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A new symbol at some Passover seders: an empty seat for Evan Gershkovich, Jewish journalist jailed in Russia
(JTA) — Shayndi Raice, a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Israel, is hoping that Jews around the world dedicate a portion of their Passover seder this week to one of her colleagues, currently detained in a Russian prison.
“This Passover, please consider setting a place at your Seder table for @evangershkovich,” Raice tweeted on Sunday. “As you celebrate freedom, join us in demanding freedom for Evan.”
The call — echoing a tactic used in the 20th-century campaign for the freedom of Soviet Jews — grew louder on Monday as it was shared by prominent personalities from tech journalist Kara Swisher to the former chief rabbi of Moscow to Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of New York City’s Central Synagogue, who said she would be leaving an empty chair at her own seder in honor of Gershkovich, a Moscow correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
Gershkovich, 31, has been charged with espionage, in a move that human rights organizations are decrying and the Biden administration is fighting. He was arrested Wednesday while he was dining at a restaurant in the city of Yekaterinburg, about 800 miles east of Moscow in the Ural Mountains.
The Wall Street Journal has denied the allegations against Gershkovich, who pleaded not guilty during a court appearance last week, according to Russian state and international media. He reportedly has not been able to speak to an attorney representing him while he is held in the notorious Lefortovo Prison, whose past inmates include the famous Soviet Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky.
Gershkovich is the first American journalist since the Cold War to face spying charges in Russia, which carry a sentence of up to 20 years in prison. People charged with espionage are almost always convicted in Russia, according to the New York Times.
“Let him go,” President Joe Biden said Friday about his message to Russian authorities in Gershkovich’s case, using a phrase that itself is redolent of the Passover story and the Soviet Jewry movement.
The arrest has propelled Gershkovich to the front lines of deepening tensions between the United States and Russia. It has also drawn attention to Gershkovich’s background as the child of Jews who fled the Soviet Union — and renewed questions about whether people like him can be safe in Russia today.
“He cares a lot about his identity as a Jew, and especially his identity as the son of Soviet Jewish immigrants,” his college roommate Jeremy Berke told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I think that was a large part of why he wanted to go back to Russia.”
Gershkovich was born in New York City to Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union who left in the late 1970s, when the Communist state briefly opened the gates to emigration for some of its Jewish citizens.
His father is from Odessa — today in Ukraine — and his mother is from St. Petersburg, Time Magazine reported. According to an account published by the Wall Street Journal, the only outlet to which his family has spoken, his mother fled Russia using Israeli documents with her mother, a Ukrainian Holocaust survivor, after hearing rumors that Jews were going to be deported to Siberia.
Gershkovich grew up speaking Russian at home in New Jersey, where he graduated from Princeton High School before heading to Bowdoin College in Maine. After college, he got a job first at the New York Times before moving to Moscow in 2017 to report for the Moscow Times, an English-language news organization that has been a launching pad for multiple high-profile Russia reporters. His reporting there included coverage of Hanukkah celebrations in Moscow. He was hired by the Wall Street Journal in 2021.
His mother told the Journal that Gershkovich had become more interested in his Jewish identity while in Russia, taking her to a synagogue that she had been warned as a child never to enter. “That’s when Evan started to understand us better,” she said.
“Part of his mission was to not only explain Russia to a Western audience, but to really kind of pierce the bubble and tell the stories of Russians themselves, which was something he was able to do, because he’s fluent in Russian,” Berke told JTA.
He said his friend sought to tell “stories that weren’t necessarily just the purely kind of economic stories that you saw coming out of the country, but that were really about what the people were doing — you know, people in synagogues, people in nightclubs, like all aspects of Russian society.”
Like many foreign journalists, Gershkovich left Russia in February 2022, after Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine and turned overnight into a pariah state that intensified its crackdowns on dissenters. But he returned later in the year on the longstanding assumption that foreigners would be insulated from the harsh treatment that Russian journalists can face.
“By detaining the American journalist Evan Gershkovich, Russia has crossed the Rubicon and sent a clear message to foreign correspondents that they will not be spared from the ongoing purge of the independent media in the country.” said the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Gershkovich, drop all charges against him, and let the media work freely and without fear of reprisal.”
Gershkovich had most recently reported on Russia’s declining economic position and was reportedly in Yekaterinburg reporting on the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary force, and Nizhny Tagil, a factory town where Russian tanks are made.
Wagner’s owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, joked about Gershkovich and other journalists being found in a mass grave or a torture chamber when reached by the Daily Beast last week. Prigozhin said he had not known about Gershkovich’s arrest at that time.
Julia Ioffe, a fellow Russian-American Jew and journalist, said after Gershkovich’s arrest that the Kremlin takes criticism from people of their background differently than from other journalists.
“Although he was born in the U.S., his parents were immigrants from the Soviet Union, Jewish immigrants,” Ioffe told CNN. “There is a sense in Moscow, especially in the foreign ministry and in the Kremlin, that people of this background — my background — they are particularly sensitive to … our criticism. They feel that it is a different kind of betrayal.”
WSJ’s Evan Gershkovich, detained in Russia for espionage, is about the age @juliaioffe and I were when we met as Moscow reporters. We spoke today about what Gershkovich is facing, particularly as a reporter whose family fled the Soviet Union and how Russia is ‘banking’ hostages. pic.twitter.com/gsUbZz2N0q
— Alex Marquardt (@MarquardtA) March 30, 2023
The former chief rabbi of Moscow who fled Russia shortly after the invasion of Ukraine last year suggested that Russia had targeted Gershkovich because of his identity.
“He just happened to be Jewish, right?” Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt sarcastically tweeted last week.
Goldschmidt has emerged as a prominent critic of the Russian government after leaving the country last year, saying that as a prominent rabbi he faced pressure to support Putin’s war.
“When we look back over Russian history, whenever the political system was in danger you saw the government trying to redirect the anger and discontent of the masses towards the Jewish community,” he told the Guardian in an interview late last year.
Gershkovich is not the first American to be arrested in Russia amid rising tensions between the countries. Last year, the basketball star Britney Griner was sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison on drug charges, then traded to the United States in exchange for the release of Victor Bout, a Russian convicted of dealing arms.
In a social media post this weekend, Griner called on the United States to “continue to use every tool possible to bring Evan and all wrongfully detained Americans home.”
The Wall Street Journal has made Gershkovich’s reporting free and produced a video highlighting his importance as a journalist. Meanwhile, Gershkovich’s Jewish supporters are putting their own spin on the campaigns to raise awareness of Gershkovich’s plight and lobby for his release.
“Dear friends, if you are in shul this weekend, please say an extra tefillah for the release of @evangershkovich, a @WSJ reporter and son of Soviet Jewish immigrants, who was detained this week by the Russian government,” tweeted Chavie Lieber, a Wall Street Journal reporter, last week. (Lieber was a JTA reporter in 2012 and 2013.)
On Monday, Raice’s call for a place at Passover seders for Gershkovich was being shared widely.
“A worthy endeavour. However, Evan is not the only political prisoner in Russia and Byelorussia. Thousands of people are being held in prisons in Russia and Byelorussia, among them Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Kara Murza, Ilya Yashin and others, many, who are of Jewish descent,” Goldschmidt, the former Moscow chief rabbi, tweeted. “We should remember all of them, when we celebrate freedom at the Seder table Wednesday evening!”
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The post A new symbol at some Passover seders: an empty seat for Evan Gershkovich, Jewish journalist jailed in Russia appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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He was a hidden child during WWII. The French town that saved him lost his painting and rediscovered a chapter of its history.
The day Isabelle Siméon cleared out a basement storage area in the town hall in Houdan, France, and found a rolled-up painting on top of a bookcase, she discovered a forgotten piece of history. My father, Philip Orenstein, a professor of art at Rutgers University, had started work on that painting in 1989 and donated it to the town in 1994 at an event marking the 50th anniversary of its liberation by American forces.
My father donated the painting because he felt a deep debt to the town that saved his life during the Second World War. A hidden child in Houdan from 1942-45, my father was saved by a parish priest who threatened to excommunicate anyone in this small market town who informed the occupying Germans about the Jewish children, resistance fighters, or downed allied pilots concealed there, or other acts of resistance. And by a farming family — the Trouvers — that took in children of French POWs, including Jews.
Yet by 2024, when Siméon, a municipal official, made her discovery, the town had forgotten not only the painting that had gone straight into storage, but its proud history of sheltering Jewish children and its heroic French resistance priest Abbé Pierre Condé. A dramatic page in the town’s 1,200 years of recorded history was lost. Even among the Jewish community in Yvelines, the bucolic region immediately to the west of Paris, the story was unknown. In France, the story of the hidden children, Jewish children sent to the countryside or small towns under various pretexts to avoid detection by Nazi occupants is well known. Several towns have established national reputations as places of refuge. But not Houdan and not elsewhere in Yvelines according to Valérie Boussard, president of the Council of Jewish Communities of Yvelines.
After spending more than a year to find my father based only on his signature and then restoring the painting, the Tannery (La Tannerie) gallery in Houdan is now hosting an exhibition through Nov. 1 to celebrate the restoration of this painting and this forgotten page of the town’s history.
Houdan today has changed. For many Parisians, this part of France serves as a country retreat and Houdan has fought hard to preserve its ancient town center. The result is a small town that continues to serve as a delightful regional hub with open air markets, restaurants situated in old farm buildings, an enormous fair each September, and increasingly fancy small shops, perhaps akin to the Cotswolds in England.
I accompanied my father to Houdan for the opening of his exhibition on Sept. 10 and stood with my extended family and Mayor Jean-Marie Tétart who proudly announced the future installation of the painting to a pride of place in the town hall. A former parliamentarian, Tétart seeks for Houdan the recognition it deserves as a place that, when times were at their hardest, resisted antisemitism and sought to repair the world. Even today.
Yet the town’s proud embrace of my father, his work, and this vital chapter of its history raises an important question: How was this history lost in the first place? And why was it rediscovered only now?
According to my father, the hidden child whose family survived the war and then emigrated to Brooklyn, France was simply not ready to receive this history before. It was not until 1995 that France officially took responsibility for the Vel d’Hiv roundup in Paris that claimed the lives of my father’s cousin Henri Herzhorn and thousands of other children who died in the French concentration camp in Drancy in inhumane conditions or in Auschwitz, their final destination. My father intended the seven murals that he painted starting in the 1990s to force France to recognize this history.
Paradoxically, with the dramatic rise of antisemitism that has deeply worried the French Jewish community, this history and the history of those who resisted resonates even more loudly. With every online or physical or verbal attack, the Jewish community and its allies in France respond with acts of memory.
My father’s work is at once personal and political, mixing family imagery with images of the grand politics of the day and oddly juxtaposed popular culture references. His murals stun the viewer with outsized images of a DeGaulle and Pétain or the D-Day landings, overlaid with family photos, Parisian graffiti, posters, and film advertisements. The colorful, powerful, and emotional images rush together and appear to jump off a graffitied wall in Paris as you are passing by.
“The Big Cheese,” his painting in Houdan, features an outsized image of the Ile de France steamship sailing across a brightly tricolored French flag background. The ship that bore him and his family to New York appears to be racing away from images of the iron cross, yellow stars, Drancy, and Karl Marx towards Mt. Rushmore, Max Beckman, and Statue of Liberty sunglasses. The work is colorful and epic in composition, on the one hand, while also inlaid with engaging and perplexing historical symbols designed to draw one in from afar and up close. My father has always dwelt on this history.
“As I worked on the seven canvases I describe as murals — my major body of work — I constantly thought of my cousin Henri Herzhorn, whom I had never met, as well as the more than 4,000 Parisian children who were victims of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup — my contemporaries, who, like me, left France,” my father said when he was in Houdan.
Today, though France seems open to revisiting this history, mysteries still remain. Particularly the postwar life and fate of Abbé Pierre Condé. I spoke with Monsignor Luc Crepy, the Bishop of Versailles for Yvelines, who has begun to research Houdan’s wartime hero together with the current Curé of Houdan, Father Pierre Bothuan. Condé left behind a published journal recording the major events of the war, occupation, and liberation of Houdan. After that, he too disappeared from collective memory.
Growing up in my father’s house, surrounded by this history, I came away from Houdan shocked at the distances we have traveled and the voids that remain. My father and his older brother Stephen, a former professor of nuclear physics at CUNY — hidden with him in Houdan — never expected to survive 1944, let alone to return there in 2026. The house where they lived lay just beside a small bridge that the Germans planned to dynamite after D-Day to slow the advance of Patton’s army. Yet the town’s postman cut the wires and my father and uncle survived to consider the contemporary relevance of a lost painting and a lost history to a lost world in need of repair.
The post He was a hidden child during WWII. The French town that saved him lost his painting and rediscovered a chapter of its history. appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu to confront Mamdani’s call to arrest him in U.N. address this week
(JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday accused New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani of supporting Hamas and inciting violence against Jews, setting up a showdown between the Israeli leader and one of the most prominent American pro-Palestinian politicians ahead of Netanyahu’s visit to the city.
Netanyahu said he would respond to Mamdani’s criticism of him and Israel during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, when he will visit New York for the first time since Mamdani took office.
Mamdani on Monday renewed his demand for the arrest of Netanyahu, who he called “a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people” in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. He acknowledged that he did not have the authority to carry out a warrant for Netanyahu issued by the International Criminal Court, but said the warrant should still be “honored” to protect “accountability” to international laws.
“If the International Criminal Court deems someone worthy of an arrest because of a violation of those laws, then who are we to say that anyone should be above that?” said Mamdani.
Netanyahu responded in a video statement, “Shame on you for supporting the Hamas terrorist monsters who butchered our people. Shame on you for inciting riots against New York Jews.” A number of prominent New York Jewish figures have asked Mamdani to tamp down his rhetoric about Israel, linking it to rising violent attacks on Jews. Mamdani has said that he is mayor for all New Yorkers, including Jews, and denounces antisemitism.
“I’m coming to the U.N., I’m going to tell the truth about our heroic soldiers, and I’m going to tell the truth about you,” added Netanyahu.
Mamdani pledged during his mayoral campaign last year that he would seek to arrest Netanyahu if he visited, but admitted in July that the city could not legally do so.
The ICC issued its warrant for Netanyahu in 2024, accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The United States and Israel are not signatories of the treaty that created the ICC in 2002 and do not recognize its jurisdiction.
Netanyahu has prominently featured Mamdani in campaign ads as he currently seeks reelection in Israel, framing the mayor as both a pro-terror extremist and a leader reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
Netanyahu is set for one of his shortest trips to the United States, where he is not slated to meet with President Donald Trump, according to The Jerusalem Post. He is currently scheduled to leave New York on the same day he arrives. Protests are expected both outside the United Nations and inside during Netanyahu’s speech, which last year saw representatives from dozens of countries walk out.
Meanwhile, Mamdani had his third meeting with Trump on Monday, continuing a rapport between the two populist leaders on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Despite their stark differences on issues including immigration enforcement, Trump praised Mamdani during a press conference on the lawn of Gracie Mansion.
“I want him to be a great mayor, and he’s certainly got potential,” Trump told reporters before shaking Mamdani’s hand and patting his arm.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netanyahu to confront Mamdani’s call to arrest him in U.N. address this week appeared first on The Forward.
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Could going to synagogue help or hurt a Jewish candidate? This poll offers a clue
Voters may react differently to a Jewish politician who publicly practices their faith than to one who simply identifies as Jewish, a new poll found. The distinction could matter for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a possible 2028 presidential candidate who has made his Jewish faith central to his public life and service.
The Politico poll of 2,002 U.S. adults showed that Democratic voters were less likely to vote for a candidate who regularly attends synagogue than for a candidate not practicing a religion or attending services once a year. Among Republicans, however, a candidate who regularly attends synagogue performed better than one who attends only once a year.
The survey, conducted online in partnership with the London-based polling firm Public First between August 8 and 14, asked respondents to choose between hypothetical candidates with different characteristics, including political ideology, age, race, profession, sexual orientation and religious practice. The sample has a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2.2%.
The poll offers a window into how religious observance may shape the way voters view a Jewish candidate. In an earlier poll conducted by the same firm in May, among 2,038 voters, candidates were identified simply by religion rather than how often or where they worshipped. Being identified as Jewish hurt a hypothetical candidate among voters in both parties compared with being identified as Christian.
The findings could be particularly relevant to Shapiro, the popular Pennsylvania governor running for reelection this fall. He maintains a traditional Conservative Jewish lifestyle, keeps kosher and is a longtime member of Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park, outside Philadelphia. In his recent memoir, Where We Keep the Light, Shapiro detailed experiences shaped by and tied closely to his Jewish identity, including his vetting as a vice presidential candidate in 2024.
Shapiro has been viewed as a potential first Jewish president since his gubernatorial campaign in 2022 and is one of three prominent Jewish Democrats — along with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — mentioned as possible 2028 presidential candidates.
Religious identity, particularly Christianity, has become more central in Republican politics since President Trump returned to the White House in 2025. Trump and his Cabinet have made religious faith a prominent part of his administration’s agenda. He created a White House Faith Office to work with religious organizations and established a Justice Department task force focused specifically on what the administration calls anti-Christian bias. At the same time, an increasingly vocal faction on the far right has made Christian nationalism and antisemitism central to its politics.
The Politico poll does not explain why Republican voters responded differently to Jewish candidates based on how often they attended synagogue. But the gap aligns with the broader split in positions among conservatives who have warmly embraced visibly religious and politically conservative Jews, while criticizing liberal or less observant Jews over their politics and commitment to Judaism.
Trump has repeatedly drawn that distinction himself. During the 2024 election, for example, he said that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats “hate their religion.”
The post Could going to synagogue help or hurt a Jewish candidate? This poll offers a clue appeared first on The Forward.
