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Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world
(JTA) – Israel Mizrahi joined dozens of fellow connoisseurs of rare Jewish books last December to watch the livestream of Genazym, the hottest auction house in the market. A bookdealer by trade, Mizrahi was also on the phone being paid to advise a wealthy client who had signed up to make bids.
But as the auction proceeded, Mizrahi’s advice had little use. His trigger-happy client didn’t seem to care about established valuations: He ended up paying about $50,000 for a book estimated at half that price. “He just pressed the button and kept on bidding until the bidding was over,” Mizrahi said. “There was no convincing him out of it. He spent nearly $600,000 that day and there was no sense to it.”
Behavior that confounds veterans of the rare Jewish book market has become routine at auctions organized by Genazym.
Mizrahi recalled the sale in 2021 of a Passover Haggadah printed in the 1920s in Vienna. With attractive illustrations of a prominent 19th-century rabbi named Moses Sofer and his family, the book makes for a nice addition to a collection. It also happens to be very common.
“I sell copies for $100, and I have probably sold 150 copies in my life,” said Mizrahi, whose shop in Brooklyn is a mecca for Jewish book lovers. “It sold for about $5,500 at Genazym’s auction. I currently have it on sale still for $100.”
At the highest end of sale prices, a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, commanded $620,000 at a Genazym auction last September, while a copy of Noam Elimelech, a classic rabbinic treatise, printed in 1788, fetched $1.4 million four months later — in both cases at least doubling or tripling what experts thought the items were worth based on past sales of the same texts.
“Genazym has come on like a freight train into the world of Jewish auctions. Some of the prices realized are far beyond what this market has seen before,” said David Wachtel, the former Judaica consultant for Sotheby’s auction house.
Since Genazym’s first auction in 2017, it has sold some 1,900 books, manuscripts and other collectible documents for about $26 million plus commission, roughly $12 million above total starting prices, according to an analysis by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of auction records on Genazym’s website. Genazym has increasingly outperformed the longest-standing Judaica auction firms in New York and Jerusalem.
A page from an illustrated Passover haggadah printed in Vienna in the 1920s. (Courtesy of Genazym)
It’s hard to tell exactly what’s driving the boom because the identity of Genazym’s customers is confidential and few flaunt their collections widely. One of the auction house’s owners, in a rare public comment, ventured that Jewish buyers are craving a connection with their heritage. What’s clear is that at a time when traditional libraries are cutting back on buying Jewish texts, Genazym is tapping into an emerging luxury market among Orthodox Jews — and fueling the rise of religious texts as both a status symbol and investment vehicle in some communities.
“I know the sellers, the customers and everybody involved and there is a new wealthy class of Orthodox Jews that have a limited range of things they can splurge on,” Mizrahi said. “They don’t go to Vegas, they don’t do crazy vacations. They keep kosher. So this is a way that they can splurge and show off.”
Rabbi Pini Dunner, who collects rare Jewish books, said investing in Judaica is likely attractive for some in the Hasidic community, whose religious observance is stricter than that of congregants at his Modern Orthodox synagogue in the Los Angeles area.
“There are people I know here in Beverly Hills who’ve got car collections worth tens of millions of dollars,” Dunner said. “In the Hasidic world that has no currency, just as the wow factor of a Picasso has no currency. An original manuscript or first-edition of the Noam Elimelech has a real wow factor, particularly if you can tell people the book sold for more than a million dollars at a Genazym auction.”
The impression that the Hasidic world has grown wealthier over the last decade or two is widespread and based, at least in part, on the proliferation of luxury products and services tailored for the community in places like Lakewood, New Jersey, and Kiryas Joel, New York. Weddings have become increasingly expensive and elaborate, fine dining options are common, and high-end kosher wine and liquor are more readily available.
“It wasn’t that long ago that sit-down dining was looked down upon or not even available. Now there are a plethora of options,” said Chaim Saiman, a law professor at Villanova University who studies the intersection of commerce and Jewish law. “It’s no secret that $200 bottles of Scotch appear at kiddush clubs all the time. $50 used to be a big deal, then $100 was a big deal, now we are at $200.”
Where the new wealth is coming from is not totally clear. Limited survey and U.S. Census data suggests that Orthodox Jews feel crunched by costs associated with practicing religion and that there are large pockets of poverty among them, particularly in Hasidic communities, according to Mark Trencher, the founder of Nishma Research, a nonprofit dedicated to studying the Orthodox Jewish community. The prevalence of large families also means that generational wealth can be harder to accrue for Orthodox Jews.
But there have always been high earners whose philanthropy has buttressed their communities, Trencher noted. “There are a lot of people in that community that are very successful in their businesses and they have large amounts of wealth,” he said. “Those people generally are huge donors to charities. From a financial perspective, those communities are probably doing much better than you would expect them to.”
Many of those high earners make their money through entrepreneurship rather than professional success in the white-collar world. Many nursing home chains — an industry valued at an estimated $171 billion and where growth is expected — have Orthodox owners. Amazon has also created new opportunities for Orthodox businessmen. Orthodox landlords, meanwhile, have benefited from skyrocketing real estate prices in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
A page from a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, which fetched $620,000 at a Genazym auction. (Courtesy of Genazym).
Recent reporting in The New York Times about the Hasidic education system has provided a window into another stream of revenue for private businesses in the community. Entrepreneurs in the community have responded to the increased availability of government funding for special education in New York in recent years by establishing companies to service Hasidic schools, with the government footing the bill. In one example highlighted by the Times, a married Hasidic couple opened such a business in 2014 when they were 21 and 19 years old; in 2022, their company received more than $38 million in government funding.
The owners of another set of companies providing services to Hasidic schools appear to have used their windfall to purchase rare books through Genazym. The owners were indicted in January for allegedly billing the government for more than $1 million in childcare services that they never provided and otherwise defrauding the government out of more than $2.8 million.
Prosecutors are seeking to have the alleged fraudsters forfeit seven books and other documents as listed in a federal indictment. They include manuscripts with a rabbinic signature and rare books of blessing and Jewish law, all of which match items listed on Genazym auctions, where they sold for a total of about $274,000.
Buying Jewish texts at auction can seem like a savvy investment for buyers seeking to safeguard or grow their wealth. Before Genazym launched, a typical Genazym buyer might have invested in U.S. Treasury bills or the stock market, according to Wachtel, the former Sotheby’s consultant.
“I think Genazym has been able to convince people that this is a good vehicle for establishing and growing wealth,” he said. “That also dovetails with your ability to, let’s face it, show off. Somebody comes to your house, you can show them a first-edition Shulchan Aruch. But you’re not going to say, hey, come look at my T-bills.”
The auction house’s tactics appear tailor-made for this growing market. Its motto is “Own your heritage,” and it’s printed on the catalogs the company distributes through popular Orthodox magazines like Ami or Mishpacha or podcasts, places where people with no prior interest in books might encounter the hype. The catalogs also appear in synagogues in heavily Hasidic areas like Brooklyn or Lakewood, but without the prices printed on them so as not to violate a Jewish prohibition against discussing financial matters on Shabbat.
The descriptions in the catalogs emphasize any links that exist between the items for sale and notable rabbis from history, especially figures who established rabbinic dynasties that continue to exist today and who are revered by yeshiva-educated Orthodox Jews. The link might be a signature of a rabbi in a ledger from an old fundraising tour that took place 200 years ago. Or it might be that an important rabbi owned the book in question or even prayed out of it. Like a pair of pants of a prominent Israeli rabbi that drew widespread attention when they briefly went up for auction last month, these texts are seen by some as conferring holiness onto those who possess them. By virtue of their pedigree, these artifacts might even be seen as a segula, or Jewish protective charm.
In its promotional materials and live auctions, Genazym also uses more colloquial and hyperbolic language to describe its items than traditional auction houses, which tend to stick to the kind of terminology used by academic scholars.
“Genazym found a formula to make books and manuscripts really exciting for the layperson, especially in the Orthodox community,” said Yoel Finkelman, a former curator of the Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel. “They are not using the vocabulary of experts, they’re using plain ordinary language, like ‘very old’ or ‘very rare.’ No one at Sotheby’s would ever refer even to a thousand-year-old book that way.”
Genazym’s unique approach extends to the delivery of items to buyers. A traditional buyer in the rare Jewish book market, like Michelle Margolis, Columbia University’s Jewish studies librarian, might only care that the book they bought is safely delivered. But with Genazym, the books come wrapped in a proper clamshell and velvet bag. “I rolled my eyes when my delivery arrived, but at the same time that’s a lot of investment,” Margolis said, adding that many other auction houses have been cutting costs, for example, by doing away with their customary printed catalogs.
Jacob Djmal, who lives in Brooklyn, has dabbled in Judaica collecting for many years, an interest he picked up from his grandfather. He remembers suddenly seeing Genazym’s advertising everywhere. “They started reaching out to you in every way possible, finding a demographic that wasn’t aware before. Every Genazym auction I have people texting me — ‘Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that?’ — as if something is happening that had never happened before.”
Sometimes, that is true. A breakout moment came during the December auction, when Genazym cleared $4.4 million in sales, about $2.6 million above total starting prices.
“If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on Earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for at least twice [the estimated amount],” a major British book collector living in France said on his anonymous Twitter account, which has around 110,000 followers, in December.
If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for *at least* twice estimate…. 1/https://t.co/iAC4sQudIz pic.twitter.com/eeunjqWzAs
— Incunabula (@incunabula) December 13, 2022
It remains to be seen whether Genazym can challenge Sotheby’s Judaica division as the destination for sellers with the rarest and most valuable books. Last year, a medieval prayer book sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s and this year, the New York auction house is accepting bids for the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible, which is expected to fetch as much as $50 million.
But Djmal considers especially remarkable about Genazym is not just the high prices but also the way in which rare books have caught on among Orthodox youth as something cool. “My son and his friends in yeshiva are talking about these items,” Djmal said. “These books represent rabbis they have heard about from a young age.”
The team behind Genazym’s success is led by three brothers from the Stefansky family who live in Jerusalem and New York. Before starting an auction house they worked for many years as private dealers in the rare book market. Their names, Chaim, Moshe and Bezalel, rarely appear anywhere and they almost never grant interviews. Chaim Stefansky made an exception for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and requested that this article not put him in the spotlight nor portray Genazym’s success as a product of his business acumen.
Stefansky said Genazym has tapped into a universal and deep-seated desire of people to strengthen their identities by connecting with the past. The Jewish community, he said, has been poorly served by an emphasis on historical and even current persecution.
“Always, we are victimized and we cry,” Stefansky said. “What we have in common maybe is that your grandmother and my grandmother were sharing the same bed in Auschwitz. Give me something positive of my past to be proud of. Your heritage has not only sorrow but also a happy, rich, and huge intellectual tradition. So Genazym comes and tells people about their heritage. It’s yours. It belongs to you.”
He said the same thing can be done with any ethnic or religious group.
“If you go to the Irish community and press the right buttons in terms of what you know that every Irish person is extremely proud of, I think you’ll be very successful,” Stefansky said.
He rejected the impression that Genazym’s buyers come primarily from the ranks of the nouveau riche in the Hasidic world.
“It’s coming from all sections,” Stefansky said. “People will say that there’s a lot of fresh money in the market. But we also have very good old money. We have institutions. And, also, the regular man. Mostly, the regular man, who never knew he could have access to any of this.”
One of the only customers who agreed to be identified and interviewed for this article is Rick Probstein, who says he’s spent more than $100,000 at the company’s auctions. He can’t remember when he started seeing Genazym catalogs but he had never collected Judaica before, which is perhaps surprising given that he’s an Orthodox Jew who’s been working in the collectibles business since he was a child trading baseball cards.
Today, at 53, Probstein is one of the largest sellers of sports collectibles in the world, operating through a dedicated account on eBay. “I run a humongous business — I am doing something like $160 million a year,” he said of his sales volume.
Probstein, who lives in Passaic, New Jersey, had long felt a pang of guilt about the lack of Jewish content in his collection. “I collect things but what do I have of my own heritage?” he recalled thinking to himself. “So when I started getting the catalogs, I said, ‘I gotta be a good Jew.’ I started bidding on things and I got really into it.”
Once Probstein got started, the Stefansky brothers began checking in on him, providing concierge service and cultivating him as a client.
“This is a boutique run by a Jewish family with a personal touch,” Probstein said “They call me on the phone, saying, ‘Rick, did you get the catalog? What did you think? Here are some items that you could really like.’”
Bidding on Genayzm items is not purely sentimental for Probstein. “I’m putting real money into it because I think that from an investment standpoint, it has a lot of upside,” he said.
Still, the items he buys tend to have personal significance.
“I am partial to items relating to the Chofetz Chaim,” Probstein said, referring to the rabbi and Jewish scholar Yisrael Meir Kagan, who died in 1933. Probstein’s oldest son is named Yisrael Meir in his honor. The Chofetz Chaim also appeals to Probstein because of his writings about lashon hara, the prohibition in Jewish law against speaking evil of people. “I think that speech is important and he’s sort of the embodiment of that,” Probstein said.
Genazym has sold six letters and a handwritten blessing signed or written by the Chofetz Chaim at prices ranging from about $16,000 to $68,000.
Ever since Probstein started collecting Judaica, these items have served as a draw for family and friends visiting his home.
“People in my community that come over for kiddush [refreshments after Shabbat service] know that I have this stuff and they always want to see it,” Probstein said. “Nobody ever looks at my sports memorabilia collection because it’s in my office but my Judaica stuff is in my house. They look at the letters and talk about the historical context. People love it.”
The revelation that so many Jews appear fascinated with their own history and want to engage with scholarly tradition comes at a time when many Jewish libraries have been struggling.
The library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, which has the most comprehensive and significant collection of Jewish books outside of Israel, has seen its footprint downsized amid budget cuts at the Conservative movement seminary. Also under financial pressure, American Jewish University was forced to sell its Bel Air campus in Los Angeles, which housed a library. Hebrew Union College, meanwhile, opted to end its Reform rabbinical training program in Cincinnati and even though the campus library has survived the cuts, financial uncertainty remains.
Genazym’s populist approach might hold lessons for Jewish institutions and university libraries with significant Judaica collections that hope to engage the public around books.
“The lesson is to lay off the snobbery a little bit,” said Finkelman, the former Judaica curator at the National Library of Israel, which is slated to reopen in a new and more accessible space later this year. “The goal of public institutions is to enable preservation but also to enable public access and public education. There are great stories in books and archives.”
Finkleman said he has encountered sneering reactions to the way Genazym promotes books, and they are similar to the response in the United States when the pop star Lizzo played a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison on stage at the Library of Congress.
“There are echoes of the same thing here,” he said. “Get out of the snobby ivory tower and realize you are preserving history for people.”
—
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Netanyahu compares New York with ‘the 1930s’ after Mamdani calls for his arrest
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s leadership with “the 1930s,” escalating a showdown between the two leaders as Netanyahu plans to visit the city in the coming weeks.
The Israeli leader made an evocative reference to the period when the Nazis took over Germany in a Fox News interview on Tuesday, adding that he is “definitely going” to New York for the U.N. General Assembly in September. The planned trip prompted Mamdani, a staunch pro-Palestinian advocate, to explore executing an international arrest warrant against Netanyahu.
Mamdani said last week that his Law Department did not find the city could legally make the arrest, but he challenged the U.S. government to do so, calling Netanyahu “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.” President Donald Trump has rejected the idea of an arrest. The United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court, which has accused Netanyahu of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and its warrants have no legal power in the U.S.
Netanyahu responded to Mamdani in an interview with Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, a close Trump ally, while visiting Washington, D.C. this week. He called the mayor a “hate-spewing elected official who’s pitting one group of New Yorkers against the other.”
“He’s turning them against New York Jews. I mean, what are we, in the 1930s?,” said Netanyahu.
Since calling for Netanyahu’s arrest, Mamdani has said repeatedly that he does not single out Jews or Israel for punishment.
“My interest in executing that warrant is not specific to Benjamin Netanyahu, but to anyone who they put a warrant towards for war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Mamdani said to reporters last week, adding that he also described Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel as a “horrific war crime.”
In a separate press conference on Monday, Mamdani said his characterizations of Netanyahu as a war criminal “were not even frankly personal assessments, they were objective facts.”
Mamdani’s views are increasingly popular in the United States, with a new survey from The Economist/YouGov showing that nearly half of Americans believe the country should arrest Netanyahu. 49% of respondents said the U.S. should enforce the ICC warrant, while 27% said “no” and 23% were unsure.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio also backed Mamdani’s statements. “I think he drew attention to the fact that Netanyahu is literally a war criminal,” de Blasio said in a Fox News interview on Monday. “This guy’s policies led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and that defines a war crime to me and to so many people around the world.”
Major Jewish groups have fiercely criticized Mamdani’s arrest ambitions. The UJA-Federation of New York accused him of “distortions and disinformation.”
“At a time of rising antisemitism, repeatedly singling out and vilifying the world’s only Jewish state for perceived political benefit is repugnant, puts Jews at greater risk — and leaves many Jewish New Yorkers feeling targeted and unwelcome in the city we call home,” the federation said in a statement.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu slipped into the White House through a side door for a meeting with Trump that did not include public face time. Pundits theorized that the low-profile affair reflected how unpopular Netanyahu has grown in the United States amid the Iran and Gaza wars, making it politically risky for Trump to be seen with him, as the president’s approval also sinks to a new low.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netanyahu compares New York with ‘the 1930s’ after Mamdani calls for his arrest appeared first on The Forward.
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London’s Hackney council gives initial nod to ending 58-year twinning with Haifa after emotional debate
(JTA) — LONDON – It was one kippah vs. a sea of keffiyehs, as Hackney Council gave initial approval on Tuesday night to begin the process of ending its nearly six-decade twinning relationship with the northern Israeli city of Haifa.
The motion, brought by the Green Party-led administration, was voted on and approved after councilors argued passionately for almost 30 minutes over whether ending the relationship was a moral imperative in light of the war in Gaza or that it would undermine one of the borough’s longest-standing examples of coexistence and dialogue.
The final tally, which has yet to be made public,follows the Green Party’s sweeping victory in Hackney’s May 7 local elections, when it won control of the council for the first time, capturing 42 of the borough’s 57 seats. Labour, which had controlled Hackney for more than two decades, was reduced to nine seats, while the Conservatives held six.
Hackney is an inner London borough, home to one of Britain’s largest Jewish communities alongside a substantial Muslim population. According to the council’s own report, which cites estimates from the Interlink Foundation, Hackney’s Orthodox Jewish community numbers between 27,405 and 29,460, or between 11.7% and 12.5% of the borough’s population. According to the 2021 census, Hackney’s Jewish population is 6.7% while its Muslim population is 13.3%.
The passage of the vote does not mean that the council will immediately sever ties with Haifa, which it has been twinned with since 1968. Instead, the council voted to begin the formal process, including writing to the mayor of Haifa, conducting an equalities impact assessment, and establishing a cross-party working group before a final decision is brought before the full council.
Introducing the proposal, Green councilor Sam Mathys said the move fulfilled a central manifesto pledge made during the election campaign.
“For decades, we have witnessed human rights abuses committed by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people, which has escalated to a horrifying and unprecedented scale over the past years,” she said, adding, “We want civic partnerships that are about fostering peace, justice, and equality.”
The council report notes that Haifa was originally selected because of its “harmonious multicultural, multi-faith populations and good records in community relations.” Over the past three decades, the relationship has centered on links between Hackney’s Homerton University Hospital and Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center, rather than broader civic exchanges.
Conservative councilor and Orthodox Jew Simche Steinberger argued the proposal ignored both the history and practical benefits of the partnership.
“You’ve not spoken to any of the six Jewish councilors about it,” he said. Citing medical exchanges between the two hospitals, he added, “It’s probably the only twinning which actually does something because I remember a few years ago where the doctors from Haifa Hospital were here in Homerton teaching them what to do.”
He argued that councilors had been elected “for local issues, not for national issues,” and called the proposal “a disgrace,” before urging them to withdraw the motion.
Labour councilor Ben Lucas likewise opposed the proposal despite saying his party was “unequivocal in our abhorrence of the devastation and violence in Gaza caused by the Israeli government” and “we utterly condemn the Hamas terrorist attacks.”
“The Labour group in all good conscience cannot support this paper,” he said.
Lucas described the twinning agreement as having been forged in 1968 in a spirit of working-class solidarity, a partnership that was “multi-faith, multi-ethnic, and built most notably on the noble idea of medical cooperation.”
He added, “Haifa is not perfect, but for those who want peace, it represents a model of coexistence, a fighting chance for peace.” He also noted that the Israeli city was home to “socialists and greens, aghast at the conflict and fighting for lasting solutions.”
“You’re punishing a people for the actions of a government,” he said, calling the proposal “a performative gesture.” He added, “Let’s be bridge builders, not burners.”
Former deputy mayor Anntoinette Bramble, speaking for Labour, also argued that twinning existed to preserve relationships precisely when disagreements arose.
She said the medical exchange partnerships strengthened communities by bringing together professionals and residents of different faiths and backgrounds. “I’m perplexed by this proposal because it doesn’t seem to strengthen those communities,” she said. “What it seems to do is cause division.”
She also asked, “How can a transparent review that is non-partisan, already come with a decision before the review has begun? You need to be honest about what you’re doing here.”
Supporters argued that maintaining the relationship would conflict with Hackney’s stated commitment to human rights.
Green councilor Manal Massalha, who described herself as the granddaughter of Nakba survivors, spoke at length about conditions in Gaza and the West Bank before declaring, “Never again is never again for everyone.”
“Respect for international law and human rights born from the ashes of the Holocaust, together with the ICJ’s findings on Israel’s unlawful occupation requires us to reject dehumanization, military occupation, oppression, impunity, and racism,” she said.
Massalha rejected accusations that the proposal targeted Israelis or Jews. “De-twinning is not about opposing a people, a religion, or a culture. It’s about ensuring that our institutional relationships reflect those values.”
One of the proposal’s most vehement supporters was Green councilor Florence Schechter, who was raised in, but no longer practices Orthodox Judaism.
“It is my Jewish values that inform me. Hackney should no longer be twinned with Haifa,” she said, adding that fellow Green councilor Cathy Troupp, who is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, shared her position.
Drawing on Jewish teachings, she argued, “When Gentiles open their newspapers or log into social media and they see the horrors that are being committed in Palestine, children maimed and murdered, prisoners mocked by soldiers, what will people think of all Jews?”
“It isn’t fair and it isn’t right that the actions of Israel should reflect on all Jewish people,” she added. “If the Jewish people of Britain want to fight rising antisemitism, the first thing they must do is condemn the genocide in Palestine.”
Closing the debate, Mathys stressed that the vote marked “a first step,” saying the cross-party working group would hear from interested parties before bringing recommendations back to the council in January 2027.
Following the decision, Board of Deputies President Phil Rosenberg posted on X, “Tonight, the Hackney Green Party showed its ignorance and bigotry.” He added, “This vote represents the prioritization of spite over sense.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post London’s Hackney council gives initial nod to ending 58-year twinning with Haifa after emotional debate appeared first on The Forward.
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An Illinois farmer thought he knew how his family survived the Nazis. Then he went to the town that saved them.
STADSKANAAL, THE NETHERLANDS — The lights dimmed and through the old church’s stained glass windows, the afternoon sun scattered color across the wooden pews. Sitting among them, Nik Jakobs watched his family’s past come to life on a stage in front of the room.
In a 90-minute play, actors reenacted what happened in this small town in the northern Netherlands during the Holocaust: A Christian farmer who hid more than a dozen Jews in a single room of his farmhouse. A village — nearly 100 people — that knew, and said nothing. A child born in hiding, to a Jewish man and the farmer’s daughter.
And an 11-year-old girl who lived in that room for nearly three years, survived, and became Nik’s grandmother.
Nik, a 41-year-old cattle farmer from Illinois, thought he knew her story. He had grown up with it — hearing from his grandmother about the hiding, the silence, the survival. But sitting at one of four sold-out performances with his parents, his wife and his four daughters, he realized he was watching a version of his family’s past that stretched far beyond what he had been told.
“We only really had her lens,” Nik said of his grandmother, Edith, who at 95 was unable to travel from the U.S. to see her own story staged. “To hear it from other people, it’s like seeing the same story from different vantage points. And suddenly it’s deeper.”
Nearby, his cousin Hannah had a similar reaction: “I didn’t realize how many people were part of this.”
Even the venue was part of the story. The play was staged in the church where the Dutch farmer’s family prayed — a story of hiding, retold in the open, on holy ground.
This wasn’t just his family’s story. Non-Jews were carrying an extinguished Jewish community on their backs — a memorial, a play, a shul — because almost no Jews were left to carry it themselves. Stadskanaal’s Jewish community was erased in the war: deported, murdered, never rebuilt.
What survives of it now survives because non-Jews decided it should — historians pulling records, docents leading tours, a playwright and a cast of actors performing a story none of them lived. That’s what Nik was taking back home: the fact that Jewish presence doesn’t restore itself once it’s gone. Somebody has to keep doing the work, whether or not there are Jews left to do it.
Nik recognized the work, because it is his own. In a two-acre cornfield in Sterling, Illinois, two hours west of Chicago, he is building a synagogue from the remnants of closing congregations — gathering the scattered pieces of American Jewish communities that are themselves disappearing — alongside a museum of tolerance rooted in his family’s past. An ocean apart, a Dutch town and an Illinois farmer are doing the same thing: refusing to let a Jewish story vanish from the landscape.
He came thinking the story belonged to his family. He left knowing it belonged to a village.
A country of contradictions
The Holocaust in the Netherlands is remembered through a single image: a teenage girl keeping a diary in a secret annex in Amsterdam. The story of Anne Frank has become universal — a shorthand for innocence, for persecution, for the human face of genocide.
For decades, hers has been the defining Dutch story of hiding. Others — like the one that brought Nik to Stadskanaal — are less famous. But this story has had a life here for decades.
The story of the Stadskanaal farmhouse has been pieced back together — first by historians racing to preserve fading memories, then through a book, a museum exhibit, a memorial on the site and even a musical.
It had nearly disappeared after the war, lost as the country rebuilt and moved on. But in recent years, it has been revived and retold, a lesser-known counterpart to Anne Frank but with a happy ending, and a love story: one in which the family survives, a child is born, and generations later, a grandson returns. Nik exists because it did not end in tragedy. That effort, as much as the story itself, is what Nik came to see.
But it exists alongside a harder truth. Roughly 75% of Dutch Jews were murdered during the Holocaust — one of the highest death rates in Western Europe. And yet the Netherlands also has one of the highest numbers of people recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations” — more than 6,000 individuals, including the family that saved Nik’s grandmother.
The country’s memory has long lived in that tension: between loss and rescue, between what was done and what was not.
After the Holocaust, the national story leaned heavily toward one side of that equation. “The Dutch are very proud,” said local historian Geert Volders, “that about 25% of Jews survived because of the resistance.” He paused, looking frustrated. “But only 25%.”
What has emerged more recently is something closer to a reckoning — a shift from pride to responsibility. Geert, 37, is part of that shift. He is not Jewish, like so many others who have taken on the work of remembering.
The story they are keeping alive is one of those rescues. It begins with a bicycle.
The cast of the play warming up backstage. 🎭 pic.twitter.com/i5nu2DyzTg
— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) July 28, 2026
A rural refuge
Before the Holocaust, Stadskanaal was a peaceful place. Edith Delevie, Nik’s grandmother, remembered skating in the winter, canoeing in the summer, a small Jewish community, everyone knowing everyone else.
Then the Germans came. And then came the rules. No school. No theater. A yellow star stitched onto coats and shirts. And then, one night, there was a bicycle.
A man named Willem Drenth rode out to their house. Nathan Delevie, Edith’s father, had gone into hiding months earlier. Now it was time for his wife, Hertha, and the children — Edith, 11 years old, and Herb, just 7 — to follow.
Drenth was a socialist, shaped by working-class politics and a distrust of authority. His wife, Hindertje, was a devout Protestant. Nathan, a cattle trader who had done business with Willem, asked for refuge. When Willem relayed the request to his wife, she turned to her husband and asked a simple question: “You said yes, right?”
The Drenth farmhouse sat at the edge of town, alone, with a canal running in front of it and almost no traffic beyond the small bridge that led there. It was poor even by the standards of the time and place: no electricity, no running water, a pump outside, rainwater collected when it fell.
Inside, the house had a kitchen and a few rooms. The biggest was a formal parlor, about 215 square feet, only used on Sundays and holidays. It was here, with the windows covered, where those in hiding would live.
For a while, the Drenths were just hiding Edith’s immediate family. Then others arrived: an aunt and uncle, cousins, friends, strangers who became kin by necessity. Within a year, there were 13 Jews hidden inside. Eight adults. Five children.
The toilet was a wooden plank with a hole cut into it, set over a bucket. The children slept on straw tucked into cabinets, sheets pulled tight to soften the edges of the world.
Edith never saw the rest of the house. For two years and eight months, she lived in that single room. They woke. They kept quiet. They waited. “You were under tension most of the time because you had to repress your anger, your frustrations,” Edith recalled in a 2022 oral testimony she gave of the experience. “You took it in stride.”
No noise, no movement that could be seen from the outside, no mistakes. If someone coughed, a pillow went over their face to muffle it. If danger was lurking, someone would knock three times on the wall — a signal to freeze into stillness.
Bennie Kosses, 21, a distant relative of Edith’s who worked in the family butchering business, joined them in hiding. There was no formal school, but Bennie taught the kids arithmetic and geography, just enough to keep their minds from collapsing inward.
Books arrived, smuggled in by the Dutch resistance and by the younger of the two teenaged Drenth daughters, Fennie, who brought them home from school. Herb read constantly — thousands of books, he said years later in an oral testimony — devouring anything that entered the room.
Later, his son would recall that Herb rarely spoke of this time to his family. “He wanted us to grow up American without the albatross of things,” said Brian Delevie, a professor of visual storytelling at Vanderbilt University.
Inside that one room, the family did more than endure.
While in hiding, Edith learned to crochet, to knit, to embroider. They were skills taught out of necessity, to keep hands busy, minds occupied. One of those embroidered cloths survived. It is stitched with the Hebrew words “L’kavod Shabbat V’Yom Tov,” which means “In honor of Shabbat and the holidays,” and will now be used to wrap the Torah scrolls in the new synagogue Nik is building — a thread pulled taut across continents and generations.
They played cards, board games, anything that could pass the hours and blunt the edge of fear. Luck, chance, risk. These were not abstractions. They were daily realities.
Food was its own quiet operation.
The Drenths had a garden, and vegetables came from the soil behind the house. They butchered a hog for meat. It was, of course, not kosher. But it kept them alive. Extra ration cards, obtained through an underground network, allowed them to buy more than a household of their size should have needed.
Lammie, the eldest Drenth daughter at 17, traveled to different towns to shop so no one store would notice the excess.
She also took a job with the NSB — the Dutch Nazi collaborators — as camouflage. If people got suspicious, the focus would be less likely to fall on a household whose daughter worked for the enemy. It was the kind of moral contortion survival required: to hide Jews, you sometimes had to appear to side with those hunting them.
Still, there were moments that bordered on the surreal.
A Nazi officer’s wife once came to the house for tea, sitting casually at the kitchen table while, just beyond the wall, Edith and her family held their breath. And later, near the end of the war, a defector — a Nazi soldier who had abandoned his post — was taken in and hidden alongside the Jews he might once have been ordered to kill.
An improbable love story
And then there was the other kind of life that took root in the house, the kind no one could have anticipated.
Lammie moved between two worlds: the outside, where she worked, gathered supplies and performed a careful version of normalcy; and the inside, where more than a dozen people depended on her family for their lives.
Somewhere in that narrow space between risk and routine, Bennie and Lammie fell in love.
In a room defined by scarcity, something as expansive as love still took hold. They had no privacy, no future to plan for, no safe place even to imagine what came next.
And yet. They found ways to speak, to connect, to carve out something like intimacy in a space where even breathing too loudly could be dangerous. Lammie became pregnant.
Outside the house, that alone would have been complicated enough: the scandal of an unwed teen carrying a child. Inside the house, it was something else entirely: a risk layered on top of risk, a new life emerging in a place where survival itself was uncertain.
When the time came, Lammie gave birth there, inside the house, while the others remained hidden — a baby entering the world in a room designed, above all else, to keep death out.
That child was named Hennie. After the war, Bennie and Lammie emerged from hiding and wed in front of the house on May 8, 1945. It was Victory in Europe (VE) Day. A photo of both extended families, and baby Hennie, marks the occasion. Lammie eventually converted to Judaism.
When the story was staged this spring as a play in Stadskanaal, that moment — the birth, the love, the impossibility of it all — unfolded again, this time under lights, before an audience.
Hennie, now 81, sat in the audience with her daughter, watching the story of her own beginning play out in front of her — the room, the fear, the love that had brought her into the world.
A scene from the play about a Dutch farmer hiding Jews in his home during the Holocaust. pic.twitter.com/82i73j6B7M
— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) July 29, 2026
When the lights came up, the crowd shifted toward her. People asked for photos. They wanted to meet her, to touch the story they had just watched. She smiled and obliged, a little shy, a little overwhelmed, a reluctant celebrity.
Afterward, she walked to the stage. The young actress playing Lammie stood waiting. Hennie took her hands. Looked at her. “You’re my mother.”
After the show, performed on the 81st anniversary of Stadskanaal’s liberation, descendants of the Drenths introduced themselves to Nik’s family. “We wouldn’t be alive, standing here right now, if it wasn’t for your family,” Nik’s mom, Margo Jakobs, told two of Fennie’s daughters.
Hannah, Nik’s cousin and another of Edith’s grandchildren, moved through the church hall, embracing cast members and descendants of the Drenth family — people she had only just met, but who carried pieces of the same story.
Nik lingered by the stage, tracing the distance between the actors and the ones they had been asked to become. He kept returning to one man in particular, pulling others over to meet him.
“This,” he said, beaming, “is my great-grandfather!”
The actor had been playing Nathan Delevie. Everyone called him Nicco. It is the name Nik carries.
Later, he would struggle to explain what that moment felt like.
“It was almost like his character coming to life,” Nik said. “It was a very spiritual experience. I knew so little about my great-grandfather. And here was someone who had studied him, who had put himself into that role. It gave me a reference point I never had before.”
What stayed with him most was the choice his great-grandfather made. “When you’re named after someone, you don’t always think about it,” Nik said. “But now I look at it differently. I have a 10-year-old daughter. He had an 11-year-old. And I ask myself: Would I have had that courage? Would I have made that decision for my family?”
The gratitude he had for years, he said, had shifted into something deeper. “It was always something I understood,” he said. “But now it’s something I feel.”
Nearly 100 villagers were aware of the Jews hidden in the Drenth home — and no one betrayed them. The secret did not end with the war. Between performances, the story moved back to the place where it began. At the site of the Drenth house — long gone now — a memorial stands, built in 2021, its sculpted panels shaped like the pages of an open book. Each one represents a person who found refuge there, a life preserved not just in memory, but in form.
The cast gathered there, placing stones at the memorial’s base and singing a song from the play. Their voices carried across the field, another layer added to a story that has been told and retold in Stadskanaal.
For Moon Suijs, the actress who portrays Edith’s mom, Nik’s great-grandmother, the lesson feels unmistakable. “These people risked their lives,” she said. “Without hesitation.”
The cast of the play placing rocks at the memorial on the site of the Drenth home, where more than a dozen Jews hid during the Holocaust. pic.twitter.com/tD5XxMCsQp
— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) July 27, 2026
A history inherited
The play about the Drenths expands the frame — showing not just what happened inside the house, but how far beyond its walls the story reached.
About 45 miles north of Stadskanaal, at the lone surviving synagogue in the Groningen province, Geert, the local historian, and many of the docents guiding visitors through that sacred space are not Jewish, including a former vicar. They have, in a sense, inherited a history that is not their own. And yet they speak of it in terms of obligation. “This synagogue and museum exists because non-Jews help,” Geert said.
Geert has seen echoes of the 1930s reemerging, old prejudices resurfacing in new forms. “That’s worrying me,” he said, adding, “It’s also motivating me.”
Motivation, here, is not abstract. It looks like school groups, about 100 a year, walking through this synagogue. It looks like maps, salvaged artifacts, reconstructed ones — and plays.
For Peter Meijer, 68, the playwright and director of the Stadskanaal production, the motivation was both personal and deliberate. He grew up in a family shaped by the war — a grandfather in the Dutch resistance who rarely spoke about it — and spent decades asking the same questions: “Why do people want to hurt each other? Why do people follow a leader that is obviously bad? And most of all: How was it possible that the world allowed this to happen?”
The story of the Drenth farmhouse was one he felt compelled to tell. “They were ready to help anyone who was suffering from evil,” Peter said. “I strongly admire that and I try to live like that, too.”
When he began assembling the cast, he found no shortage of volunteers. Many had never heard the story before. All of them understood why it needed to be told. “It serves as a reminder,” said actor Luca van der Pol, “that we cannot allow something like this to happen ever again.”
The past, in the Netherlands, is not just a story of what happened. It is a story of choices: of people who said yes, and of a country still trying to understand why more did not.
Inside the Groningen synagogue hang two carved wooden signs: the Ten Commandments and a board painted with the words of the Shema prayer.
They came from the synagogue in Stadskanaal where, before the war, there were 180 Jews in the community. After, only 44 remained. When that congregation collapsed after the war, its sacred objects were dispersed. Torah scrolls and ritual items were sent to a Jewish home for the elderly in the town of Bussum. Other pieces, deemed to have little financial value, disappeared into private hands.
Decades later, those two wall hangings resurfaced at a flea market. Someone called Geert. Did he want them? Of course. When Nik saw them, he traced the lettering with his eyes. He has spent the past year rescuing pieces of closing shuls across America to include in the new one he is erecting in an Illinois cornfield. Now, he said, he wants to replicate these two pieces that once adorned the walls of the synagogue where his ancestors prayed.
As the sun set, the work of remembering extended beyond the stage. At the Jewish cemetery in Stadskanaal, Geert led Nik’s family past rows of headstones whose dates abruptly end in 1942 — a record of lives cut short, but not erased. He opened a small bag of black velvet yarmulkes, placed one on his head, then handed the rest to Nik and other men in the group.
He brought a binder he had assembled — obituaries, family trees, fragments of lives pieced back together.
At one point, he pulled out an old newspaper advertisement featuring the family’s butchering logo, preserved in print. Nik’s ancestors had been cattle traders here, the same work he and his brothers do now in Illinois. He plans to revive the historic logo and use it along with the family’s present-day one to honor their legacy.
Standing there, among the graves, Geert watched Nik’s daughters running between the stones, their voices carrying lightly in the evening air.
He thought of a line from the Talmud. “He who saves a life, saves a world.”
A banality of good
For Jan Erik Dubbelman, that world, and the decision to save it, is of central importance.
After decades working at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Dubbelman, 71, who is not Jewish, launched an online mapping project of the hiding places across the Netherlands, linking stories to specific addresses. Click a house, and a story appears: sometimes a sentence, sometimes an entire book.
What he found unsettled him. “Every single house I lived in as a child,” he said, “had histories of hiding or persecution nearby.”
The Holocaust was not distant. It was embedded. And within those stories, a pattern emerged. They often began small. Can you take the baby? Then the mother. Then another relative. What started as a temporary act expanded into something larger.
“The minute people start to care,” Dubbelman said, “they continue to care.”
He said it was a counterpoint to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” describing it as “a banality of good.” Not heroes. Not saints. Just people who said yes, and then kept saying it.
While Nik was in the Netherlands, he brought his daughters to the Anne Frank House. Taylor, 10, is a few years younger than Anne was when she went into hiding.
Inside, they moved through the narrow rooms, past the bookcase that concealed the annex, the walls where Anne and her sister marked their height as they grew.
Nik watched his daughters absorb it all. “Anne’s story ends,” Nik said. “My grandmother’s didn’t.”
A new life
Stadskanaal was liberated on April 12, 1945.
When Edith stepped outside for the first time in nearly three years, the world felt impossibly large. She could not walk properly. Her legs, unused to distance, had to be retrained. Her voice, conditioned to a whisper, never regained its full volume. Her story did.
After the war, the family traveled back to their home in the Dutch countryside. The Germans had used it as an office but left it largely intact. There was a black cat waiting, still there after all that time. Some things, improbably, had endured. Others had not.
Edith’s grandparents, who had refused to go into hiding for fear of endangering the others, were murdered in the concentration camps. This, too, would become part of the inheritance.
Life resumed, or something like it. And then, in 1949, they left.
America was not a dream so much as a direction. A place to rebuild, to start again. Edith arrived at 19, stepping onto Ellis Island and into a country she did not yet understand, watching Christmas lights in New York City with the same curiosity she had once reserved for the canals of Stadskanaal. She learned English by watching television commercials.
Edith and her family settled in Madison, Wisconsin, picked up at the train station by Manfred Swarsensky, the local rabbi and a fellow Holocaust survivor. Her dad got a job in a banana warehouse; her mom, at a bridal shop. Edith found work in an Oscar Mayer sausage factory, and Herb got an after-school job delivering newspapers. They eventually pooled enough money between them to buy their first cow. And a pickup truck. Soon, Edith’s dad restarted his pre-war cattle business.
In Madison, at a synagogue dance, Edith met Norbert Jakobs, another Dutch Holocaust survivor — a man who had been hidden in a home in Nijmegen, about 100 miles south of Stadskanaal. Like Edith, he was rescued by neighbors who also chose to say yes. (Decades later, a great-granddaughter would be named Madison to honor the origin of their love story.)
Edith and Norbert married and moved to Sterling, Illinois, where Norbert started his own cattle business. Two generations later, Nik and his brothers, Alex and Ricky, run it.
In 2015, Edith and Norbert would return to visit the Netherlands and stumble upon something they hadn’t known existed: a model of the Drenth house, recreated in Amsterdam’s Dutch Resistance Museum. Seeing it — the layout, the space, the memory rendered in miniature — hit Edith, she recalled, “like a sledgehammer.”
As a child, she had never seen the full house. Only the one room. Only the limits of survival.
Years later, her grandson Nik would ask Edith a question that had lingered. Why didn’t she blame the Nazis? Why no anger, no bitterness? “What good will it do?” Edith always responds.
The model has since moved to the public library in Stadskanaal, and one afternoon during the trip, the family crowded around it. Margo’s voice shook as she looked at the tiny house. “It’s overwhelming,” she said. “This moment is divine.” Beside her, Hennie — born inside the real house — wiped tears from under her glasses.
From Stadskanaal to Sterling
The family story has been passed down, altered in the telling: some details fading, others taking their place. And now, in a two-acre cornfield in Illinois, it is taking shape again.
The 5,000-square-foot synagogue and museum they are building in Sterling is not just a house of worship. It is an attempt to gather what has been scattered — the physical remnants of communities that no longer exist, and the stories that risk disappearing with them.
Several dying congregations from American small towns have donated sacred items to Nik. An ark from a Rust Belt town in Pennsylvania. Stained glass from a Chicago suburb. Ritual objects carried across state lines, across decades, across lives. Each piece arrives with a history. Each one asks to be remembered. Nik plans to honor each with exhibits that tell their stories.
He is building the synagogue, in other words, the way his family survived: out of what other people were willing to give. When Hindertje Drenth asked her husband the simple question — “You said yes, right?” — it echoed across history. When Nik broke ground on the synagogue this spring, his neighbors — farmers of many faiths — showed up with their equipment to help.
“You go fast by yourself, you go far with others,” Nik said. “I have a community and a family and so many other people who, with their open arms, want to be part of this project.”
For Nik, the trip altered something more fundamental. “You sometimes feel like you’re on an island as a Jew, especially in rural America,” he said. “But being in the Netherlands, seeing how many people care about this story, it made me feel like you’re not running this race alone.”
When he talks about what he’s building, Nik does not describe it as preservation. He describes it as continuation. Preservation implies something fixed — a past held in place. What he is trying to do is something else: carry it forward, leave something behind so the next generation knows where to begin.
The synagogue, when it is finished, will include a museum to tell the stories of the Holocaust and of several now-shuttered shuls across America. Among the exhibits, Nik plans to recreate the room where his grandmother Edith spent nearly three years in hiding.
His childhood friend John Carroll, who is Lutheran, is the contractor on the project. “We want to allow people to transport themselves back to that time and space,” John said. “Not just to tell Edith’s story, but to feel the solemnity of it, and to walk out wanting to stand in the way of tyrants and do the human thing: be kind.”
And, like the synagogue in Groningen, it will be a place where schoolchildren come. Where the past is not just preserved, but taught. Where Holocaust stories that once survived in silence are spoken aloud.
“If you don’t share the story,” Nik’s mother, Margo, said, “it gets watered down until nothing is left.”
Nik’s cousin Hannah felt similarly. “My grandmother told the story,” she said. “My aunt Margo tells it. Nik tells it. And I’m one of the next people in line to do it.” She made it sound less like a burden than an honor. “What do you get to be responsible for? It’s really a blessing.”
In the Netherlands, Nik found himself circling the same idea. That the story he inherited is not just something to remember, but something to propel him forward. The Holocaust, for him, is not distant history. It is a presence, shaping decisions, framing urgency, making the question of what comes next feel less abstract.
For David Jakobs, Edith’s son and Nik’s father, that presence has always been harder to name. “We’re true children of survivors,” he said. “It’s something you feel inside. It’s a duty.”
In a moment when antisemitism is rising, when Jewish communities are once again thinking about safety and survival, the work they are doing takes on a different kind of weight. Not symbolic. Practical. What does it mean to build something that lasts? What does it mean to make it visible?
The synagogue will be filled. With prayer. With people. With noise. With life. Work on the site has begun and, if construction stays on track, the building could open in the fall of 2027. The first service, they hope, will be the bat mitzvah of Nik’s oldest daughter, Taylor.
It will likely be a large gathering. Members of the now-closed Temple B’nai Israel in McKeesport, Pennsylvania — the congregation that gave many of its sacred objects so that Nik’s could be built — are planning to take a bus trip to Illinois for the occasion. Their former rabbi has offered to officiate.
A congregation that no longer has a building will come to celebrate in one that does — the past arriving in the present, and continuing forward.
Nik has already begun thinking about what will happen inside the building once it is open. Among his ideas: bringing the story full circle. The play performed in Stadskanaal — the one that told the story of the Drenth family saving his own — could be staged again, this time in Illinois, inside the new sanctuary.
A Dutch story, performed for an American audience. One more thread carried across time and place.
The project, Nik said, has grown in ways he didn’t anticipate — each discovery leading to another, each story opening onto the next. “You pull a thread,” he said, “and more yarn comes.”
A tree replanted
That thread keeps unspooling. There is one more thing he hopes to plant.
Outside the synagogue, in the Illinois soil, Nik plans to grow a sapling from the chestnut tree Anne Frank saw from the attic window where she hid — the tree she wrote about as it changed with the seasons, marking time in a life suspended.
The original tree, weakened by disease, fell in a storm in 2010. But before it did, cuttings were taken and nurtured into saplings, now planted at schools, museums and memorial sites around the world, living descendants of the original.
Now, one will take root in Sterling. The offer came from Lauren Bairnsfather, the CEO of the Anne Frank Center USA — who, as it happens, grew up attending the same Pennsylvania congregation whose sacred objects are going to fill Nik’s synagogue.
For her, the connection felt unavoidable. “There are too many interwoven threads to ignore,” she said, pointing to the links between her family’s synagogue, Nik’s project and the story of Anne Frank.
Of all the work her organization does, she added, this project feels different. “This is the most hopeful,” she said. “We don’t plant a tree for ourselves. We plant it for the future.”
For Nik, the idea landed immediately. “My brothers and I, when we think about our farm, we think of ourselves as stewards — caretakers of it to pass on to another generation,” he said. “I feel the same way about this temple, and the same way about this tree.”
He views it as a responsibility. “It’s our honor to take care of the tree,” he said — to tend it, as he does his land, his livestock, his family, “and let it grow.”
When it is planted, the tree will stand just beyond the sanctuary — its branches stretching upward, its roots sunk into the same ground where a new synagogue is rising from the remnants of others.
A tree once glimpsed from hiding. A new one planted in the open.
The post An Illinois farmer thought he knew how his family survived the Nazis. Then he went to the town that saved them. appeared first on The Forward.
