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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
—
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Chef Alon Shaya shares the stories, resilience and recipes of World War II survivors
(JTA) — In 2015, while visiting Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, James Beard Award-winning chef Alon Shaya came face-to-face with a World War II artifact that moved him deeply.
It was a red cloth triangle — cut from a Nazi flag — embroidered with the names of a few dozen female prisoners at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
In a place where they were starving to death, he learned these women had formed a clandestine “food” club. Together, they talked about recipes, their Friday night Shabbat candlesticks and cherished memories of home.
That red cloth was “100% the catalyst,” Shaya said, for his deep interest in food as “an agent of survival, defiance and bringing people together.”
Now, 11 years after that defining moment in Jerusalem, Shaya’s second book, “Memories of a Good Meal: Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival,” is being published on Oct. 6. Co-authored with food historian June Hersh, the book gathers accounts from survivors and heroes of World War II, illustrating the outsized role that food — and the memory of it — played in human survival. While featuring 80 recipes, it functions as much as a history book as a cookbook.
“The recipes are there to support the stories,” Shaya said. “It’s not the other way around.”
Shaya and Hersh tell the stories of 10 distinct groups impacted by the war, including Jewish partisans, hidden children, Navajo code talkers, persecuted homosexuals, Japanese Americans, and Austrian and German Jews who built new lives in the Dominican Republic.
Alongside these narratives, the authors included family recipes preserved across generations. Where none survived or existed, Shaya crafted recipes using ingredients available to the book’s subjects during the war.
The opening chapter highlights a story particularly close to Shaya’s heart. In 2019, during a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Shaya was shown a tattered, 100-year-old, handwritten recipe collection from the Fenves family of Yugoslavia. Saved during the war by the family’s cook, Maris, the Hungarian-language notebook was eventually donated to the museum by survivor Steven Fenves.
Determined to bring those dishes back to life, Shaya worked with Fenves to translate the recipes, filling in missing elements like precise steps, exact measurements and oven temperatures.
“I really became a part of their family,” said Shaya, whose collaboration on what became known as the Rescued Recipes project has raised nearly $1 million for the Holocaust Museum to digitize historical documents and artifacts. “The family wouldn’t be here if Steven and his sister didn’t survive Auschwitz,” said Shaya.
Featured recipes from this chapter reflect the Hungarian culinary traditions of Fenves’s hometown of Subotica, including körözött (a spiced cheese spread) and authentic Hungarian goulash.
Other chapters explore how people sustained themselves despite meager resources. In the profile of Polish Jewish partisan Shalom Yoran — who subsisted largely on potatoes while hiding in the woods — Shaya developed recipes centered on the staple tuber, including Polish herring and potato salad, potato dinner rolls and potato, and pine nut doughnuts with blackberry caramel.
“Shalom’s wife, Varda, shared his story with us,” Shaya explained. “The partisans lived in a hole in the ground in the Polish forest through winters that reached minus-20 degrees, and they did that for four years. Potatoes were a huge part of their survival.”
For Sarah Pelz, executive editor at Harvest, the book’s publisher and the granddaughter of a partisan, the concept of the book resonated deeply, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks inside Israel. “The throughline here is the power of food and memory — the power of food to bring us together at a table, and to remind us who we are and where we come from,” she said in an interview.
“Alon’s message is powerful and necessary right now,” she continued. “He hopes that people will read this book, will cook from it, and that it will bring people together at the table, people of diverse backgrounds, people of diverse perspectives, that it will not just help to enlighten readers, to history and to what happened, but also help bring people together.”
In gathering these accounts across the globe, Shaya and Hersh faced a race against time, as most interviewees were well into their 90s or older. John Kinsel, one of the last living Navajo code talkers, was 107 years old when the authors visited him on the Navajo Nation reservation. His chapter details the vital role Native American Marines played by using their complex language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific theater. The book features recipes inspired by Navajo traditions, including blue corn mush and stuffed pumpkin with stewed lamb.
Throughout the project, Shaya couldn’t help but draw parallels between past atrocities and modern struggles.
“One of the lessons that struck home the most for me is that people will persecute you for what you believe in and gather together and create laws to persecute you,” he said. “We saw it in what happened with immigration in the 1940s, and we see it with what’s happening in America today.”
He was also struck by the role of propaganda, promulgated then by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, and today by bad actors on social media, in spreading hate and disinformation.
Some of the stories, like the meal prepared by nuns in a convent for a group of persecuted homosexual prisoners, seem almost cinematic in nature.
“I have definitely thought about turning these stories into a miniseries or a movie,” said Shaya. “Nobody has shown interest in it yet, but it is something that I think the more ways these stories can be shared, the better.”
Born in Israel and raised in Philadelphia, Shaya has become one of the country’s leading interpreters of Israeli and Middle Eastern cooking, with a distinctly Southern sensibility. His 2018 cookbook, “Shaya: An Odyssey of Food, My Journey Back to Israel,” blends memoir with recipes.
Shaya was committed to the latest book despite huge demands on his time. The chef and his wife, Emily, have two children, aged five and two. His Pomegranate Hospitality operates three restaurants, Saba and Safta’s Table in New Orleans, where he lives, and Safta in Denver. (Saba means grandfather and Safta means grandmother in Hebrew.) He is also involved in a variety of philanthropic work.
“The work I put into this book fills my heart and makes me feel good, like I’m doing something that builds me up and can have an impact,” said Shaya.
Shaya views the book as an educational tool.
“This book might engage a 13-year-old who really loves the chocolate cake recipe,” Shaya reflected. “If he or she hears the history behind that chocolate cake and delves into the history behind it, they learn that Austrian and German Jews took refuge in the Dominican Republic and wanted to keep their culinary traditions alive and need to use the local resources. That’s how a traditional Sacher torte-inspired tres leches cake came to be. Or a plantain latke, or matzo ball soup with avocado, lime and yucca.
“If those stories can come together and have that kind of impact on one 13-year-old in the world,” he added, “I will feel complete.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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‘That’s a lie’: Israeli journalists clash with Irish football association ahead of tense rematch
(JTA) — Israel and Ireland’s UEFA Nations League rematch on Sunday ratcheted up tensions between the two teams, in a sports drama where emotions over the Gaza war have fueled theatrics as intense as the match itself.
During the 1-1 draw played in Serbia, Ireland’s captain declined, as in the last match, a pregame handshake with his Israeli counterpart, Irish players bowed their heads during the playing of the Israeli national anthem and the team donned black armbands to signal their disapproval of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Israeli players also wore black armbands displaying “7/10,” in recognition of the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
Tensions also spilled off the pitch.
Staffers for the Irish team abruptly cut short a Saturday press conference with Irish head coach Heimir Hallgrímsson after a tense back-and-forth between Israeli journalists and Ireland’s press officer, Kieran Crowley.
While both Hallgrímsson and Israeli coach Ran Ben-Shimon, in his separate meeting with the media, insisted their focus remained on the game itself, Ireland’s press conference took a turn when an Israeli journalist asked Hallgrímsson for his thoughts on the flydubai hijacking last week.
“What do you say about the people that you support? Their ideology is based on murder,” the reporter asked. “Just this week, one of them tried to kill 170 Israeli passengers, including 27 innocent children and thousands of others.”
Crowley interrupted, saying, “We are not doing any questions like this today. We are doing football questions.”
Another Israeli reporter then asked Hallgrímsson about his team calling Israeli players “monkeys” during the Sept. 27 match. Crowley again interrupted, saying, “That is completely untrue. … That’s a lie. You’ve just broadcast a lie.”
The press conference was then cut off, as the reporter argued with a staffer who confiscated the microphone. UEFA barred the two Israeli reporters from the postgame media gathering on Sunday.
The incident came after months of controversy leading up to the Sept. 27 match between the two sides, which Ireland faced intense pressure to boycott. Ireland has a long history of pro-Palestinian policies and anti-Israeli sentiment.
There were additional signs of tension on the field, with Ireland’s head of athletic performance, Damien Doyle, alleging that an Israeli player spat at him as the teams left the field at the end of the first half. Israel’s football association denied the accusation.
After the match, Hallgrímsson called on UEFA to ensure the two teams do not face each other in the future.
“That’s not ours to decide, that’s UEFA,” he said. “I wouldn’t want or wish any national team to go through what we have gone through these two weeks. UEFA needs to step in and do something.”
Hallgrímsson also indicated that he had made a “mistake” by sharing his stance on the war in Gaza. In the lead-up to the matches, he had told reporters, “We’re not playing with genocide, we’re playing against genocide. We’re playing against Israel, we’re not playing with Israel.”
On Sunday, Hallgrímsson added that “my feelings and my opinions should be set aside when I am spokesman for an organisation.”
Sunday’s game included Irish player Finn Azaz, whose mother has Israeli heritage, as a substitute.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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How Jim Bakker sent a rabbi’s son to 52 churches
Jim Bakker convinced me to go to church.
Bakker died Monday at 86. For a stretch in the 1980s he and his wife, Tammy Faye, were on television every day, praying, singing and weeping, her in waterproof mascara, in front of as many as 13 million people. Then came the sex scandal, the hush money and the fraud trial.
And yet, he became my gateway into Christianity.
I’m an Orthodox rabbi’s son who grew up in the Bible Belt, which made me a spiritual window-shopper. My bedroom window looked out across the street at Cokesbury Methodist Church. Every Sunday morning, I watched the families climb out of their minivans in khakis and pastels, smiling like people who had never once wondered whether turning on a light switch counted as work on Shabbat.
We didn’t have cable. Regular TV in our house was already a negotiation, and a channel devoted to Jesus wasn’t even up for discussion.
Then I went off to college, moved out on my own, and one of my first acts of rebellion was ordering basic cable. I flipped on the Cartoon Network, a channel that showed animated classics around the clock, and wondered if this was what the Messianic age felt like.
On Sunday mornings, on channel after channel, I stumbled across pastors preaching to their congregations. What hooked me wasn’t the theology; the sermons seemed more like self-help seminars. It was the production. Where I came from, worship was a closed-door affair, in Hebrew, for members only. Here it was a show, with a band and cameras.
The format Bakker perfected inspired others: the tears, the house band, the host who knew exactly where the camera was. I couldn’t look away.
Heaven, with a gift shop
Bakker was born in Michigan in 1940 into a Pentecostal family, and he met Tammy Faye at Bible college. They married in 1961, after three dates, which, as a rabbi’s son who spent years in the dating trenches, I find both reckless and enviable. They drifted into television through Pat Robertson’s network, where they hosted a children’s show, and in 1976 they started their own ministry: PTL, short for Praise the Lord. At its peak, PTL drew as many as 13 million viewers a day and took in more than $100 million a year. Critics said PTL stood for “Pass the Loot.”
On 2,500 acres in Fort Mill, South Carolina, the Bakkers built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park with a hotel, water slides, skating and Bible study. They sold shares in it and offered lifetime vacations there to donors.
I’ll confess: I was jealous. Christians had a place you went to bring your family closer to God, with a gift shop and cotton candy. We had the Catskills and a very long buffet. I took this about as well as a kid whose neighbors have a swimming pool.
Then it all fell apart. In 1987 came the revelation of Bakker’s encounter with a church secretary, Jessica Hahn, and the $265,000 paid to keep it quiet. Fellow preachers lined up to condemn him, Jerry Falwell took over the ministry, and a federal inquiry followed. He was convicted of fraud in 1989 and sentenced to 45 years. He served five. Tammy Faye divorced him while he was in prison.
Bakker left prison in 1994, chastened. In a 1996 book called I Was Wrong, he wrote that Jesus had nothing good to say about money, a lesson he learned, as so many of us do, only after losing the water park. In 2003 he resurfaced in Branson, Missouri, hosting a new show from a café and selling viewers buckets of emergency food for the end of days.
The Jew on the Jumbotron
Soon, I had a plan of my own. I would spend a year going to 52 churches over 52 Sundays. Jewish tradition teaches that it’s verboten to go to church, especially during services. I planned to go as a journalistic endeavor and write a book about the experience.
Yet, I was still riddled with the guilt of my ancestors, so I went to my synagogue’s rabbi and asked his permission. To my surprise, he granted it on two conditions: I had to wear my press badge, so worshippers knew I was there to take notes and not to take part in prayer. The second condition was that I had to wear a yarmulke. People needed to know I was Jewish, the rabbi said. As if being short, bespectacled and named Benyamin Cohen didn’t already give that away.
Jim Bakker had put church on television. I was going to find out what happened when you stepped through the screen.
My wife, Elizabeth, a Christian minister’s daughter who had converted to Judaism, was still dripping wet from the mikvah and not exactly thrilled that her husband was going to spend a year in churches. She pointed out that I was about to become the first Orthodox Jew in history to qualify for a church loyalty card.
I started in the deep end, at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, one of the country’s largest megachurches, home to 15,000 people on a typical Sunday. The sanctuary looked like a sports arena. A camera operator found me in the pews. Within seconds my shayna punim was 20-feet tall on Jesus’ Jumbotron for all to see. I had been there for all of five minutes and I was already outed as the Jew.
“Oh God,” I thought. “What if my dad could see me now?”
Watching church was Bakker’s big idea. At New Birth, the cameras roamed the pews and the congregation cheered at itself on the big screens. After years of watching church from my couch, I was the one in the shot.
I’d spent my childhood sure the grass was greener at the proverbial church across the street. It wasn’t. It was just better lit. Once the cameras and the choirs were gone, what I found were people trying, like me, to figure out how to believe, and some of them were doing it better than I was.
Hanging out with Jesus made me a better Jew, a sentence I never expected to write, and one my father never expected to hear.
The other Bakker
There was another Bakker I felt I knew.
I was born the same year as Jay Bakker, the son of Jim and Tammy Faye. He was 12 when his father was indicted. By 18, he’d co-founded Revolution, which eventually opened a branch in Atlanta, my hometown. The New York Times once described churches like it as meeting in “warehouses, bars, skate parks, punk clubs,” which is, to put it plainly, not where my synagogue held services.
In 2006, the Sundance Channel made a six-part series about him called One Punk Under God, and I was hooked. The camera was back on the Bakker family business, only now it followed the son, who seemed to be building the opposite of his parents’ church.
I felt a kinship with Jay that I couldn’t have explained then. We were both preachers’ kids, which meant your father’s job was also your religion, so you couldn’t be mad at one without it messing with the other. He titled his memoir Son of a Preacher Man, which is also what I called a chapter in mine.
His choices were harder than mine. My father never lost his congregation to a federal grand jury. While Jim Bakker went to Branson to sell apocalypse buckets and political prophecy, Jay went toward a gentler, more inclusive faith.
As I learned throughout my journey, a church built for television is only as strong as its ratings. The Jewish service I understand best would make terrible TV. On Yom Kippur we fast for 25 hours and act somberly. In the prayers, we confess in the plural, a whole congregation beating its chests together: we have sinned, not I.
Jim Bakker got me into church, and church sent me back to synagogue. Praise the Lord, as they used to say on his show. And, as we say in mine, amen.
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