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Hereditary cancers aren’t just a women’s problem. Jewish men need to take precautions too.
Bill Harris, a veteran Los Angeles photojournalist, didn’t think much of it when one morning in 2012 he woke up and found a tiny blood spot on the T-shirt he’d slept in. The next morning, he found blood in the same place on his chest — and went straight to his computer.
“Online, I could find only three things that would cause a man’s nipple to discharge blood: being an avid runner, which I wasn’t; having a subtropical fungus, which I didn’t; and breast cancer,” he said. “That was a pretty big shock.”
Harris, then just a few weeks shy of his 61st birthday, immediately called his doctor, who ordered a mammogram and ultrasound. They confirmed a cancerous growth in his right breast. Ten days later, a biopsy came back positive. The next month Harris got a right mastectomy, followed by the removal of his left breast half a year later.
“I walked into a woman’s imaging center and had to get into a pink paper robe,” he recalled. “All the women in the waiting room were staring at me.”
Like many other Ashkenazi men, Harris never had considered that he might have been born with a harmful mutation of the BRCA gene, which elevates the risk not only of breast cancer, but also of melanoma and prostate, ovarian and pancreatic cancer.
“Hundreds of other mutations in the BRCA gene are just as dangerous, but they’re not specific to Ashkenazim,” said Dr. Robert Sidlow, director of the Male BRCA Genetic Risk Program at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. About 1 in 40 Ashkenazi Jews (those of Eastern European descent) carries the harmful mutation, compared to about 1 in 400 in the general population.
“The vast majority of patients I see are relatives of women who have breast or ovarian cancer and then get tested,” he said. Of BRCA mutation carriers, Sidlow added, “Most men are pretty happy to enroll in some kind of surveillance program once they get over the initial shock.”
Sidlow is on the Men’s Leadership Council at Sharsheret, the national Jewish nonprofit organization that educates the community about cancer risks and supports those with breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
Elana Silber, CEO of Sharsheret (Hebrew for “chain”), says it’s crucial that men with a family history of cancer undergo genetic counseling screening for BRCA and other hereditary cancer mutations.
Genetic testing is possible via a standard blood or saliva sample.
While Sharsheret is primarily considered a women’s organization, it has been using November — nicknamed Movember for its focus on men’s health — for an awareness campaign focused on Jewish men’s cancer risks.
“This is not only a women’s issue,” Silber said. “Family history is so important. When a man shares his family history with his doctor, he may not realize that he should mention that his mother had breast cancer or that his sister had ovarian cancer, as these are not generally ‘men’s diseases.’ They are not aware that these cancers could mean that they themselves are at increased risk for cancer and that they can pass on these mutations to the next generation – their daughters and their sons.”
If someone discovers he (or she) is a carrier of one of the genetic mutations with elevated cancer risks — not just BRCA but also such mutations as ATM, TP53, CHEK2, and PALB2 — there are various precautions they can take for themselves and their children. They can monitor their own health more closely, they can get encourage their children to test to see if they are carriers and, for any future children, take steps to prevent the mutated genes from being passed down.
For example, couples can conceive via in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and then test the embryos before implantation to ensure that only those unaffected by the genetic mutation are implanted.
While most women are aware of the risks of breast cancer, men generally are not — even though the disease strikes 2,500 men in the U.S. every year and kills about 500 of them, according to Sidlow. About 1-2% of men with the BRCA1 mutation and 6-7% of men with the BRCA2 mutation will develop cancer by age 80.
“This is why we recommend periodic mammograms starting at about age 50 for men who carry a BRCA2 mutation,” Sidlow said. “We like to educate these men on how to check their chests once a month and have a clinician do a breast checkup on them once a year.”
Since the BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations also make prostate cancer more likely, men with either mutation should get PSA (prostate-specific antigen) levels in their blood tested annually beginning at age 40, rather than 50, the age at which screening generally begins, Sidlow said.
Sharsheret has been promoting the importance of learning one’s family history, genetic counseling and screening among both men and women. The 20-year-old organization also runs various peer support networks, offers financial assistance to cancer patients, provides mental health counseling and guidance to patients, caregivers, and their friends, and seeks to educate the broader Jewish community about cancer risks and support.
Peggy Cottrell, a certified genetic counselor at Sharsheret, said men in general are more reluctant to get regular checkups than women.
Ashkenazi Jewish men are at elevated risk not just of breast and prostate cancer but also of pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is particularly difficult because it’s tough to detect early enough and hard to treat. The five-year survival rate is only 11%. About 2% of BRCA1 carriers and 4% of BRCA2 carriers will develop pancreatic cancer, Sidlow estimated.
“Usually by the time pancreas cancer is clinically detected it has already spread microscopically to the liver,” Sidlow said. “But pancreas cancer is potentially curable if caught when the tumor is extremely small.”
Even among those with elevated risks, certain behaviors can improve one’s odds, such as avoiding obesity, smoking and excessive alcohol consumption.
Harris, the California photojournalist, is still fighting at age 71. While he overcame breast cancer 10 years ago, last year he was diagnosed with ampullary cancer, a rare disease related to his BRCA2 status that was discovered thanks to his participation in a UCLA study. Surgeons have removed his gall bladder, half his pancreas and part of his small intestine, and he has had to endure eight rounds of chemotherapy.
“I’m still working through the aftereffects of the chemo. I have to eat smaller quantities than before and take enzymes to supplement my digestive processes,” Harris said.
Meanwhile, his 37-year-old son discovered that he, too, carries the BRCA2 mutation, and he had a double prophylactic mastectomy and reconstruction at age 30 — just to be on the safe side.
“If there’s any history of breast, ovarian or prostate cancer in your family, get tested genetically so that you’re informed,” Harris advised. “Diagnoses happen way too late for men, and the danger is too big.”
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BBC draws fire after airing Holocaust cello repair story that does not specially mention Jews
(JTA) — In a Christmas special this year, a BBC One program devoted a quarter of its episode to telling the story of a Jewish child refugee whose cello was damaged while fleeing the Nazis on the Kindertransport.
But while the story itself is steeped in Jewish history, the segment of the program failed to make any mention of Jews, igniting criticism from British Jews who are on high alert for signs of antisemitism from the network.
Now, the BBC has issued a clarification, adding a note to the program description in its iPlayer app explaining that the Kindertransport evacuated Jewish children from Nazi territory.
The production company behind “The Repair Shop,” a popular show where family heirlooms are refurbished, said it believed the historical context of Martin Landau’s cello would be obvious to viewers when Helen Mirren, the famed actress who recently portrayed the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, brought it in during the episode that aired Dec. 26.
“We were honoured to share the history of Martin Landau’s cello and play a small part in telling an important and emotive story with contemporary resonance,” a Ricochet spokesperson said in a statement. “We felt that Martin’s story was told clearly and succinctly, and we believed the fact that he was Jewish was implicit in the story.”
Born in Berlin in 1924, Landau — who later became a prominent theater director — was 14 when he brought his cello with him on board the Kindertransport, a rescue effort that brought nearly 10,000, mostly Jewish, children to safety in Europe during World War II.
But before getting on the train, the neck of Landau’s instrument was “deliberately snapped in two,” according to a description of the episode on the BBC website.
“Despite this blow, Martin guarded the cello carefully for the remainder of his life, eventually gifting it to Denville Hall, a care home for retired members of the entertainment industries, of which both he and Dame Helen are loyal supporters,” the episode’s description continues. “Sadly, the cello has remained silent for over 80 years, and the residents would dearly love to see it restored so that they can hear it played for the first time.”
Thirty-one members of Landau’s family, including his parents, were killed in Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz, according to his obituary in The Times. In London, Landau went on to become a prolific producer of plays and musicals. He died in 2011 at 86.
The Jewish Chronicle was first to report frustration over the show’s lack of explicit mention of Landau’s Jewish identity. It reported that a reference to Jews appeared to be truncated from a sentence by Mirren, who said, “…children were put on the Kindertransport.”
The episode is one of several antisemitism and Israel-related controversies to hit the British public broadcaster in recent months. In October, the BBC was penalized after it failed to identify the narrator of a Gaza documentary as the son of a Hamas government official. Over the summer, it was also criticized for airing a performance by the punk group Bob Vylan that included chants of “Death to the IDF.”
On Saturday, the BBC also reached a settlement with an Israeli family whose home it filmed following the Oct. 7 attacks without consent.
Now, the network has added new language to the “The Repair Shop” episode, too.
“This program is subject to a clarification. The Kindertransport was the organized evacuation of approximately 10,000 children, the majority of whom were Jewish, from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia,” the iPlayer description read. (The initiative was funded largely by Jewish groups, but a small number of the children rescued were Roma, Christian children of Jewish parents or the children of political prisoners.)
During the episode, the repaired instrument was played by the British Jewish cellist Raphael Wallfisch, whose 100-year-old mother Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is the only surviving member of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz.
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At a former driving school, Kehillat Harlem plants roots for Jewish life uptown
(New York Jewish Week) — The “Yes You Can” driving school is no more, but the sign that still hangs over its former storefront in Central Harlem is something of an apt message for the new tenant — a fledgling synagogue that aims to demonstrate the vitality of Jewish life in the neighborhood.
Kehillat Harlem, a non-denominational “shul community,” moved into the Adam Clayton Powell storefront last year after seven years in transit. Since its founding, it has held services in a basement, a local cafe and even outdoors.
Now, Kehillat Harlem is using the space for what its founding rabbi, Kyle Savitch, says is the only option for weekly Shabbat services in the neighborhood, even as a host of new initiatives aim to serve Harlem’s growing Jewish population.
“We’re the only synagogue in Central Harlem that’s meeting every Friday, every Saturday, let alone having meals and everything else, so I definitely think we’re serving a need there,” Savitch said. “For folks who are looking to move or looking to join a new community, sometimes what they want to know is that there is consistency in Jewish life, and so I think we’re able to provide that.”
But Kehillat Harlem isn’t just striving to add a synagogue to the neighborhood. Savitch also aims to leverage the shul into a community hub or even, one day, a restaurant serving Jewish food.
A dress rehearsal came last month on the first night of Hanukkah, when roughly 70 people filled Kehillat Harlem’s storefront space for the shul’s annual Hanukkah speakeasy. To enter the event, which included a jazz band, latkes and kosher tequila from Tekiah Spirits, partygoers used the secret password “Lehadlik ner,” the Hebrew phrase meaning “to light a candle.”
“We’re exploring how our role in the community can expand to infrastructure in terms of kosher food, in terms of space access, in terms of places to gather,” Savitch said.
Kehillat Harlem is hardly the only entity to tackle those questions in Harlem, which once had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. Once home to roughly 175,000 Jewish residents at its peak in 1917, the neighborhood saw most of them leave as it transformed into a hub of Black culture during the Harlem Renaissance. Some of the neighborhood’s synagogues remain standing, but have been converted into churches.
Over the last 15 years, the neighborhood’s Jewish population has gone from an estimated 2,000 people to 16,000 adults and 8,000 children, according to a 2023 study by the UJA-Federation of New York.
To serve them, a branch of the young professional programming nonprofit Moishe House has opened up, as has a branch of the Upper West Side’s Marlene Meyerson JCC with its own rabbi-in-residence and monthly Shabbat service. Tzibur Harlem, an initiative founded in 2024 by Rabbi Dimitry Ekshtut and Erica Frankel, offers programming including occasional Shabbat services; it recently played a role in getting a Hanukkah menorah added to a local Christmas display.
But when it comes to regular prayer services, the only option until Kehillat Harlem opened was the Old Broadway Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation founded in 1911 that serves families in West Harlem and Morningside Heights.
Many observant Jews in the neighborhood were looking for something different, said Savitch, who was ordained at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a liberal Orthodox seminary, in 2021.
Kehillat Harlem, he said, “came out of the need for a Jewish community in the neighborhood, which was inclusive and welcoming to everyone who walked in the door. Our community is very diverse. There’s folks who are observant, there’s folks who aren’t observant, there’s queer folks, there’s folks in interfaith relationships, and there wasn’t really a place in the neighborhood for all those people to go and feel comfortable.”
Arielle Flax, a 32-year-old Jewish Harlem resident and co-president of Kehillat Harlem, described the shul’s ethos as “socially progressive but halachically traditional,” meaning that she seeks to follow Jewish law.
While Kehillat Harlem has a mechitza, the gender partition that separates men and women in Orthodox synagogues, it also has a third section for genderfluid or nonbinary participants. Unlike at most Orthodox synagogues, where reading from the Torah is restricted to men, people of all genders are invited to read from the Torah.
“We want to be as inclusive as possible, while still keeping that bar for those who do want to fulfill the more stricter obligations for Judaism,” said Flax. “We try to empower people of all genders, all backgrounds, to participate, to feel like they are contributing and involved and not just spectating.”
Before Flax joined Kehillat Harlem in 2017 for its inaugural Shabbat, she had hesitated to move to the neighborhood because of its sparse Jewish infrastructure, but the presence of the fledgling congregation had helped tip her decision.
“I immediately felt like I had a place to go as soon as I moved up to New York, which is great, but before we moved up we were a little concerned,” said Flax.
Since then, Flax said she had seen the neighborhood’s Jewish population grow.
“I think by having Kehillat Harlem and other organizations in the area, I think more Jewish people are kind of coming out and getting involved in Jewish life in Harlem,” she said. “I think that’s a really beautiful thing.”
Laura Lara, a 50-year-old Argentinian native who moved to Rego Park, Queens, in 2022, said that she had struggled to connect to a Jewish community in the city until attending Kehillat Harlem’s Purim party last year.
“Being an emigre from another country and another language, finding the right place was a little bit hard for me at the beginning,” said Lara. “Finally, I found a place, and I went to a celebration of Purim in Harlem, and I found the diversity, everyone has a voice, everyone has a place, and that is what I like.”
After making the “schlep” to services and community events at Kehillat Harlem over the past year, Lara said that she and her husband are considering making the move to Harlem.
“I am also thinking of moving to the area,” said Lara. “I feel like I live in a bubble in my neighborhood, my community and the values and the place is far away from my home.”
In August, Kehillat Harlem marked a milestone — and another journey from Queens to Harlem — by dedicating a Torah that had been rescued during the Holocaust from Germany in 1940 and donated by the former Bayside Jewish Center.
“By bringing this Torah into Kehillat Harlem and returning it to use, we’re literally carrying it into the next generation,” Savitch said at the dedication ceremony. “We’re weaving together its survival through the Holocaust, its history in Queens and its future here in the neighborhood of Harlem, so we’re marking not just the dedication of this Torah, but the renewal of Jewish life in Harlem.”
Savitch said his dream is for Kehillat Harlem to become a one-stop shop for services, classes and communal gatherings and kosher food in Harlem.
Doing so could help hack the high cost of real estate in New York City. In neighborhoods with dense Jewish infrastructure, small synagogues have begun sharing space with Jewish organizations, but that’s not as much of an option in Harlem.
“The dream is really to have a fully multi-purpose space, especially as costs are going up and synagogues are having a hard time paying rent, and restaurants are closing left and right, especially kosher restaurants,” said Savitch.
While other parts of the city boast dozens of Jewish and kosher restaurants, Harlem has fewer options for its Jewish neighbors, including Silvana, a restaurant that serves Israeli cuisine, and Tzion Cafe, a kosher and vegan Ethiopian-Israeli restaurant.
To fill the gap in kosher offerings, Savitch transformed Kehillat Harlem into a makeshift restaurant in 2024 for Passover, and hosted a weekly program called “Shtiebel Sundays” last year where kosher pastries and coffee were for sale.
While Savitch said that Shtiebel Sundays hadn’t garnered revenue for the shul, he said it was “successful as a community-building model.”
“That’s also part of what we’re doing,” he said. “In a community that can’t necessarily yet support a fully functioning kosher cafe, restaurant, whatever it is, we’re providing that as a nonprofit.”
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Teens, seniors explore Ashkenazi traditions at Yiddish New York festival
A group of klezmer musicians was jamming in Lower Manhattan, when its fiddler suddenly stopped and encouraged a preteen clarinetist to lead a tune. After a moment, the young musician began playing a traditional Yiddish dance melody known as “der shtiler bulgar,” and the other musicians joined in.
This was one of many scenes at the 11th annual Yiddish New York festival that took place last month at the New York City campus of Hebrew Union College.
The size of the festival was impressive: Over 100 speakers, 700 participants and 200 workshops and sessions on various aspects of Yiddish culture.
Yiddish New York began after KlezKamp, a storied Yiddish cultural festival that had been held in the Catskills for three decades, made its decision to shut down. “It was 2014 and KlezKamp had announced its last festival,” said Pete Rushefsky, executive director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance and one of the lead organizers of Yiddish New York. “A bunch of us got together and said ‘we can’t bear to face the world without our Yiddish festival.’”
Now that the college has announced the sale of its Manhattan campus to nearby New York University, the five-day festival will be searching for a new home for 2026. “We’re going to have to find a new venue,” said Rushefsky. “It will be a challenge we will have to overcome. I’d love to see a residential component moving forward — I think there’s an interest.”
When he wasn’t helping out with administrative tasks, Rushefsky spent much of the day behind a tsimbl (an Eastern European hammered string instrument with a long history in the klezmer tradition), leading informal klezmer jams.
The festival’s offerings were wide-ranging within the scope of Yiddish culture: practical workshops, lectures, concerts, film screenings and informal music jams. And, of course, plenty of schmoozing.
Concerts included an evening of music by the versatile Yiddish playwright and performer Mikhl Yashinsky whose setlist included original Yiddish tradaptations (adapting a text from one language to another to make it culturally relevant for a new audience) of Tom Lehrer’s “Hanukkah in Santa Monica” and Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side.” Yashinsky also performed, together with a group of collaborators, several original songs and scenes from his Yiddish stage works Feast of the Seven Sinners and The Gospel According to Chaim.
Cantor Sarah Myerson and Dr. Avia Moore led a Yiddish Dance Fellows program featuring four fellows from around the country: Hannah Mira Friedland (Chicago), Sarah Horowitz (Albuquerque), Yael Horowitz (NYC), and Rachel Linsky (Boston). All were already leading, teaching and in some cases even choreographing Yiddish dance in their communities.
But the training that Myerson and Moore gave them wasn’t just about learning dance steps. They also role-played typical scenes where dance sessions might not go so smoothly. “Avia and I offered the most common ‘disruptions’ we experience on the dance floor: ignoring the leader, talking loudly, doing the wrong steps, etc. The fellows adjusted with generous grace!” Myerson said.
There were also programs for younger audiences. Teens learned about a 1950s music group, the Jewish Young Folksingers, affiliated with the International Workers Order, a mutual aid organization targeted during the Second Red Scare. Yiddish folk singer Ethel Raim, who was a part of the Jewish Young Folksingers herself, taught songs from the group’s history and shared her experiences in it. On the last day of the festival, the teens presented a skit based on all they had learned.
“It was really exciting to have that many generations in one room; we were spanning almost eight decades,” said Ozzy Gold-Shapiro, one of the teen program’s organizers. The youngest was 10; the oldest — in her eighties. “I was especially moved watching the Teen Program kids express and perform their version of cultural exploration and participation,” said Raim, who is herself in her 80s.
On the last evening of the festival, people gathered for the awarding of the 14th “Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Award” to musician and researcher Michael Alpert, known affectionately by his Yiddish name, Meyshke. Cooper, a singer and Yiddish cultural activist who passed away in 2011, played a leading role in the contemporary revival of Yiddish music.
“I was inspired and touched by Adrienne’s ability to make the Yiddish tradition accessible,” Alpert said. “There was a time when I thought I’d be the last person in the world who knew how to sing old Yiddish ballads and obviously that’s not the case. The younger cohort of this remarkable intergenerational community is one of the great joys of my life.”
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