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Class assignment: Get to know your murdered Jewish neighbors
Last Sunday, my cousin, his cousin, their spouses and I arrived by rental car into a small city that until then had existed for us only as a blip on a genealogy chart: Saint-Quentin, in northeast France, where my cousins’ great-uncle Marcel had lived alongside, for a time, their grandfather.
We were here thanks to the determined efforts of a history teacher named Damien Bressolles, who since 2023 has been assigning his classes of high school seniors to construct written portraits of neighbors dragged out of France and deported to their deaths during the Holocaust.
Bressolles has done the math: Saint-Quentin had around 400 Jewish residents before the war, 87 of whom were deported. Only five returned from the camps.
The last Sunday of April is National Deportation Remembrance day in France, marked with marching band processions, flag rituals and hearty renditions of “La Marseillaise” and Resistance songs. This year in Saint-Quentin, the proceedings that began at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial by the River Somme included something new: a strong showing of Jews.
Bressolles and his students had given us the gift of getting to know our own families, and gathered us for a reunion. A couple dozen of us got to know one another over champagne at City Hall, where we toasted Bressoles, and then during a tour around town. We ended at the cemetery where Bressoles first spotted the deportation memorial that sparked his yearning to learn about his lost Jewish neighbors.
Many participants were descended from parents and grandparents who had left Saint-Quentin before it could betray them — but not everyone. Yvon Doukhan’s family survived in town because they were Algerian, and the Nazis didn’t recognize their name as Jewish. He showed us their house, just off the main square.
Alain-Sam Federowski’s father, a military officer, was protected, ironically, as a prisoner of war in Austria. His mother fled with other family members to the south of France and worked in melon fields. The Federowski family gravestone, which sits next to the deportation memorial pylon in the cemetery, is crammed with names, with a small blank spot on the lower left reserved for one more: Alain-Sam’s own.
Gilles Weiss is a magician and local son, who bought a house in Saint-Quentin to use as for storage midway between performances in Paris and Brussels, and discovered wood paneling with Hebrew carved in it. He determined that those panels had been salvaged from the deportation train cars, the desperate farewells of passengers to their loved ones.
Saint-Quentin is a quiet and dignified little city that, before Nazis controlled France, had been a hub for the textile industry, and therefore home to hundreds of Jews. They operated looms, sold merchandise, ran the shops that lined the Rue D’Isle, learned there and prayed there.
Now, just three Jewish families remain.
Restoring Jewish presence
Bressolles, who is in his mid-30s and hails from southern France, is not alone in asking young Europeans to confront the Holocaust person by person, story by reconstructed story, participating in bringing the dead to a shadow of life.
A family-led French project called Convoi 77 is working with teachers and students to identify and produce biographies of everyone on the last train from Drancy to Auschwitz in July 1944 — a train that carried some residents of Saint-Quentin.
But Bressolles’ project at Jean Bouin high school brings a distinctively local lens — one that Bressolles calls “historical, civic, and deeply human.” He and his students are restoring Jewish presence to a place from which it had been eradicated with intent. As elsewhere, Nazis destroyed the synagogue after the human purge.
Camille Sazerin, a 17-year-old participating in the school project, had no idea that Jews had been part of her community — never mind that they had so violently been torn away, sent to another country to be slaughtered. (Bressolles has brought some of his students to Auschwitz and Birkenau.) She became so committed to Bressoles’ project that she, alone among the students, spent the entire last day of spring break with us, after delivering a speech with a classmate at the ceremony by the Somme.
She hopes she’ll find a way to continue with the project after graduation, she told me. “I don’t want to finish,” she said.
Another student, Manon Jurczinsky, who is 18, wrote me in a testimonial translated into English about her research on the Goldblum family. “This project made me realize that these events could also happen in our own town and not only in large cities like Paris,” she said. “I also understood that wherever Jews went, they were hunted and persecuted, and most of them were deported to camps. Saint-Quentin showed us that this family had come here to ‘hide.’ They had jobs and a way to live, but it was not enough. Perhaps they could even have been part of our own family.”
Bressolles has focused the project on individual people, starting with the few dozen names on the cemetery memorial. He digs up an array of documents, such as birth, marriage and death records, then asks his students to read through and write up narratives based on the information.
Verifying and building on the student work, Bressolles puts together detailed dossiers on each of the people profiled, including historical context for their biographies. Eventually, he expects, their collective research will become a book.
Revived relatives
That effort has connected Bressolles to the descendant families, who get relief from the common burden of working alone to excavate the stories of murdered relatives. His files, gleaned from the French National Archives, go far deeper than merely facts and dates.
In reading the students’ historical portrait of Marcel Rapaport — my uncle’s uncle — my cousins discovered details they hadn’t known about his brother Max, who was their grandfather, and another brother, Jacob, who had also passed through Saint-Quentin.
Using naturalization records, the eight-page writeup details the intensive bureaucratic efforts that Marcel had to go through in order to bring his fiancée, Chaja Grynsztejn, over to France from Łódź, Poland — proof that the immigrant will have a source of financial support and not be a burden on the state, that they are not a criminal, and so on.
Saint-Quentin police records document pivotal moments during the Occupation — such as when Marcel had his Grammont 5555 radio confiscated in 1941 under a German law forbidding Jews from possessing receivers. Even the issuance and ongoing monitoring of the stars of David they were forced to wear as identification has been preserved in a local police file — as was the record of their arrest by local French authorities. Marcel and Chaja were on the first transport from Saint-Quentin to Auschwitz, and died there.
My cousin Gill Pratt rallied our little delegation here as part of his global project of repairing family ruptures. Starting during the COVID pandemic with questions to his mom during her isolation in a senior living facility, in the years since he has tracked down relatives in Poland and Brazil and brought us together to get to know one another.
They were lost to us, not because they were killed but because their parents chose to protect them from what they considered dangerous knowledge of their Jewish identity.
One of the relatives Gill found was Krzyzstof Goszcyzynska, who lives in Łódź, and had had no idea his grandfather was Jewish. That was Max Rapaport, who lived in Saint-Quentin for a time but at some point, for reasons unknown, moved back to Łódź, Europe’s textile manufacturing mothership.
“Talking to dead people is much easier. You can invent any characteristic for them,” reflected Gill about the unknowns. “It’s really wonderful because you see them; you discover documents about them and you make up a story about what they were like. They were always wonderful, never difficult.” (Gill, for the record, is always wonderful.)
A shared conversation
The corollary: talking to the living is hard, especially when all my years of high school and college French have collapsed in a rusty heap of disuse doused in Spanish I since learned.
Over lunch, I sat near Camille, the 17-year-old student, and did the thing that journalists do, while she, the dutiful and sharp student, answered my questions, with both of us switching back and forth between French and English to ensure we were understood.
How did the project make her feel? Sad. She described it as “very intense.”
Which families did she document? Apel and Goldblum.
What do you want to do professionally? Teach special ed, or work with survivors of domestic violence.
Then the student had questions for me.
How do Americans see the French? (A lesson on red states and blue states, and the Iraq War and Freedom Fries followed.) Are there things about French culture that I do not like? (The pop music, with an extremely specific exception for Serge Gainsbourg.)
Then, in politely coded English, she asked me: How do I approach political subjects, when so often people are not able to talk to one another about it? I suspected she was alluding to Israel and Gaza, and she confirmed that’s what she meant.
I responded in unexpectedly fluent, confident French. To translate: I do it by having conversations just like this one, where I speak to the person in front of me, respect their individual humanity, offer my perspective, and listen. I don’t take my views to social media. And, I said, more people need to do exactly this: talk, and listen. She nodded.
By the end of the day, dozens of us had joined a new WhatsApp group Bressolles created, called Communauté Juive Saint-Quentin. The hundreds who had lived here were gone, their stories and photos bare traces of their lives. The synagogue — which Weiss, the magician, designed, and where he has installed the carved wood from the deportation train — has to bring in people from nearby communities for the high holidays in order to have a minyan.
Nonetheless, from Paris and Lodz and California and New York here we briefly were as a collective presence in the city that had almost forgotten us, and revived in the name of the WhatsApp group: the Jewish community of Saint-Quentin.
The post Class assignment: Get to know your murdered Jewish neighbors appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever
The Israeli city of Netanya has renamed one of its streets Rechov Avrom Sutzkever (Abraham Sutzkever Street), after the renowned Yiddish poet and Vilna partisan.
The event on June 10 marked an important cultural moment, recognizing the legacy of a poet who devoted his life to Yiddish language and Jewish culture. During his lifetime, Sutzkever was celebrated not only for his poetry, but also for editing the storied Yiddish literary magazine Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) for 46 years. His work remains a fixture in the field of Yiddish literature today.
Sutzkever was born in 1913 in the shtetl of Smorgon, in what is now Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother Rayne moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever survived the Vilna Ghetto. He was a leader of the “Paper Brigade” that rescued Jewish cultural treasures from the Nazis and later became the only Jewish witness called by the Soviets to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.
His poetry chronicled his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna ghetto and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1947 he settled in Palestine, later Israel.
In Israel, he continued to create, publish and preserve Yiddish culture for decades. Yet, despite his immense influence around the world, he remained less known in Israel because he chose to write and fight for the Yiddish language rather than switch to Hebrew.
This is the first time a street in Israel has been named after him. Even Tel Aviv never did so, despite the fact that Sutzkever lived there for many years and the city was once a hotbed of Yiddish cultural activity, due to the influx of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who settled there after the Holocaust.
The street-naming ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Netanya, Avi Slama; representatives of the Lithuanian Embassy; public figures, artists, and members of the family, including Sutzkever’s granddaughter, Hadas Kalderon.
In the past decade, Kalderon has been instrumental in keeping Abraham Sutzkever’s memory alive, most notably through two documentary films: Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?) in 2021, and Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever in 2018.
Kalderon told me that she was very moved by Netanya’s decision to name the street after her grandfather, in a garden overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. “It was not only a tribute to Sutzkever himself, but also a powerful moment of recognition for Yiddish language and culture within the State of Israel,” she said.
The post Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever appeared first on The Forward.
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At the dawn of the World Cup, the story of the Jews who helped bring soccer to America
When the North American FIFA World Cup starts in Mexico City on June 11, the story will largely be told through the familiar lenses of Lionel Messi, the geography of the 48 participants and three hosts, and — because 75% of the games will be played there — the continuing rise of soccer in the United States. But there is another, less familiar story woven through the tournament: the long, strange and often overlooked history of Jews in North American soccer.
Mostly that’s been in the United States where players and owners have included a larger proportion of Jews than in Canada and Mexico. By my count, no Jewish players have represented Mexico, and only two Jewish men have represented Canada at senior international level and one of them, Tomer Chencinski, only did so once, in a friendly game where Canada lost 2-0 to Belarus in Doha. (Daniel Haber played 5 international games in his career).
For whatever reason, whether more closely linked to Europe, denied entry to other sports, or just arbiters of excellent taste, Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of soccer in the United States for over a century. The first American to play for a major European team was Eddy Hamel for Ajax Amsterdam in 1922. Hamel was a New York-born winger who became a star for Ajax in Amsterdam during the 1920s. An injury forced his retirement in the 1930s and, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he was deported and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. His story remains one of the most tragic intersections of Jewish history and world football.
Jews also comprised the largest soccer crowd in America when 46,000 New Yorkers watched Hakoach Vienna play New York All Stars in 1926. That record stood for over 50 years but it also encouraged a number of members of the Hakoach team to emigrate to the US and start a New York team that was a crucial part of the American Soccer League of the era.
Later, in the 1970s, the National American Soccer League — the glitzy NASL — became a success thanks to the glamorous New York Cosmos. As head of Warner Communications, their CEO Steve Ross, born Rechnitz, was the person who brought Pele over and made the league the star-studded affair it became. After Herman Sarkowsky co-founded the Seattle Sounders, the continent was almost ready for football.
When the NASL faded and folded, soccer dwindled as a major sport in the United States. Alan Rothenberg saw an opportunity to revive the sport by hosting the 1994 World Cup and founding the MLS as a reset. As president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and the chief executive of the World Cup USA 1994 organizing committee, he made both of those happen and laid the foundations for the current shape of U.S. soccer.
The success of the MLS was not a foregone conclusion, though; indeed, it barely survived to the millennium. It was founded in 1993 but only started playing in 1996 — losing an estimated $350 million between its founding and 2004. The league initially turned to Don Garber, a former NFL executive, in August 1999 but even he couldn’t turn it around. By late 2001, it looked like the league would fold like its predecessors but it was able to secure new financing from owners Lamar Hunt, Philip Anschutz, and the Kraft family to take on more teams. Over the past 20 years, it has become robust, enjoying the general boom of all things soccer, riding the coattails of the English Premier League.
Without Robert Kraft and Anschutz, Major League Soccer might not exist today. During the league’s precarious early years, the two billionaire owners absorbed enormous losses to keep the fledgling competition alive. Kraft, the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, was also a central figure in bringing the 2026 World Cup to North America. As chairman of the United Bid Committee, he played a crucial role in securing the tournament for the United States, Canada and Mexico.
If Kraft represents one side of the Jewish soccer story, Chuck Blazer represents another.
The larger-than-life American soccer executive helped expose corruption inside FIFA, serving as a key witness in the investigations that ultimately toppled some of the most powerful figures in world football. Yet Blazer was a product of the very system he later helped unravel. His spectacular rise and fall remains one of the strangest chapters in soccer history, a tale of luxury apartments, exotic pets and global corruption.
Unlike baseball, basketball or boxing, soccer never became known as a major arena of Jewish achievement in the United States. Perhaps that has been due to the historic lack of status for soccer in the country. Despite the excellence of Yael Averbuch West for the USWNT and a number of Jewish players for the USMNT including Jonathan Bornstein, Benny Feilhaber, Dan Calichman, DeAndre Yedlin, Kyle Beckerman and the maverick Yari Alnutt there have been no soccer equivalents of Sandy Koufax or Hank Greenberg.
The stalwart defender Jeff “Goose” Agoos came closest with 134 international appearances and six more for the U.S. soccer Olympic team. But playing with a mediocre USMNT, he enjoyed few legendary moments. In fact, arguably no professional moments outshone the bizarre story of his 1989 NCAA championship ring in his junior year, the season that he played in the Maccabiah. On Dec. 3 of that year, his Virginia Cavalier team (playing for future USMNT coach Bruce Arena) met the top ranked, undefeated Santa Clara team in a freezing cold stadium in Piscataway, N.J. The teams were still tied 1-1 after FOUR overtimes and, with no penalties on the books, they shared the spoils. It was the third time that two teams shared the championship and has never happened again.
This year’s USMNT squad does include the only Jewish player at this summer’s tournament — reserve goalkeeper Matt Turner. If, as coach Mauricio Pochettino plans, Turner exclusively warms the bench, he will take his place alongside many of America’s notable Jewish soccer figures who have furthered the game, even if not on the field.
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‘Remember the Liberty’ has become code for ‘Israel Is Evil’
The first tragedy of the U.S.S. Liberty attack is that it happened at all. The second is that Israel’s critics have weaponized it to spread hate.
When Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood on the House floor on June 8, the 59th anniversary of the attack, and called for a Congressional probe into the incident, he wasn’t seriously trying to bring the truth of some long-buried historical secret to light. Massie, who in 14 years never once brought up the U.S.S. Liberty on the House floor, was using the latest cudgel in the Israel-haters’ arsenal to level one last official blow at a country he loathes.
“I’ve got a call to action for everybody here,” said Massie, speaking of attack survivors who were in the audience, “Honor these individuals. Quit ignoring that they exist. Let’s have an investigation. It’s long overdue.”
Let’s put aside the fact that there have been numerous official investigations into what exactly happened on June 8, 1967, the second day of the Six Day War, when Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the Liberty off the Sinai Peninsula, killing 34 American service members.
These investigations concluded that the tragedy was a friendly-fire incident. The Israelis initially mistook the Liberty, an intelligence-gathering vessel, for an Egyptian warship. After the smoke cleared, they accepted responsibility, apologized and paid $12 million in compensation to the victims.
Of all the explanations, it’s perhaps the least satisfying but the most logical. During the Vietnam War, happening at the same time, an estimated 11% to 15% of casualties were from friendly fire.
Massie’s call for a new investigation would be more believable if he then didn’t go on to recite the alternative one-sided narrative of the incident long pushed by some survivors and now taken up with gusto by Israel haters Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and others.
To them the attack was deliberate: The Israelis ignored the large American flag the Liberty was flying and began shooting.
“It was intentional murder by the country of Israel,” said Massie on the House floor, “either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”
What Massie and his fellow conspiracy theorists are alleging is a crime, but none of them has sufficiently proven a motive. Why would Israel attack the ship of its most important and powerful ally?
The false flag theory — the idea that Israel wanted to sink the Liberty, blame Egypt or the Soviet Union for it and draw America into the war — makes no sense.
The war was all but won by June 8. Moreover, as the historian and former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren relates in Six Days of War, the Israelis actually stopped firing initially when they suspected the ship was American.
The Israelis sent helicopters to investigate, but heavy smoke obscured the ship. Meanwhile, as Israeli torpedo boats closed in, a U.S. Navy crewman, perhaps not hearing his commander’s orders, opened fire.
The Israelis, now convinced it was an enemy ship, unleashed torpedoes, killing 25 Americans.
Massie left all this out of his narrative. He quoted then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who said at the time, “the attack was, quite literally incomprehensible,” implying that a murky conspiracy underlay it all.
But he didn’t include the rest of what Rusk said: That what happened was “an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life.”
In other words, Rusk’s full quote doesn’t suggest intention, but gross carelessness, which is a far cry from premeditated murder. It was chaos, miscommunication, uncertainty, incompetence, fear — the fog of war.
But to Massie and others, there’s no need to establish a coherent motive for why Israel attacked its harmless friends, because in their minds that’s just who Israelis are.
If Massie wants another investigation, fine. But I find it hard to believe that any investigation that doesn’t find Israel guilty of murder in the first will ever satisfy him or the people for whom “Remember the Liberty” is shorthand for “Israel is evil.”
The post ‘Remember the Liberty’ has become code for ‘Israel Is Evil’ appeared first on The Forward.
