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A picture book about a heroine of Holocaust memory and 2 fantasy novels top year’s Sydney Taylor Jewish children’s book awards
(JTA) — An illustrated book about an inspiring Holocaust survivor and two works of fantasy featuring dybbuks and Jewish demons have won this year’s top prizes in Jewish children’s literature.
The Sydney Taylor Book Awards are awarded annually to outstanding works of Jewish literature for children, as part of the American Library Association’s youth media awards and in conjunction with the Association of Jewish Libraries.
This year, the top winner in the picture book category was ““The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs” by Chana Stiefel, illustrated by Susan Gal. “Aviva vs. the Dybbuk” by Mari Lowe won in the middle-grade level. And “When the Angels Left the Old Country,” the debut novel by Sacha Lamb, garnered the young adult award.
Named in memory of Sydney Taylor, the author of the “All-of-a-Kind-Family” series that is being made into a TV show, the prestigious award “recognizes books that exemplify high literary standards while authentically portraying the Jewish experience,” according to the award committee announcement.
As chair of the Sydney Taylor award committee for the past three years, Martha Simpson sees a growing diversity in Jewish children’s books. This year, they considered an array of new titles that portray global Jewish life, others that feature neurodiverse characters and LGBTQ kids and more set in Orthodox communities, she wrote in an email.
“There are many different ways to live a Jewish life,” Simpson said. “It’s wonderful that these stories are finally being written and published so that readers can see themselves and also learn about other experiences.”
The top picture book tells the story of Yaffa Eliach, who survived the Holocaust in hiding with her family after being expelled from their hometown of Eishyshok, a Polish shtetl (now in Lithuania) where she had helped in her grandmother’s bustling photography studio taking portraits of the Jewish villagers.
After immigrating to the U.S. and becoming a historian, Eliach set about a globetrotting journey to thousands of photographs and remembrances from Eishyshok’s Jewish families. Her ambitious project is now a centerpiece of the core exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She died in 2016.
The Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. (Wikimedia Commons)
Gal, a previous Sydney Taylor winner and past recipient of the National Jewish book award, brings Eliach’s story to life through her richly colored illustrations interspersed with photographs of Eliach.
Lowe’s “Aviva vs. the Dybbuk” is a suspenseful coming-of-age novel about an introspective 11-year-old girl that opens a window into daily life in a tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community in New York. After the traumatic accidental death of her father, Aviva and her increasingly reclusive mother move into a small apartment above the old mikveh, the ritual bathing house where Aviva’s mother becomes the caretaker. A supernatural, troublemaking dyybuk, whom only Aviva can see, becomes Aviva’s confidant. The tale of resilience deals with grief, memory, the ups and downs of teen friendship, acts of antisemitic violence and the healing power of love and community.
A demon named Little Ash and an angel named Uriel are the compelling otherworldly characters at center stage of “When the Angels Left the Old Country,” Lamb’s lyrically penned historical fantasy. As the page-turning drama unfolds, the pair of unlikely, centuries-old Talmud study partners, who take on human-like form, set out from their small Pale of Settlement shtetl and head to New York City on a quest to find the village baker’s missing daughter.
In their journey, they confront the perils faced by Jewish immigrants — a deceitful rabbi, probing Ellis Island officials, exploitative sweatshop bosses and the pushes and pulls of Jewish assimilation. Lamb, a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow in young adult fiction, paints a richly textured tale of pathos and wit, filled with Jewish culture that explores gender identity and the bonds of friendship.
“Angels” took home two other ALA prizes, including the Stonewall book award for LGBTQ works for young readers.
In addition to the top winners, the Sydney Taylor committee named nine books as silver medalists and nine notable titles of Jewish content. Winners will be honored in June at the AJL’s digital conference. https://jewishlibraries.org/2023-digital-conference.
Other books with Jewish characters and themes also garnered several ALA awards including, “The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen,” by Isaac Blum, which won the William C. Morris young adult debut award; and “Just a Girl: A True Story of World War II” by Lia Levi, illustrated by Jeff Mason, which won the Batchelder prize, adapted for young readers, and translated from its original in Italian.
Jewish children’s books recently recognized by the Jewish Book Council’s National Jewish book awards were “The Very Best Sukkah: A Story from Uganda” by Shoshana Nambi, illustrated by Moran Yogev, and the middle-grade novel “The Prince of Steel Pier” by Stacy Nockowitz.
Last week, the Association of Jewish Libraries announced separately that Omer Friedlander won the organization’s fiction prize for “The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land,” a collection of short stories set in Israel.
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251 hostages were taken to Gaza on Oct. 7. The bodies of these two remain there.
Hamas on Tuesday returned to Israel the body of Dror Or — a 48-year-old father from Kibbutz Be’eri who was abducted with his family on Oct. 7. The handover was mediated by the Red Cross and confirmed by Israeli forensic testing. Or’s wife was killed in the attack, and two of their children were later released during a previous ceasefire.
In exchange, Israel returned 15 Palestinian bodies, completing the latest exchange under the ceasefire as talks begin on advancing to the agreement’s second phase.
Hamas took more than 250 people hostage on the day of the attack. With only two captives now believed to remain in Gaza, the transfer marks a grim but significant step in resolving one of the central flashpoints of the current truce negotiations.
The bodies of one Israeli and one Thai national are still in Gaza.
- Ran Gvili, 24, was a member of a police counter-terror unit who was on medical leave with a broken shoulder when he heard about the attack. He rushed south and helped evacuate fleeing concertgoers at the Nova music festival. It was later determined that Gvili was shot and killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, his body dragged into Gaza.
- Sudthisak Rinthalak, a 43-year-old agricultural worker from northeastern Thailand, was killed in Kibbutz Be’eri during the attack, and his body was taken into Gaza. He had been working in Israeli agriculture since 2017, and was regularly sending money back home to support his parents.
Hamas said Wednesday it remained committed to the deal and intends to return both bodies.
Related: Jews around the world pinned yellow ribbons to their clothes and wore dog tag necklaces. How will they continue to mark Oct. 7 once all the hostages have been returned?
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Boston’s unfinished Holocaust museum hoists boxcar into exhibit space overlooking Boston Common
(JTA) — Traffic on Tremont Street in downtown Boston came to a standstill Tuesday morning as a crane lifted a historic 12-ton railcar onto the fourth floor of the city’s upcoming Holocaust museum.
The museum, the first of its kind in New England, was launched by the The Holocaust Legacy Foundation in 2022, which was founded by couple Jody Kipnis and Todd Ruderman following a 2018 March of the Living trip to Auschwitz.
While construction on the site, which rests on the city’s Freedom Trail near the Boston Common, remains ongoing, the installation of the 20th-century railcar, believed to be the same type used by the Nazis to transport Jews to extermination camps, marked a major milestone for the museum’s creation.
The railcar, which measures 30 feet long, 12 feet high, and nearly 9 feet wide, was lifted into the new museum structure by a 173-foot tower crane before construction continues around it.
A group of supporters, Massachusetts officials, civic leaders, Jewish community representatives and Boston-area partners looked on as the railcar was installed, according to the museum.
“The hardest truth this railcar forces us to confront is this: the Holocaust was not carried out by the Nazis alone. It was carried out by people, ordinary people, who kept the trains running, who stamped the papers, who followed schedules, who chose silence over courage,” said Kipnis, the co-founder and CEO of Holocaust Museum Boston, in a statement. “This railcar will stand at the heart of the Holocaust Museum Boston to confront that truth.”
After the museum opens in late 2026, the railcar will rest in a protruding bay window on the museum’s fourth floor so that pedestrians will be able to see visitors enter the railcar but not exit, a choice the museum said it intended to symbolize “the millions who never returned and the freedoms that were stripped away.”
The railcar was donated to the museum by Sonia Breslow, a Phoenix resident whose father was deported to the Treblinka concentration camp on a railcar of the same kind. Breslow’s father, who later moved to Massachusetts, was among fewer than 100 survivors of Treblinka, where 900,000 Jews were murdered.
The railcar was first discovered in a Macedonian junkyard in 2012, according to the museum, and later transported to Massachusetts, where conservator Josh Craine of Daedalus Art Conservation spent the past six months restoring it for exhibition.
“Seeing this railcar lifted into its new home took my breath away,” said Breslow. “My father survived a transport to Treblinka in a car just like this. Most who were taken there did not survive. For this railcar to be in Massachusetts, a place where he rebuilt his life, is deeply personal. It ensures that his story, and the stories of millions, will never be forgotten.”
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Peter Beinart is speaking in Israel. Cue the criticism from both the left and the right.
(JTA) — Progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart drew a volley of criticism on Tuesday from the boycott Israel movement as well as a right-wing Israeli group over an appearance at Tel Aviv University.
Beinart, who is an outspoken critic of Israel and a journalism professor at the City University of New York, spoke Tuesday evening in Tel Aviv with Yoav Fromer, a senior faculty member at TAU’s English department, in an event titled “Trump, Israel and the Future of American Democracy.”
A founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, publicly called on Beinart to cancel his visit after saying it had privately urged him to do so. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is the BDS movement’s cultural arm and a leading advocate for boycotts of Israeli academic institutions.
“Palestinians condemn Peter Beinart’s event at complicit Tel Aviv University in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” PACBI said in a post on X. “Whitewashing genocide can never be reconciled with any claim to humanism or moral consistency.”
In a press release, PACBI accused the university of being “deeply complicit in enabling and trying to whitewash Israel’s US-armed and funded genocide as well as its decades old regime of settler-colonialism, military occupation and apartheid.”
Beinart declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But he responded to the criticism on social media, where said he supports a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as well as a right of return for Palestinians and an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — all principles of the BDS movement to which he has long subscribed.
At the same time, he said, while he supports “many forms of boycott, divestment and sanction against Israel and Israeli institutions,” he believes there is “value in speaking to Israelis about Israel’s crimes” by speaking at universities.
“I do so because I want to reach Jews who disagree with me—because I believe that by trying to convince Jews to rethink their support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, I can contribute, in some very small way, to the struggle for freedom and justice,” Beinart wrote.
The author of several books including “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” published earlier this year, Beinart is also scheduled to speak at Hebrew University later this week, according to Haaretz.
Beinart also wrote that “right-wing Israeli organizations have pressured Tel Aviv University to cancel my talk,” adding that he felt he should “take advantage of this opportunity to say in Israel what I’ve been saying elsewhere for the last two years.”
Matan Jerafi, the CEO of the right-wing Israeli activist group Im Tirtzu, sent a letter to Tel Aviv University’s president, Ariel Porat, on Tuesday urging him to cancel the event, according to Israel National News.
“Why is he hosting someone on his campus who does not recognize the State of Israel and calls for sanctions against Israel?” wrote Jerafi. “We call on Mr. Porat to cancel this absurd event. Stop tarnishing the reputation of Israeli academia. This is not Columbia University.”
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