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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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Chuck Schumer faces new challenges in the Senate — and now a challenger for majority leader
(JTA) — The clock may be running on Chuck Schumer, the most senior Jewish elected official in U.S. history as Democrats flipped at least seven Senate seats in midterm elections last week. The Democratic takeover of the Senate has led to some carping that he is too old, moderate or not aggressive enough against President Donald Trump to continue as leader. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, an outspoken critic of Israel who has led efforts to investigate the country’s human right practices and pressure its right-wing government, announced on Thursday that he will challenge in December’s election for Senate Majority Leader.
Schumer has led the Senate’s Democratic caucus since 2017, including as majority leader from 2021 until 2025. A pro-Israel stalwart who prides himself as a Shomer Yisrael (“guardian of Israel”), Schumer has found himself increasingly out of step on Israel-related matters with the party’s caucus and its voters. Progressives are also pushing for a bolder agenda that includes policies such as Medicare for All, which Schumer has not taken up.
Van Hollen told reporters on Monday that he is also kicking the tires on a 2028 presidential run. He has drawn blowback from some Jewish leaders in recent years over his criticism of Israel and of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, and Michigan Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed both said Thursday that they back Van Hollen. 59% of Democratic voters said they want “someone else” to lead Senate Democrats versus 22% who prefer Schumer, according to a poll commissioned last month by a progressive PAC.
Political strategist Hank Sheinkopf told JTA that a Van Hollen leadership would “move the Senate more to the left, unquestionably,” and cautioned that Van Hollen would “permit” discussions that would jeopardize defensive military assistance to Israel.
But he noted that it was difficult to imagine Van Hollen winning the leadership position for a number of reasons, not least of which, the Democrats just retook control of the Senate on Schumer’s watch.
“Unless the entire [class of] new Senate members are completely disloyal, it’s hard to imagine them saying no to Chuck Schumer and yes to Van Hollen,” he said. “Schumer just raised an extraordinary amount of money, has probably extracted pledges from them for committee positioning. You know, this is straight-ahead politics, not about ideology and not about Israel.”
Schumer, long an ally of Israel, broke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2024 when he said on the Senate floor that Netanyahu had “lost his way” and called for the country to hold new elections. Schumer also called for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and said the U.S. should use its leverage to push for its goals in the region if Netanyahu remains in power.
But Schumer’s leadership since then has not quieted critics who say that he should have done more to exert pressure on the Israeli government during its military campaign in Gaza and West Bank settlement expansion. He is among the small minority of Senate Democrats who have continued to vote against Bernie Sanders-led resolutions blocking weapons sales to Israel; all but seven out of 47 voted with Sanders earlier this year.
Van Hollen, meanwhile, has consistently voted to block those transfers and has said he would oppose selling offensive weapons to Israel “so long as Israel is violating international law and American law.” Van Hollen also said this year that there is “an important distinction” between selling offensive and defensive weaponry, and that he supports selling components for the Iron Dome missile system given that Israel is in “a tough neighborhood.”
Hadar Susskind, president and CEO of progressive Zionist group New Jewish Narrative, told JTA that Van Hollen would “meet the moment” and “prioritize and steer toward real, meaningful things that can leverage U.S. influence” as majority leader.
“I think he has always been and remains a proponent of a strong U.S.-Israel relationship — but one that is different than what we’ve seen between Trump and Netanyahu,” Susskind said.
“There are people who perhaps would stand up there and simply say, ‘OK, the Israeli government’s been doing bad and we don’t support it.’ Van Hollen is much more thoughtful than that,” Susskind said.
Van Hollen was long seen as a pro-Israel politician in his time as a Maryland congresman, though pro-Israel groups criticized him after he called for a ceasefire to end the 2006 Lebanon war.
In 2019, he opposed anti-BDS legislation, clarifying on the Senate floor that he disagrees with boycotting Israel but asserting that people should not be punished by the government for doing so. Schumer supported that legislation, which facilitated states’ ability to pass laws banning business with supporters of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.
Van Hollen has taken a more vocally critical stance on Israel and the pro-Israel lobby since the Israel-Hamas War started in 2023. Ron Halber, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, took aim at Van Hollen’s outspoken criticism of the Israeli government during a JCRC event last year, which prompted a Van Hollen spokesperson to call Halber an “apologist for the Netanyahu government” who is out of step with his constituents. Halber called the comment “laughable” and other Jewish leaders responded with outrage, while Susskind rushed to Van Hollen’s defense, saying he had “always been there for his Jewish constituents and in support of the people of Israel.”
Speaking at this year’s J Street national convention, held in Washington by the liberal Jewish Middle East advocacy group, Van Hollen panned AIPAC and said that it is neither pro-Israel nor pro-American, drawing pushback from some Jewish leaders.
Neither AIPAC nor J Street returned a request for comment on the possible battle for leadership in the Senate.
J Street’s president Jeremy Ben-Ami has written positively about Van Hollen, calling him “a true friend of Israel” in a 2024 opinion piece for the Washington Jewish Week. The piece came in response to an editorial claiming that Van Hollen is “not our friend” because of his “self-righteous spewing of anti-Israel accusations and positions,” and Ben-Ami countered by pointing to Van Hollen’s record of voting to send “tens of billions of dollars” in aid to Israel.
Van Hollen voted yes on a $14 billion security assistance package to Israel in February 2024, even as he accused the country of committing “war crimes.” (Van Hollen has since accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and said he agrees with organizations and scholars who say that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal standard for genocide.)
This week, Van Hollen led a letter signed by a dozen Senate Democrats, addressed to House and Senate leadership, about the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, urging them to remove provisions on U.S.-Israel military and intelligence cooperation.
Senate Democrats will pick their next majority leader in a December vote. A number of them have said they want new leadership and a fresh voice to steer the caucus and direct its legislative agenda.
Still, Schumer says he is “confident” that he will win the leadership election. Jim Kessler, vice president of the Democratic think tank Third Way and a former Schumer aide, agrees with him.
Kessler told JTA in an email that it’s “hard to imagine anyone mounting a serious challenge to Schumer after he led the most successful midterm for Democrats in 50 years.”
“He can say, well look at me, I was the leader when we had this big win,” said Democratic strategist Steve Jarding, in a JTA interview.
Schumer played an active role in recruiting candidates who won Senate seats in red and purple states, such as Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Josh Turek in Iowa and Scott Colom in Mississippi.
“It’s hard to imagine them saying no to Schumer and yes to Van Hollen,” said Sheinkopf, who pointed out that a number of the new Senate Democrats are moderates.
Progressive critics have said Schumer’s choices were too old and too moderate, and pointed out that his top choices in Michigan (Rep. Haley Stevens) and Maine (Gov. Janet Mills) were unsuccessful. Van Hollen said during an event on Tuesday that Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee “sided with the crypto industry and AIPAC against” a pair of progressives who were elected, including presumably El-Sayed. (The Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC spent $30 million boosting El-Sayed in that election after he won the primary.)
Jarding, a past executive director of the South Dakota Democratic Party, opined that it would be “good for the party” for another senator to “emerge and at least test Schumer.” Should that happen, Jarding said, the leadership race could be “much closer than people think.”
“There’s a lot of people in that caucus that want a change. They may not say it publicly, but I know people in that caucus that want a change,” Jarding said.
Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who is Jewish, has said she would “certainly not vote for” Schumer without seeing a satisfactory 100-day plan from him, according to Politico.
Minnesota Senator-elect Peggy Flanagan said one day after her election that “it’s time for new leadership.” She has not said who she would support instead of Schumer, but told Politico that she has been “very impressed by Senator Van Hollen’s leadership.”
Incoming freshmen Troy Jackson of Maine and Juliana Stratton of Illinois have explicitly said that they would not support Schumer, while Annie Andrews of South Carolina says it is “time for a generational change on both sides of the aisle.” New Hampshire Senator-elect Chris Pappas has been noncommittal, saying that “this is a moment to see a passing of the torch.”
Kansas Senator-elect Adam Hamilton, meanwhile, has said that he won’t support Schumer because he is too far to the left, in the eyes of his constituents. Hamilton did not have a specific successor in mind, but said that there are senators who could “lead more from the center.”
Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who is Jewish, told reporters on Monday that he would not endorse Schumer and that Democrats “need a conversation about leadership going forward because we need new energy and ideas.” But he changed his tune later that day, saying he will in fact support Schumer.
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Sherrod Brown have said they will support Schumer, while most senators have not publicly committed either way.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Call Your Mother bagel shop, JCC were refuge during deadly DC shooting
As a deadly shooting unfolded Thursday in Washington, D.C., people fleeing the scene in the Logan Circle neighborhood took refuge in a bagel shop and a local Jewish Community Center.
The shooting took place at VIDA gym, and outside the gym in the street, just north of the White House. One person was killed, four were injured, and the suspect took his own life, authorities said, after barricading himself in his apartment.
The bagel chain Call Your Mother, located just around the corner from the gym, helped locals stay safe.
“We tried to get as many people who were running out into the building,” general manager Oscar Vazquez told reporters. “After that we locked the doors.”
The shop posted about the incident on its Instagram page. Many users commented thanking Vazquez for ushering people to safety during the crisis.
“We are proud of our shop’s General Manager for leading with care and composure through such a difficult situation, and we thank our entire team for supporting one another,” said the bagel shop in a statement to the Forward.
About 8-10 employees were in the store at the time, Call Your Mother owner Andrew Dana told The Washington Post.
The shop closed for the rest of the day following the incident.
“Obviously, selling bagels is not important,” Dana told the Post.
The Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center, located a few minutes away from the gym, sent an email to its community members Thursday afternoon assuring them it wasn’t a target of the shooting and noted certain programs would be canceled for the rest of the day:
“Throughout today’s events, we have been grateful that the EDCJCC could serve as a safe, welcoming space for our community, including neighbors who were evacuated from their homes and the law enforcement officers responding to the incident.”
The post Call Your Mother bagel shop, JCC were refuge during deadly DC shooting appeared first on The Forward.
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In a family divided over Israel, which side would Tevye choose?
Sixteen members of my family spent two terrifying years concealed in the attic of a peasant’s home in rural Poland during the Holocaust. Their lives depended on the extraordinary courage of the Polish couple and on the hope that the world outside would eventually become a place where they could live freely again. When liberation came, the 13 survivors emerged carrying memories that would shape generations to come.
My mother was among them. Like so many survivors, she rarely spoke of the past, but its presence was unmistakable in our childhood. We inherited our parents’ anxieties, their sense of vulnerability and their understanding of how suddenly the familiar world could become dangerous.
For the generation raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, the establishment of Israel represented an extraordinary transformation in Jewish history. After centuries of persecution, culminating in the systematic murder of six million Jews, the Jewish people possessed a sovereign state capable of providing refuge and defending its citizens. For families such as mine, whose survival had depended on the willingness of a stranger to risk her life on their behalf, the significance of Jewish self-determination carried an emotional weight far beyond the ordinary language of politics.
For many younger American Jews, their understanding of Israel has been shaped by the occupation of the West Bank, the expansion of Jewish settlements there, the suffering of Palestinians and now the Oct. 7 attacks and the devastating consequences of the war in Gaza.
The result is a profound generational divide in which people who share a historical inheritance increasingly struggle to recognize one another’s moral reasoning. For parents whose understanding of Israel emerged from the Holocaust and its aftermath, challenges to the legitimacy of the Jewish state can awaken deeply embedded fears about Jewish vulnerability. For their children, expressions of unconditional loyalty to Israel can seem incompatible with the moral responsibilities they associate with their Jewish upbringing.
As I began thinking about how to explore these divisions dramatically, I found myself returning to Sholem Aleichem and Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye the milkman struggles to reconcile his love for his daughters with their rejection of traditions he has spent his life upholding. His conversations with God, his humor and his anguish capture something timeless about Jewish family life: the painful realization that the next generation may not embrace the values and beliefs that have sustained its parents.
I wondered what Tevye’s dilemma might look like in an American Jewish family today. The questions have changed, but the underlying struggle remains remarkably familiar. Where Tevye wrestled with his daughters’ choices about marriage and religious tradition, today’s Jewish parents may find themselves confronting children whose views about Israel challenge their deepest understanding of Jewish history and survival. Like Tevye, they must ask themselves how far they can bend without betraying what they believe, and whether holding too tightly to those beliefs risks losing the people they love most.
Marc Chagall’s paintings provided another source of inspiration. His floating violinists, suspended above the rooftops of Eastern European villages, evoke a Jewish world that has largely vanished but whose traditions, memories and anxieties continue to shape succeeding generations. The image of a violinist hovering above a modern Manhattan street became a way for me to connect that lost world to the lives of an American Jewish family struggling with questions their ancestors could scarcely have imagined.
Such tensions form the central conflict of my new play, The Blue Violinist Over West End Avenue, which unfolds during a gathering in the Upper West Side apartment of a Jewish family. The evening descends into confrontation when the youngest son arrives with his anti-Zionist girlfriend, whose convictions challenge the father’s understanding of Jewish history and survival.
As the argument deepens, the son insists that Jewish identity carries no automatic obligation of loyalty to a state, while his father, for whom Israel embodies the aspirations and sacrifices of generations, demands an affirmation of the Jewish state’s importance. Their disagreement becomes so painful that the father orders the young couple to leave, turning a family celebration into an occasion of rupture and exposing the fragility of relationships that had seemed secure.
The father’s anguish emerges from a history that has shaped his deepest convictions, while his son’s resistance reflects a different understanding of the responsibilities that accompany Jewish identity. Each approaches the argument with the conviction that something essential is at stake, and each experiences the other’s position as a challenge to values that have become inseparable from his sense of self. Their inability to recognize the emotional and historical foundations of each other’s beliefs transforms a political disagreement into a crisis of familial belonging.
I recognize in this conflict an echo of the questions that first led me to explore my history. In 1988, I made a documentary about my family’s experiences, returning to Poland with my aunt and cousins to meet the couple who had sheltered our relatives. The journey was an attempt to recover a history that had shaped our lives while remaining largely beyond the reach of ordinary family conversation.
My mother’s generation carried experiences whose enormity often exceeded the possibilities of language, while their children absorbed the consequences of those experiences through the atmosphere of family life. The silence surrounding the Holocaust became a form of communication in itself, shaping our understanding of danger, responsibility and the precariousness of Jewish existence.
Today, the challenge facing many Jewish families arises from the intensity of their disagreements and the difficulty of sustaining meaningful conversation across them. The language of political conviction can leave little room for complexities, and can seem to contradict inherited experience, particularly when arguments about Israel become measures of moral character or Jewish authenticity.
I have experienced some of these tensions within my own extended family, particularly in conversations with younger relatives whose understanding of Israel differs sharply from mine. One nephew has been intensely critical of Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza and deeply sympathetic to the Palestinians, while firmly rejecting Hamas. He accepted many of the accusations made against Israel during the war, including some that were subsequently disputed or discredited, such as an early account of a hospital bombing. Our disagreements reflected the different sources of information we trusted, as well as the different assumptions and experiences we brought to the conflict.
My nephew and I eventually recognized how quickly our conversations became heated and decided to try a different approach, exchanging articles, podcasts and other material that might help each of us understand the other’s perspective. Even that effort generated tension, and we gradually abandoned it, leaving Israel as a subject we largely avoid when we are together. I have often wondered whether the play might help us find a way back to those conversations, allowing us to recognize in the characters something of ourselves and perhaps understand why the same events can provoke such different reactions among people who love one another.
The fears of older generations deserve to be understood within the historical circumstances that produced them, just as the ethical concerns of younger Jews deserve serious consideration on their own terms. Acknowledging the suffering of Palestinians and the legitimate aspirations of their people can coexist with an understanding of Jewish historical vulnerability and the importance of Israel to Jewish collective life. Such recognition requires a willingness to engage with the experiences and convictions that give different perspectives their emotional force.
Families possess a particular responsibility in this regard because their bonds reach beyond the political positions of any given moment. Parents transmit values, memories and traditions to their children, but the meaning of that inheritance inevitably changes as children encounter the world through their own experiences. The continuity of a family depends in part on its capacity to accommodate that transformation while preserving the relationships through which its history is passed along.
In my play, the father eventually encounters a form of ancestral wisdom through a dream in which his family’s long-departed relatives return, including the milkman who, according to family lore, inspired Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye. These ancestors urge him to apologize for the harm he has caused and to leave the door open for his son, an appeal that places the preservation of their relationship alongside the convictions that have divided them. Family can and must prevail, even when the questions at stake touch the deepest elements of identity.
When I think of the 16 members of my family who survived together in that attic in Poland, I think of the extraordinary value of the lives that were preserved and of the generations that followed because a courageous woman chose to shelter them. Their story belongs to a history of persecution and survival, but it also attaches to the human capacity for solidarity and the responsibility we bear toward one another.
The generations that followed inherited both the memory of that vulnerability and the opportunity to build lives enriched by freedoms their ancestors could hardly have imagined. Honoring that inheritance requires an understanding of the fears that shaped our parents, together with an openness to the different moral questions that confront our children.
The future of Jewish family life will depend in part on our ability to sustain those conversations with generosity, humility and a recognition of the profound bonds that connect us across generations. Our disagreements over Israel may remain intense, and the questions they raise will continue to demand serious engagement. Yet the preservation of our relationships is itself an expression of the continuity that our ancestors struggled so desperately to secure.
We can honor their memory by keeping our doors open to one another.
The post In a family divided over Israel, which side would Tevye choose? appeared first on The Forward.
