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A new children’s book will depict the Jewish Theological Seminary’s devastating 1966 library fire — and how its neighbors responded
(JTA) — Just before locking down in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, children’s book author Caroline Kusin Pritchard was waiting to pick up her two toddlers from preschool at Congregation Beth Am in Palo Alto, California, when she saw a thin volume poking out of a shelf in the synagogue library.
The 56-page book, called “Fire! The Library is Burning,” by Rabbi Barry Cytron, detailed a historical event she had never heard of before: the 1966 library fire at the Jewish Theological Seminary, in the Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights.
The fire was a devastating event for the seminary, the flagship institution of Conservative Judaism. It destroyed some 70,000 books and 40 Torahs in the library’s collection, some of which had been saved from Poland. No people were hurt and few rare books were burned, but because of the way the library was constructed, in a windowless tower, the only way to put it out was to dump water from above, resulting in sweeping damage even to volumes that escaped the flames.
What grabbed Kusin Pritchard’s attention was not the fire itself, but the way New Yorkers who lived and worked near the school responded to it — volunteering to evacuate books from the library and protect them from lasting damage.
That response is the focus of her upcoming children’s book, “The Keeper of Stories,” announced this week and due out in the fall of 2024. The episode, Kusin Pritchard said, feels all the more meaningful at a time when activists and local governments across the country are banning books — including some about the Holocaust — and restricting them from school library shelves.
“I just never thought a story about saving books would feel radical in 2023,” she said. “People are proactively going out of their way to strip books from public libraries and school shelves.”
The message of “The Keeper of Stories,” Kusin Pritchard added, is that “it didn’t matter to people what necessarily was in the books. They just knew there was inherent value and the story is being told and to save and protect books more generally, like these sacred gatekeepers of our humanity.”
The book is on the road to publication at a time of significant change for the JTS library, a large and storied institution with 400,000 volumes that includes a notable collection of rare Jewish books. The library downsized its space after a 2015 real estate deal and has more recently drawn scrutiny for auctioning some of its rare books. The longtime lead librarian who led the efforts to recover from the fire, Menahem Schmelzer, died last year.
Schmelzer, a Holocaust survivor born in Hungary who served as JTS’ head librarian from 1964 to 1987, spoke to Kusin Pritchard about his recollection of the fire, which happened to occur on his birthday.
“He was able to share just gorgeous, textured memories about what the experience was like for him,” she recalled.
“There’s a refrain throughout about ‘the keeper of stories,’” Kusin Pritchard added, referencing the book’s title. “This idea of, ‘who are the keepers of stories?’ Is it the building involved? Is it the pages of the book?”
Kusin Pritchard is the author of other children’s books with Jewish themes. “Gitty and Kvetch,” released in 2021, features a character who is always complaining; “Where is Poppy?”, out next year, is about a girl’s first Passover after her grandfather’s death. The new book, meant for readers in elementary school, will be illustrated by Selina Alko, who is Jewish and has previously illustrated books about interfaith holiday celebrations and the effort to save Czech children from the Nazis.
“The Keeper of Stories” will depict the steps that JTS’s neighbors took to save the books that didn’t burn. They formed an impromptu chain to pass books out of the library, pack them in boxes and, in turn, clear the boxes out to make more space for additional evacuated books. Volunteers also mobilized to place paper towels between each page of books soaked by the firehoses that were in danger of growing mold.
“These volunteers came from across the city and dried these books with paper towels and you can still see the places where they taped them and glued them back together on some of these actual books, on the pages.” Kusin Pritchard said. “Their stories still kind of exist in person.”
Initially, Kusin Pritchard wrote the draft from the perspective of the person who came up with the idea of using paper towels to preserve the books — an effort that caused a run on the towels nearby. But she soon realized that the story was about more than one individual’s efforts to save the contents of a library, so none of the characters is named.
“This wasn’t about this one person,” Kusin Pritchard said. “It was about how everyone came together. Preschoolers, students down the street, the pastors, the company that heard about this and sent paper towels, or General Foods who had these freeze dryers and they sent their food scientists to try and freeze dry the books. It was a collective.”
Kusin Pritchard said she usually writes lighter fare, but as the parent of three young children — 6, 4 and 2 years old — she said she isn’t worried about frightening readers.
“Kids can take on and handle a lot more than we give them credit for,” she said.
She also hopes to show her young readers that they can play a role in safeguarding books, too.
“In a world where book banning seems more and more normalized,” she said, “a story about saving books feels really resonant.”
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The post A new children’s book will depict the Jewish Theological Seminary’s devastating 1966 library fire — and how its neighbors responded appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A New Jersey congregation was already falling apart. Then came Oct 7.
Partly Strong, Partly Broken
By Nathaniel Popkin
New Door Books, $19.95, 249 pages
When Rabbi Adinah Feld returns to her reform congregation in New Jersey after a nearly week-long trip to Israel, she discovers two crises have occurred in her absence: The roof of the synagogue has collapsed after a heavy storm and the Muslim teenager, Fami, who helps clean the shul is in the hospital after a savage attack by a local white supremacist.
Things only further devolve from here in Partly Strong, Partly Broken, a new novel from author and former Wall Street Journal critic Nathaniel Popkin. The fictional synagogue of Temple Beth Israel fractures — metaphorically and physically — in the month leading up to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.
Feld is presented as the archetypal neo-liberal American rabbi. Her trip to Israel, we quickly learn, consisted of participating in the pro-democracy protests and pining for her Palestinian ex-girlfriend, whom she first met nearly two decades earlier while living in Israel. Once she’s home, her attention is split between trying to fix the storm-damaged roof, respond to the attack, and finally launch the Hebrew learning center she’s been advocating for the synagogue to have for years.
But at every turn there’s a challenge: The incompetent and combative building manager can’t seem to get the roof fixed; some congregants believe Feld’s concern for Fami is proof she cares more about Muslims than Jews; a wealthy board member wants his name on the Hebrew center and his project manager in charge — a woman who takes personal offense when Feld invites the local Imam to join tashlich.
Many readers will probably see their own congregation in the fictional Temple Beth Israel, especially if they’ve served on a synagogue’s board or committee. But for those who have avoided seeing behind the administrative curtain of a synagogue, the complex power dynamics might come as a shock.
Popkin deftly captures a stark truth: The attack on Oct. 7 and the subsequent war didn’t create the divisions over Israel in the Jewish community; it exposed tensions that were already there. This reality, combined with a prophecy from the Book of Daniel — Daniel tells Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar that his dream of a statue with feet made of iron and clay reveal that the foundations of his kingdom were “partly strong, and partly broken.” — is the inspiration for the book’s title.
For some, the fact that Jews have always been divided over Israel may not seem like a particularly insightful observation. But after Oct. 7, there was a lot of shock and outrage among the Jewish community at the wide range of opinions in their communities. As Partly Strong shows, when synagogues avoid talking about Israel to mitigate conflict (or please wealthy donors, as Feld does in the book), they don’t prevent conflict — they just make disagreements and tough discussions about Israel taboo and volatile.
In Popkin’s novel, the conflict comes to a head less than a week before Oct. 7 at a whiskey-fueled book talk where a Jewish comparative literature professor presents his claims about understanding the role of epigenetics and inherited trauma in the book of Genesis. The conversation quickly turns towards trauma among Israelis and Palestinians — a subject the drunken congregants are not prepared to discuss civilly.
As startlingly realistic as Popkin’s story is, the strong narrative occasionally feels disrupted by verbose, overexplanatory writing (“She’d better go find Fami right away and give her the silver chain with the hamesh pendant, the palm-shaped amulet of protection that is usually called by its Arabic name, hamsa, and sometimes the hand of Fatima, for the daughter of Mohammed”) and a surfeit of subplots. At one point, readers are pulled away from the main story for a brief and sappy sex scene between two teenage Hebrew school instructors on a faux polar bear rug (the girl is described as “dessert” and the boy is described as an “Olympic eater”). While it was impressive to see what seemed like half of my home congregation represented, at some point it becomes too much to keep track of all the characters, big or small, and all their issues.
We don’t actually see how the characters respond to Oct. 7 — the book ends with a small group of them huddled together watching the first reports of the attack on a television. We’re left to imagine how Feld and her congregation will handle the aftermath — although readers have probably already lived it themselves.
The post A New Jersey congregation was already falling apart. Then came Oct 7. appeared first on The Forward.
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Hezbollah Pays Steep Price in Battle to Reverse Its Fortunes
Workers remove a coffin with a body from temporary graves and prepare for transport for a funeral ceremony of four Hezbollah fighters and two civilians, amid a temporary ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, in Tyre, southern Lebanon, April 26, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Marko Djurica/File Photo
Hezbollah has paid a heavy price for going to war with Israel on March 2: Israel has occupied a chunk of southern Lebanon, displaced hundreds of thousands of its Shi’ite Muslim constituents and killed as many as several thousand of its fighters, according to previously unreported casualty estimates from within the group.
The move has brought severe political consequences, too. In Beirut, opposition has hardened to its status as an armed group, which domestic rivals see as exposing Lebanon to repeated wars with Israel.
In April, Lebanon’s government held face-to-face talks with Israel for the first time in decades, a decision Hezbollah firmly opposed.
However, more than a dozen Hezbollah officials told Reuters they see a chance to reverse deteriorating fortunes by aligning with Tehran in its war with Israel and the United States. The group, founded by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1982, opened fire two days into the conflict, which began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28.
The group’s calculations are based on the assessment that its participation would force Lebanon onto the agenda of U.S.-Iranian negotiations, and that Iranian pressure can secure a more robust ceasefire than one that took effect in November 2024 following a conflict sparked by the war in Gaza, the officials said.
Hezbollah was mauled in the last war, which killed its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, along with some 5,000 fighters, and weakened its long-dominant hold over the Lebanese state.
Rearmed with Iranian help, it has used new tactics and drones, surprising many with its capabilities after a fragile 15-month truce during which Hezbollah held fire, even as Israel continued to kill its members.
Hezbollah lawmaker Ibrahim al-Moussawi denied the group was acting on Iran’s behalf when it resumed hostilities, as alleged by opponents. He told Reuters Hezbollah saw a window to “break this vicious cycle … where the Israelis can target, assassinate, bombard, kill, without any revenge.”
He acknowledged losses and damage in southern Lebanon but said “you don’t go into making calculations of how many are going to be killed” when “pride and sovereignty and independence” are at stake.
Hezbollah’s media office said the figure of several thousand fighters killed in the present war was false.
While a US-mediated ceasefire that took effect on April 16 has led to a significant reduction in hostilities, Israel and Hezbollah have continued to trade blows in the south, where Israel maintains troops in a self-declared “buffer zone.”
Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said Hezbollah had “shown more resilience than many thought possible, but that was not a strategic gain in itself.”
“The only thing that will contain Israel is a comprehensive US-Iran deal,” he said. “Without a deal, there’s going to be a lot of pain for everyone. At best, a hurting stalemate.”
GRAVES FRESHLY DUG, AND QUICKLY FILLED
More than 2,600 people have been killed since March 2, around a fifth of them women, children and medics, Lebanon’s health ministry has reported. Its toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Three sources, two of them Hezbollah officials, said the ministry’s figures do not include many of the group’s casualties. They said several thousand Hezbollah fighters have been killed, though the group does not have the full picture yet.
In a statement to Reuters, Hezbollah’s media office denied the figures cited by the sources, and that the numbers published by Lebanon’s health ministry included its members killed in Israeli strikes.
One source, a Hezbollah commander, said scores of fighters had gone to the frontline towns of Bint Jbeil and Khiyam intending to fight to the death. Their bodies have yet to be recovered.
In the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut, more than two dozen freshly dug graves were quickly filled with fighters’ bodies in the days after the ceasefire took hold. Simple marble tombstones identify some as commanders, others as fighters.
In one southern village alone, Yater, the council recorded the deaths of 34 Hezbollah fighters.
Lebanon’s Shi’ite Muslim community has borne the brunt of Israel’s attacks, forced to flee into Christian, Druze and other areas, where many blame Hezbollah for starting the war.
Israel has been entrenching its hold over a security zone stretching as far as 10 km (6 miles) into Lebanon and demolishing villages, saying it aims to shield northern Israel from attacks by Hezbollah militants embedded in civilian areas.
An Israeli government official said Hezbollah had abrogated the November 2024 ceasefire by firing on Israeli citizens on March 2. The threat to northern Israel would be eradicated, the official said, adding thousands of Hezbollah militants had been killed, and Israel was steadily destroying the group’s infrastructure.
The Israeli military says Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel since March 2. Israel has announced 17 soldiers killed in southern Lebanon, along with two civilians in northern Israel.
Citing ongoing Israeli strikes, Hezbollah has called the April ceasefire meaningless and continued to attack.
IRAN ‘WILL NOT SELL’ THEIR FRIENDS
A diplomat who has contact with Hezbollah described its decision to enter the war as a big gamble and a survival strategy, saying it felt it needed to be part of the problem so it could be part of an eventual regional solution.
It has yet to be seen if the gamble will pay off.
Tehran has demanded that Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah be included in any deal on the wider war. But US President Donald Trump said last month that any deal Washington reaches with Tehran “is in no way subject to Lebanon.”
A spokesperson for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, Tahir Andrabi, referred Reuters to an April 16 statement in which he said peace in Lebanon was essential to the talks it is mediating between the U.S. and Iran.
A Western official said they saw a possibility the US and Iran might eventually reach a settlement that does not address the war in Lebanon.
Asked about this, the US State Department, Iran’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva and Lebanon’s government did not immediately comment.
Hezbollah’s Moussawi said a ceasefire in Lebanon continues to be a top priority for Iran, adding Tehran shares Lebanon’s objectives, including that Israel halt attacks and withdraw from Lebanon. Hezbollah has “full trust in Iran – that the Iranians will not sell their own friends”, he said.
The State Department referred Reuters to an April 27 interview Secretary of State Marco Rubio did with Fox News, in which he said Israel had a right to defend itself against Hezbollah’s attacks, and that he didn’t think Israel wanted to maintain its buffer zone in Lebanon indefinitely.
The United States has urged Israel “to make sure their responses are proportional and targeted,” he said.
When the April 16 ceasefire was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hezbollah’s disarmament would be a fundamental demand in peace talks with Lebanon.
Hezbollah has ruled out disarmament, saying the matter of its weapons is a topic for a national dialogue. Any move by Lebanon to disarm the group by force would risk igniting conflict in a country shattered by civil war from 1975 to 1990.
Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam have sought Hezbollah’s peaceful disarmament since last year. On March 2, the government banned the group’s military activities.
Hezbollah has demanded the government cancel that decision and end its direct talks with Israel.
Lebanese officials have told Reuters they believe direct talks with Israel under the auspices of the US are the best way to secure a lasting ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli troops, as only Washington has enough leverage with Israel to achieve those aims.
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US President Trump Tells Israeli Media: ‘I Studied Iran’s New Proposal, It Is Not Acceptable to Me’
US President Donald Trump arrives to award the medal of honor to Master Sgt. Roderick ‘Roddie’ W. Edmonds, Staff Sgt. Michael H. Ollis, and retired Command Sgt. Maj. Terry P. Richardson during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 02 March 2026.
US President Donald Trump said he has reviewed Iran’s latest proposal and described it as “unacceptable” in an interview with Israeli broadcaster Kan News on Sunday. Trump added that ongoing efforts related to the conflict are “progressing very well,” without providing further details. He also renewed his call for clemency for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, arguing that Israel needs a leader focused on wartime priorities rather than legal matters.