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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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Why this Zionist Israeli is running with an Islamist party
(JTA) — KIBBUTZ EIN HAHORESH, Israel – He’s been called a “terror supporter” and a “traitor,” and even accused of devious steps to enable Islamists to “infiltrate” Israel’s next government. But Yoav Segalovitz, the Jewish parliamentarian who recently broke strict taboos by teaming up with an Arab Islamist party, is unperturbed.
“There are always crazy people, and it doesn’t matter what they say on television; I think when you’ve chosen your path, you just have to ignore it all,” he said in a recent interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
It has been just over a month since Segalovitz, 67, a veteran member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, made his unprecedented decision to leave the centrist Yesh Atid party for Ra’am, an Arab-Israeli party with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, in the hopes of bridging the gap between Jews and Arabs in Israel.
“Are all the old patterns going to change in the coming month? Absolutely not,” Segalovitz, a former deputy minister for public security and a former police investigator, said. “But I’m thinking long term, not just about these particular elections. From my perspective, this is a long-term story. It’s not about the here and now.”
At a recent campaign event in the well-worn communal dining room of Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, an agricultural community in the Emek Hefer region of central Israel, Segalovitz explained to a group of around 80 Jewish voters why he made the radical decision as a self-declared Zionist to team up with an Islamist party.
“I wanted to have an impact,” he said, describing how he knew it would somehow be related to the Arab community in Israel that makes up around 21% of the total population.
“I knew I wanted to break down the paradigms that exist; I wanted to cross the bridge; the only question was how I could do this,” Segalovitz said, speaking to the small crowd of kibbutz members and residents of the surrounding communities.
Microphone in hand, the neatly dressed former police officer described how, when tensions were high and societal divisions deeper than ever during the final days of the previous Knesset, he asked himself how he could make a meaningful difference in Israeli society.
Segalovitz said that at first he considered creating a brand new joint Israeli-Arab party. But he quickly realized that he could make greater change by joining forces with Ra’am, an Arab party whose leader, Mansour Abbas, is already known for his own paradigm-breaking political moves.
Abbas, a deeply religious conservative Muslim who, in his own words, identifies as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, was the first Arab party leader to join an Israeli government, breaking deep-rooted taboos in his own community. In 2021, his bold move to join former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in a ruling coalition helped to briefly oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power.
While the move signaled an unprecedented shift in Israeli politics, it was also fraught with tension and ultimately proved to be deeply unpopular with much of the Israeli public and some in the Arab community. Ultimately, Ra’am’s inclusion in the Bennett-Lapid government was one of the factors that led to its rapid downfall.
If including an Arab party in the government was controversial before Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, today it is close to unthinkable. In the run-up to the Oct. 27 election, most predominantly Jewish parties have avoided saying publicly that they would consider including Ra’am, or any other Arab party, in a future coalition. And, beyond Ra’am, the other Arab party – the Joint List – remains emphatically against any such alliance.
But recent polls suggest that bringing Arab parties into a governing alliance could be the only way to secure the parliamentary majority needed to form a new government. With Segalovitz now running on Ra’am’s list, such a prospect may be slightly more realistic.
However, the challenges of reaching such an arrangement were evident at the recent Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh meeting.
An aging audience of casually dressed kibbutzniks sauntered into the sparse hall curious to hear Segalovitz’s story. They gave him a warm and polite reception, and grilled him with questions after listening to him speak. But most said they were not swayed to vote for him.
“He’s very brave for doing what he did,” said Elie Aloni, 80, a resident of nearby Beit Herut. But she continued to say that she would not vote for Ra’am because she’s already committed to the left-wing Democrats Party.
Aloni said her party’s leader, Yair Golan, had already stated that he wanted to see Ra’am join the government, and she hoped that would happen. She was also hopeful that having an Israeli Jew on Ra’am’s list would make it easier for the party to be included in the next coalition.
But she acknowledged that, after Oct. 7, including Arab parties in a government could prove difficult.
“I’m a peace activist, but even I have become disillusioned,” she said. “After Oct. 7, it has become more difficult to trust the Arabs. But they are not going to disappear, and neither are we.”
Segalovitz knows that his support is unlikely to come from Jewish voters. Instead, he has been focusing on reaching the Arab community and encouraging them to exercise their democratic rights.
Since joining Ra’am in early September, he has traveled around the country to address Arabic-speaking audiences – Muslims, Christians and Druze – about why he joined the party and what he hopes to achieve. The meetings are conducted in Hebrew because, as he admits, he does not speak a word of Arabic.
Segalovitz told JTA that despite the cold reception, including some outright attacks, from Israeli Jews, the Arab community has overwhelmingly embraced him – even though there is some skepticism.
Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, who has researched political trends in Israel’s Arab community for years, called Segalovitz’s decision to join Ra’am “pioneering.”
However, he noted that the Jewish MK has also faced attacks from within the Arab community from those who struggle to accept an openly Zionist Israeli joining their political ranks.
Although there are some Jewish Israeli members of Arab parties, namely the communist-leaning Hadash, they often identify as anti-Zionist. Segalovitz’s arrangement with Abbas is slightly different. He has not formally joined the Islamist party but rather forged an agreement whereby he will retain the freedom to vote independently on issues including religion and state, national security and LGBTQ rights.
“His move is revolutionary; he is not a post-Zionist or an anti-Zionist like some Jewish members of Hadash,” Milshtein said. “He [Segalovitz] is creating connections with a traditional religious party and it’s just bizarre.”
Segalovitz’s presence in Ra’am, which emerged from the southern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, historically linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, has also prompted questions across the Arab world about how Abbas can continue to be associated with the movement that also includes more extreme groups such as Hamas, Milshtein said.
But Milshtein said the two men were “pioneering” in much the same way.
“It’s kind of a mirror: Mansour breaks all kinds of taboos, and so does Segalovitz,” he said, adding that many Jews respected Segalovitz, and even supported his decision, “even if they won’t end up voting for him.”
Ra’am’s changes started in the 1990s when Israel’s Islamic Movement split into two, enabling the southern branch, the political home of Ra’am, to seek political engagement with state institutions as a way to make changes within the community. Abbas’s ascent to the leadership brought Ra’am’s current goals into even sharper focus.
Abbas, 52, a dentist by training, succeeded in breaking the party’s organizational ties with the religious leadership, allowing it to work even more harmoniously with institutions in Israel and focus on improving life for the country’s Arab citizens.
At this point in Ra’am’s history, Segalovitz’s arrival could be a significant political asset. The party’s focus is on improving life for Israel’s Arab community, and Segalovitz brings experience tackling violent and organized crime, one of the sector’s most pressing concerns.
As head of the Israel Police’s Investigations Unit from 2009 to 2013, and as deputy public security minister from 2021 to 2022, Segalovitz focused on violent crime. As deputy minister, he headed a government program aimed at addressing violent crime, successfully reducing homicides in the Arab sector by some 16%, the lowest level since 2014.
After Netanyahu’s return to office in 2022, Segalovitz’s program was scrapped. Since then, the murder rate has soared, with organized crime reaching beyond the Arab community. According to statistics compiled by the Abraham Initiatives, the number of murders in the Arab sector more than doubled between 2022 and 2025, rising from 116 to 252.
“Today, Israel has similar crime rates to those in South American countries,” said Segalovitz, referring to the organized crime that has been surging in the Arab community. He pointed the finger at Netanyahu and his government for failing to address deeper social and economic problems in Arab society.
Segalovitz is also a firm believer in some type of national community service for the Arab sector, akin to the mandatory military service most Jewish Israelis must undertake.
“Arabs make up 21% of Israel’s population,” Segalovitz said. “They are involved in every area of daily life in Israel, in medicine, economics, education and more. We live together with one another, and we need to decide how to manage a future partnership.”
“Our future does not allow us not to work in partnership with each other,” he said. “We have partnerships in all areas of life, except in politics.”
While running with Ra’am is his way of trying to change that, Segalovitz is under no illusion that his efforts will translate into votes. Instead, he sees his candidacy as a small first step toward a longer-term shift in Israeli politics.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why this Zionist Israeli is running with an Islamist party appeared first on The Forward.
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From Holocaust survivor to Nazi hunter to Entebbe hero
(JTA) — When Boaz Dvir flew from the United States to Israel in late September to screen his new film, “To Kill a Nazi,” he didn’t expect its story to become newly relevant. But just as Dvir arrived, the thwarting of an apparent hijacking of a flydubai flight bound for Israel offered an uncanny echo of the history his film recounts.
The film tells the largely overlooked story of Michel Cojot, a French Jewish Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter who helped fellow hostages during the Entebbe hostage crisis and later provided intelligence that aided the Israeli rescue mission. For Dvir, the timing was striking.
“As I’m driving around, what do I hear?” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Somebody tried to hijack a plane from Dubai to Israel and do a 9/11 type of terrorist attack? And the passengers saved the day? Ordinary guys?
“And of course, people brought it up everywhere I went, because the parallels are uncanny.”
Michel Goldberg was born in Paris in 1938. After the Nazis invaded, his father Joseph Goldberg was captured and sent to Auschwitz, where he was killed. According to his 1982 memoir “Namesake,” Michel was raised in France’s so-called “free zone,” which the Nazis would also occupy starting in 1942, and took his last name from his stepfather after his mother remarried.
Growing up to become a successful banker, Michel teamed with the famed Nazi-hunting couple Beate and Serge Klarsfeld and in 1975, while working in South America, embarked on a plot to find and kill Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo commander who had signed the arrest papers for Cojot’s father, and who was at that point hiding out in Bolivia.
Posing as a journalist, an armed Cojot met the “Butcher of Lyon,” but given the opportunity, Cojot failed to pull the trigger. In his memoir he writes that Barbie instead deserved to live in constant fear of reprisal, and that murder was a “Nazi” solution.
The year after his mission to Bolivia, Cojot and his son were on the fateful Air France flight that, bound from Tel Aviv to France, was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists and West German far-left radicals, with 102 Israelis on board. It led to the standoff at Entebbe International Airport in Uganda and the heroic rescue by Israeli commandos.
During the seven-day crisis, Cojot acted as a translator and go-between among the hijackers and passengers. When the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin spoke to the hostages, Cojot translated his English into French. He was even credited with persuading the lead hijacker, Wilfried Böse, to release the non-Israeli hostages. After his release, Cojot provided information to Mossad, including the layout of where the hostages were being held, which greatly assisted the Operation Thunderbolt rescue mission.
Cojot went on to write a book about Barbie’s crimes, and then testified in Barbie’s war crimes trial in the late 1980s. Barbie was sentenced to life in prison; he died of cancer in 1991. Cojot himself passed away in 1999. While the story of Entebbe is very well-known, Cojot’s role in it has often been left out of such tellings. None of the feature films about the rescue, most recently 2018’s “7 Days in Entebbe,” include him as a major character.
Divir hopes to give the forgotten hero the recognition he deserves. The grandson of Holocaust survivors who was born in Petah Tikva a few weeks after the Six-Day War in 1967, the filmmaker remembers the weeklong Entebbe crisis. He was nine years old then.
“I was like most Israeli kids at the time, outside most of the day and playing,” Dvir said. “But my brother and I, who was a year younger, decided that in solidarity with the hostages, we’re gonna ground ourselves, and so we did for that whole week.”
At the end of the week, he remembers his father waking him up and telling him, “The IDF did it.”
“We knew immediately what he meant, and of course we were thrilled for everybody, the released hostages, the military, but we’re also happy to be able to go outside again,” said Dvir.
While histories of the Entebbe affair omitted the actions of Michel Cojot, another Frenchman, pilot Michel Bacos, has often been recognized as a hero of the affair for having refused to be freed in the first release of the hostages. Most obituaries of Bacos, who died in 2019 at age 95, included this.
In fact, Dvir originally planned to make a documentary about Bacos. However, his research, including an interview with Bacos himself, led Dvir, a journalist and journalism professor at Penn State, to doubt Bacos’ version of the events.
But those former hostages kept mentioning another Michel, a genuine hero. “The story that I knew so well, Operation Thunderbolt, that I grew up with, now suddenly took on a whole new meaning,” Dvir said.
The film includes interviews with all four of Cojot’s children, including his son Olivier, who was with him in Entebbe, along with hostages and experts; Cojot himself appears in archival footage.
Dvir also composed the film’s music, which Penn State musicians perform on the soundtrack.
Dvir worked on the project for nearly a decade, even presenting it publicly as a work in progress as early as 2018.
“This project took a lot longer than most of my projects,” the director said.
A familiar voice narrates the film: Jason Alexander, the Jewish actor best known for “Seinfeld.” Dvir’s manager and business partner is a friend of Alexander’s, who agreed to narrate after viewing a rough cut.
“To Kill a Nazi” premiered at the Dances With Films festival in June. It has also screened at the Nashville Jewish Film Festival and the Croatian International Film Festival, and premiered in New York City on Oct. 16 at Regal Battery Park as part of the Chelsea Film Festival.
It’s also set to play the Austin Film Festival at the Boulder Jewish Film Festival, and the Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival on Oct. 29; at the Galaxy Theatre in Austin, Texas on Oct. 31; and at the Harrisburg Jewish Film Festival on Nov. 12. Dvir hopes it will be picked up by a streaming service.
Some Jewish and Israeli filmmakers, especially since Oct. 7, have complained that they’ve had difficulty getting their films into festivals.
Dvir said that while “To Kill a Nazi” is “doing very, very well” and has been accepted to film festivals both Jewish and non-Jewish, “it’s been a little more of an effort than I’m used to putting in.”
“I don’t have any proof for it, but my sense is that there are some film festivals to which we submitted that may not have even really watched it or given it a fair shot,” said Dvir, who denounced the apparent boycotts of other films and artists. “At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter. Because we can only do so many film festivals anyway. I’m very happy with what we got.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post From Holocaust survivor to Nazi hunter to Entebbe hero appeared first on The Forward.
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Michigan’s El-Sayed doubles down: Israel ‘not an ally’
(JTA) — Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, is doubling down on his view that Israel is not a U.S. ally as the Nov. 3 midterm elections draw closer.
El-Sayed, a vocal critic of Israel who faces former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in one of the country’s most competitive Senate races, told ABC News on Monday that Israel is “not actually our friend.”
“An ally that takes your money to push you into wars you shouldn’t be fighting is not an ally,” said El-Sayed, referencing Israel’s reported lobbying of the United States to enter into a war with Iran.
He compared Israel with a friend who “keeps bumming off [your kid’s] money” and “talks about them behind their back and then gets them into fights with other friends.”
“What would you tell your kid to do with that friend? You’d probably tell them, maybe it’s not actually your friend,” he said.
El-Sayed made similar remarks in an interview with MS NOW on Thursday, saying that “the government of Israel has done nothing but use us” and “has done terrible things with our money.”
He added that he would continue to question whether Israel was an ally regardless of the outcome of Israel’s election on Oct. 27, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has served as Israel’s leader for most of the past 18 years, seeks another term.
“Netanyahu is one part of it, but the Israeli military has done heinous things, like heinous things, full war crimes, genocide,” said El-Sayed. “So I think we got to just get serious about whether or not we as a country should be subsidizing that government.”
El-Sayed previously affirmed that he does not consider Israel an ally to the United States in his first bitter debate with Rogers on Oct. 8. The candidates will meet for a final debate on Wednesday.
He told MS NOW that he was “committed to the safety and security” of Jewish voters, some of whom have pressured him to moderate his views on Israel. “Now, we may have differences when it comes to Israel, but the things that unite us are a lot bigger,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Michigan’s El-Sayed doubles down: Israel ‘not an ally’ appeared first on The Forward.
