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His family was killed in Sydney. Hours later, he helped feed 600 unhoused people in LA.
Hanukkah on Bondi Beach was the coolest party of the year, recalled Yossi Segelman.
“There’s singing. There’s dancing. There’s sufganiyot … There’s clowns and petting zoos,” he said. “It brought all people together.”
Segelman, who was born in London, spent 16 years living in Sydney, and now resides in Los Angeles, used to attend the celebration every year.
It was Segelman who drew Rabbi Eli Schlanger, his childhood neighbor in London, to Australia almost 20 years ago. Segelman made the shidduch, or match, between Eli and his wife Chaya’s cousin. As they became family, Segelman and Schlanger also became close friends.
“He was just always happy … a rocket full of joy,” Segelman said. “I knew many people who were personally moved and touched and became more connected to Judaism and to Israel as a direct result of their impact and connection with Rabbi Eli.”
When Segelman logged on to WhatsApp on Sunday, he learned that terrorists had murdered Schlanger at the same yearly Hanukkah celebration. One of his nieces was in surgery.
“I had a number of other family members, nieces, nephews, who were ducking at the tables and had bullets whizzing overhead and had seen things that no one should ever see,” he said.
And yet hours later, Segelman, who is the executive director of the nonprofit Our Big Kitchen Los Angeles, still showed up to lead dozens of people in preparing 600 meals for Angelenos in need.
That Sunday was my second time volunteering at OBKLA. As I snapped on blue nitrile gloves and prepared to scoop meatballs from a tub of ground beef, I was stunned that Segelman felt capable of showing up with one family member dead and another on the operating table.
But he insisted, during the session and two days later when I came back to speak with him, that it’s precisely during dark times that a community needs a space to come together and serve others. As rising antisemitism and violent attacks like the one in Bondi might pressure Jews to turn inward, Segelman’s emphasis on both Jewish pride and welcoming all, no matter their background, offers us a path forward.
Giving back in times of crisis
Schlanger and Segelman both served as chaplains in Australia; Schlanger for corrective services and Segelman for the military.
“We were involved in the same thing and that is to try and bring peace, and comfort, and solace, encouragement, to those who found themselves in difficult situations,” Segelman said.
In parallel to his work as a chaplain, Segelman became involved as an early director of Our Big Kitchen in Sydney, which prepares meals for Australians in need. The organization’s Bondi kitchen is less than a mile from where Sunday’s terror attack took place. Though the food is kosher, most meals go to the broader community, and most volunteers aren’t Jewish.
A few years after moving to Los Angeles, at the height of the pandemic, the Segelman family sprung into action to distribute snacks to hospitals, unhoused people, and first responders. Their impulse to help has since grown into a smooth operation, one the Segelmans activated at full throttle during LA’s wildfires this year.
In his office, Segelman has a basket where he keeps empty rolls from the stickers volunteers use to package food. Each roll signified a thousand meals. The basket was overflowing. In the past year, Segelman said, OBK LA welcomed more than 24,000 volunteers who made 183,574 meals.
Segelman emphasized the impact of the meals not only on the recipients, but also on the volunteers who created them.
“Volunteering, it’s being hands-on. It’s a visceral experience. You’re immersing yourself in an act of goodness and kindness,” he said.
How we respond to terror
Segelman has more practice than most in taking action. But the attack in Sydney posed a new challenge.
“For me to get up Sunday morning and welcome everybody and do what we do usually at OBK with cheer and with love was not easy,” he said. But he knew that his job was “to inspire people, especially when the going gets tough, and to really transform those feelings of helplessness into hopefulness.”
When we spoke on Tuesday at noon, Segelman had just finished an event with 70 school kids, with more programs to come later that day. Schlanger’s funeral, which he would attend remotely, was at 4 p.m. His teenage niece’s operation was successful, though his entire family remained extremely traumatized.
Nevertheless, Segelman insisted the Hanukkah celebration must return to Bondi Beach.
“100%. Bigger and better,” he said. “To cancel events and close down events is contrary to the story of Hanukkah.”
“We need to continue doing what we’re doing, do it stronger, obviously be smart, be vigilant, but absolutely go out there and to continue to do what we do and do it proudly.”
When I asked if a terror attack like Sunday’s might complicate OBK’s practice of welcoming everyone into its kitchen, his answer was adamant: “We are an organization rooted in Jewish values of chesed, of tzedakah, and we’re proudly kosher, and we’re proudly based in the heart of the community. But we welcome absolutely everyone, both to volunteer and to receive a meal.”
Violence cannot shatter our empathy
To be proudly Jewish and yet welcome everyone is an essential message; one whose second component, I think, may be hard for some in our community to hear right now.
The brutality of Oct. 7, of the subsequent rise in antisemitism and terror like the kind unleashed in Sydney, rightfully activates Jewish fears. It also, however, threatens to make a drought of our empathy. At its very worst — as I’ve written about in the case of far-right Jews denying hunger in Gaza or using AI to spread hate — Jewish pain is contorted into a pretext to ignore others’ suffering or even inflict it on them.
But now is the time to lean into our values, not turn away from the rest of the world. Segelman’s message for all of us this Hannukah: Find a way to give our time in service to others, even if it’s just an hour a week, and to provide inspiration or love, even to just one other person.
On Sunday night, a few hours after the OBKLA event, my partner and I welcomed our friends, some Jewish, some not, for the first night of Hanukkah. We fried latkes and schnitzel. My hand shook, then steadied, as I sang and led a menorah lighting for the first time. The candle burned through its wick; yellow and blue wax dripping onto parchment paper. We sat in the gentle glow, affirming joy.
This Hannukah, Segelman and OBKLA show us that when faced with unimaginable violence, the best way to nourish our souls might be to come together, cook, and serve others.
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Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100
The television entertainment personality Gene Shalit, who celebrated his centenary on March 25, semaphored a Jewish appearance for decades to viewers of NBC’s early morning gabfest The Today Show.
With his Jew-fro hairstyle that fascinated celebrity interviewees and his abundant mustache that outdid Groucho Marx’s mere greasepaint simulacrum, Shalit was one of a kind. Born in New York City in 1926, he clearly aimed to be recognizable even through half-opened bleary eyes of half-asleep viewers. And audible too. Shalit’s precise pronunciation, always at a vigorous decibel level, sought to be comprehensible even during voiceovers. The Canadian comedian Eugene Levy, transfixed by this persona, imitated him on SCTV roaring at high decibel levels.
In one skit, Levy embodied Shalit with haimish affection, hawking a remedy for a migraine presumably caused by his own bellowing. In another, Levy spoofed Hollywood celebrities who were notorious fressers at local restaurants, including the American Jewish actress Shelley Winters (born Shirley Schrift). In still another lampoon, Levy-as-Shalit danced and also kibitzed with the late Catherine O’Hara as the Jewish gossip columnist Rona Barrett (born Burstein).
Shalit apparently kvelled at the notion that he was prominent enough in media culture to be affectionately kidded like other Jewish noteworthies Levy imitated, including Howard Cosell, Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Milton Berle, Judd Hirsch, Jack Carter, James Caan, Lorne Greene, Norman Mailer and Neil Sedaka.
Years later, Levy recalled that when the SCTV comedy troupe was invited to appear on The Today Show, before the segment was filmed, chairs were arranged so that Catherine O’Hara was seated next to Shalit. Suddenly Shalit exclaimed: “Wait a minute, shouldn’t the person who [imitates] me be sitting beside me?” Another Jewish comedian, Jon Lovitz, would likewise attempt to imitate Shalit on Saturday Night Live, but without the zest of Levy’s indelible incarnation.
Shalit once told showbiz reporter Eileen Prose that at first, his looks limited him to radio jobs in more conventional times for TV talent. By the more liberated late 1960s, when long hair and a hirsute upper lip were more common, he was hired as quasi-permanent house Jew on The Today Show. Although his mustache fit the counterculture in the mode of Jewish activist Jerry Rubin’s, Shalit as an aspiring journalist may have grown his facial hair more in tribute to earlier literati like the playwright William Saroyan or the eminent humorist Mark Twain.
At times, Shalit’s appearance could be clown-like or cartoonish, so it was natural that characters inspired by him would appear on animated series such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Family Guy as well as The Muppet Show.
Famous interviewees like Peter Sellers were plainly at ease with Shalit’s persona. A conversation filmed shortly before Sellers’ untimely death was cordial, with the sometimes tetchy actor on his best behavior, acknowledging Shalit as a fellow entertainer. And with Mel Brooks in 1987, Shalit looked to be in paradise.
A warm-hearted empathizer and enthusiast, Shalit was more suited to promoting films than criticizing them. In 1989, a tzimmes occurred when a memo drafted by Bryant Gumbel, a Today Show colleague, deemed Shalit a “specialist in gushing over actors and directors” and added that Shalit’s interviews “aren’t very good.” To his credit, Shalit minimized the controversy, telling The Los Angeles Times that Gumbel’s disses were “not big whacks.”
“Listen, I’ve been interviewing people on the show for 17 years,” Shalit said. “I must be doing something right.”
Part of his inspiration was a sincere appreciation for humor, Jewish and otherwise. His 1987 anthology, Laughing Matters featured contributions by Jewish wits such as Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Woody Allen, Fran Lebowitz, Samuel Hoffenstein, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, George S. Kaufman, Milt Gross, Arthur Kober, Leo Rosten, Allan Sherman, Max Shulman, Calvin Trillin, Rube Goldberg, Sam Gross, Roz Chast, B. Kliban, Robert Mankoff, J. B. Handelsman, Jules Feiffer and George Burns. The volume was dedicated to, among others, the Jewish screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who was Shalit’s instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His visceral reaction to Jewish parody was such that during one commuter train ride, Shalit admitted in a preface, Perelman’s story “No Starch in the Dhoti, S’il Vous Plait” caused a conductor to lean down with concern, stating: “A passenger says you’re crying.” To which Shalit retorted, choking and rubbing away tears: “I’m laughing.”
The subliminal message of Shalit’s book was that without Jews, America would have distinctly fewer tears of laughter. And he regretted not being able to include funny Jews like Jack Benny and Ed Wynn whose performances could not be transferred to the printed page.
Shalit also reviewed books for years. Sticking firmly to the content of cultural products with a few brief hints of value judgment, Shalit seemed to have neither the time nor presumably the inclination to subject new items to analysis of Freudian intensity. He clearly preferred boosting things to panning them, and when a film displeased Shalit, he could be uncomfortable saying so.
One occasion when Shalit raised hackles was his response on The Today Show to the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. Shalit described one of the gay characters as a “sexual predator.” The LGBTQ media group GLAAD objected to Shalit’s characterization as a homophobic stereotype. Shalit’s son Peter wrote an open letter to GLAAD, identifying himself as a gay physician with a Seattle practice helping the gay community. Peter Shalit admitted that his father “did not get” the film in question, but was “not a homophobe.” He might have added that his father had even included an excerpt from Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy in the aforementioned humor collection.
Shalit followed up with his own apology, stating in a mensch-like way that he did not intend to cast “aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself.” When Shalit finally retired from broadcasting at age 84, with the Yiddish-inflected declaration: “It’s enough, already,” he left behind admiring viewers and decades of bonhomie as one of morning television’s most genial protagonists.
Mazel tov, Gene Shalit. Biz hundert un tsvantsik (May you live until 120)!
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How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay
I’m almost positive I heard about the old lady who swallowed a fly before the father who bought a goat for two zuzim.
This occurred to me a few years ago while riding in my sister’s minivan. My niece was in her car seat fidgeting with a toy that plays a catalogue of public domain children’s songs. But unlike the version I’d grown up hearing, where the old lady’s ravenous habit of devouring ever-larger animals is met with the prognostic shrug of “perhaps she’ll die,” the refrain was changed to the more kid-friendly “oh me oh my.”
The Seder tune “Chad Gadya,” which involves a quite similar conceit, has no such timidity when it comes to the ravages of death.
Jack Black once described it as the “original heavy metal song” for the way it progresses along the chain of life from a little goat bought for two zuzim, to the cat who ate the goat, to the dog who bit the cat, all the way up to the angel of death. (“Very Black Sabbath.”)
It is pretty metal — in a kosher Kidz Bop, tot Shabbat kinda way. But why we sing it should, in Jewish circles, be as popular a seasonal question as what a bunny with a clutch of eggs has to do with Jesus’ resurrection. (Some Haggadot explain the greater significance of “Chad Gadya;” my Maxwell House does not.)
Dating the song or rooting out its precise origins is not easy.
As historian Henry Abramson wrote, scholars have noted the song’s similarities to a late Medieval German folk rhyme. While the fact that it is mostly in Aramaic, not the vernacular in Europe in the Middle Ages, suggests an earlier provenance, it is missing from extant Sephardic and Yemenite Haggadot, where one would expect to find texts originating in the language, and the Aramaic itself has many errors.
Abramson reasons that, given the surviving written versions, it was likely adapted sometime in the 14th century from a German children’s rhyme called “The Foreman that Sent Jockel Out,” about an idler named Jockel who a foreman tries to rouse to fieldwork with an escalating series of messengers, ending with a hangman. (Abramson notes the original is characterized by “some Teutonic weirdness,” like a witch sent to subdue a vulture.)
“Chad Gadya” belongs, like its Seder companion “Echad Mi Yodea,” to a genre called “cumulative song,” where verses build with new information a la “12 Days of Christmas.” But “Chad Gadya” stands out for its strangeness and its more oblique message.
Abramson and others see the goat, small and vulnerable, standing in for the Jewish people, and the ensuing parade of antagonists corresponding to historical enemies (Assyrians, Babylonians) and periods of time (Exodus, various conquests), ending with redemption in the Messianic age when the Holy One smites death.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in a commentary for his Haggadah, the song “teaches the great truth of Jewish hope: that though many nations (symbolized by the cat, the dog, and so on) attacked Israel (the goat), each in turn has vanished into oblivion.”
That this truth is conveyed in song, with much banging on the table or animal noises, speaks to the centrality of children in the Passover Seder. And, some think, its inclusion serves a practical purpose: keeping the kids awake through the last leg of a long ritual meal.
My own interpretation is admittedly less lofty. I don’t think of Israel’s tribulations. I do think of the abundance of stray cats in Jerusalem, said to have originated during the British mandate when the city had a rat problem.
And, in the years since my own days as designated Four Questions asker, I’ve been reading “Chad Gadya” into non-Jewish contexts. “The White Cat,” off of Mitski’s new album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, contains a lyric that recalls the song, only altered to be a metaphor for the predations of capitalism.
In it, the speaker says she must work to pay for the cat’s house and “for the bugs who drink my blood/and the birds who eat those bugs/so that white cat can kill the birds.”
These cycles speak across cultures and time because they represent a fundamental rule of nature: There’s always a bigger fish (or cat or dog or stick).
To erase death from the equation, like my niece’s toy does with that hapless, insect-ingesting pensioner, is a concession to today’s sensitivities. That’s not to say “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” represents anything more homiletic than a choking hazard warning, but in the case of “Chad Gadya,” death is the story, and an end to death is the hope.
“The Haggadah ends with the death of death in eternal life,” Rabbi Sacks concluded his drash on the song, which ends when God strikes down the Angel of Death. “A fitting end for the story of a people dedicated to Moshe’s great command, ‘Choose life.’”
I know it’s a principle of faith all over the Haggadah, but I’m more agnostic as to that Messianic promise and maybe more in the camp of our old lady. My understanding of Jewishness, which accords with Moshe’s command, says life is best lived knowing that — perhaps — we’ll die.
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Katz: ‘Israel’s Goal in Lebanon is to Disarm Hezbollah’
Then-Israeli transportation minister Israel Katz attends the cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Feb. 17, 2019. Katz currently serves as the foreign minister. Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz held a situation assessment Friday with senior military and defense officials, reiterating that the country’s policy in Lebanon remains focused on disarming Hezbollah by military and political means. Katz emphasized that the goal applies “regardless of the Iran issue” and pledged continued protection for Israeli northern communities.
Katz said the Israel Defense Forces are completing ground maneuvers up to the anti-tank line to prevent direct threats to border towns. He outlined plans to demolish houses in villages near the border that serve as Hezbollah outposts, citing previous operations in Rafah and Khan Yunis in Gaza as models.
The Defense Minister added that the IDF will maintain security control over the Litani area and that the return of 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon who had evacuated north will not be permitted until northern communities’ safety is ensured. Katz also reaffirmed that the IDF will continue targeting Hezbollah leaders and operatives across Lebanon, noting that 1,000 terrorists have already been eliminated since the start of the current campaign.
“We promised security to the northern towns, and that is exactly what we will do,” Katz said. He further warned that the IDF will act decisively against rocket fire from Lebanon, stating that Hezbollah “will pay heavy prices.”