Uncategorized
How this Brooklyn neighborhood became the ‘Klezmer Shtetl’
(New York Jewish Week) — Some of the greatest talents in Jewish music have strolled Midwood’s lettered avenues, including the klezmer musician Pete Sokolow and the Hasidic composer Ben Zion Shenker. Both have left us — Sokolow in 2022, Shenker in 2016 — but the Modzitzer synagogue on Avenue L, where Shenker once lead prayers, is a spiritual home for klezmer virtuoso and Midwood denizen Andy Statman, 73. He’s davened (prayed) there for more than 30 years.
Now, a younger group of klezmer musicians joins Statman in making the quiet, south-central Brooklyn neighborhood their home, due to the (relatively) affordable rents, low density and greenery, as well as its proximity to Jewish communal life spread across the borough.
“We needed more room than Park Slope could provide on our budget,” Pete Rushefsky, who has played a hammered dulcimer known as the tsimbl in the city’s klezmer scene for more than 30 years, told the New York Jewish Week. “It’s been a great neighborhood to raise a family.” That’s especially true for a culturally active family: Rushefsky’s wife, Madeline Solomon, sings, plays accordion and runs the Brooklyn Workers Circle School in Park Slope; their 12-year-old daughter, Mathilda, plays in a children’s fiddle band in the neighborhood.
Midwood looms so large over the present-day Jewish music scene that there’s even a klezmer rock band named for it: Midwood, the band, was founded in 2015 by the fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment. The 39-year-old veteran klezmer violinist lives in the same apartment building on Ocean Avenue as Jeremiah Lockwood, a blues performer and a scholar of cantorial music.
“I call it the ‘Klezmer Shtetl,’” said Midwood’s vocalist, Eleonore Weill, who is also a multi-instrumentalist. (Weill used to reside in Midwood but now lives in next-door Ditmas Park, which is also home to Sarah Gordon, lead singer of the rock band Yiddish Princess. Nearby Kensington counts among its klezmer-making residents D. Zisl Slepovitch and the klezmer couple Ilya Shneyveys and Sarah Myerson.)
Another Midwood musician is Michael Winograd, 40, who many consider to be the best klezmer clarinetist of his generation. As a teenager, he went to Statman’s home for lessons; last summer he moved to the neighborhood.
Midwood musicians Jeremiah Lockwood, left, and Pete Rushefsky. (Courtesy)
Elsewhere in Midwood resides guitarist Yoshie Fruchter, founder of Pitom, which the Tzadik record label called “a shredding Jewish instrumental band.” Fruchter has performed with Jon Madof’s Zion80, which plays Shlomo Carlebach tunes in an Afrobeat style, and Mazal Tov Cocktail Party, the latest klezmer/dance music project led by David Krakauer and Kathleen Tagg.
“I didn’t choose Midwood, particularly,” Shulman-Ment told New York Jewish Week. “It sort of fell into my life.” The fiddler decided to rent his Midwood one-bedroom in the summer of 2021 while he was on tour in the Pacific Northwest. After seeing the place online and sending a couple of friends to check it out in person, Shulman-Ment signed a lease while he was still on the road.
As it happens, Lockwood — who lives with his two sons, ages 14 and 16, on the floor below Shulman-Ment — also rented his apartment sight unseen that same summer.
The two neighbors credit Ivona Hertz, co-owner of Ocean Empire Management, with helping them find a home. Her company manages a pair of buildings across from Prospect Park that are home to so many jazz musicians, they came to be known as “the jazz dorms.”
“When the tenants are happy they always recommend their friends,” Hertz said, describing how she came to rent Midwood apartments to so many musicians. “That’s how the ‘jazz dorms’ were created and that’s how the Midwood buildings are now getting more musicians. The apartments are larger, up to three bedrooms, including the square footage, and more affordable in Midwood.”
According to the available rentals on the real estate website StreetEasy, the median rent in Midwood is $2,566. (Hertz, the property manager known for helping musicians, says she typically charges between $1,500 and $1,750 a month for one-bedroom rentals.) The median sale price in the nabe for the first quarter of this year was $644,000, according to the real estate website PropertyShark — that’s substantially less than the Brooklyn borough-wide median of $755,000.
In addition to relatively low housing costs, Midwood is also known for being home to a very large — and mostly Orthodox — Jewish community. Traditionally Ashkenazi, the southern reaches of the neighborhood have also seen steady growth of its longtime Sephardic Jewish community. “Sephardic Jews dominate from [an area known as the] Avenue H cut to Avenue Z,” Sarina Roffe, CEO of the The Brooklyn Jewish Historical Initiative and president of the Sephardic Heritage Project, told the New York Jewish Week. “The Sephardic community in Brooklyn has been growing for more than 100 years.”
Most of these newer, klezmer residents identify as secular Jews, and not Orthodox. But many of them said they enjoy living among their Orthodox brethren. Clarinetist Winograd lives in part of Midwood that’s “very Jewish,” as he described it. “I kind of like being a secular Jew who gets to experience the benefit of a quiet Shabbes. I enjoy being a culturally-engaged Jew living in a Jewish neighborhood even if I’m not partaking in the more religious activities.”
Shulman-Ment — who identifies as a secular Jew who is committed to Jewish culture — spent a year living in Crown Heights, so he was familiar with the feeling of living in an Orthodox neighborhood and feeling like a bit of an outsider. He said he’s noticed, though, that if he’s in his “gig costume” — a suit and fedora — some of his Orthodox co-religionists offer a friendly greeting.
Lockwood described his (and Shulman-Ment’s) section of Midwood, along Ocean Avenue, as “rough-hewn and unlovely. It is a hard-working and threadbare place.” And yet, “I like it here fine,” he told the New York Jewish Week, adding: “I just don’t want to encourage out-of-towners to move in.”
Fruchter — who moved to Midwood last December with his wife, Jewish cookbook author Leah Koenig, and their two kids, aged 4 and 9 — said his area of Midwood has a lot of Pakistani residents, but on Saturday his family can often hear zemiros, hymns sung at the Sabbath table, coming from the homes of Orthodox neighbors down the block. “I really like how you see people from so many different places, cultures, religions and backgrounds all sharing the same sidewalks,” Fruchter told the New York Jewish Week via email. “I love walking by businesses with signs in different languages and restaurants where I have no idea what to order… I love that it’s a ‘quiet’ neighborhood but with a lot of bustle in it.”
Klezmer virtuoso Andy Statman, left, has lived in the neighborhood more than 30 years, while guitarist Yoshie Fruchter, right, is a more recent resident. (Courtesy)
The family is involved in the Flatbush Jewish Center, a Conservative egalitarian synagogue in the neighboring Kensington section of Brooklyn where Fruchter has served as cantor on the High Holy Days and organized a concert series.
Fruchter is also a member of Shulman-Ment’s band Midwood — whose recording of their live performance at the “Klezmer On Ice” festival in Minneapolis last winter will be released in the coming months. Midwood the band’s next gig is at the National Yiddish Book Center’s annual Yidstock festival in Amherst, Massachusetts on July 16.
Shulman-Ment will also be performing with the actor and musician Daniel Kahn on June 15 at the East Village world music venue Drom. The performance is timed to the release of the duo’s first album, “The Building & Other Songs,” which features Yiddish versions of songs by Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Woody Guthrie.
The other Midwood klezmer musicians with gigs to look forward to are Rushefsky — who is also the executive director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance — and Statman, who will both be playing with the violinist Itzhak Perlman in the coming months.
In addition, Statman plays in two trios: The Andy Statman Trio, which has performed at the Greenwich Village Synagogue in Manhattan regularly for 20 years, and another with the Eddy Brothers, two young West Virginia bluegrass musicians. More recently, Statman started playing with a traditional bluegrass quartet that’s comprised of players he’s known since he was a teenager. That band is now known as Andy’s Ramble, not to be confused with the 1994 Statman album of the same name.
Statman grew up in Queens and was in his mid-20s when he first moved to Brooklyn in 1976. After a series of apartments, he and his wife Basha moved to Avenue L in Midwood in 1987, where they raised their four children. “Our kids needed to be here. We needed to be here,” Statman said. “There is sky and trees and grass here. There are birds chirping all over. The neighborhood was incredibly vibrant.”
When he first arrived, Statman took a break from his music career for a year to study Jewish holy texts full time. In the 35 years since, he’s seen real estate values soar to a level he calls “ridiculous.” Statman said that since the early 2000s, he’s watched kids who grew up on his block move to Lakewood, New Jersey or Monsey in Rockland County — both home to sizable Orthodox Jewish communities — because they couldn’t afford to buy homes in Midwood. Now their parents are leaving, he added, because they want to be near their grandchildren.
It’s a fate the clarinetist is personally familiar with: None of his four children, now grown, live in the area. With two daughters and their grandchildren living near Lakewood, the Statmans are considering relocating there themselves.
—
The post How this Brooklyn neighborhood became the ‘Klezmer Shtetl’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Germany has found the culprit behind a deadly antisemitic arson fire. It still hasn’t learned its lesson.
The only way out of the Jewish old-age home at Reichenbachstrasse 27 in Munich ran through a four-story wooden stairwell. On the evening of Feb. 13, 1970, someone soaked that stairwell with gasoline and set it on fire.
It became a chimney. Flames and smoke raced upward, cutting off the residents above. Firefighters rescued many of the roughly 30 people inside, but seven Jewish residents aged 59 to 71, died. 15 people were injured, four seriously. All seven victims had survived Nazi persecution. Auschwitz had been liberated just 25 years earlier.
For 56 years, no one could identify the culprit.
In August, the Munich General Prosecutor’s Office announced that it now believes a right-wing extremist started the fire. Earlier this year, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel identified him as Bernd V., providing only his first name and last initial in accordance with German privacy laws. Der Spiegel also ran a black and white police photo of the suspect. It shows a man with a broad forehead, deep-set eyes and weak chin, wearing an unsmiling, withdrawn expression. The caption read, “Raised with Love for the Führer.”
Bernd V. was 25 at the time of the arson attack and died in 2020. His death means there will be no trial, though prosecutors say the evidence now points clearly to his responsibility. They found no reliable evidence of accomplices.
After his death, a woman contacted authorities and told the police that Bernd V. and two other men had been involved in a botched burglary at a jewelry store close to the Jewish community center on the night of the attack. Bernd V. ranted to his accomplices that the Jews had everything while Germans like him had nothing and verbally threatened to set Jews on fire. Roughly 15 minutes later, the building at Reichenbachstrasse 27 was ablaze.
In April 2025, investigators in Munich reopened the case, which had been closed in 2017 for lack of evidence. Old acquaintances of Bernd V, including relatives of the woman who had provided the new statement and who corroborated her account, remembered a man with a deep hatred of Jews who was obsessed with Hitler. He played records of the Führer’s speeches and practiced shooting around Berchtesgaden, where Hitler once had an idyllic residence. As a juvenile, Bernd V. had been sentenced for blowing up two telephone booths.
More strikingly, he was not a new suspect in the arson case. A former cellmate from one of Bernd V.’s prison stints in the early 1970s told investigators that Bernd V. had boasted to him of carrying out the Reichenbachstrasse attack and described details that, according to prosecutors, were not publicly known. Prosecutors questioned Bernd V. in 1972; he denied involvement, and the case against him was dropped two years later for lack of evidence.
The Reichenbachstrasse fire changed Jewish life in Germany — and the long uncertainty about its perpetrator helped shape a comforting German story about the sources of postwar antisemitism.
Bernhard Purin, the founding director of Munich’s Jewish Museum, has called the attack, quite simply, “the rupture.” Purin, who died in 2024, explained in a 2020 interview that before Feb. 13, 1970, people entered Jewish community centers much as they entered Christian ones. Afterward came police cars, cameras and heightened security, including metal detectors. Jews in Germany drew the bleak conclusion that they could only live under protection.
That security regime has become so routine here that it passes for normal. Police officers and Israeli security stand guard outside synagogues and Jewish schools. Visitors pass barriers and identity checks before entering institutions devoted to worship, education and community.
Permanent security presence has an unintended consequence: It marks official Jewish life as something fundamentally separate from ordinary life. A synagogue behind police barriers may be safer, but that fortification tells Jews and non-Jews alike that Jewish institutions are a world apart.
The attack also has another legacy. Because nobody knew who committed it, the crime gradually became evidence in a wider argument about left-wing antisemitism. In 1969, German left-wing radicals planted a bomb that failed to detonate at the Jewish community center in West Berlin on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Parts of the revolutionary left embraced an anti-Zionism that could turn antisemitic. The Red Army Faction later celebrated the Palestinian terrorists who murdered 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972; German left-wing terrorists subsequently collaborated with Palestinian militants at Entebbe.
But the history of left-wing antisemitism gradually absorbed a crime for which no such attribution had been proved. It fed into the narrative that, as the political scientist Yascha Mounk put in his 2014 book Stranger in My Own Country, “since 1945, the Germans who have committed the most radical attacks on Jews were not right-wing radicals.” Many Germans found it psychologically convenient to believe that the Reichenbachstrasse victims had died at the hands of German antifascists rather than neo-Nazis.
The generation of 1968 performed an indispensable service by forcing West Germany to confront questions its parents had largely evaded: What had Germans done under Hitler? Why had former Nazis returned to positions of authority? What did Auschwitz demand of the generations that followed?
The discovery that some of those self-proclaimed antifascists themselves became antisemites produced a terrible historical irony. It also offered Germans a way to relocate antisemitism. The Jew-haters were now the rebellious children, the revolutionary leftists, the Palestinians and not necessarily the political descendants of the very people who had murdered Europe’s Jews.
Mounk himself called the radical left’s projection of fascism onto Jews and Israel a “psychological coping mechanism.” The apparent solution of the Munich case suggests a parallel mechanism in postwar Germany: antisemitism has often been easiest to recognize when it belongs to somebody else.
Today, that somebody else is frequently Muslim.
At the reopening of the Reichenbachstrasse synagogue last September, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz explicitly acknowledged that antisemitism “was never gone” from the Federal Republic. But within minutes he turned to immigrants, arguing that Germany had ignored the fact that a “considerable” number came from countries where antisemitism was effectively state doctrine. Months earlier, he had told Fox News that Germany suffered from “a kind of imported antisemitism.”
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jews in Germany have faced alarming hostility connected to Israel and Gaza, including from Islamist and radical anti-Zionist milieus. But that’s only part of the story. Germany’s principal civil-society monitoring network for antisemitism, RIAS, recorded 8,725 antisemitic incidents in 2025. It linked 807 of them to right-wing extremism, the highest number in that category since nationwide monitoring began. And Germany now has a far-right party of enormous electoral strength whose leading figures have repeatedly tested the boundaries of the country’s postwar taboos.
That party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), is currently polling around 41% in Saxony-Anhalt ahead of next month’s state election. One of its most prominent politicians, Björn Höcke, has twice been convicted for using the banned slogan of Hitler’s SA.
Fifty-six years after seven Jews died in a burning building, prosecutors now believe the likeliest perpetrator was a German neo-Nazi whose fanatical hatred had been visible for years. That finding comes too late to punish him. It does not come too late to unsettle the story Germans have often told themselves about the crime.
And the other legacy of that night remains all around us. The rupture of 1970 has never fully healed. German Jews still worship, study and gather behind cameras, guards and police barricades: constant reminders that Jewish life here is somehow separate.
The challenge is not only to safeguard Jewish life, but to stop treating permanent protection as its natural condition. That requires Germany to confront antisemitism wherever it appears, including on a resurgent far right whose danger is easier to minimize when attention is fixed elsewhere.
The post Germany has found the culprit behind a deadly antisemitic arson fire. It still hasn’t learned its lesson. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Emil Kalin wins Mendele Prize for Yiddish Literature 2026
דער תּּל-אָבֿיבֿער שטאָטראַט האָט די וואָך אַנאָנסירט, אַז דער ייִדישער שרײַבער עמיל קאַלין האָט זוכה געווען צו באַקומען דעם מענדעלע-פּּריז פֿאַר ייִדישער ליטעראַטור. דעם פּרײַז טיילט די שטאָט אויס יעדע פֿיר יאָר פֿאַר בעלעטריסטיק, ליטעראַטור־קריטיק אָדער אַנדערע בײַטראָגן צו דער ייִדיש־ליטעראַטור.
דעם פּריז האָט מען אים געגעבן אין שײַכות מיט זײַן לעצטן ראָמאַן, „צוזאַמענבראָך“ (2025), וועגן אַ געוועזענעם חרדישן ייִד פֿון ירושלים, וואָס פֿאַרלאָזט זײַן פֿרוי און קינד און לאָזט זיך גיין אויף אַ קאָמפּליצירטן גײַסטיקן דרך. דאָס בוך איז דערשינען אין פֿאַרלאַג ייִדיש-בראַנזשע און לייוויק-פֿאַרלאַג, מיט דער שטיצע פֿון דער „נאַציאָנאַלער אינסטאַנץ פֿאַר ייִדישער קולטור“. מע קאָן עס קויפן דורך leyvik.org.
נישט לאַנג נאָך דער פּובליקאַציע פֿונעם ראָמאַן האָט דער פֿאָרווערטס־רעצענזענט מיכאל קרוטיקאָוו געשריבן וועגן דעם בוך, און בפֿרט וועגן דעם הויפּט־פּערסאָנאַזש, הערש, אַזוי:
קאַלין שילדערט סײַ מענטשן און סײַ לאַנדשאַפֿטן אָן קײן שום באַפּוצונג. ער איז אַ מײַסטער פֿון מעטאַפֿאָרישן אימאַזש, װאָס שאַפֿט אַ געהעריקע שטימונג. די שטאָט תּל־אָבֿיבֿ איז אַ מין לעבעדיקע, פֿיבערדיקע חיה, װאָס כאַפּט הערשן פֿעסט אַרום „מיט בײדע שװיציקע הענט.“ די אױטאָבוסן זײַנען „אומגעלומפּערטע יבשה־שיפֿן, װאָס שנײַדן זיך קױם דורך אַ װעג אין דער ברױזנדיקער באַװעגונג.“ ער אַנטלױפֿט קײן ירושלים מיט אַ האָפֿענונג, „אַז ירושלים װעט מיך דערהײבן מיט זיך, אָבער דאָס פֿאַרקערטע איז געשען: ירושלים האָט מיך דערנידערט, אַראָפּגעשלעפּט מיט זיך אין בלאָטע.״
די דרײַ ריכטער פֿונעם פּריז־קאָמיטעט — דבֿ־בער קאָטלערמאַן, דניאל גלאַי און נירה תּובֿל — האָבן געזאָגט, אַז קאַלינס בוך איז נישט בלויז זייער גוט געשריבן, נאָר איז אויך איינער פֿון די גאָר ווייניק מאָדערנע ראָמאַנען אויף ייִדיש, וואָס באַהאַנדלען טעמעס פֿון דער הײַנטיקער ישׂראלדיקער געזעלשאַפֿט.
אַחוץ „צוזאַמענבראָך“ האָט קאַלין אַרויסגעגעבן צוויי אַנדערע ראָמאַנען, און הײַיאָר וועט דערשײַנען זײַן פֿערטער. די אויסטיילונג וועט פֿאָרקומען דעם 1טן דעצעמבער 2026 אין עינבֿ-זאַל, וווּ עס וועט אויך בײַזײַן דער תּל-אָבֿיבֿער בירגער-מײַסטער רון חולדאי.
עמיל קאַלין איז געבוירן געוואָרן אין 1982 אין בוקאַרעשט, און האָט מיט זײַן משפּחה עולה געווען קיין ישׂראל אין עלטער פֿון 7 יאָר.
ער האָט פֿאַרענדיקט זײַנע הויכע לימודים אינעם העברעיִשן אוניווערסיטעט אין ירושלים, און האָט לאַנגע יאָרן געאַרבעט אין הײַטעק. הײַנט לערנט ער פּסיכאָלאָגיע אינעם תּל-אָבֿיבֿער אוניווערסיטעט.
קאַלין האָט אויך איבערגעזעצט אויף ייִדיש דאָס דײַטשישע בוך „דער גאַנג פֿון די הינט“, וואָס איז אַרויס דורכן פֿאַרלאַג „אָלניאַנסקי טעקסט“. זײַנע אַנדערע ביכער זײַנען אַרויס דורך די פֿאַרלאַגן „ייִדיש בראַנזשע“ און „ה. לייוויק“.
זײַנע קירצערע ווערק קען מען לייענען אינעם דיגיטאַלישן זשורנאַל „ייִדיש בראַנזשע“, רעדאַקטירט פֿון באָריס סאַנדלער.
אין יאָר 2025 איז ער פֿאַרבעטן געוואָרן אויף אַ טור אין אַכט שטעט אין דײַטשלאַנד, כּדי פֿאָרצושטעלן דאָס בוך „צוזאַמענברוך“.
ער וווינט אין תּל־אָבֿיבֿ מיט זײַן פֿרוי שבֿע כּהן און זייערע דרײַ קינדער.
The post Emil Kalin wins Mendele Prize for Yiddish Literature 2026 appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Brussels Airlines workers threaten strike over flights to Israel, citing ethical objections
(JTA) — A Belgian union has threatened to strike against Brussels Airlines for compelling staff to work on flights to Israel, saying that anyone with “safety or conscientious objections” should be able to refuse.
ACV Puls, Belgium’s largest trade union, said on Tuesday that the company was breaking previous agreements to rely on volunteers for flights to Tel Aviv. The airline resumed flights to Tel Aviv on August 3, following a five-month pause because of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, and its first flights were operated with volunteers.
“Serious concerns exist among the staff regarding both physical safety and the mental and ethical impact of these flights,” ACV Puls spokesperson Jolinde Defieuw said in a statement. She added that making staffing mandatory was “particularly serious in the context of the ongoing war and the genocide in Gaza.”
ACV Puls, which represents aviation employees including pilots, cabin crews and ground staff in Belgium, said that a strike could follow if Brussels Airlines does not reverse its decision to resume regular staffing. The union argued that flying to Israel could not be deemed sufficiently safe, citing Belgium’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which advises against “all non-essential travel to Israel and Jerusalem.”
They also said that workers should be able to decline the flights for ethical reasons. Those who have “safety or conscientious objections must be able to refuse these flights without financial, professional, or disciplinary consequences,” said the union.
Nico Cardone, a spokesperson for Brussels Airlines, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that safety was the company’s “highest priority, whether we operate with volunteers or not.” He added that the airline was “not a political party” and made decisions about flight operations based on safety and demand.
“We do not engage in political discussions about the governments of certain destinations, and we ask our staff to uphold this same professional standard,” said Cardone.
ACV Puls said the airline was compelling crews to work because it had not found enough volunteers. Cardone disputed that, saying the airline always aimed to return to regular crew scheduling over time.
Along with threatening a strike, the union called on the Belgian government to weigh in. ACV Puls said the government should take a stance on the availability of commercial flights to Israel “despite the ongoing war, the massive civilian casualties, and the serious accusations of war crimes and human rights violations against the Palestinian population.”
Belgium has grown increasingly critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and Israeli settlements in the West Bank since 2023. Earlier this year, Belgium banned aircraft carrying military equipment bound for Israel from crossing its airspace. The government in July approved a ban on goods imported from Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Brussels Airlines workers threaten strike over flights to Israel, citing ethical objections appeared first on The Forward.
