This is a revised translated version of the original article in Yiddish which you can read here.

One sunny day in spring 2021, without asking permission, artist Sebestyén Fiumei climbed a ladder in central Berlin and attached a white sign to a pole. It was inscribed with an antiquated Yiddish spelling of the street’s former name, “Grenadierstrasse.” Apart from the name change and the Yiddish alphabet, Fiumei’s illicit artwork was identical to the official German street sign on the same pole.

Until 1938, Grenadierstrasse was the most visibly Jewish street in Berlin. Its Jewish residents were predominantly Yiddish speakers born in Eastern Europe. In a sense, they’d brought the language home. After all, the Yiddish language originated in Germany, or “Ashkenaz,” and most German Jews had shifted to German just a few generations earlier, hoping conformity might bring them equality.

The Holocaust catastrophically exposed the false promises of German assimilation, while nearly obliterating Yiddish, the language of 85% of the murdered Jews.

Fiumei’s rogue street sign was quickly seized by a street patrol. But a  Jewish district official, Nathan Friedenberg, was moved by its message: that German memorials and museums should commemorate not only affluent German speakers, but working-class Yiddish speakers as well — and reflect how Jews lived, not only how they died.

Together with historian Jess Earle, Friedenberg sought funding and approval for 10 official Yiddish signs around the old Jewish quarter, modeled on Fiumei’s.

The project quickly got snarled in red tape. Even the white background and the words “sign” and “art” were verboten. To make matters worse, regulations nearly prohibited the official use of Yiddish at all, due to the fact that it isn’t one of Germany’s recognized minority languages.

Five years later, on March 11, Earle, Friedenberg, and the institutions they work for, held an unveiling on the corner. The new “marker” retains Fiumei’s Yiddish spelling, above a contextualizing plaque in German and English. A QR code links to a new local history website headlined “Without a trace?”

The roughly 30 people who attended the unveiling included at least four Yiddish professionals, all thrilled to see our language in a public space. But the ceremony didn’t include a word of Yiddish.

“Of course not,” Earle told me unapologetically. “Yiddish isn’t the focus. It’s only mentioned when completely necessary.” Indeed, the website barely invokes it. Friedenberg, for his part, acknowledged the omission and promised to involve Yiddish speakers in future events.

But what exactly has vanished “without a trace”? Most Jews living in Germany today are from Eastern Europe, especially the former Soviet Union — another wave of Ashkenazis returning to Ashkenaz. Latvian-born Yiddish singer Sasha Lurje, for example, settled in Neukölln — an immigrant neighborhood like the old Jewish quarter — where she spearheaded a vibrant Yiddish music scene with her friends.

“I deeply connect to the people who once lived in the Jewish quarter,” says Lurje. “They remind me of my relatives.”

That Neukölln scene spawned the cultural organization Shtetl Berlin, with its regular events and an annual Yiddish music and culture festival, which is gradually coalescing with the literature and arts scene around a second group, Yiddish.Berlin. (I work with both groups.) In March alone, the combined community hosted a jam session, a potluck, poetry events, concerts, a Yiddish-speaking bar meetup, and assorted reading and writing groups.

Not all “real” street signs in Germany are monolingual. In late March, I drove 110 km (70 miles) to Lusatia, home to two recognized Slavic minority languages: Lower Sorbian (Wendish) and Upper Sorbian. There, Sorbian place names are legally mandated on village signs, street signs, even canal signs. But all weekend, I didn’t hear a word of the language.

For centuries, German governments suppressed Lower and Upper Sorbian: imposing German names, banning Sorbian-language newspapers, expelling pastors, resettling outsiders, collectivizing farms and destroying more than 130 villages to make way for coal mines.

Eventually, parents stopped speaking Lower Sorbian to their children, and Upper Sorbian survived in just a few Catholic enclaves. But serious revitalization efforts are now underway for both languages, with a goal of 100,000 Sorbian speakers by 2100.

The Sorbian languages are now protected under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, a status that brings funding and institutions: a Sorbian research institute; wide-ranging arts programs; language immersion programs for children and adults; a publishing house; several museums; two high schools; and, crucially, salaried jobs.

The Sorbian Institute even hired two linguists, Šyman Blum and Evan Bleakly, to visit 70 villages by bicycle and photograph every sign in the “linguistic landscape,” even ones that illegally exclude Sorbian.

For some people, seeing the revitalization of “definitely endangered” Lower Sorbian elicited an emotional reaction. “When I first heard children speaking the language, I almost cried,” Bleakly said.

Sorbian artist Bernhard Schipper called the bilingual signs “very important,” and the language activist Měto Nowak is proof. The signs inspired Nowak to learn Lower Sorbian; he later chaired the body representing Germany’s minority languages.

In a message to me, Nowak wrote: “I’ve often wondered why Yiddish is not a minority language in Germany, as it is in eight European countries.” Its significant support in Sweden, for example, was recently highlighted in the comic documentary Swedishkayt.

At a café on former Grenadierstrasse overlooking the Yiddish sign, Nowak told me behind-the-scenes stories about the politics of minority languages and how they attain this status. A week later, he published his own article about the Yiddish signs — written in Lower Sorbian.

As it happens, Fiumei was working on more than one public-facing Yiddish project in spring 2021. He also launched a campaign with his then-roommate Eliana Jacobs for Yiddish to become Germany’s eighth minority language. Their Facebook page has been silent for years — but the new signs have revitalized the discussion.

“Let’s relaunch the campaign!” Jacobs told me.

“It’s very realistic,” Lurje agreed.

One can only hope. Yiddish has certainly not vanished from Berlin — but without official recognition, it remains nearly invisible.

The post Yiddish street signs: Commemoration or marginalization? appeared first on The Forward.

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.

On Monday, three women sat for an exam — and changed the course of Israeli history.

Never before have women been permitted to take the rabbinical exams issued by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate. But thanks to a groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling in July which deemed such exclusionary practices unlawful, three scholars were able to break this glass ceiling.

Yaara Widman Samuel, Ruth Agib and Rachel Tzaban’s victory against gender-based discrimination in Israeli society is momentous, an achievement rooted in many years of tireless advocacy, courageous leadership and unflinching determination. And yet, it is but one victory in a larger, ongoing battle for gender and religious equality in Israel, a battle waged over decades and across many fronts.

Recently, I had the privilege of witnessing another front in this battle at the Western Wall. There, I joined Women of the Wall, advocates for equal rights at the Kotel, for their Rosh Chodesh Adar service. It was an experience I will never forget.

Women of the Wall are engaged in an epic struggle for equality under Israeli law. For more than 37 years, they have gathered on Rosh Chodesh — the holiday that marks the start of each new Jewish month — to pray, sing, and read Torah at the Western Wall. Their mission is simple: to secure women’s right to pray at the Wall.

And for more than three decades, they have been met with anger, disdain, humiliation and denial. Most recently, Israel’s Knesset advanced a law that would prohibit non-Orthodox and egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall complex. The proposed law would grant Israel’s two chief rabbis exclusive authority over the Wall, allowing them to define prayer and what constitutes “desecration.” Under this law, those who “desecrate” prayer — such as women who wear tallit or tefillin, or mixed gender groups that gather for worship — could face up to seven years in prison.

And yet, like the women who fought for the right to take the Chief Rabbinate’s rabbinical exams, Women of the Wall has not been silenced or deterred. They know that the Western Wall is not the property of one denomination or community; it belongs to all Jewish people — regardless of gender, denomination, or affiliation.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence states that the country “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex.” This promise must extend to the Western Wall as well. All Jewish women should be welcome at the Kotel, and all should feel safe to practice their Judaism in the manner they choose. These principles of equality and inclusion are essential to Israel’s democracy and religious identity.

But not all would agree.

When the Torah is contraband

On Rosh Chodesh Adar, we arrived at the entrance to the Wall a few minutes before 7 a.m. Even at that early hour, it was already crowded with worshippers.

The energy was charged and tense. As our group approached the security check, we were met with immediate hostility.

The security guards often harass and humiliate Women of the Wall participants. This day was no different: they asked us to remove our coats and demanded every bag be checked by hand. Purses were emptied, tallitot unfolded, even wallets were scrutinized — all in the name of preventing something “dangerous” from entering the plaza.

The “dangerous” items they were seeking were Torahs.

That morning, we carried a Torah proudly to expose the absurdity and injustice of the situation: how could our religion’s foundational document be treated as dangerous?

Security did not take kindly to our effort. Needless to say, the Torah was not allowed inside.

Shaken, we made our way toward the Wall. As we walked, we found ourselves surrounded by mobs of children, many apparently from traditional communities, who screamed hateful things, calling us heretics and shouting at us to leave. They mocked women wearing kippot and tallitot, pushing and shoving as they did.

Their contempt wasn’t surprising; similar scenes have unfolded many times, over many years. But it was shocking — and deeply disheartening.

When it came time to leave the plaza, many of us held hands, for solidarity, but also for safety. We circled back to the Kotel entrance, to read from the Torah, since we couldn’t do so at the Wall itself.

As we read, the commotion reached a crescendo. The noise was deafening, and we were increasingly hemmed in by rioting crowds. Meanwhile, the security guards — tasked with keeping the peace — not only allowed the agitators to continue, but targeted us. Ultimately, two of our prayer leaders were detained — simply because they were women reading Torah.

Not at the Wall. Outside the Wall.

Incredulously, these women — rather than the violent crowds around them — were deemed a “disturbance to public order.” rather than the violent rioters attacking them. And yet, even amidst this harassment, they bravely stood their ground. Until the moment they were detained, they prayed with sincerity, with strength, and — appropriately for the start of Adar, a month that ushers in joy — with audacious joy.

A continuing fight

After their release from police custody, the two women who had been arrested put out a video in which they said, defiantly, “We will be back!”

And indeed, in honor of Rosh Chodesh Iyyar they returned. While their Torah was seized yet again, they remained undeterred, declaring: “We will not give up our Jewish right. We held a Torah reading at the entrance to the Wall — and we will continue our just struggle.”

That struggle has been going on for decades, but has perhaps never been more important than today. The erosion of religious freedom in Israel may begin at the Wall — but it will not end there.

That is partly why the image of the three brave women taking the Chief Rabbinate’s exams resonated so deeply: Our rights are under threat, but at the same time, we have clear proof that progress is still possible. It’s a reminder that privileging one segment of the Jewish community at the expense of the rest will only divide us, within Israel and across the Diaspora. As Rabbi Mauricio Balter teaches, “A strong Israel is a democratic Israel. A faithful Israel is a pluralistic Israel.”

And so, we persist. We fight for ourselves, for our mothers and our grandmothers, and for our daughters and granddaughters. We do not give up this fight because religious equality matters. Because gender equality matters. And because Israel’s future as a democracy depends on it, for those who live there and for those who call it their spiritual home.

The post Women aren’t equal citizens in Israel. But this week brought us closer than ever appeared first on The Forward.