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How a Catholic university amassed a treasure trove of Jewish artifacts from the Bronx
(New York Jewish Week) – A Catholic university may be the unlikeliest place for what may be the largest depository dedicated to the Jewish history of the Bronx.
But at Fordham University — the private, Jesuit institution in the Bronx — decades worth of archival documents and artifacts from the local Jewish community have found a home, thanks to its Jewish studies department.
For the last three years, Fordham has been collecting and cataloging items that detail a once-thriving Jewish community in the Bronx: yearbooks full of Jewish last names, Bar Mitzvah invitations, phonebooks full of Jewish-owned businesses — all the simple transactions that define an era in history.
The archive at Fordham is one of the only physical collections of everyday material from Jewish residents of the borough, according to Magda Teter, the chair of the Center for Jewish Studies at the university, who spearheaded the project.
“It’s not only preserving a piece of New York Jewish history, but also a way of life,” Teter told the New York Jewish Week. “Bringing this voice to the dominant Christian identity of Fordham and teaching about Jews [as a minority] within the dominant cultures is very important.”
A song and dance book in the Fordham University collection features the lyrics for “Hatikvah” and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and a “Jewish dictionary.” (Julia Gergely)
During the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish life thrived in the Bronx. There were 260 registered synagogues in 1940, and the borough produced some of the biggest Jewish names in show business, fashion, literature and more: designer Ralph Lauren, politician Bella Abzug, novelist E.L. Doctorow, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, Miss America Bess Myerson, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Robert Lefkowitz.
At the community’s peak in 1930, the Bronx was approximately 49% Jewish, according to the borough’s official historian, Lloyd Ultan. South of Tremont Avenue, the number reached 80%. Most of the Jewish Bronx was of Eastern European descent; many were first generation Americans whose parents had immigrated and lived on the Lower East Side, but who could now afford to live in less cramped neighborhoods with more trees and wider streets.
Though there is a strong Jewish community in the neighborhood of Riverdale, most of the Jewish community moved out of the Bronx for the suburbs after World War II when mortgages for white would-be homeowners were being subsidized by the government and Blacks and Latinos were steered to Bronx neighborhoods they couldn’t afford or that the city had chosen to neglect. The Jewish population of the Bronx dropped from 650,000 in 1948 to 45,000 in 2003. Many of the synagogues have been converted for other uses, and the physical legacy of the Jewish community there has begun to erode over time, making an archive all the more necessary.
While Teter was always interested in collecting items from the Jewish Bronx, the archive got an unexpected boost from a member of the public. In the spring of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Fordham hosted a virtual event, “Remnants: Photographs of the Jewish Bronx,” which featured evidence of the area’s faded Jewish history gathered by writer and photographer Julian Voloj. (Voloj is the husband of the New York Jewish Week’s managing editor, Lisa Keys.)
An invitation for the bar mitzvah of Freddie Rothberg, which took place on Oct. 6, 1951 at Beth Hamedrash Hagadol. (Julia Gergely)
In the audience was Ellen Meshnick, who had grown up in New York and now lives in Georgia. Inspired, she offered Fordham a trove of material her parents, Frank and Martha Meshnick, had kept throughout their lives in the Bronx. The boxes included donated yearbooks from Morris High School and Walton High School, songbooks, bar mitzvah invitations, a marriage certificate, receipts for a flower delivery — even a document from the hospital from when she was born — mostly from the 1930s through the 1960s.
The donation significantly bolstered what materials Fordham already had on hand, which included less personal but still unique items like matchbooks from kosher restaurants. Now, Teter is growing the archive through other private donations and occasionally by purchasing materials online — personal family archives, books about Bronx Jewish history, songsheets and the like.
The marriage certificate, or ketubah, recognizing the marriage between Frank Meshnick and Martha Farber on Aug. 23, 1942. The certificate was part of an archive donated to Fordham University by the couple’s daughter Ellen. (Julia Gergely)
“They may not be the most beautiful things, but we are interested in what people actually used and lived with,” Teter said.
Teter said that while the American Jewish Historical Society in Manhattan does collect the types of quotidian and personal items that American Jews kept with them in the last few centuries, they don’t have much that uniquely focuses on Jewish life in the Bronx.
The entire collection is part of a greater effort by Teter, the Jewish studies department and the librarians at Fordham to increase awareness about Judaism and Jewish people. “I will not hide that I think it’s an important way to fight antisemitism — to teach Jewish history and Jewish culture in all its colors and in all its experiences,” she said. “It enriches the students’ appreciation and understanding of Jewish life beyond how Jews are usually portrayed.”
The Jewish studies department at Fordham is relatively new: The college began offering a Jewish studies minor in 2016, and opened the department in 2017. At the time, the highlight of the library’s archives was the Rosenblatt Holocaust collection, which was funded by an alumnus. Since 1992, the library has amassed over 11,000 titles, videos and artifacts on the Holocaust, according to librarian Linda Loschiavo.
When Teter arrived, Loschiavo worked with her to bring in historical Passover haggadahs from all over the world. Fordham now possesses two Italian haggadahs from the 1660s, as well as Jewish artifacts from unexpected places, like playbills from Jewish Bollywood.
Last month the university opened the Henry S. Miller Judaica Research Room on the fourth floor of the campus’ main library — named for Fordham’s first Jewish student, who graduated in 1968. Miller, a leader of a financial restructuring firm, is now a trustee of the college.
Fordham President Tania Tetlow described herself jokingly as “a wannabe Jew” at the room’s unveiling. “I’ve understood how deeply intertwined Judaism and Catholicism are,” she said, “and the connections we have of the deep intellectualism of both faiths, of the desire to study text and the interpretation of text going back for thousands of years, of the love of ritual — and the central place of food and guilt!”
The former Jacob Schiff Center on Valentine Avenue. (Julian Voloj)
“At the moment, we envision that the research room will be a space for exhibitions that would foster the curatorial skills of our students and that will bring Jewish art and artists to campus,” Teter said. “We would now be able to display their art and combine the exhibitions with some items from the Judaica collection.”
The research room is currently displaying Voloj’s Bronx photographs, along with some of the recently acquired local archival materials, curated by sophomore Reyna Stovall, who is interning in Fordham’s Jewish studies department this semester.
“It is really, really rewarding,” said Stovall, who is Jewish. Stovall became involved in the Jewish studies department because of her interest in Holocaust studies, but as she began her internship, she was excited to work on the archives cataloging the once thriving Jewish history of the Bronx.
The yearbook photo of Frank Meshnick (bottom right), who graduated from Morris High School in Morrisania in 1931. (Julia Gergely)
“It’s pretty amazing that they have the collection to begin with,” she added. “It really shows Fordham’s commitment to diversity and inclusivity that they’re willing to take on this massive collection of Judaica, even though that’s not the religion that the school was founded on.”
Teter estimates there are about 300 Jews among the school’s 15,000 undergrads. As a result, the Center for Jewish Studies and the research room offers students from all backgrounds the opportunity to learn more about Judaism — as well as marginalized communities in general, and connect their stories to their own lives.
“Our identity grew to showcase Jewish studies at the intersection and in conversation with other fields and areas of study,” Teter explained.
The Center’s goal, she added, is “to make students, faculty and the public realize that studying Jews is not just for Jews, and that they can learn so much about the areas of their own concern and interest by studying Jews.”
“Something magical happens when you give students the opportunity to work with historical artifacts, and really touch history,” Teter said. “That’s what I think inspired the director of the library to devote that space to that kind of research and to that kind of student experience.”
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The post How a Catholic university amassed a treasure trove of Jewish artifacts from the Bronx appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Nobel Laureate Mohammadi in Iran Hospital After ‘Cardiac Crisis,’ Foundation Says
A picture of Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi on the wall of the Grand Hotel in central Oslo before the Nobel banquet, in connection with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize 2023, in Oslo, Norway December 10, 2023. Photo: NTB/Javad Parsa via REUTERS/File Photo
Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi was in an unstable condition in an Iranian hospital on Saturday after she was taken there from prison following a catastrophic deterioration of her health, a foundation run by her family said.
The secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awarded Mohammadi the 2023 prize, had expressed concern on Thursday that the condition of the Iranian human rights activist was worsening after she had suffered a heart attack in prison.
Mohammadi, in her 50s, won the prize while in prison for her campaign to advance women’s rights and abolish the death penalty in Iran.
The Narges Mohammadi Foundation said in a statement on its website on Friday that she had been “urgently transferred to a hospital in Zanjan today following a catastrophic deterioration of her health, including two episodes of complete loss of consciousness and a severe cardiac crisis.”
This transfer was an “unavoidable necessity after prison doctors determined her condition could not be managed on-site,” it said.
In an update on Saturday, the foundation said she remained in an unstable condition receiving oxygen. It called for her to be transferred to a hospital in Tehran for tests and specialized treatment.
Reuters could not independently confirm her condition.
Mohammadi was sentenced to a new prison term of 7-1/2 years, the foundation said in February, weeks before the US and Israel launched their war against Iran. The Nobel committee at the time called on Tehran to free her immediately.
She was arrested in December after denouncing the death of a lawyer, Khosrow Alikordi; prosecutor Hasan Hematifar told reporters then she had made provocative remarks at Alikordi’s memorial ceremony.
On Friday morning, Mohammadi fainted after days of dangerously high blood pressure and severe nausea, the foundation said. After multiple bouts of vomiting, she blacked out and was moved to the prison medical unit for emergency intravenous fluids.
The activist, who has undergone three angioplasty procedures, faces a “direct and immediate” threat to her right to life, her family said. “We call for all charges to be dropped immediately and for all sentences imposed for her peaceful human rights work to be unconditionally annulled.”
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Is supporting peace illegal in Israel? A shocking arrest carries a warning
A Jewish man is wearing his kippah at a local café when an angry customer accosts him. The kippah is against the law, the man is told; the other customer calls the police.
Within minutes, officers arrive. They confiscate the Jewish man’s belongings, and place him in a cell without water for around 20 minutes. He is not allowed to call his wife. Near release, the officers threaten to put him back in the cell if he does not leave the station without his kippah.
The man refuses. And so an officer of the law takes a blade to the man’s sacred religious symbol. “She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it,” the man said.
This was not Europe in the 1930s. It was Israel in 2026. And it all happened because Alex Sinclair, 53, had a Palestinian flag embroidered onto his kippah.
That Sinclair is a Zionist — his kippah also featured an Israeli flag — meant little to his fellow citizen, or to the police, who have taken an increasingly authoritarian tack against Palestinian symbols.
Israeli censorship of innocuous political expression isn’t new, especially for Palestinian citizens of Israel. But the egregious case of a Palestinian flag being cut off of Sinclair’s kippah shows the predictable consequences for Jews of policies that repress others’ speech in our name. A government that lets officers cut a Jew’s kippah is taking a page out of the playbook of antisemites by defining what it means to be a good Jew who gets to live freely in society
A kippah built for complexity
Sinclair is a Jewish education lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His 2013 book Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism — a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award — argues that Jewish education should be built around principles including complexity, conversation and empowerment.
He has spent his career insisting that you can love a country honestly only if you confront its flaws. As part of that effort, he has worn a kippah bearing both an Israeli and a Palestinian flag for nearly 20 years.
“The reasons behind the kippah are long and complex,” he wrote on Facebook after his detention, “and related to the messy ambivalence of my Jewish-Zionist identity.”
The kippah was, in part, his way of expressing his religious commitment without being folded into assumptions about what a kippah-wearing Jew stands for politically.
His wearing of it has sometimes sparked meaningful reactions from other Israelis, especially Palestinians. Once, a cashier in Sinclair’s neighborhood supermarket told him: “Thank you on behalf of all of us.” Another time, the mechanic fixing his flat tire saw the kippah and burst into tears. Among Jews, the kippah acts as necessary friction in a country sometimes desperate to maintain a smooth narrative.
In a 2024 essay called “The Two Most Important Flags for Liberal Jews Today,” Sinclair argued that the dual flags answer extremism from both Hamas and the Israeli right:
“By portraying the Israeli flag and the Palestinian flag together, we show Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists that we will not give up our country and our national identity, but we show potential Palestinian partners that we accept their national identity and wish to live in security, mutual dignity, and peace with them.”
Cutting the Palestinian flag out of Sinclair’s kippah was the state literally cutting complexity out of acceptable Jewish vocabulary.
The gap between what the law is and what it does
What happened to Sinclair was not a case of bad laws so much as police taking matters into their own hands despite the law.
No Knesset law makes the Palestinian flag illegal in Israel. Israeli legal authorities and courts have repeatedly affirmed the Palestinian flag as protected political expression, while allowing police only narrow authority in cases where there is a high probability of a breach of the peace or genuine suspicion that someone identifies with or supports a terrorist organization
Israel once used the power of the state to discipline Jewish radicals. The country’s first anti-terror law, passed in 1948, was directed at Jews. It was used to designate Lehi, a Jewish paramilitary group that assassinated United Nations mediator Folke Bernadotte because his proposed partition plan was seen as too favorable to Arabs. (This despite the fact that the Swedish nobleman’s “White Buses” operations rescued tens of thousands of prisoners, including Jews, from Nazi camps in 1945.)
Now, police contorted the statutory tradition descended from that law against a Jew for the peaceful connotations of his kippah. Politicians and law enforcement whose beliefs are arguably influenced by extremists like Lehi are abusing their power to harass peaceful citizens of the state.
Foremost among them is National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. In January 2023, days after being sworn in, Ben-Gvir directed the Israeli police to remove “terror-supporting flags” from public spaces — a directive that in practice included the Palestinian flag. Senior police commanders quickly said that the order was not legally sound. None of that has stopped censorship from happening.
The legal-rights organization Adalah has documented at least 645 people arrested for speech-related offenses since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023. The overwhelming majority of that number are Palestinian citizens of Israel, many of whom were eventually indicted. By contrast, human rights organization Yesh Din has found that nearly 94% of investigations into settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank have been closed without indictments.
There was never going to be a firewall
It was always naïve to assume that the coercive apparatus used against Palestinians could be cordoned off from the democracy Jews live in.
Unchecked power, as critics like the Orthodox Jewish philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned, corrodes everything it touches. A state’s abuses undermine democracy for the citizens in whose name they are carried out.
The Israeli right may object that Hamas and its supporters have used the Palestinian flag in hateful contexts, including in imagery surrounding the Oct. 7 massacre and at rallies celebrating Hamas’s attack. (Hamas has its own, separate flag). That’s true, and it helps explain why many Israelis experience the Palestinian flag as threatening.
But just as the Israeli flag does not mean that every Jew who flies it endorses every action of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian flag does not mean that every Palestinian who waves it endorses Hamas. Flags, and nations, contain multitudes. Many Palestinians wave their flag out of a sincere desire for self-determination.
“I, like every Israeli, know people who lost loved ones on Oct. 7 or in the war thereafter,” Sinclair himself said. “Hamas is my enemy: an enemy who seeks my destruction, an enemy who is not interested in coexistence.” His kippah does not pretend otherwise.
If officers had cut a Jew’s kippah in any other country in the world, Israeli MK Gilad Kariv noted last week, “there would have been an uproar here in Israel.” He’s right.
Instead, the Israeli police have publicly described what they did to Alex Sinclair as a “clarification process.” That sounds like the bureaucratic vocabulary of a state that no longer trusts its citizens to exercise their rights and liberties. Following his detention, Sinclair filed a complaint with the Department for Internal Police Investigations. He requested compensation for the kippah and a written commitment that he could walk through Modiin without harassment.
“I’m not holding my breath,” he said.
His assessment is haunting: “If we are looking ahead, oh my God, is this what is in store for us?” The answer, if things continue along these lines, is a government that is increasingly authoritarian, deeply insecure and farcical. Days after Sinclair’s detention, Israeli police seized another suspect flag that was red, green, and white at an anti-Netanyahu protest. It was Hungarian.
The post Is supporting peace illegal in Israel? A shocking arrest carries a warning appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran Expected to Ramp Up Chemical, Biological Weapons Programs
Symbolic mock-ups of Iranian missiles are displayed on a street, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 22, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Amid sustained international scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear program, missile development, and regional proxy network, new assessments point to a quieter and more troubling front as allegations grow that Tehran may be expanding work related to chemical and biological weapons capabilities.
According to a new report from the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, the Islamist regime in Iran may be advancing efforts to significantly develop its chemical and biological weapons programs — a move experts warn would pose serious risks not only to Israel but also to the wider region and the Iranian population itself.
Iran’s chemical and biological research programs allegedly focus on a range of toxic agents, including blister agents like mustard gas, nerve agents such as sarin and Novichok, and substances that attack the lungs or blood and can cause suffocation.
These reportedly also include biological threats such as anthrax, ricin, and botulinum toxins, as well as certain viruses, all of which can cause severe illness or death by disrupting the body’s nervous system, organs, or immune response.
Israeli officials have previously warned that the Iranian government has been developing dual-use chemicals, with both civilian and military applications, and may be channeling them to its regional proxy terrorist forces, raising fears they could be used to intensify proxy conflicts and destabilize the wider Middle East.
Tehran is also suspected of having used such agents to help suppress the nationwide anti-government protests earlier this year, which were violently crushed by security forces in a crackdown that left tens of thousands of demonstrators tortured, imprisoned, or killed.
Similar allegations have repeatedly emerged in the past, adding to a wider pattern of reported abuses against civilians and violations of human rights.
According to a report from Iran International, a medical staff member in Karaj said some detainees released during the January protests had reported body aches, lethargy, weakness, loss of appetite, nausea, and vomiting — all symptoms that may indicate possible drug-related poisoning.
Iran first began developing chemical weapons-related capabilities in the 1980s. In recent years, those efforts have reportedly evolved to include pharmaceutical-based agents and other compounds designed for incapacitation or riot control.
US government assessments have indicated for decades that Iran has been researching and developing chemical agents, including anesthetic compounds designed to incapacitate individuals by targeting the central nervous system.
These reports point to Iran’s academic sector playing a key role in this area, with Imam Hossein University and Malek Ashtar University of Technology — military-linked institutions associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Defense — reportedly conducting research since at least 2005 into chemical agents designed for incapacitation.
Since the start of the war earlier this year, the Israeli Air Force has carried out sustained strikes targeting sites linked to chemical weapons research, development, and production, aiming to disrupt facilities embedded within Iran’s broader military-industrial infrastructure and associated pharmaceutical-based programs.
Even though Tehran has long denied pursuing chemical or biological weapons and remains a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention, Western governments continue to accuse the regime of violating international norms.