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American synagogues are closing at a record rate. This retired judge is rescuing their stained glass windows.
CHICAGO — Jerry Orbach moves through the sanctuary of Northbrook Community Synagogue with the practiced eye of a man who’s spent years rescuing pieces of a fading world. The suburban Chicago congregation glows with stained glass saved from shuttered synagogues, their colors reframed along these walls. What began as one man’s mission has turned the space into a living museum — a collage of light and loss.
A large gold Star of David hangs from a chain around Orbach’s neck, catching the light from the windows he’s saved from seven shuls. At 79, the retired judge has made a second career of rescuing what others have left behind: stained glass from synagogues that have closed, merged, or fallen into disrepair.
He isn’t just saving glass; he’s salvaging light — the one thing that never stops traveling.
Each panel is marked by a small plaque: the name of the congregation, the town it once illuminated, the year it died. When the sun hits them just right, color ripples across the walls like ghosts, a chorus of light still singing long after the voices are gone. “A continuation instead of a destruction,” he says, as if arguing a case.
For more than a century, the number of synagogues in America steadily climbed, a reflection of immigration, assimilation, and Jewish ambition. But by the 1990s, that momentum stalled. In the decades that followed, it reversed. There are roughly 20% fewer synagogues today than there were in 1990, according to data gathered by Alanna E. Cooper, a Jewish Studies professor at Case Western Reserve University. For the first time in American history, more synagogues are closing each year than opening.
The walls of Northbrook Community Synagogue now hold what those closures leave behind: fragments of glass salvaged from sanctuaries across the post-industrial Midwest, where factories shuttered and congregations dwindled. Orbach has become a one-man preservation society.
A history in glass
Stained glass has long been a marker of Jewish arrival in America. When immigrant congregations began erecting monumental synagogues in the early 1900s, they built them with arches, domes, and large window apertures. Glass became the medium of belonging.
In cathedrals, stained glass told the stories of saints. In synagogues, it told the story of survival. Early designs depicted the 12 tribes, the days of creation, the Exodus from Egypt. Later came darker panels, fractured blues and reds evoking the Holocaust, followed by bursts of gold and white celebrating the creation of the State of Israel. Across a century of Jewish life, the art evolved into a visual Torah of endurance.
The factories closed. The congregations scattered. But the windows remain: fragile, luminous, still looking for a home.
Orbach leads me into a small elevator, one hand steadying his cane as the doors close. “You’re gonna like this,” he says, as the bell dings and the elevator jolts to a stop.
The basement sprawls beneath the entire building, a hidden warren of storage rooms and concrete corridors. One room is a large gym. Another section is soon to become indoor pickleball courts. But in a far corner, the scene could be straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. This is where Orbach has built something else: a warehouse of memory.
Wooden crates line the walls, some open, others nailed shut. Inside are stained-glass windows that have yet to find a new home — towering panels from Beth Achim synagogue in Southfield, Michigan, each thirteen feet tall and three feet wide. For now, they rest here, waiting for wherever their journey next takes them, like the vessels of a traveling tabernacle.
Orbach lifts his phone, flicking on the flashlight. Dust drifts through the beam. The air smells faintly metallic, like old pews and time. He runs the light along the edge of a crate, tracing the outline of a hidden window.
“I just got these in two weeks ago,” he says, like a shopkeeper showing off new stock. “Seven for the holidays, seven for the days of creation. They’re gorgeous.”
He steps closer to a crate, resting his hand on the wood as if on a headstone. This, he said, is how memory becomes a kind of faith.
The case for light
A son of Chicago, Orbach was born in Humboldt Park to parents who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe — his mother from Ukraine, his father from Poland. When he was eight, the family moved north to Albany Park, then a humming center of Jewish life. He’s stayed close to the city ever since: studying law at Loyola, serving as a prosecutor and alderman, and later, in 1988, taking the bench in Cook County. In time he rose to head the court’s law division in District Two, a job that taught him to listen before ruling. He retired two decades ago, though he now mediates and arbitrates cases — a judge, it seems, never entirely off duty.
A few of Orbach’s earliest rescues were the panels from his childhood synagogue in Albany Park. They once illuminated the sanctuary where he became bar mitzvah, where he was married, where his parents once prayed. Reinstalled now in Northbrook, they’ve since framed his grandchildren’s baby namings. “They sold the building to a church,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the idea of those windows ending up in a dumpster.”
Something shifted. He started calling contractors, preservationists — anyone with a ladder and a conscience. Soon he was showing up at demolition sites, paying crews out of pocket to let him climb the scaffolding and pry the glass from the walls. Once, at Mikro Kadosh Anshei Ticktin, an old Chicago congregation, he and his crew worked through the night, prying the stained glass from the front while a bulldozer tore into the back of the building. “By the end, there was one wall left,” he said. “It was shaking while we got the last window out.”
He talks about the windows the way some people talk about those who once prayed beneath them, as if they still have a pulse. “If you keep the memory of the shuls alive,” he said, “the people in them are alive too.”
From ruin to renewal
Among Orbach’s most prized rescues are a set of stained-glass windows from Saginaw, Michigan — luminous panels manufactured in France and salvaged just before their synagogue was torn down. He brought them to Northbrook several years ago, giving their light a second life.
A few months after Orbach installed the Saginaw windows, Cooper — the scholar who tracks synagogue closures and the fate of their sacred objects — flew in from Cleveland to see them. She’d been studying what happens to the sacred items left behind when synagogues close: Torah scrolls, yahrzeit plaques, arks, pews, memorial lights. But the stained glass, she said, posed the hardest questions.
Stained-glass windows don’t have a sacred status like a Torah scroll or even the building itself. They carry a different kind of holiness. “I’ve heard many congregations describe their windows as the soul of their congregation,” Cooper said.
She found in Orbach what her fieldwork had only theorized. “He’s creating an afterlife for these windows,” she said at a dedication ceremony at Northbrook, where they both spoke.
Standing before the crowd that day, Cooper described the scene she’d witnessed when windows were removed from Ahavath Israel in Kingston, New York, which Orbach also rescued and relocated to Northbrook. Cooper recalled workmen carrying the panels to their crates as the last members of the congregation looked on. “As they lowered the windows into the boxes,” she said, “it felt like a burial.”
Now she gestured toward the sanctuary, the glass alive with color once more. “And this,” she said, “is the afterlife.”
In his own sanctuary
Orbach has one more thing to show me, in his two-story home on a quiet suburban street. Rusty, his six-year-old rescue mutt, bounds to the door. His wife, Noreen, waves from the hallway.
The foyer is lined with photos of his two daughters and their families. Hanging above the entryway are two stained-glass windows he salvaged years ago from a shuttered synagogue in Lakeview, Illinois, where he used to go for minyan. The site is now condos.
“In my own way, this is how I keep those shuls alive,” he says, glancing up at the glass.
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There’s a new Judaism in town — or maybe it’s very, very old
In a townhouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a gathering for Tu B’Av was underway. There was chanting and breathwork, singing and ceremony. Several Brooklyn-based Jewish communities, including Temple of the Stranger and Lab/Shul, had come together for the experience.
These vibes are usually associated with Eastern traditions, paganism or indigenous American practices; most Westerners who want that form of spirituality go looking for it at Buddhist meditation centers or ayahuasca retreats, forms of engagement more often associated with the 1960s or ’70s counterculture movement than with a synagogue.
But a group of rabbis, leaders and spiritual seekers believe drum circles, chanting, meditation and mysticism are, in fact, just as core to Judaism as any rabbinic text — a sort of lost magic that has impeded vibrant, direct spiritual experience.
“I get this sense that my family believed God is dead, God died 2000 years ago when the Temple burned. Everything could only be archaeology,” said Rav Jericho Vincent, who grew up Haredi and now leads Temple of the Stranger, a Brooklyn based Ivri community. “I don’t accept God’s death.”
Instead, Vincent wants to teach a Judaism that is more alive, and more connected to the divine — one that can offer wisdom to Jews and non-Jews alike. To that end, at the Tu B’Av event, Becca Goldstein, a 34-year-old cultural entrepreneur and spiritual practitioner who is helping to build the new movement, announced a new name for what they were doing to those gathered for the ceremony: Ivri.
For some of the attendees, this was a word they’d already been using to describe their spiritual identity, and the announcement was met with celebrations. For others, it was confusing. Ivri is one the oldest words in the Torah for the ancestors of the Jewish people; it’s the Hebrew word for Hebrew. Weren’t they already Ivri?
Defining the term is complicated, not least because the burgeoning movement is more of a loose web of teachers and spiritual seekers than a clearly defined organization with official values or tenets; every single person I spoke to for this story used the word “mycelial” to describe it. (A mycelium is the underground network of thread-like connections between mushrooms.)
“There’s been something happening, certainly in American Judaism for a while now,” said Vincent, who has a book on Ivri Judaism coming out next year. “This mycelial network of a different way of doing and being Jewish that’s embodied and mystical.”
Because of this diffuse nature, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what Ivri is; there are commonalities — a desire to cultivate a more spiritual and mystical Judaism, an emphasis on the feminine aspect of the divine, a tendency toward participatory rituals, and a strong sense that they are reaching back to ancient or lost Jewish practices. But there’s no central structure meting out decisions or defined set of tenets, and each group operates independently.
There is Vincent, and their Brooklyn-based community, Temple of the Stranger, and Amichai Lau-Lavie and Shira Kline of fellow Brooklyn-based Lab/Shul; their organizations lean into queerness and often incorporate theater into their services. There is Rabbi Zvika Klein in Berkeley, the spiritual leader of the congregation Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley, and Adena Phillips, founder of a group called Kimu that serves “Jewish spiritual seekers” — both also lead Shabbat at the Burning Man festival as part of a camp called “Milk and Honey.” There is Rabbi Jill Hammer, who co-founded the Kohenet Institute, which ordained Jewish priestesses from 2005 until it closed in 2024 due to leadership changes and the pandemic; she now leads Beit Kohenet, an organization offering classes and retreats on Jewish witchcraft and the divine feminine. There is Shefa, an organization that cultivates psychedelic use and exploration for Jews.
But whatever the throughline is, it’s magnetic, powerful and popular.
Chochmat HaLev’s membership has tripled in the past three years, regularly maxing out their sanctuary’s 300 person capacity on Friday nights. Their yearlong intensive Jewish learning course, “Go Deeper,” planned for 30 participants, had to cap its first cohort at 90.
The Big Jewish Gathering, a sort of coming-out event for the Ivri movement in Brooklyn, organized by Goldstein, sold out with a waiting list of well over 100 people. The Burning Man Shabbat draws at least a thousand festivalgoers each year to pray in the dust. Vincent has nearly 20,000 followers on Instagram.
Yet Ivri offerings are also controversial. The rituals are so unrecognizable to what people expect Judaism to be that several people I spoke to wondered whether the Ivri movement was really Jewish at all — or whether they wanted to be.
“It’s a totally post-halachic model,” said Shaul Magid, professor of modern Jewish studies at the Harvard Divinity School. (He attended, spoke at and wrote about the Big Jewish Gathering.) “If you write something about this, people will be scratching their heads like, ‘This is crazy.’”
Roots and branches
At the Big Jewish Gathering in January, dozens of Jewish thought leaders and groups came together for a weekend event in Brooklyn. Though the event didn’t advertise the term Ivri, in practice, it was a kind of coming out party for the movement.
The event had some more familiar forms of engagement, such as panel discussions. But there was also drumming and breathwork. Hammer led “Heelooleem,” a vineyard ritual based on biblical descriptions of ancient Jewish celebrations; participants sang and danced as they stomped grapes in a wooden basin.
These rituals may sound New Age-y, but Ivri practitioners argue they are in fact callbacks to Jewish practice that was lost.
“We can read about the libations in the temple. They’re like, ‘OK, why don’t we just do them — if they’re so powerful and so important, then why don’t we just do them?’” said Magid by way of example.
It’s clear that Jewish practice has changed over time. Women’s rituals and folk rituals were rarely recorded, meaning they were lost over the years. Centuries of persecution forced Jews to gather more quietly. And, after the Temple’s destruction, rabbis had to form a new tradition that could survive without being anchored to a particular land; in creating a new, portable religion, they shaped Jews into the people of the book.
Those in the Ivri movement feel that something important was lost in that process, including the wisdom of women, an ecstatic joy in prayer and Judaism’s connection to the earth. And, to critics who believe they are departing too far from tradition, they say that Judaism has always changed; they’re simply participating in that custom.
“When I hear those kinds of questions, I imagine them being asked of the rabbis who were forming what became rabbinic Judaism. How can you not have animal slaughter? How can you not have priests?” said Vincent. “I imagine the rabbis must have gotten that pushback, because they remade Judaism more than anything.”
The Ivri movement doesn’t want to get rid of existing wisdom — “I’m always trying to balance like, give me that quote from Rabbi Akiva, and also give me the wisdom of the mothers and aunties,” said Vincent. But they do want to add to it.
That said, many of the teachers I spoke to voiced a deep suspicion of preserving what was done purely for the sake of preservation, a tendency toward nostalgia-driven practice that they believe has reified.
“Too many people say, ‘I come to prayer services not because the prayer services are meaningful in any way but because it reminds me of the prayer services of my youth — even though I was bored out of my mind as a kid, and remain bored out of my mind,’” Krieger said. “I’m saying no, spiritual practice should be meaningful! It’s not just preserving tradition for the sake of preserving tradition.”
Hammer voiced a similar stance. “Ultimately rituals survived to support people. They exist to help people live in meaningful ways. And what can happen if you hold the rituals too tightly is that they become a kind of museum, like we’re going to do this thing to remember what our ancestors did,” she said. “And we forget what that was meant to do. We forget that the ritual was meant to transform.”
Making the old new again
Some of the boldness these leaders feel in designing rituals that are so different from what most Jews might expect may spring from the fact that many of them grew up more religious than the average American Jew. Krieger grew up Orthodox, as did Adena Phillips, who leads the Burning Man Shabbat with him. Goldstein went to a Conservative day school and an Orthodox synagogue. Vincent grew up Haredi.
Each felt unsatisfied with the Judaism they were raised with — restrictions around gender norms and limitations, a culture of social conservatism. And they felt the Judaism they were given was too cerebral, focused on studying texts instead of practicing them.
As Goldstein put it, “My experience is that it’s very hard to have a direct experience of the divine from your mind.”
Yet they also didn’t feel as though established progressive movements, like Reform Judaism, had the depth they were seeking.
“Their way of being progressive is watering down Judaism and making it as thin and vanilla as possible,” said Krieger. “There’s this myth that if you want to make Judaism accessible to people, lower the bar of what you’re asking of them.”
But, he pointed out, plenty of Jews and non-Jews alike are seeking a demanding spiritual practice, turning to rigorous practices like meditation or yoga that require specific diets and strict observance but also offer a deep experience of the divine. The issue isn’t that kashrut or Shabbat are too difficult; the issue, Krieger said, is that these people aren’t finding the transcendent experiences they crave in Judaism. But they want to.
“The folks I think of as being involved in this movement are folks who really don’t want the weak tea Judaism, the bagels and lox Judaism, or summoning in Native American teachers because we don’t have our own wisdom,” said Vincent. Instead, those drawn to the Ivri movement want to find that kind of spirituality within Judaism, without having to be an outsider appropriating or visiting another practice.
This has emboldened Ivri thinkers to look to the past, mining from folk tales, Kabbalah and biblical descriptions of celebrations to find what they seek within Judaism. On Shavuot, Krieger led a grief ritual based on the Shalosh Regalim, part of ancient Temple pilgrimage rituals in which pilgrims circled those grieving and ostracized. It was deeply based on real practices, but innovated to fit the modern moment; participants chanted the words to an ancient mourning song, stopping to share their stories and embrace. For Rosh Hashanah last year, Vincent designed a ceremony around the story of the binding of Isaac in which participants put Abraham on trial to interface with the tale’s traumatic themes.
And Magid pointed out that however woo-woo these rituals — often full of theater, witchiness and connection to the spirit world — might seem, they could arguably be seen as part of a Hasidic ultra-Orthodox tradition. To most people, an image of the black-hatted Orthodox Jew symbolizes the most Jewish kind of Jew, the most religious form of practice. But, the professor pointed out, the Judaism practiced in Hasidic sects is full of spirits and magic.
“If you grow up in a modern Orthodox world or a Conservative world, it’s very different. It doesn’t have that very aesthetic, mythical flavor to it,” he said. “The ultra-Orthodox world is a very magical world — all of these mythic stories about demons floating around.”
But Vincent, for their part, rejects a framework of comparison; they don’t want to cede an automatic legitimacy to the Judaism of the Haredi world.
“There is this pandemic of a spiritual inferiority complex. Even rabbis will tell me: ‘I don’t know enough, I’m not a good Jew,’” said Vincent. “We’re letting it be defined by ultra-Orthodoxy. Those of us who have seen the wizard behind the curtain understand that actually ultra-Orthodoxy is a post-Holocaust version of Judaism. We understand the ways in which it is different than the Judaism of a hundred years ago.”
The birth of a name
The Ivri movement is far from the first to try to build a new, more spiritual, more embodied, more radically open practice of Judaism. Many of the hallmarks of what the Ivri teachers point to in their spiritual practice might be familiar from both the Renewal movement, the Kohenet movement and even the neo-Hasidut of Martin Buber or Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Indeed, many of the Jewish communities and teachers in the greater Ivri movement identify, or previously identified at least loosely, with Renewal Judaism; Krieger and Vincent were both ordained through ALEPH and Vincent has studied with Hammer, of Beit Kohenet. So why the need for a new name?
To Hammer, the difference between Ivri and what came before is a cultural one. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of the Renewal movement, died over a decade ago and his work grew out of 1960s counterculture. The Kohenet movement, too, was born decades ago now. Ivri feels like the product of a new generation.
“I also identify as a Kohenet, and I also identify as part of the Jewish Renewal movement. It’s not that Ivri would define me as a person or practitioner, but I’m finding it helpful,” she said. “Maybe if you think of a movement more as pieces of music that go together, but one comes after the other.”
Goldstein, who organized the Big Jewish Gathering, said meeting the cultural moment is a big focus of the movement — and one that draws funders.
“My bubbie’s voice comes to mind, she always says: ‘Why does your generation think so much and ask so many questions? Why can’t you just be and live and let live?’” she said. “We’re forced to right now because of identity. The Jewish identity signifiers that held up in our parents generation and grandparents generation aren’t working right now.”
Hammer echoed the sentiment, saying that many American Jews are too focused on “replicating the spiritual practice exactly,” becoming so rigid about both identity and prayer that they have forgotten that religion is supposed to be a living vehicle to create meaning and transformation.
Goldstein wants to find a Judaism that can speak not only to Jews, but show the rest of the world that Judaism has more to offer than the highly politicized identity that dominates today, an identity which is breaking down as Jews debate what their relationship to Israel, to the Holocaust and to persecution really should be. She believes the growing Ivri movement — which she is working to find funding and create new events and avenues to develop — can offer Jews a new way to relate to their Judaism that they feel joyous and proud to participate in.
Showcasing Jewish practices that have a spiritual appeal, and speak to today’s concerns — like climate change, a non-dual understanding of gender and a need for meaning — could make Judaism more accessible and appealing to Jews and non-Jews alike. (Most Ivri spaces welcome non-Jews to participate.) And it could give Jews a new way to relate to their Jewish identity, one that isn’t rooted in a Judaism these teachers see as rooted in a closely-held trauma that is doing damage.
Of course, the emerging school of Ivri Judaism won’t speak to everyone; however well-grounded in ancient traditions and practices it may be to stomp on grapes or chant in a circle, it just feels too woo-woo for some.
“Ideally we want people to follow a practice because it is transformative, and we can only find out what’s transformative if we experiment,” Hammer said. Even the changes that don’t end up sticking or stay on the fringes, she believes, get shape Judaism over time.
Of course, every Ivri leader acknowledged, not everyone wants to experiment. But that’s fine — there are already plenty of people who do. Their biggest problem is finding a space to fit them all in one room.
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How the Kefalonia killings led to the World War II massacre of Greece’s Jews
The Holocaust in Greece has always occupied a strangely small place in the broader memory of World War II. This is despite the fact that Greece lost somewhere around 80 to 90 percent of its prewar Jewish population, one of the highest proportions in occupied Europe, and that Thessaloniki had been one of the great Jewish cities of the continent. The destruction was so complete that it is easy today to visit Greece, even repeatedly, without quite appreciating what disappeared.
I was reminded of this on Kefalonia, an Ionian island where we spent part of this summer. We try to get to a Greek island most years, but this trip unexpectedly led into a history that connected the collapse of Fascist Italy, a largely forgotten German massacre of Italian soldiers and the final destruction of much of Greek Jewry.
In September 1943, two months after Italy overthrew Benito Mussolini — then abandoning its alliance with Hitler and signing an armistice with the Allies — German forces on Kefalonia turned against their former partners. The roughly 12,000 men of the Italian Acqui Division resisted German demands to surrender their weapons. After defeating them, the Germans executed thousands of Italian prisoners in one of the largest massacres of prisoners of war of World War II.
But Italy’s defeat had another consequence that was ultimately more important for Greece. Much of the country had been under Italian occupation since 1941, and Italian authorities, despite being Fascist occupiers, had generally resisted German efforts to deport Jews from the territories they controlled. This produced the strange situation in which Jews could sometimes find relative safety by moving from German-occupied Greece into Italian-held territory.
On Sept. 8, 1943, that protection effectively disappeared.
As German troops moved to disarm and, on Kefalonia, massacre their former Italian allies, they also took control of Italy’s occupation zones. Jewish communities that had survived the first years of the war were suddenly exposed to the machinery of the Holocaust. The German takeover of Italian Greece thus links two histories that are usually remembered separately: the slaughter of the Acqui Division and the destruction of the remaining Jews of Greece.
The Ionian islands show with unusual clarity what followed.
Corfu, north of Kefalonia, had a Jewish community stretching back centuries. In June 1944, the Germans rounded up nearly all of its roughly 1,800 Jews and deported them, principally to Auschwitz. Few survived. On Zakynthos, just south of Kefalonia, the Germans also demanded the Jews. There, Metropolitan Chrysostomos and Mayor Loukas Karrer refused to provide the requested list, while local residents hid their Jewish neighbors. All 275 Jews survived.
Kefalonia had once had a Jewish community of its own, but most had left before the war, so there was no comparable population remaining when the Germans took over. Within a short distance, then, three Ionian islands produced three different Jewish outcomes: a community destroyed on Corfu, an entire community saved on Zakynthos and a community on Kefalonia that had largely departed before the Germans arrived.
Behind these island stories was the much greater catastrophe of Thessaloniki, the largest city in northern Greece. Before the war, roughly 50,000 Jews lived there, descendants largely of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. They had helped make Thessaloniki one of the great Jewish centers of Europe, a city whose Jewish identity was woven deeply into its commercial and cultural life. Beginning in 1943, the Germans deported the overwhelming majority to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most were murdered.
This is part of what makes the Greek Holocaust so striking. Jews had lived in the Greek world for more than 2,000 years. The Romaniote communities were among the oldest Jewish communities in Europe, predating the arrival of the Sephardim by many centuries. In a few years, most of that world was destroyed. Of roughly 72,000 to 77,000 Jews in prewar Greece, a small fraction survived.
On Kefalonia, some memory of the Italian killings still survives. Kosmas Theodoratos, a 30-year-old islander, told me a story passed down through a friend’s grandmother. Older villagers had claimed that after the massacre they could “smell the blood all the way to the village.”
How far away was it? “A few kilometers,” he said. Even he was skeptical. “It sounds unreal, to be honest,” Theodoratos said. “But that’s the quote my friend’s grandmother had said to us when we were younger.” The witnesses are almost all gone now. “The older generation that lived a little closer to it” talked about the massacre, he said. “There’s not a lot of them left now.”
The same, of course, is increasingly true of the generation that remembers the Jewish communities of Greece before their destruction.
Kefalonia therefore seems worth revisiting not simply because of what happened to the Italians here, extraordinary as that story is. September 1943 was a hinge in the occupation of Greece. Italians who had been occupiers became victims of the Germans; Jews who had found a precarious refuge under Italian rule lost it; and communities that had existed for centuries suddenly found themselves facing deportation and extermination.
The results can still be traced from island to island: Kefalonia, Corfu, Zakynthos. And beyond them stands Thessaloniki, where an entire Jewish civilization was almost erased. Europe seems placid today. But evidence of the tempest is never far from view, for anyone willing to look.
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How Jews made ‘Les Miz’ Christian again
At the end of the 1941 school year, 13-year-old Yitshkok Rudashevski went to meet his friend from the Soviet youth movement. Their confab, and that clear summer day, was soon disturbed by the howl of a siren and the raining down of bombs.
“The street was full of smoke,” Rudashevski wrote in his diary. “It is war.”
On Sunday June 22, Nazis mobilized Operation Barbarossa and began their push toward Vilnius. That Rudashevski was determined to fight back could be credited, at least in part, to the book he had with him at the start of the offensive, which he planned to share with his comrades.
“I carry with me Der Giber in Keytn [The Hero in Chains],” the Yiddish translation of Les Misérables, Rudashevski wrote, “from which we will read together about Gavroche, the child of the Paris proletariat who fell on the barricades alongside the adult fighters.” (Gavroche died in the street fighting of the 1832 June rebellion in Paris; Rudashevski would survive Lithuania’s June uprising, and its ensuing antisemitism, to be murdered by Nazis in the Ponary massacre of 1943.)
It makes sense that Rudashevski, a dedicated Marxist and product of the Lithuanian Yiddish school system, would find a kind of role model in Victor Hugo’s gamin.
That Les Misérables in translation was popular among Yiddish-speaking socialists — it was serialized in the Forverts in our first year of publication — is itself unsurprising, given the book’s preoccupations with social justice. That its ethic was a fundamentally Christian one seemed to matter less than its overall message: a universal concern for “the wretched” and vulnerable, particularly children, women and the formerly incarcerated. This last factor may have resonated deeply with Baderekh, a Yiddish theater troupe composed of displaced persons, who staged the story in 1946 Berlin.
I’ve been reading Les Misérables for about a year now (it’s long and brimming with Hugo’s commentary on post-Napoleonic revolts, essays on the argot of the underworld and digressions on Parisian city-planning) and was successfully influenced to buy a nosebleed seat to the arena tour of the musical at Radio City last Friday. Watching the megawatt melodrama, it occurred to me that in much the same way Jews conquered the Christmas song catalogue, the Jewish creative team behind Les Miz brought Hugo’s doorstopper to the world — and arguably made it more Christian.
Composer Claude-Michel Schönberg, born in France to Hungarian refugee parents who lost much of their family in the Holocaust, and the Tunisian-born Sephardic lyricist Alain Boublil created a concept album and early stage version that was Gallic in the extreme, and so more concerned with Enlightenment concepts than an enlightened human soul.
But when the show was brought to British shores, Boublil, Schönberg and original directors John Caird and Trevor Nunn reimagined the structure, adding a prologue with Valjean and the bishop, who gifts him silver candlesticks to restart his life after 19 years slaving as a convict at the shipyard in Toulon.
The revamp, which brought on journalist Herbert Kretzmer as lyricist, gave the bloodhound Inspector Javert a new solo — beloved by Ben Shapiro — where he connects his unyielding policing to the watchful stars and the God who punished Lucifer for his challenge to the heavenly order.
Valjean prays. A lot. And it ain’t the Shema.
The key innovation of the musical may well be how it sets Valjean and Javert in opposition. Whereas in the novel, Javert seems to have no God save the rigid rule of law, in the show his dogma derives from what its creatives recently, and reductively, referred to in a New York Times interview as an “Old Testament” form of justice. His foil, Valjean, the redeemed man of mercy, stands in for the New Testament’s core of forgiveness, which the show clearly favors.
If it’s odd that the presentation of this false binary was trusted to a Jew named Herbert Kretzmer, it hasn’t seemed to deter many Jews from embracing the show as they once did the novel.
A couple of years ago, I attended a virtual Rosh Hashanah service that used the musical’s final takeaway, “to love another person is to see the face of God,” as its thematic thrust. (It was a bit much for me.) It would make just as much sense — though it would be cringe in the extreme — to deploy the show for a Yom Kippur sermon on atonement.
The Jewish affinity for the material is helped by that Hugo, unlike so many — probably most — of his contemporaries is not marred by antisemitism. He inveighed against pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 1880s, warning in an English paper that “Christianity is martyrizing Judaism” and publishing a not-so-subtle allegory about the Spanish Inquisition to drive the point home. I’d say he was doing the Emile Zola thing before it was cool, but it was never particularly popular to speak out in this way in the French Third Republic.
While Kretzmer was born in South Africa to refugees from a later wave of Tsarist pogroms, he and the other Jewish writers of the Les Miz musical do not seem to have been particularly observant. The strongest hint of the cultural inheritance is in the klezmeresque intro to “Master of the House,” a theme of the penny-pinching innkeeper Thénardier. (If that’s problematic, Thénardier later makes an antisemitic remark when the tune is reprised, implying he’s not Jewish himself.)
The show nonetheless points to universal values legible to Jews and, indeed, the world. Like Fiddler before it, Les Misérables is a global phenomenon not on the merits of its specificity, but for how it draws on a common humanity. The Yiddish left of the 20th century read the book; protesters in Hong Kong and China can now be heard singing the musical’s anthem of angry men.
As Hugo wrote in his introduction to the book, “so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.”
It may be immodest, but history, and his own adapters, have proven him right.
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