts standing in Rūdninkai Forest include genuine remains of Jewish partisan bunkers. He supports the government’s view that the structures were built entirely as Soviet propaganda — but even so, he believes they should be protected.
“It has to be saved, from my point of view, for those who are coming there because of family,” said Lempertas. “It serves as an exhibition.”
Mikulskienė said the forts are deeply important to the families of Jewish fighters. She watches visitors stand before them, recite memories of war and sing partisan songs passed down through generations.
Yet in recent years, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked security threats and surging anti-Russian sentiment in Lithuania, Mikulskienė has found it increasingly difficult to advocate for the memory of Jews who fought alongside Soviets.
“You are seen as a follower of Soviet propaganda, and also now Putin’s propaganda,” she said. “That’s a bit dangerous, being this person in Lithuania.”
Anna Avidan, who was born in Vilnius to Holocaust survivors and founded the Jewish history nonprofit Jerusalem of the North, said the bunkers should be treated as a memorial site with educational opportunities.
“There is a strong stereotype here that Jews were communists and they deserved the killings — this simplified worldview,” she said. Dispelling such stereotypes “is a good case for explaining why it has to be commemorated.”
One the eve of World War II, about 4 in 10 people in Vilnius were Jewish. But decades after the end of the Soviet Union, Avidan said the city has yet to fully recognize the Jewish world that vanished from Lithuania’s cities, towns and forests.
“Lithuania has been independent for more than 35 years already,” said Avidan. “Still, we have no clear memorial in this city to the victims of the Holocaust, and for me, that’s a message.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Abdul El-Sayed and Jamie Raskin sidestep Hasan Piker, and Israel, in Michigan campaign stops
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR – As Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed made campaign stops with a prominent Jewish congressional leader on Wednesday, there was one subject neither he, nor his Democratic allies onstage, were interested in discussing.
“Don’t any reporter ask me again about Hasan Piker,” Michigan U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell told the crowd at an Ann Arbor, Mich., town hall, to cheers. “It’s not what November is about.”
Dingell’s crack was the only time the prominent left-wing streamer’s name was mentioned at all during the pair of El-Sayed rallies that day. Piker’s recent comments that American Jews who “tie” themselves to Israel would “suffer the consequences of the actions of that state” prompted uproar from several corners of Democratic leadership. Despite this, El-Sayed’s new Jewish campaign surrogate, U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, avoided the topic altogether.
That reluctance to talk about Piker on the campaign trail Wednesday extended to the candidate himself. El-Sayed didn’t mention Piker, nor Israel, once in either of his campaign stops with Raskin, except when asked directly by reporters.
The former county health official campaigned with Piker during the primary — including at one stop at the University of Michigan a stone’s throw away from Wednesday’s event — as the two made opposition to Israel a central issue of his candidacy. But at a press conference following his Ann Arbor event, El-Sayed described Piker as “a streamer in California,” adding that the media was putting too much focus on his most prominent supporter.
“I’m less interested in going to the tabloid version of our politics where we cover this as who’s in, who’s out, who’s up, who’s down, who’s talking to who,” El-Sayed said. “I’m a lot more interested in talking to the people in the state who had a bum deal because of Donald Trump and the politics that [El-Sayed’s GOP opponent] Mike Rogers has been the epitome of for a very long time.”
Raskin, one of the most prominent Jewish Democrats in the House, also showed a reluctance to talk about Jewish voters in general. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency asked the congressman in Ann Arbor how he would sell El-Sayed to Jewish Democrats uncomfortable with his rhetoric. In response, he did not mention Jewish concerns.
“Those of us who have been fighting Donald Trump and his authoritarianism and corruption and violence against American citizens and immigrants for 10 years now understand that this is an essential referendum about the future,” Raskin said in response. “Will we have democracy or will we have autocracy?”
He added that he has been “campaigning for Democrats all over the country,” and praised the party for being “a very big tent.”
“Just like any big family Thanksgiving dinner, there can be arguments and people jostling, and there’s unruliness,” Raskin said. “But fundamentally, we all believe in democracy and freedom and the progress and prosperity of our people.”
Yet questions about Piker, and how close the movement he represents may come to remaking the Democratic Party’s values, hang over both Michigan’s Senate race and the future of Jewish inclusion in the party. As the party fights to retake Congress this fall, some liberal Jewish voters believe the growing backlash against Israel among the “big tent”’s progressive wing is damaging their historic coalition. A growing number of Jewish voters in Michigan who previously backed Democrats are now supporting Rogers instead, and El-Sayed’s association with Piker is often cited as a key reason why.
In playing the role of uniter, Raskin is slaloming carefully between the party’s different factions. Before campaigning with El-Sayed, the congressman stumped for Michigan Rep. Hillary Scholten, a moderate Democrat who has withheld her endorsement of El-Sayed while specifying his association with Piker as a sticking point.
Also being silent on the rallies is a key target of Piker’s: Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, whose likeness the streamer had made his latest comments in front of. The Jewish and pro-Israel Democratic congressional candidate is running in a heavily Jewish district that encompasses Oakland County, where El-Sayed’s second rally of the day took place. In recent days, Moss said that El-Sayed was “going to have to demonstrate some serious outreach to Oakland County’s Jewish community.” He declined to comment to JTA about the day’s rallies.
As they largely avoided the elephant in the room among Democrats, El-Sayed and his allies also preached the importance of party unity in taking on their Republican opponents.
“There’s a big effort to divide us,” Raskin told the second rally’s audience in Farmington Hills. “They’re trying to pick on disagreements in our party, trying to exacerbate conflict, because we have freedom of thought in our party and freedom of speech in our party and freedom of dialogue.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Abdul El-Sayed and Jamie Raskin sidestep Hasan Piker, and Israel, in Michigan campaign stops appeared first on The Forward.
