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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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Yiddish study and research in Amsterdam — a long history
אַמסטערדאַם און די ייִדישע שפּראַך האָבן אַ לאַנגע בשותּפֿותדיקע געשיכטע. ווייניק מענטשן ווייסן אַז ייִדיש־רעדערס לעבן אין האָלאַנד זײַט דעם 17טן יאָרהונדערט, און אַז זײַט דעם מיטן צװאַנציקסטן יאָרהונדערט װערט די שפּראַך געפֿאָרשט און, מיט איבעררײַסן, געלערנט, אינעם אַמסטערדאַמער אוניװערסיטעט.
לעצטנס האָט זיך געענדיקט די דרױסנדיקע סובװענץ, וואָס האָט געשטיצט די ייִדיש־פּראָגראַם אינעם אוניווערסיטעט און דעם קומענדיקן זמן װעט מען קײן ייִדיש־קורסן נישט לערנען. אַ נײַע דערװײַליקע לײזונג איז, דאַכט זיך נאָענט, נאָר די דאָצענטן און סטודענטן האָפֿן אַז די פֿאַקולטעט־פֿאַרװאַלטונג װעט װאָס פֿריִער גיבן די ייִדישע שפּראַך אַ פֿעסטן אָרט אין דער לערן־פּראָגראַם.
ס׳איז דאָ אַ סך צו דערציילן וועגן דער געשיכטע פֿון ייִדיש אין אַמסטערדאַם. אינעם 17טן און 18טן יאָרהונדערט איז די שטאָט געװען דער װעלטצענטער פֿון דער ייִדישער דרוקאַרבעט. די סאַמע ערשטע ייִדישע צײַטונג, די „דינסטאַגישע און פֿרײַטאַגישע קוראַנטן“, האָט מען טאַקע געדרוקט אין אַמסטערדאַם אין 1686 און 1687.
אין משך פֿונעם 19טן יאָרהונדערט, אונטער דער השפּעה פֿון דער דעמאָלט אײַנגעפֿירטער האָלענדישער שפּראַך־געזעץ־געבונג, איז דער דיאַלעקט מערבֿ־ייִדיש בהדרגהדיק פֿאַרשװוּנדן געװאָרן. לויטן געזעץ האָט מען קינדער געדאַרפֿט לערנען בלױז אױף האָלענדיש און די דרשות אין שיל האָט מען געמוזט האַלטן אױף האָלענדיש.
סוף 19טן יאָרהונדערט האָט זיך דער מצבֿ געביטן ווען ייִדישע אימיגראַנטן פֿון מיזרח־אײראָפּע האָבן מיטגעבראַכט זייער מיזרח־ייִדישן דיאַלעקט. ביזן הײַנטיקן טאָג קען מען הערן די השפּעה פֿון האָלענדיש ייִדיש אױף דער אַמסטערדאַמער גאַס ווי, צום בײַשפּיל, אינעם באַקאַנטן צונאָמען פֿון דער שטאָט אַמסטערדאַם: „מקום“ (אָרט).
דער אַרבעטער־קולטור־פֿאַראײן „אַנסקי“, וואָס איז געגרינדעט געוואָרן אין 1920, איז אַזש ביז אין די 1970ער יאָרן געװען אַ װיכטיקער קולטור־צענטער פֿאַר די ייִדיש־רעדערס אין האָלאַנד. דרײַ פֿערטל פֿון די ייִדן אין לאַנד האָבן נישט איבערגעלעבט דעם חורבן. פֿון דעסטוועגן איז אין האָלאַנד נאָך דער צװײטער װעלט־מלחמה אַלע מאָל געװען אַ קלײנער סכום ייִדיש־רעדערס. עד־היום לערנט מען אַ טייל פֿון די לעקציעס אין דער פֿרומער ייִדישער שול „חדר“ אױף ייִדיש.
דער אינטערעס צו דער שפּראַך האַלט אין איין װאַקסן. אַ צאָל װעלטלעכע ייִדיש־רעדערס, װאָס אַ גרױסער טײל פֿון זײ האָבן זיך געלערנט די שפּראַך ווי דערוואַקסענע, באַטײליקן זיך הײַנט אין ייִדיש־לײענקרײַזן אין פֿאַרשיידענע שטעט. במשך פֿון די לעצטע 20 יאָר זענען אַ רײ קלאַסישע ייִדישע ליטעראַרישע װערק איבערגעזעצט געװאָרן אױף האָלענדיש. עס װערט אַרױסגעגעבן די ליטעראַרישע צײַטשריפֿט „די גאָלדענע פּאַװע“ (דער המשך פֿונעם אַמאָליקן זשורנאַל „גרינע מדינה“) און די שפּראַכקורסן אינעם אַמסטערדאַמער אוניװערסיטעט האָבן זיך די פֿאַרגאַנגענע פֿיר יאָר אַרױסגעװיזן פּאָפּולער ביז גאָר.
זײַט די 1960ער יאָרן האָט זיך אַמסטערדאַם אויך אַנטװיקלט ווי אַ לעבעדיקער און פּראָדוקטיװער פֿאָרשצענטער פֿון דער ייִדישער שפּראַך. טאָגטעגלעך אַרבעט מען איבערן סאַמע גרעסטן צוויישפּראַכיקן ייִדישן װערטערבוך — דעם אָנלײַן „ייִדיש־האָלענדישן װערטערבוך“, צונויפֿגעשטעלט פֿון יוסטוס וואַן דער קאַמפּ. אָנהייב מײַ זענען אַרײַנהאַקערס אָנגעפֿאַלן אויפֿן ווערק אָבער הײַנט איז עס שוין ווידער צוטריטלעך. װאַן דער קאַמפּ האָט געזאָגט, אַז קײן דאַטן זענען, צום גליק, נישט פֿאַרלױרן געגאַנגען.
במשך פֿון דער געשיכטע האָבן אַ רײ ייִדיש־רעדערס אין אַמסטערדאַם געזאַמלט אָרטיקע ייִדישע אױסדרוקן און וועלטסווערטלעך. אין מיטן 19טן יאָרהונדערט האָט יונה ל. פֿאָרזאַנגער צונויפֿגעקליבן חנעװדיקע װערטלעך פֿון די האלענדישע ייִדן און זײ געניצט אין אַ מעשׂה װעגן די איבערלעבונגען פֿון אַן אָרעמען גאַסן־מוזיקאַנט. אַ סך פֿון די שפּריכװערטער זענען שפּעטער אַריבער אױף האָלענדיש, לדוגמא „זײַן תּחת ברענט, מוז ער אױף די בלאָסטערס זיצן“ (װער עס טוט שלעכטס, מוז „טראָגן“ די קאָנסעקװענצן).
אין אַנדערע אױסדרוקן זענען ייִדיש און האָלענדיש צונױפֿגעמישט געװאָרן, ווי למשל אין דעם װערטל װאָס כאַראַקטעריזירט די באַציִונגען אין דער אַמסטערדאַמער ייִדישער קהילה: „װען קהל שפּילט דע באַס (בעל־הבית), שנעלט מער דער פּרנס פֿאָר דען נאַז.“ (װען קהל שאַפֿט זיך, שנעלט מען דעם פּרנס אין דער נאָז.)
אין אַ סך ייִדישע שטיבער קען מען געפֿינען האַרטאָג בײמס ביכער װעגן דעם האָלענדיש־ייִדישן װאָקאַבולאַר. ביים, אַ האָלענדישער לערער היסטאָריקער, האָט צונױפֿגעשטעלט אַ װערטערביכל פֿונעם האָלענדישן ייִדיש (Resten van een taal) און אַ זאַמלונג אױסדרוקן און שפּריכװערטער (Jerosche). די צװײ ביכער זענען געװען באַליבט בײַם ברײטן ייִדישן עולם.
זײַט 1964 זענען אַ צאָל געניטע ייִדיש־לערערס געווען אויפֿן פֿאַקולטעט פֿונעם אוניווערסיטעט: צו ערשט, לעאָ פֿוקס, און דערנאָך — רענאַ פֿוקס מאַנספֿעלד. אין 2005 האָט שלמה בערגער פֿאַרנומען די פּראָפֿעסור „ייִדישע שפּראַך און קולטור“ ביז ער איז ניפֿטר געװאָרן אין 2015.
אַ רײ דיסערטאַציעס װעגן ייִדיש זענען די פֿאַרגאַנגענע יאָרצענדליקער פֿאַרטײדיקט געװאָרן. הילדע פּאַך האָט געפֿאָרשט די ערשטע ייִדישע צײַטונג אין האָלאַנד, „די דינסטאַגישע און פֿרײַטאַגישע קוראַנטן“. באַרט װאַלעט האָט אַנאַליזירט די ייִדישע היסטאָריאָגראַפֿיע אין האָלאַנד; זײַדמאַן מאַוער האָט אָנגעשריבן אַ דאָקטאָר־אַרבעט װעגן פֿרי־מאָדערנער מעדיצינישער ליטעראַטור און אָקערשט האָט מאַריאַנע אָסטינג באַקומען אַ דאָקטאָראַט פֿאַר איר שטודיע װעגן דעם ניסתּרס ראָמאַן „די משפּחה מאַשבער“.
אין אַן אַרטיקל אינעם „פֿאָרװערטס“ דעם פֿאַרגאַנגענעם מײַ האָט פֿיליפּ שוואַרץ געשריבן אַז די אַמסטערדאַמער פֿאָרשערס פֿון ייִדיש און ייִדישע לימודים האָבן זיך ביז אַהער אײַנגעשפּאַרט „אין העלפֿאַנדבײן־טורעמס“. איך בין נישט מסכּים. אַדרבא, עס זענען כּסדר געװען און אַנטשטאַנען נײַע פֿאַרבינדונגען צװישן ייִדיש־רעדערס און דער ייִדיש־פֿאָרשונג און צװישן דער ייִדישער קולטור־ירושה און דער לעבעדיקער שפּראַך.
פֿון 2023 ביז 2025 האָבן די אַמסטערדאַמער ייִדיש־סטודענטן אין אײנעם מיט זײַדמאַן מאַוער צוגעגרייט און אויפֿגעפֿירט פּורים־שפּילן אױף ייִדיש: קודם־כּל אין אַ קלאַסצימער אין אוניװערסיטעט, און אין 2025 — אין טעאַטער. זײ האָבן באַװיזן צוצוציִען צוקוקערס פֿון האָלאַנד, דײַטשלאַנד און ישׂראל. אינעם פּראָיעקט „די ייִדישע שטאָט“ האָבן פֿאָרשערס און אײַנװױנערס פֿון אַמסטערדאַם צוזאַמענגעאַרבעט, פּובליקירט פּאָדקאַסטן און מיט עפֿנלטעכן סוכּה־פּראָיעקט אין 2023 און 2024 ממש צוריק אַרײַנגעשטעלט די ייִדישע געשיכטע אין שטאָט.
אַ סך סטודענטן און לערער זענען שטאַרק אַנטוישט וואָס מע האָט אָפּגעשאַפֿן די ייִדיש־קורסן און זײַדמאַן מאַוער וועט אָנהייבנדיק אין סעפּטעמבער לערנען אינעם בר־אילן אוניװערסיטעט אין ישׂראל.
„די ייִדישע שפּראַך איז אַן אינטעגראַלער טײל פֿון די ייִדישע לימודים אינעם אַמסטערדאַמער אוניװערסיטעט,“ האָט געזאָגט באַרט װאַלעט, אַ פּראָפֿעסאָר דאָרט פֿון ייִדישע לימודים. „כּדי אױפֿצוזיגלען די רײַכע אַמסטערדאַמער ייִדישע קאָלעקציעס קען מען זיך נישט באַגײן אָן אַ קענשאַפֿט פֿון דער ייִדישער שפּראַך.“
אירענע זװיפּ, אַ פּראָפֿעסאָרין פֿון העברעיִש און אַראַמיש, האָט צוגעגעבן אַז זי און אַנדערע האָבן גוטע האָפֿענונגען אױף פֿינאַנציעלן שטיץ דורך ברײטהאַרציקע יחידים.
„די געשיכטע פֿון ייִדיש אין אַמסטערדאַם האָט זיך נאָך לאַנג נישט געענדיקט,“ האָט וואַלעט געזאָגט.
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A smaller, scarred Maccabiah Games opens in Israel, carrying the weight of Oct. 7 and war
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Just days before the start of the Maccabiah Games, the Jewish sports competition held every four years in Israel, Australia was officially out of the competition.
Australia had canceled its official delegation — typically one of the largest — during Israel’s war with Iran. In early June, its organizing group said it could not flout the Australian government’s designation of Israel as a danger zone.
But on Sunday, with the war on hold amid peace deals announced by the United States, Maccabi Australia reversed course. On Wednesday, 14 Australian athletes marched behind the Australian flag into Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem, where they are competing in six sports across two weeks of play.
Australia’s about-face reflects the uncertainty that has plagued the quadrennial “Jewish Olympics” for more than a year, diminishing the number of athletes and countries participating and making it unusually challenging for their supporters to attend from abroad. Organizers say about 5,000 athletes are competing from 55 countries, compared to 10,000 in 2022, when U.S. President Joe Biden joined the opening festivities.
The 2022 Games marked a triumphal return after a year’s delay due to the pandemic. This year’s competition, too, followed a delay: Three weeks before play was set to start in 2025, organizers understood there was no way to bring thousands of Jewish athletes to Israel. Israel was at war with Iran, the government had declared an emergency, and airlines had stopped flying. They postponed — never expecting that conditions would be similar in the months ahead of the Games.
“We were sure that things would be much better by now,” said Roy Hessing, Maccabiah’s chief executive. “The only really good thing that has happened since then is that all the hostages are back.”
Signs of the postponement, and the wrenching years since the last Maccabiah, were omnipresent at Wednesday night’s opening event, starting with the logo for the Games, which features a “25.”
Former hostages took part in the ceremony, including IDF spotter Daniella Gilboa and the American-Israeli soldier Edan Alexander, who both performed with Israeli singer-songwriter Idan Raichel.
The ceremony also included wounded soldiers and representatives of Irgun Nechei Zahal, Israel’s official organization for disabled veterans, as well as recognition of several athletes, including swimmer Eden Zimri, who were killed on Oct. 7.
Members of the French delegation carried shirts featuring Dan Elkayam, their football teammate who was killed in December’s shooting attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney.
“Welcome to your home away from home,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog told attendees. “Your gathering together in Jerusalem, in this beautiful event, fills us with pride and charges this stadium with magnificent energy. … Each of you here is a winner, and I know you will have a great Maccabiah together, in unity and in love of Israel.”
In a sign of Israel’s internal tensions, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew both applause and audible boos as he took the podium. The ceremony took place on the eve of the 1000th day since Oct. 7, with an election looming and the vast majority of Israelis critical of Netanyahu’s refusal to open a state commission of inquiry into the failures that led to the historic attack.
Netanyahu said he had “only one message” for attendees: “In the face of antisemitism, stand tall, stand proud, do not bend, do not bow, stand strong, stand together, and together we shall win. You are all winners here, we shall be winners in the world.”
Hessing said the decision to postpone rather than cancel the Games was essential as the event has only grown more important for Jewish communities abroad, where he said “antisemitism is raging,” and for Israelis still living with the fallout of Oct. 7 and the wars that followed.
“We must have some events that will give us some joy and hope,” he said.
About 3,000 athletes arrived from the Diaspora, joined by about 2,000 Israelis. Taiwan and the Philippines sent athletes for the first time, while the largest overseas delegation came from the United States, with more than 900 athletes, ranging in age from 14 to 87.
The U.S. cheering section is smaller than it might have been, as scarce and historically costly flights have made it hard for supporters to make the trip. Einav Rabinovitch Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from her home in Ohio that she and her family had hoped to accompany her son Adam, who is on the U15 football team, to the competition. But she was not eager to bring her family into a war zone, and then she could not secure plane tickets once hostilities ended.
“It was a) really expensive and b) a transportation nightmare,” she said. “It just became impossible.”
At the opening ceremony, a mother who came from Los Angeles to support her son, also on a soccer team, told JTA that she had lucked out by purchasing El Al tickets in 2025, well before prices shot up. But when her husband went to book his own tickets last month, the only options available cost more than $10,000. He stayed home.
In total, organizers expect the Games to bring roughly 9,000 visitors from overseas, many fewer than in 2022.
But Hessing said he was looking on the bright side: “We’re still talking about thousands of tourists that will come to Israel, will support the state of Israel, will be part of amazing ceremonies, amazing trips, volunteering, and the competitions, of course,” he said.
Over the past year, there were many moments when Hessing questioned whether the Games could or should go ahead.
“We had very tough times,” he said, pointing to March’s second round of fighting with Iran and ongoing hostilities on the northern border. “I said to myself, oh my gosh, are we doing the right thing?”
The postponement made the budget harder to close. Propelled in part by war, the dollar fell from about 3.7 shekels last summer to about 2.9 today, reducing the value of money raised abroad, while flight prices climbed sharply amid widespread cancellations and rising oil prices.
The combination raised costs for both the organization and the delegations, forcing the Maccabiah to secure additional funding from the Israeli government, philanthropists and the private sector companies to close the gap.
Meanwhile, it took months of reassurance to persuade some delegation leaders to come to Israel amid security concerns. Then, hundreds of athletes from around the world backed out in March, and some countries were unable to send official delegations because of travel warnings and insurance restrictions tied to Israel’s status as a war zone.
Some athletes from those countries decided to come anyway, Hessing said, competing as individuals rather than as part of a national delegation. But Great Britain canceled its youth delegation, sending only adult athat least a dozen countries that competed last time are not represented this year, including Canada, whose 700 athletes were the fourth-largest delegation in 2022.
“While we are saddened that our more than 300 delegates were unable to take part this year, our Maccabi spirit remains as strong as ever,” Maccabi Canada posted in an Instagram story on Wednesday promoting a livestream of the opening event. “Join us in watching the opening ceremony and cheering on all those competing.”
The only recent precedent for a much smaller Maccabiah, Hessing said, was in 2001, during the Second Intifada, when about 2,000 athletes came as suicide bombings were hitting Israeli buses and cities.
The Maccabiah began in 1932 with 390 Jewish athletes from 18 countries competing. More than nine decades later, Hessing said, the Games are still judged not only by the competitions but by what participants take back with them.
This year, he said, success will mean turning those who chose to come in wartime into “great ambassadors to the state of Israel,” sending them back to their communities “as leaders, as members, with pride, and most important, with a much stronger connection to Israel.”
For many participants, it will be their first time in the country, he said, with first-time visitors typically making up 65% to 70% of the Maccabiah and about 5% later immigrating to Israel.
For Hessing, the first test has already been met. The message he hears most often from athletes and their families is that they are grateful the Maccabiah was happening.
“The first thing people are saying when they land is thank you for not canceling the Games,” he said. “It’s going to be two weeks they will never forget.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Looking for a precedent for the Supreme Court’s decisions? Try Germany in the 1930s.
In October 1936, German law professors held their annual meeting in Berlin. In his welcoming address, the meeting’s chairperson turned to the pressing issue of Jewish influence. “The Jew’s relationship to our intellectual work is parasitical, tactical and commercial,” he warned. Thanks to the Nazi state’s “healthy exorcism” of this malign presence from their profession, though, German “ethnic honor” would triumph over Jewish “cruelty and impudence.”
The chairperson was Carl Schmitt, the political philosopher whose prominence during the Nazi era earned him the moniker of the “crown jurist.” Neither his name nor his jurisprudence was cited by the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice John Roberts in his majority opinion in this week’s ruling in the case of Trump v. Slaughter. Nevertheless, this decision that, by neutering the independence of federal agencies like the FTC and FCC and stretching the already expansive powers of the president, makes for a distinct Schmittian chill.
As a young professor of constitutional law in Weimar Germany, Schmitt was as ambitious as he was accomplished, as prolific in his writings as he was pessimistic about parliamentary democracy. Nevertheless, though critical of the Weimar constitution, Schmitt was even more critical not just of the rise of political violence, but the concomitant rise of the Nazi Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler.
Come 1933, however, when Germany found itself under new management, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party and became one of Hitler’s most ardent advocates — a position that neatly dovetailed with his equally ardent hatred of Jews. As the political theorist Richard Wolin has noted in Theory and Society, Schmitt did not think the Nuremberg Laws went far enough; he demanded that existing marriages between Jews and non-Jews also be annulled and urged his fellow jurists, when quoting from works written by Jews, to label the authors as “Jewish.” (Published during the 2000s, Schmitt’s private diaries are a trove of antisemitic bilge.)
Though Schmitt distanced himself from politics in 1936 — scholars still debate the reasons — he never distanced himself from his support of the Nazi regime or its policies. With the defeat of the Third Reich in 1944, Schmitt was arrested not once, not twice, but three times as a possible candidate for the Nuremberg trials. Though his case was ultimately dismissed, he incurred a lifetime ban from teaching — a sentence that did not prevent the unrepentant Schmitt from continuing to write, transforming himself into the éminence grise of German conservative thought.
Since his death in 1985, Schmitt has enjoyed a growing reputation among arch conservative political and legal theorists — including dozens of applicants to the Heritage Foundation — to the dismay of liberal theorists like the late Jurgen Habermas. Schmitt’s early works in particular — Political Theology, The Concept of the Political, and The Guardian of the Constitution — have much bearing upon the jury-rigged jurisprudence of the six Republican sages who now sit on our Supreme Court.
Political Theology opens with a famous and oracular line: “Sovereign is he who decides the exception.” By this statement, Schmitt locates the source of sovereignty not with the people — after all, he did not write “Sovereign are they” — but with the individual who, by charisma and conviction, lays claim to power. If this sounds familiar, it should: Schmitt was a fan of the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose book The Leviathan, makes the case for an authoritarian ruler.
In a word, Schmitt dismisses the legitimacy of natural law, which posits that our rights are found in human nature. But he also swats away positive law, which affirms that rights, not necessarily found in nature, are established and enforced by the state. For Schmitt, sovereign authority is instead embodied by that charismatic individual who cancels what had been law and employs violence, if necessary, to enforce his power and normalize the situation. Any binding order, Schmitt insists, is based not on natural rights or legal norms, but solely on that individual’s authority.
Such a claim echoes Hobbes’ line from the Leviathan that it “is not Wisdom but Authority that makes a law.” Not that the three justices named to the court by Trump would ever have the chutzpah to describe him as a fount of wisdom. But along with their Republican colleagues, they did have the chutzpah to dismiss nearly a century of legal precedent concerning the powers of independent federal agencies, and instead double down on their earlier decisions that had already, thanks to their dubious unitary executive theory, expanded the executive branch’s powers.
Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political reveals the danger of the fast and furious pace of these court decisions. Schmitt argues that the most fundamental political distinction is that between friends and enemies. This distinction has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with seeking and maintaining power. As the legal scholar Lars Vinx notes, Schmitt insisted that the essence of great leadership is to decide “which approach to legality or its opposite and which set of public enemies is in the interest of the nation.”
Few lines better capture the essence of politics according to Trump, just as it captures the foolishness and fearfulness of the majority on the Supreme Court. For the past 18 months, it has done its best to avoid being labeled a public enemy by our president. That it has so far been successful is a measure of just how far it has failed to defend our same nation and its constitution.
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