Uncategorized
Hannah Senesh’s example of Jewish pride and sacrifice gains renewed attention in our anxious era
More than 80 years after she parachuted into Yugoslavia as part of the only military operation in World War II that attempted to rescue Jews, the Jewish poet and kibbutznik Hannah Senesh is having her moment.
The play “Hannah Senesh” is running through Nov. 9 at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in New York — an excellent one-woman show, starring Jennifer Apple, that draws directly from Senesh’s diary and poems.
A new book by Douglas Century, “Crash of the Heavens: The Remarkable Story of Hannah Senesh and the Only Military Mission to Rescue Europe’s Jews During World War II,” is a work of nonfiction written with the pacing and tension of a thriller.
Early next year, the noted Israeli journalist Matti Friedman will tell the story of Hannah’s team of parachutists in “Out of The Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe.”
And this week the New York Times gave Senesh the obituary treatment she had been denied in 1944, as part of its “Overlooked No More” project.
Why, in 2025, is the culture turning its attention to the story of this young poet, soldier and martyr? What does her life mean, especially, to Jews?
Hannah Senesh was born in Budapest in 1921 to an assimilated Hungarian Jewish family. Her father, Béla Szenes, was a well-known playwright and journalist who died when she was a child, and her mother, Katharine, raised her and her brother alone. Their home was cultured and secular.
As a schoolgirl, Hannah excelled in writing and was drawn to literature, but by her teenage years, antisemitism had begun to close in on Hungarian Jews. Rather than retreat, she grew more conscious of her Jewish identity and of the new Zionist movement that sought to combine Jewish pride with action.
In 1939, as the clouds of war gathered, Senesh left Budapest for Palestine. She studied at the Nahalal agricultural school for girls and later joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam near Caesarea, embracing the pioneer life. In the kibbutz she found a community rooted in the land and faith in the future of the Jewish people. There she also honed her poetic voice, writing verses that would later become part of Jewish collective memory.
I, along with countless young people, grew up singing her most famous poem in Jewish summer camps. That is “Eli, Eli” — “My God, my God, may these things never end: the sand and the sea, the rustle of the waters, the lightning of the heavens, the prayer of man.” The poem’s original title is “Walking to Caesarea,” which is where Hannah wrote it. Caesearea, the Roman capital of ancient Palestine, was where the sages suffered martyrdom. The reference to the site suggests Hannah could sense the possibility of her own martyrdom.
So does “Blessed Is the Match,” another of her best-known poems: “Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame, blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.”
As the Holocaust unfolded, Senesh could not remain on the sidelines. She volunteered for a special British unit to train Jewish parachutists who would drop behind enemy lines to aid Allied forces and assist persecuted Jews.
Hannah Senesh wears the uniform of the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, which she joined in 1943. (Yad Vashem Photo Archive)
In 1944, she parachuted into Yugoslavia as part of an Allied mission to reach occupied Hungary. Her goal was to make contact with the underground and help rescue Jews who were being deported to Auschwitz. After months of operating with Yugoslav partisans, she attempted to cross the Hungarian border but was captured by fascist forces. Tortured, interrogated and offered the chance to save her life by revealing secret details of her mission, she refused. When asked if she was British, she reportedly declared instead, “I am a Jew.”
Senesh was imprisoned in Budapest, tried for treason and executed by firing squad on Nov. 7, 1944. She was only 23. Her writings — diaries, poems, and letters — were preserved by her mother and later published, ensuring that her voice lived on. Nearly every Israeli household has a copy of her writings.
Like Anne Frank, Hannah left behind a diary chronicling her idealism and inner life. But where Anne Frank’s writings reflect a confined adolescence, albeit with a free-floating spirit, Hannah Senesh’s life was defined by agency and action.
She was not only a poet and diarist; she was a soldier who took up arms against the Nazi war machine. Her vision of heroism fused cultural Zionism with physical courage — a model of Jewish strength that is both intellectual and militant. She was, in many ways, a figure closer to Theodor Herzl than to Anne Frank: a Hungarian Jew whose secular upbringing gave way to a conscious and proud Jewish identity, and whose life was devoted to the realization of that identity in the land of Israel.
Like me, Douglas Century grew up learning Hannah’s story. In my conversation with him, he told me that “her martyrdom amazed and terrified” him. He came to know David Senesh, Hannah’s nephew, who is a therapist specializing in trauma (and who this month spoke to the Times of Israel about how his aunt’s story influenced his life and his work with former hostages and other traumatized Israelis). David had been a prisoner of war in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and spent months undergoing torture. David’s father, George, had been in a POW camp in Vichy France, and his grandmother, Catherine, had been a prisoner of the Gestapo
As David wryly told Century: “I sometimes think it’s our destiny – or something in the Senesh family DNA.”
These converging story lines of Jewish agency and sacrifice suggest why Hannah’s story may be right for these fraught times, marked by antisemitism, anti-Zionism and moral confusion.
The Folksbiene production of Hannah Senesh and the books by Century and Friedman arrive at a time when Jews feel pressure to minimize or conceal their identity. The play’s climactic moment — when Senesh asserts her Jewishness to her captors — feels like a direct message to today’s audience: a call not to erase or apologize for who we are. It is both a historical reenactment and a moral demand.
To that end, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene has launched a special fundraising initiative to make tickets for “Hannah Senesh” available free of charge for students — both Jewish and non-Jewish. With incidents of antisemitism, intolerance and hatred taking place at an alarming clip in the city, NYTF is committed to providing up to 1,000 free student tickets.
There is also a deep cultural hunger for stories of heroism and moral clarity. Senesh’s story even appears in the late Sen. John McCain’s memoir, “Why Courage Matters”: “I don’t think Hannah wanted to die for the sake of having her memory exalted in history or to prove herself equal to a romantic image she conceived for herself,” writes McCain. “Her purpose wasn’t to die. She died for her life’s purpose.”
Senesh’s story is also a rebuke to the way too many Jews and others remember the Holocaust. For decades, much of Holocaust representation has focused on Jewish victimhood and suffering. Senesh represents something different: defiance, action and dignity. Her story restores a narrative of Jewish power and resistance, embodied not by generals or politicians but by a 23-year-old woman who refused to compromise her Jewish identity. In an age when many feel ambivalent about that identity — when assimilation, fear, or politicized hostility challenge Jewish expression — her unwavering sense of purpose feels radical and necessary.
At a time when “Zionist” and its hateful cousin “Zio” are epithets, more often spat than spoken, the musical, in particular, reclaims that identity as a badge of courage. Moreover, it locates a Zionist identity where it belongs — as a symbol of idealism and resilience. In the show, Hannah makes it clear: Her Zionism echoes that of the philosopher Martin Buber, who believed that both Jews and Arabs could and would share the land.
Every time I lead services from the Reform prayer book, “Mishkan T’filah,” and I come to the readings before the Mourner’s Kaddish, I encounter Hannah’s poem, “Yesh Kochavim”: “There are stars up above, so far away we only see their light long, long after the star itself is gone.” That is Hannah Senesh — a star that fell to earth long before its time, but whose light still illuminates the world.
This is Hannah Senesh’s moment. It comes at a time that calls for models of Jewish strength, compassion and integrity. The play and Century’s book answer that call — not with nostalgia but with renewal. They remind us that, even when surrounded by darkness, the match still burns, and the stars still shine.
—
The post Hannah Senesh’s example of Jewish pride and sacrifice gains renewed attention in our anxious era appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The real Jewish story of Ceuta, Spain’s migrant-magnet neighbor to Morocco
For all of us who don’t know much about geography, international political crises are always welcome. Since the start of Trump 2.0, we have been discovering places we never knew existed, but now present existential threats. From straits — think Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab — to islands — whether Greenland or Heard and McDonald — we now have, along with higher gas and food prices, a better appreciation of our world.
Late last week, yet another obscure part of the globe was suddenly brought, this time without our president’s assistance, to the attention of western media: Ceuta. A city of approximately 83,000 inhabitants, Ceuta is ensconced on a peninsula which, though attached to the Moroccan coastline, is nevertheless under Spanish rule, even while it enjoys a significant amount of autonomy.
As we now know, Ceuta was also the magnet that, starting on July 30, drew about 72,000 young Moroccans who sought, mostly by swimming, to reach its beaches and, from there, perhaps reach Europe. That nearly 100 young men and women drowned in the effort — one that moreover proved naught for those who reached Ceuta as nearly all of them were obliged to return to Morocco — adds a heartrending chapter to the complex history of a city where tragedy has long mixed with comity.
Founded two millennia earlier by the Phoenicians, Ceuta was successively ruled by the Romans, Ottomans, Portuguese and Spaniards. In 1492, when the kingdom expelled its Jewish population, a few thousand crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta, where they managed to avoid the bloody reach of the Inquisition. Yet they were not the first Jews to make their home on this tip of North Africa; as early as the 11th century, the Spanish-Jewish poet Abraham Ibn Ezra refers to the Jews of Ceuta in one of his poems. For the next few centuries, the small community lived in relative peace alongside its Christian and Muslim neighbors, a continuation, argues the historian Veronica Viviana Reyes, of the medieval “al-Andalus,” that brilliant and brief moment of cultural convergence between the three “peoples of the Book.”
Come the mid-20th century, the steadily dwindling Jewish community received reinforcements with the arrival of a few hundred Sephardic Jews who left their native Morocco in the wake of its independence from France. Earlier that century, several hundred Indians, mostly Sindhi, who were subjects under the British Raj also arrived in Ceuta, drawn by the city’s busy trading and commercial opportunities. Though the statistics are approximate — Spain does not require citizens to list their religion — about 58% of Ceuta’s population is Christian, 40% is Muslim, and the remaining couple of percentage points comprise its Jewish and Hindi communities. [ As a result, this ancient city attached by a thread of rock and soil to North Africa has accomplished a remarkable feat: the braiding of four distinct faith communities into what the locals call convivencia, or peaceful coexistence.
Yet, as last week’s event revealed, convivencia is a fragile thing. The influx of Moroccan youths on the beaches and streets of Ceuta, though over as quickly as it began, has become the gift that does not stop giving for the extreme-right media and politicians in countries bordering Spain. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s ethno-nationalist party the National Rally, demanded that the French government “reinforce its border controls.”
Not to be outdone, her second-in-command, Jordan Bardella, warned that these “invaders will soon be on our streets.” Going a step further, the extreme-right prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, called for Spain’s suspension from the Schengen Accord—the guarantee of free movement of citizens across the borders of European Union nations — and resurrected immigration controls for Spanish citizens, although Spain does not share a border with Italy. (This geographical fact did not deter Mette Fredricksen, the prime minister of distant Denmark, from voicing her support for Meloni.)
Inevitably, the old chestnut of a Jewish conspiracy has also been resurrected. Public figures, ranging from antisemitic fantasist Candace Owens, through the former director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, to the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, have posted or reposted wink-wink, nudge-nudge claims that Israel orchestrated the mad rush of Moroccans towards Ceuta. The reason cited for this nefarious feat is Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to embarrass the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, who has been one of the harshest European critics of the war in Gaza and a proponent of a more liberal immigration policy than his European peers. The Moroccan government’s irritation over Spain’s support of Algerian claims to the western Sahara makes this baseless claim seem more reasonable.
The political and rhetorical theatrics have little to do with reality. Europe is not being overrun by what Marion Maréchal, a politician to the right of her aunt Marine Le Pen, described as a “veritable invasion” by “hordes of young Moroccans.” Or, for that matter, what her Spanish homologue, Santiago Abascal, the leader of the extreme-right party Vox, insisted was “an act of war” against Spain and, by extension, Europe.
This frenzied response deliberately ignores the fact that not a single Moroccan migrant entered Spain — a strait, after all, runs between Spain and Ceuta — and have nearly all been returned by Spanish soldiers and police to Morocco. Tellingly, residents of Ceuta have also used the word “invasion,” but with greater nuance. As a journalist for Le Monde reported, none of the locals she interviewed described the Moroccans as enemies. Though frightened by the sudden and massive influx, they also understood the migrants were not seeking “to rob them,” but instead to find a better future. Besides, as one Ceutan, Rachel Gomes, observed, she has Muslim in-laws. “This does not make for problems. Four cultures exist here — Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian — that live together remarkably well.” If only a similar convivencia reigned among the members of the European Union.
The post The real Jewish story of Ceuta, Spain’s migrant-magnet neighbor to Morocco appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Ad for Republican Colorado governor candidate depicts Jewish opponent with horns
An attack ad on the Jewish Democratic candidate for governor of Colorado has depicted him with red horns, drawing condemnation from the state Democratic party — and the apparent approval of the Republican nominee.
Invoking an ancient antisemitic canard that Jews have horns, the ad, created in support of Republican nominee Victor Marx and circulating on various social media platforms, called the Democratic nominee and Colorado’s current Attorney General Phil Weiser “the next threat to Colorado.”
The Colorado Democratic Party said on Facebook that the graphic was “antisemitic and disgusting” and called on Marx to disavow it.
Instead, Marx engaged with a post on X accompanied by the image, calling on Republicans to stop attacking each other, “unite, stay focused, and win.”
Throughout his campaign, controversy has followed Marx, a minister and author who some have categorized as a Christian fundamentalist. Others have called him a fabulist. On the campaign trail, Marx has claimed to be the first American into Gaza during the war with Israel, boasted about performing exorcisms by phone and said his stepfather forced him to kill a man at the age of 7.
A fellow Republican party member also formally accused him of accepting unlimited campaign contributions through his online merchandise store.
The Marx campaign did not respond to an inquiry by the Forward.
Weiser, who attends a Conservative synagogue in Denver, defeated U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet for the Democratic nomination in July. He also did not respond to an inquiry.
Polls show Weiser with a sizable lead over Marx. The Colorado governor’s seat has been held by a Democrat since 2008, and term-limited incumbent Gov. Jared Polis is also Jewish.
The post Ad for Republican Colorado governor candidate depicts Jewish opponent with horns appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Suspected arson gutted Montreal’s trendiest kosher restaurant. The city’s Jews say they saw it coming
Howard Szalavetz’s phone buzzed around 3:15 a.m. Saturday, startling him awake. It was news no landlord wants: a retail building he owned was on fire. Nöam, the kosher restaurant that anchors it, was burning.
He threw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and hopped into his daughter’s Ford Bronco. The drive was only five minutes, but each one felt like an eternity. Police and fire crews had cordoned off several blocks around Montreal’s Décarie Boulevard, forcing him to abandon the car and run the rest of the way on foot. Eventually, they let him through.
“It was insane,” he recalled in an interview Sunday. “There were 80 firemen.” The building he’s owned since 1987 — home to a car wash, an auto repair garage, and Nöam — was engulfed. The restaurant’s section, a wood-frame extension, “went up pretty quickly.”
By the time the fire was under control around 8 a.m., the restaurant was gutted top to bottom. The car wash and auto repair suffered less damage and plan to reopen this week.
Video of the fire that burned down Noam, a popular Kosher restaurant in Montreal pic.twitter.com/gVvvTVvcRQ
— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) August 2, 2026
Szalavetz and police were able to pull footage from a security camera mounted to the exterior of the auto repair shop. In it, a figure appears on the restaurant’s wood deck, bends down and lights a fire with what looks like a can of accelerant. The man’s face wasn’t hidden, but the footage was too poor in quality to make out much more.
When nearby shops that were closed over the weekend reopen Monday, investigators hope to gather additional footage. Szalavetz said a camera damaged in the Nöam fire might also contain more information.
Szalavetz’s father survived three concentration camps and lost much of his family in the Holocaust. He died in 2021. “Thankfully he didn’t see this,” Szalavetz said, “because this is how Europe started.”
The Nöam fire is the latest in a rapid drumbeat of attacks on Jewish targets in Canada. Last week, in Toronto, a gunman fired at the windows of one branch of Kiva’s Bagel Bar, a Jewish-owned bakery chain, about an hour after vandals had shattered the glass front of another location. In June, a man smashed a window at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, a Reform congregation in Montreal, and tried to start a fire inside.
That same month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledged that two-thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes in Canada are directed at Jews. “Canada’s civic compact,” he said, “is failing Jewish Canadians.” B’nai Brith Canada recorded 27 violent antisemitic incidents in the first six months of 2026 — nearly triple the count for all of 2025.
Deborah Lipstadt, the noted Holocaust historian and former U.S. special envoy to combat antisemitism during the Biden administration, said the Nöam fire was “utterly predictable.” Carney, she said, “does not have the chutzpah” to stand up and declare, without qualification, that antisemitism has no place in Canada.
“If this is not a wake-up call, I don’t know,” Lipstadt said. “Do more people have to die for it to be a wake-up call? How much more do you need? Spare me your pious sympathies and sincere regrets.”
A vigil and a crowdfunding campaign
By Saturday, Szalavetz said he’d fielded some 150 calls — more, he said, than he gets on his birthday. Montreal is home to an estimated 90,000 Jews, but Szalavetz said it still has the feel of a “shtetl,” and word traveled fast: a vigil drew a crowd outside the burned restaurant Saturday night, and the community plans on launching an online crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the two owners and roughly 30 employees, since insurance can’t cover the full scope of the loss.
Brothers-in-law Meir Azerad and Ynon Cohen opened Nöam in August 2024, transforming what had been little more than a car wash’s waiting room into a polished, sit-down kosher restaurant. They named it for Cohen’s brother, Noam, who had died years earlier and had dreamed of opening a restaurant of his own.
They turned out wood-fired pizzas at 1,000 degrees, two minutes a pie. Expanding the menu to include Mediterranean and Italian, Nöam grew to a following that surprised even its owners, and had a waitlist most weeknights. The partners had just spent a year renovating a second floor to keep up with demand.
Among the social media posts circulating Saturday morning was one from Francine Goldberg, a lifelong Montrealer, that quickly went viral. The fire broke out on Shabbat — the one day, she wrote, “we are forbidden to kindle a flame. Somebody kindled it for us.”
Politicians were quick to respond. Anthony Housefather, a Jewish member of Parliament who represents the area, demanded the fire be investigated as a hate crime. Police say they have not yet established a motive.
The Mamdani angle
But for many Montreal Jews, official statements have started to feel beside the point. Goldberg calls them “the typical Hallmark pleasantries: ‘Oh, it’s horrible, and it should never happen.’”
Goldberg, who works at a medical clinic in downtown Montreal, said she’s received more hate mail this year than at any point in her life. She doesn’t think Carney is an antisemite — just a politician counting votes. “There are far more of them than there are of us,” she said. Jews make up approximately 1% of the Canadian population.
Jesse Brown, a Canadian Jewish journalist who has tracked the country’s antisemitism surge since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust, sees the same pattern from a different angle.
When Carney announced a new council to combat hate this summer, Brown called it “disingenuous” — the council had already existed for months, under a different name, and included members with histories of anti-Israel advocacy. More pointedly, Brown said, Carney has refused to name the actual cause. “This is happening because of this global movement against Israel,” he said. “Jews in Canada are being targeted in the name of targeting Israel.” Naming antisemitism, he argued, is easy. Naming anti-Zionism as its engine is the part no Canadian politician has been willing to do.
Goldberg sees this dynamic playing out beyond Canada’s borders. In New York, Zohran Mamdani was elected the city’s first Muslim mayor in January and recently to called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide.” His win in the U.S. city with the largest population of Jews has been widely read as evidence that anti-Zionist politics can win elections across the country.
In the months since his election, antisemitic hate crimes in New York have climbed sharply: NYPD data show Jews, roughly 10% of the city’s population, were targets in 55% of all confirmed hate crimes in the first half of 2026, with anti-Jewish incidents up 182% year-over-year in January alone.
Goldberg sees that rhetoric traveling regardless of the border. “That has a trickle-down effect on Montrealers,” she said. She’s watched a segment of the city’s progressive activists argue that Montreal’s own mayor should “follow Mamdani” and formally declare that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Her worry isn’t that Israeli policy is off-limits for criticism — she says she criticizes the Netanyahu government herself — but that mainstreaming anti-Zionism as just another respectable political position is what’s fueling the rise in antisemitism she’s living through.
Goldberg said that people keep telling her to consider moving to Israel. She isn’t interested. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “It’s exactly what they would want, so I’m not going to clarify their mission.” That doesn’t mean the fear isn’t real, she added: “It’s very, very dark. It’s dark times for us.”
‘A lot of gaslighting’
Brown pointed to a pattern that predates the fire at Nöam. Last August, an Orthodox man was beaten in a Montreal park in front of his three children; his attacker tore the kippah from his head and threw it to the ground. Quebec prosecutors ultimately determined it wasn’t a hate crime — the attacker was found not criminally responsible due to mental illness.
When pro-Palestinian protesters marched down Toronto’s “hospital row” in February 2024 and mobbed Mount Sinai Hospital, organizers said the hospital hadn’t been targeted; it just happened to be along the route. Brown calls this a recurring dynamic. “There’s a lot of gaslighting that occurs,” he said.
He expects something similar will happen with the Nöam investigation: police have video of the fire being set, but Canadian hate-crime charges require proof of motive that’s notoriously hard to establish. More likely, he said, if the suspect is charged with arson alone “then people who want to deny what is happening will say, well, ‘We have no proof that was antisemitism.’”
There’s already a template for how that skepticism plays out. In December 2024, a man threw a Molotov cocktail into Montreal’s Beth Tikvah synagogue; windows were smashed the same night at a nearby Jewish federation office. The man who pleaded guilty to three of six arson-related charges, Mohamed Ilyes Akodad, testified this summer that he’d been paid $15,000 through an anonymous contact on Signal to firebomb two buildings and torch a car, and that he didn’t know one of them was a synagogue. Prosecutors are seeking a two-year sentence; his lawyer is asking for a suspended sentence and home confinement. A judge is expected to rule Sept. 10.
Rabbi Lisa Grushcow of Montreal’s Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, which experienced its own firebomb attack this June, has seen the pattern up close. “At this point, none of it feels surprising,” she said, “and that in itself is quite sobering.” Protective coatings on the synagogue’s windows kept the firebomb from getting through, and police apprehended the suspect that night. It could have been far worse, she said, “but we can’t just say ‘This is not who we are,’ because clearly this is who our society is right now.”
Still, she pointed to what happened the day after her synagogue was attacked: so many families showed up for a scheduled service that the congregation had to run two instead of one. She saw the same instinct play out in Toronto, where customers lined up outside Kiva’s Bagel the morning after the shootings there. “It shouldn’t take resilience to live as a Jew,” she said. But if the choice is between resilience and retreat, her community has made its decision: “We’re not going to give up or move away.”
Lipstadt’s message to Jews was also one of resilience, not despair. Asked whether Canadian Jews should consider leaving the country, she declined to answer directly. “That’s not my place,” she said. But she was unequivocal that Jews would endure. “We have survived worse,” she said. What worries her isn’t whether Jews will survive — it’s whether the societies around them will. “Will democratic society, writ very large, be okay?” she said. “I’m not so sure.”
Nöam’s owners Azerad and Cohen have said little publicly since the fire. Szalavetz described them as “very camera shy,” agreeing only reluctantly to a brief interview with a local reporter after Szalavetz pushed them to speak. “The world needs to know,” he told them. For now, what’s certain is the plan: rebuild in the same spot and reopen “bigger, better, newer” than before, said Szalavetz. He estimates that could take six months to a year. In the meantime, he said, he’s working on finding them a temporary home so the restaurant can remain open.
“Coming back is the goal,” Szalavetz said. “It’s my goal as a proud Jew. You’re not going to take us down.”
The post Suspected arson gutted Montreal’s trendiest kosher restaurant. The city’s Jews say they saw it coming appeared first on The Forward.
