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How Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin find grace in their shattered world
Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin need no introduction. Since their son, Hersh, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, taken hostage in Gaza and, later, murdered by his captors, the American-Israeli couple have become, for many, the personification of an entire nation’s pain.
They didn’t want this. They surely didn’t ask for it. “We’re the manifestation of everybody’s worst nightmare,” Rachel said. And yet, it is precisely that fact, coupled with the almost supernatural grace they have brought to their international advocacy for Israel’s hostages, that helped make Hersh one of the most recognizable faces among the captives and why his death last year hit so hard.
It’s also why Jews have looked to them as exemplars of how to respond to one of the worst periods in Jewish history. Despite all they’ve gone through, and all they continue to endure, Hersh’s parents still see this as a moment of opportunity for cross-cultural connection.
“You’ve got your narrative, we’ve got our narrative,” Jon said. “You’ve suffered, we’ve suffered. You’ve got your Bible that says something. We’ve got our Bible that says something. You’ve got your claims. We’ve got our claims. And you know what? We’re never going to outshout each other. Let’s look forward and start right now and dedicate ourselves to something better for all of us. I still feel that way.”
The couple is speaking next week at the Z3 Conference in Palo Alto, California, near where they lived in Berkeley before moving to Israel in 2008. This interview, conducted by J. Jewish News of Northern California, has been edited for length and clarity.
A lot of people here in the United States, and also in Israel, felt as if they knew Hersh after Oct. 7. Some did, but most of us didn’t. I wonder if you could tell us about him as a person, and what it was like to be his parents.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin: Hersh, obviously, was a curious citizen of the world. “Obviously,” just because that’s really what I’ve come to realize is the most apt way of describing him. He was always hungry for knowledge, but very much outside of the confines of normative learning. So school was not really interesting to him. He did enough to get by, but was always an underachiever in school. And yet he was this voracious reader about whatever subject was floating his boat. As a young kid, he was obsessed with geography, obsessed with American presidents, obsessed with Native American history, obsessed with the Civil War.
And as he became a young man — I still think of him as a boy. He was a very young 23. He had just turned 23 on Oct. 3, three days before we said goodbye to him and he went down to the Nova festival. He was obsessed with his favorite soccer club, his Jerusalem Hapoel soccer club. He loved trance music and music festivals, and used them as an opportunity to get to know and meet different people from all over the world. He was very committed to traveling by himself when he went to those festivals, because he said when you travel in a clump, then you stay in a clump. And he wanted to meet people from everywhere.
He was also a real professional listener, which I’ve grown to understand is such a rare gift that is hard to learn. I’m trying to learn it in his memory and as part of his legacy. To train myself to really be with whoever’s speaking and not be thinking, what am I going to say next? What do I want to share? What do I want to say? What do I want to ask? And he was not afraid of having those pauses in between when someone was speaking. He would digest it, and then he would react.
We’ve had so many people come to us in these past two years to tell us about little moments that they had with him that were special, because they really felt heard. And in this time of such challenge in civil discourse everywhere around the world, when the new way of speaking is screaming, it is, I realize now, a unique blessing.
Jon, I saw you recently wearing a T-shirt that had an image of Hersh, and under it the Hebrew phrase “yehi zichrecha mahapeicha” — may your memory be a revolution. What kind of revolution did you have in mind?
Jon: It’s not the revolution of taking to the streets with fires burning. It’s a revolution for good. Hersh really, really — in some ways, naively — wasn’t jaded, and really it’s a revolution for bringing more good to the world. I was walking down the street this summer with my daughter, and a man who we didn’t know stopped me and said, “Hey, Hersh’s dad” — that’s how he referred to me — “can I show you something?” And he shows me that the screensaver on his phone is a picture of Hersh. And he said to me, “Every morning the first thing I do is turn on my phone and look at this picture and say to myself: What can I do today to be better? What can I do today to make the world better?” And right then I said, that’s the greatest legacy a person can have.
Rachel: Hersh still believed in goodness and possibility. But he also was a realist. When he was in high school in 2014, a young Israeli Ethiopian man named Avera Mengistu wandered into Gaza and Hamas took him hostage. Hersh was 15 years old and he came home and he was beside himself. He couldn’t believe that people were not on the streets advocating for Avera Mengistu. There were four or five people who would stand up on this square at the top of Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem a couple times a week, and they reminded me of the people on the UC Berkeley campus lawn who say “No nukes” — like, six people with gray hair and long braids. And then there was a short, dark boy with big, black-framed glasses standing with them. And it was 15-year-old Hersh. [Mengistu was released by Hamas in February.]
The resonance of him being out there as a kid, protesting in the street to bring someone home from Gaza, is quite extraordinary.
Rachel: We said before he was a hostage, he was a hostage advocate.
You’ve become the personification of an entire nation’s trauma. Obviously, you never wanted to be symbols like this, but you are now. Can you talk about what it’s like to have people look to you in this way?
Jon: We talk about this a fair amount, and sometimes wonder, can we just go and escape in privacy somewhere? And the answer is, maybe — but not in Israel. Part of us just wants to do that. But another part of us is saying, this has been thrust upon us, this horrific, terrible personal tragedy that’s part of a national tragedy that’s part of a global tragedy. And somehow, largely due to Rachel’s eloquence, there are people who are strangely looking to us. And we’re saying we might need to embrace this. Because part of the story is also the lack of clarity, leadership, morality, voices of sanity in the world today. And if somehow, in some small way, we can be a little bit those voices, it’s so important that we need to do it.
Rachel: We all experience loss. It makes us human. It’s a commonality that we all have. What’s different about our experience is that it was so completely public, and that is really scorching. And it is definitely hard, you know? When we go out, we are kind of the trigger for people — we’re the manifestation of everybody’s worst nightmare. That is a sad thing to be. A lot of people see us and they can’t help but cry. And I know that they are coming at it from a place of empathy and love. They’re feeling our pain. But it’s difficult to have that when you’re walking down the street just trying to go wherever your destination is, and to have people crying along the way, whenever they see you.
Jon: To the extent that we, in some way, are offering strength to anybody out there, it’s symbiotic. I’m not asking that people start coming up even more on the streets to say things and hug us, bring things to our apartment. But that stuff that we’ve been experiencing for 751 days has been remarkably strengthening. We buried Hersh 419 days ago, and we continue to be strengthened by the people who come anonymously and leave baked goods by our door every Friday. We take so much strength from so many people around the world who think they’re taking strength from us.
Rachel: Everybody is holding everybody, and I feel like that is where we as the Jewish people are, and have to be, now. And I don’t care if your hair looks that way, and you cover your knees down to here, and you pray with this book, and you don’t pray at all. It doesn’t matter.
It seems that many believe what you’ve endured must afford you special insight into what’s going on in the Middle East. That you’re singularly able to see through the confusion, right into the heart of what’s happening. I’m wondering if the terrible price you’ve paid has given you any particular understanding that’s different from what you understood before Oct. 7.
Jon: We have definitely been, against our wishes, thrust into the underworld of geopolitics and how it works. We watch the news like everybody else, and we read newspapers like everybody else, and we now understand that there’s the story that we all look at and hear and are told, and [then there are] the things we see out there every day of how the world [really] works. And I wish we could unsee it but, unfortunately, we’ve now learned that the world works on concepts like interests and equities. Every leader has them. And sometimes those interests and equities align with the will of the masses. And sometimes there are other things at play. I don’t know what to do with this information, other than it’s a hard burden to carry to know this reality.
With all that being said, I go back to something that I thought on Oct. 6, 2023, and I still think it today. There’s a better way. There’s a better path. And despite the pain, despite the suffering, despite all the agony that so many have felt, we can’t lose sight of that better path. I always say, let’s pick a day and say, “We’re moving on. We’re only looking forward. You’ve got your narrative. We’ve got our narrative. You’ve suffered, we’ve suffered. You got your Bible that says something. We’ve got our Bible that says something. You get your claims. We’ve got our claims. And you know what? We’re never going to outshout each other. Let’s look forward and start right now and dedicate ourselves to something better for all of us.”
You made aliyah in 2008. Can you tell me what it means for you to live in Israel? And I’m also curious if that meaning has changed over the course of the years you’ve lived there and specifically after Oct. 7.
Rachel: What really brought us here was very simple. Jon had said for years, we have an opportunity to be part of this giant Jewish experiment of living as a Jewish people in a Jewish homeland. We happen to be observant Jews who pray every day and we thought, how is it that every day we’re asking God to please allow us to return to Jerusalem? And Jon said, “We can go.” When you’re actually able to get on a plane and 12 hours later to be in this place, it started to feel inauthentic to be praying for that when we had the ability to do it.
So we came and we really did feel, and do feel, that we are privileged to live here. I certainly have had challenges all these years, because my Hebrew is not great, and I’ve felt like a fish out of water, and I’ve felt like a stranger in a strange land. And yet it’s my land. I feel privileged that I have lived here. I feel privileged that I raised children here. I feel privileged that my three children were and are bilingual, and that they had an opportunity and have the opportunity to still be part of this experiment.
We’ve had an enormous challenge thrust upon us. When I say us, I mean all of the nation of Israel and the people of Israel worldwide. But at the same time, with this great calamity comes extreme opportunity — extreme, extreme opportunity. And I pray that we will have the resilience, the recovery, the healing and the comfort that is needed to take this chance and make something really luminous.
Jon: You asked what we’ve learned or how things have changed. Something that’s become really clear to us, maybe to everybody in the world, is there is an intertwined sense between Israel and the Jewish people globally. We’re all connected, like it or not, and I would like to see us use this as an opportunity. How do we take this little country in the Middle East, this concept of an independent Jewish state with sovereignty and agency, and say, no matter who the government is, who the prime minister is, who’s in charge, this is a concept that’s bigger than us or any entity. How do we make this a source of pride and inspiration for all of us?
This is going to be your first time in the Bay Area since Oct. 7. What are you anticipating on coming here?
Rachel: Unfortunately, we won’t be there very long. But I know that it will be an embrace from the wonderful Bay Area Jewish community. We have felt the love and support and appreciate it. It sounds crazy to say that we feel it, but it’s like a visceral, tangible, tactile feeling of support and love. And we felt your confusion and we felt your pain and we felt your concern, and it helped us, and it touched us, and we will always feel a huge debt of gratitude to the Bay Area, because that’s where Hersh was born, and that’s where our older daughter, who’s younger than Hersh, that’s where she was born. They were both born at Alta Bates Hospital in Oakland. Jon and I had just gotten married, and we spent almost three years before Hersh was born in the Bay Area. It’s very much woven into the core of who we are. And I think in many ways, it was a foundation that made us strong as a unit in order to face this unbelievable mission that we are in now.
Jon: I just specifically want to bring it to Hersh for a minute and say, it’s amazing that we lived in the Bay Area for seven years. It left such an indelible, lasting mark on our identities. Hersh left the Bay Area when he was 3½ years old. He was blessed to grow up at Gan Shalom in Berkeley and to be part of Congregation Beth Israel in Berkeley and the Berkeley JCC. He lived 20 more years outside of Berkeley, yet Berkeley, California, and the Bay Area more broadly were such a prominent part of his personality, his thinking, who he was as a person. You could take the 3½-year-old out of Berkeley, but you can’t take the Bay Area out of the boy. It was the embodiment of so much about who Hersh was.
Rachel: I think it’s a lot of why he never liked to wear shoes.
I’m curious about the power of prayer. You talked about living in California and praying about returning to Jerusalem. Can you talk about your own approach to prayer now, and if that’s changed in any way — but also what it’s like to know that there are thousands of people you don’t even know praying for you every day?
Rachel: It absolutely works and is felt and is appreciated. And I am bottomlessly, endlessly grateful to the people who still have us in their prayers. Because I’m telling you, unfortunately, we need it. I think we might always need it.
I’m so thankful that I have prayer as a tool that I use daily. Every day, I open my eyes and immediately say the line that many Jewish people say upon waking, thanking God for giving me back my soul, and [saying] that God has tremendous faith in me, and that’s why I woke up this morning.
When I go to do my morning prayers, it’s such a relief. It’s the best therapy. You know, Rabbi Nachman, the famous mystical Kabbalist, said, “Life makes warriors out of all of us, and the most potent weapon is prayer.” And so I say to people, use it. Everyone has their pain, and we have this toolkit accessible to us. I pour my soul out in the morning, and then I can start my day. The question was, how has it changed since Oct. 7. I think I use it more. I lean on it more. I think that it’s more transformative. All of us have a different idea of God. What is God? Nobody knows what God is. It’s very confusing. But I have this idea of God, and I’ve been in a relationship with this idea of God. I’m so thankful, because when Oct. 7 happened, I wasn’t approaching a stranger. I’m thankful that I still have that and I’m grateful that people are shooting energy our way. I think it changes the sender and it changes the recipient.
This interview first appeared in J. Jewish News of Northern California. It is republished here with permission.
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The post How Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin find grace in their shattered world appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Mamdani orders review of whether New York can arrest Netanyahu when he visits this fall
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has revived one of his most controversial election promises, raising once again the prospect of arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he comes to New York in September for the United Nations General Assembly. It’s a move that legal experts say Mamdani is unlikely to be able to carry out.
In a video interview with The New York Times published Saturday, Mamdani said he ordered a review by the city’s Law Department to consider his options to comply with an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. “Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do. But we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” Mamdani said, remarks that drew a strong online reaction.
In a post to social media on Sunday, Netanyahu’s office dismissed concerns of a possible arrest, calling the ICC a “kangaroo court” and saying that “Mamdani should focus on fixing the damage his policies have caused New York.” In an interview last week, Netanyahu said Mamdani “hates America.”
The United States does not recognize the court’s authority over American citizens or foreign nationals on U.S. soil, and the federal government could likely challenge the legitimacy of such an order.
Mamdani’s statement reflects the tension that has defined his first months in office: balancing the activist politics that propelled him to City Hall with the legal constraints and governing responsibilities of the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
A political gift to Netanyahu
Mamdani’s actions could have unintended consequences abroad.
Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, who has frequently criticized Netanyahu, warned that even a failed attempt to arrest the prime minister would likely strengthen Netanyahu politically in a tough reelection bid, set for Oct. 27.
“Many Israelis are sick of him and hope to vote him out,” Shapiro wrote on X. “The only possible outcome of a fruitless attempt to arrest him in NYC would be to give him a political boost at home. That would be an own goal.”
Recent polls show that Netanyahu, seeking a seventh term in office, is trailing an opposition bloc led by two contenders — former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot.
A confrontation with New York’s outspoken anti-Zionist mayor could allow Netanyahu to cast himself once again as Israel’s defender against international efforts to isolate and punish the country. Netanyahu already labeled Mamdani as someone who “champions” Hamas and “apologizes” for Iran.
That message could resonate even with Israelis who oppose him. American Jewish opinion illustrates the same complexity. While recent polling shows many American Jews view Netanyahu unfavorably, and that Mamdani is more popular with that group, that has not translated into support for an attempt to arrest Israel’s elected leader.
A Honan Strategy Group poll in December found that although 40% of New York City voters believed Mamdani had a moral obligation to uphold international human rights standards by ordering Netanyahu’s arrest, seven in 10 of the 131 Jewish respondents said doing so would damage New York’s global standing.
In the end, Mamdani may be able to avoid acting at all by pointing to the legal opinion that New York City lacks the authority to arrest Netanyahu.
The law is not on Mamdani’s side
The ICC, based in The Hague, issued arrest warrants in Nov. 2024 for Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the Israel-Hamas war. Hamas confirmed in Jan. 2025 that Deif was assassinated in July 2024 by an Israeli strike on Gaza.
But even if Mamdani wanted to enforce the warrant, New York City has little authority to do so.
Because the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court, the NYPD has no legal authority to arrest Netanyahu based on an ICC warrant. Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched a sweeping campaign of sanctions, visa bans and diplomatic pressure to “systematically disable” the ICC “brick by brick.”
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, in a post on X, also pointed to the 1947 U.N. Headquarters Agreement, which requires the United States to allow accredited foreign representatives to attend U.N. meetings, as well as the customary international law doctrine that grants immunity to sitting heads of government traveling on official business. Netanyahu would also arrive in New York under Secret Service protection afforded to foreign leaders.
Even carrying out such an order would appear unlikely.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, has repeatedly kept a distance from the mayor on Israel-related issues. Her public statements on Israel have been unequivocal. In June, Tisch served as grand marshal of the annual Celebrate Israel Parade, which Mamdani skipped. “I understand that for many of you, having a Jewish police commissioner is deeply comforting,” she told Jewish leaders in May.
Mamdani’s foreign policy reach has already been limited. Last month, the U.S. State Department blocked a planned meeting between Mamdani and Colombian President Gustavo Petro in New York, a fierce Israel critic, who had his visa revoked last fall after he appeared at a pro-Palestinian rally in Manhattan and was attending a UN Security Council session under strict terms. Earlier this month, the Trump administration stopped a meeting between Ana María Archila, Mamdani’s commissioner for international affairs, and Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Why does Mamdani keep talking about it?
While the legal answer is largely settled, the political one is not.
By keeping the question open, Mamdani signals support to the pro-Palestinian movement that fueled his rise, while acknowledging the institutional limits of his office.
Targeting Netanyahu was central to Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. After leading chants of “Netanyahu, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” during a protest in Oct. 2023, Mamdani first pledged to arrest Netanyahu shortly after he declared his candidacy. He later repeated the pledge, including in front of Jewish audiences, arguing that he did not want New York to be a place where leaders accused of war crimes felt welcome.
The approach follows a similar pattern Mamdani confronted with a politically charged issue earlier this year. As anti-Jewish incidents continue to make up a majority of reported hate crimes, the city considered placing buffer zones around houses of worship, spurred in part by a November protest outside the Park East Synagogue that included antisemitic slogans.
After expressing reservations about the legislation, Mamdani referred the bill to the city’s Law Department before ultimately allowing it to become law without his signature, only after the City Council passed it with a veto-proof majority.
Mamdani vetoed a companion bill that would potentially limit pro-Palestinian demonstrations, particularly on campuses. (The council later passed a modified version, and the state passed a 50-foot buffer zone bill that equally applies to all community centers and schools being used for services, education and religious observance across the state.)
Mamdani’s real test
Whether Mamdani’s careful balancing act satisfies either side may become clear when Netanyahu arrives in New York this September.
While the mayor cannot dictate U.S. foreign policy or enforce ICC warrants, City Hall still plays an important role in coordinating logistics, demonstrations and municipal services during the annual gathering of world leaders.
Mamdani can influence how unwelcoming New York feels to the Israeli leader.
The Israeli prime minister’s appearance at the United Nations is expected to draw massive demonstrations, putting City Hall’s handling of protests and policing under intense scrutiny.
History suggests that symbolism matters.
In 1995, Mayor Rudy Giuliani triggered a diplomatic dispute after ejecting Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat from a United Nations anniversary concert at Lincoln Center. President Bill Clinton, protesting the move, invited the Palestinian leader to a White House reception.
For all the attention given to Netanyahu’s return to New York, he may not arrive alone. During a White House meeting last year, Netanyahu laughed off the threat as “silly” and quipped that he might travel to New York “with President Trump.” Trump responded: “I’ll get him out.”
Now, that exchange may prove to have been less a joke than a preview of where the real power lies.
The post Mamdani orders review of whether New York can arrest Netanyahu when he visits this fall appeared first on The Forward.
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A Jewish couple fell in love with rural Oklahoma. Then they built a cemetery there.
Linda Fitzerman did not want her children making burial decisions through tears.
For years, she and her husband, Todd Boone Fitzerman, told each other they needed to settle the question. They were not interested in cremation. They wanted a traditional Jewish burial. And they did not want their children, someday, to face the cost and pressure of deciding where that burial should take place.
“They just need to show up and cry,” Linda said. “They don’t need the additional pain of having to make financial decisions.”
The answer, when it came, was not one they had expected. They created a small Jewish burial ground in Sulphur, Oklahoma, a city of about 5,000 people in the Bible Belt, near the ranch the Fitzermans bought during the pandemic and had come to love.
At Oak Lawn Cemetery, a city-owned burial ground with green grass, rolling terrain and ponds, the Fitzermans purchased a group of plots to create a circular family burial section. Four corner pillars crowned with Stars of David mark the site. Beneath the grass, the pillars are connected by buried rebar, creating a distinct boundary around the section. Linda designed the stainless steel Stars of David, which a friend welded into place.
Nearby, five young trees are taking root: two Chinese pistache trees and three Autumn Blaze maples. The Fitzermans planted them with the city’s permission and have been carefully tending them for the past year, using large water barrels to help them through the early seasons.
“We are babysitting them for at least two years,” Linda said.
The burial section was dedicated in 2025. Todd’s brother, Rabbi Marc Boone Fitzerman of Tulsa, advised them on how to create a designated Jewish space within a public cemetery. Psalms and other prayers were recited at the site. There was no minyan, Todd said, but “spiritually we are there.”
To the Fitzermans’ knowledge, no other Jew is buried in Oak Lawn Cemetery.
A pandemic, and a plan
The cemetery project grew out of a life they did not plan to build in Oklahoma. Todd, 67, and Linda, 65, are both from the Detroit area and were raised in Conservative families. They met in Dallas when their children were young and have been married for 24 years. Dallas remains home. The couple still runs a business there, Local Oven, a gluten-free baking company.
But during the long uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, they began thinking about land.
“We felt so bottled up, and we wanted to get out,” Linda said.
They first responded to an advertisement for 10 acres near water in Texas. The search widened. Todd’s son suggested that 50 acres would be enough room to shoot on the property. Eventually, Todd found 158 acres outside Davis, Oklahoma, about two hours north of Dallas. They began building a working ranch. Todd’s son keeps cattle there. The Fitzermans now divide their time between Dallas and Oklahoma, spending roughly half the week in each place.
“It is a beautiful ranch,” Linda said. “It’s very calming to be out here, really beautiful, nothing like the city.”
Todd described hearing coyotes at night, watching the cattle roam, and the pleasure of “playing cowboy” for part of the week. Linda said she had not known, when they bought the land in 2021, “how important Oklahoma was going to be.”
“It was never a plan,” she said. “It just sort of evolved.”
Their relationship with the area deepened through the people they met there. Todd and Linda said one local friend, who lives across from Oak Lawn Cemetery and owns a large construction company, helped introduce them around Sulphur when they were new. He had also acquired plots in the cemetery through a trade arrangement for excavation work. Seeing what he had done opened a possibility they had not considered.
For years, Linda said, they had found “nothing intriguing” in Dallas cemeteries. Many Jewish plots cost $7,000 or $8,000. One cemetery with a Jewish section had plots priced around $36,000.
“Why would I spend money like that?” Linda said.
In Sulphur, plots were $300 each. For $4,500 total, they could create a family burial place tailored to them.
“We finally had an opportunity that just presented itself,” Linda said.
The circle layout itself came from her memory. In Michigan, she said, part of her family is buried in an older Jewish cemetery arranged not in straight rows, but in a circular shape.
“I thought that was really nice,” she said. “I liked it.”
So Linda and Todd approached the city and asked whether they could create a Jewish cemetery section in Oak Lawn. The response, they said, was strikingly easy.
“We shared that with the city and they said, ‘Yeah, sure,’” Linda said. “I’ve never seen any place give me the green light on every question.”
The city’s one practical concern was that everything remain level enough for its crews to mow. It allowed the Fitzermans to select the location, a corner where two cemetery roads meet. It also permitted them to plant the trees on easement land beside the plots.
“The city is 100% accepting,” Linda said.
Todd put it similarly. “The city could not have been more accommodating,” he said.
The Fitzermans say their religion has never been a problem. “It is the Baptist Bible Belt,” Linda said. “Everyone here has been so willing to accept us. They are inquisitive and curious. Our religion has not been an issue for anyone.”
Todd said that not everyone in Sulphur knows they are Jewish, “but lots of people know we are Jews.” When Todd’s son held his Jewish wedding on the ranch, he said, many non-Jewish guests had never attended one before. Friends asked questions. Guests wore kippot or cowboy hats. Tallitot belonging to Todd, his father and his son’s other grandfather formed the wedding canopy.
“There were more Jews in Sulphur for my son’s wedding than ever before,” Todd said.
Peace of mind
For Linda, the cemetery’s Jewish symbols were important. She wanted the pillars to be easy to find. More than that, she wanted them to say plainly what the site was.
“When we see the pillars, they reflect what we are doing, which is our religion,” she said. “Nothing is more stately than the Jewish star.”
“Our little decor, to me, sends a really beautiful statement,” she added. “I’ve always been proud to be Jewish. I wouldn’t want to be buried any other way.”
The Fitzermans have tried to spare their children as much uncertainty as possible. They have assigned the burial titles to their children and their children’s partners, while making clear that use of the plots will remain their choice. They have also documented the practical steps to follow when the time comes, including where a body could be prepared for Jewish burial in Dallas or Oklahoma City.
“You don’t think about it until a family member is going through it,” Linda said.
She views the cemetery as a natural extension of family care. “You are always, always part of your family,” she said. “If you want these, they are there for you.”
Todd described the burial ground in similar terms. It offers “peace of mind,” he said: a final resting place in a community they love and want to be part of.
The trees, Linda noted, will eventually grow large. The Chinese pistache trees can grow to over 25 feet with age. The maples, she said, will be especially beautiful in the fall.
They hope it will be many years before the cemetery is needed.
But the question that had lingered for so long has now been answered. Their children will not have to find a plot, compare prices, choose a cemetery, or wonder whether their parents’ burial wishes were honored.
They will only have to come.
And cry.
The post A Jewish couple fell in love with rural Oklahoma. Then they built a cemetery there. appeared first on The Forward.
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Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time
(JTA) — For many Orthodox Jews, a typical winter weekday begins early: head to synagogue, gather in a minyan for morning prayers, then rush off to work.
Orthodox Jewish groups say a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent could upend that routine by pushing winter sunrises — and the earliest permissible time for some prayers — an hour later.
Agudath Israel of America is among the groups urging the Senate to reject legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, arguing that the change would create both public safety risks and significant challenges for Orthodox Jewish religious life.
The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday by a wide bipartisan margin. In a statement issued after the vote, Agudath Israel said it understood the appeal of ending the twice-yearly clock changes but opposed making daylight saving time permanent.
The Orthodox advocacy organization warned that permanent daylight saving time would push winter sunrises past 9 a.m. in some parts of the country, forcing many children to travel to school before dawn. It also said the later sunrise would make it difficult for observant Jews to attend morning synagogue services and still arrive at work or school on time, because Jewish law prohibits reciting key morning prayers before prescribed times tied to sunrise.
“The extension of DST will create an extreme hardship on observant Jews,” the organization said. “It would be extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible — to arrive on time for a job and will affect the start time of our schools.”
The Orthodox Union and the Coalition for Jewish Values have also come out against the measure.
In a column for Chabad.org that didn’t take a position on the bill, Menachem Posner also wrote that the change would present a challenge in parts of the country for morning minyan, the 10-person prayer quorum. But he also noted an upside to the extension of daylight saving: a later start time for Shabbat on short winter Fridays.
Shabbat begins at sundown, which during the winter can fall before 4:00 p.m. in parts of the country. “With DST, however, this will be shifted one hour later, so that even on the darkest day of winter, Jews will have one more hour to prepare for Shabbat,” Posner wrote.
Orthodox parties in Israel have also made an issue of changes to the daylight saving calendar. In 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet unanimously approved extending daylight saving time until the first Sunday after Oct. 1, despite objections from haredi parties. The change brought Israel’s clock closer to European practice while still acknowledging Orthodox concerns about morning prayer and a later start time to Yom Kippur that they argued would make the fast more difficult.
This week Agudath Israel also pointed to the brief U.S. experiment with year-round daylight saving time during the 1970s energy crisis, when Congress repealed the policy after widespread public dissatisfaction over dark winter mornings.
The organization said it hoped the Senate would weigh the broader consequences of permanent daylight saving time, including alternatives such as permanent standard time or retaining the current system of seasonal clock changes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time appeared first on The Forward.
