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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.”
—
The post Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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They traveled to the U.S. as Jewish teens. Here’s how these 4 Israelis see America now.
As the U.S. celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, some past participants in the Bronfman Fellowship, which for three decades has brought a cohort of 17-year-old Israelis to the United States for two weeks each summer, looked back on how their visits — and what they learned about the American experiment — shaped their lives. Here are their stories as told to Talya Zax and Sage Lattman, edited and condensed for clarity.
Oz Bin Nun
Oz is a combat veteran of the Egoz Unit, a former Jewish Agency emissary and co-founder of the “Reserve Duty Servants Forum,” leading strategic advocacy for reservists’ rights.
My first time in the U.S. was through Bronfman, and the most honest way to describe it was life changing. I grew up in a very, very Israeli family — all of my grandparents were born in Israel, which is pretty rare, and my parents don’t really speak English, which is not very common in Israel. I didn’t think I’d be in the U.S. in the future even, so Bronfman for me was the first time that I found myself there.
I’m trying to find the U.S. that I met during my Bronfman journey, but I’m not sure it really exists.
Back then I thought the U.S. was a magical place, but it was also the whole Bronfman idea: you’re driving around, you have the best speakers, you speak with the most interesting people, in a very open-minded, curious and friendly way — more than friends, kind of like allies to your journey. All that framework created a pretty magical experience, and when I got back to Israel I was like, ‘Wow, it really changed something inside me.’ But I came back in 2016, which was also the rise of Trump and a lot of things that I didn’t see in 2015, and I guess a lot of Americans didn’t see as well.
When I think about the U.S., the first thing is some specific smell that Americans aren’t really aware of — something wet in the air, and a lot of things are very green. And almost immediately after that is the sense of room. There is enough room. When you’re going there, you don’t feel that someone else is taking your place, or stepping on your toes. In Israel there is a sense that there is no room; everything is so crowded, and not just physically. There is something about just driving until the horizon — it’s a sense of awe and a sense of freedom.
My wife and I lived for two years in Madison, Wisconsin, not in the classic places, not on the coasts, and to some extent we saw the real America — the beautiful things in it and the problematic things in it. Once you’re driving through America, America makes much more sense. You drive for six or eight or 10 hours and around Southern Illinois, St. Louis, Arkansas you see the signs flip, and the best coffee in Mobile, Alabama has a pride flag. I feel like a citizen of two worlds — and it’s rare to be a citizen of two of the biggest Jewish communities in the world, specifically in a time when they’re spreading apart, and it’s harder and harder to find a common ground.
Alex Rif
Alex is an Israeli-Russian social activist and poet, who is currently a candidate on behalf of the ‘Yashar!’ party with Gadi Eisenkot. She is the founder and former CEO of One Million Lobby, the first and only Israeli non-profit that promotes a better social, economic, state-religious and cultural reality for the 1.2 million Israelis from the former Soviet Union states (IFSU).
I went to the U.S. in 2003, more than 20 years ago, when I was in 11th grade — and I want to jump to the end, which is that yesterday I joined a political party, with Gadi Eisenkot, as a candidate. A lot of the things that Bronfman gave me led me to that, specifically the visit to the U.S., because it was the first time I actually met different communities of Jews.
I come from Soviet Jewry — we came after 70 years of our Jewish culture, stories, heritage, religion being erased — and I didn’t feel connected in Israel to the Israeli Orthodox mainstream. Visiting the U.S. was the first time I saw that there are many ways of being Jewish, and they are all beautiful and profound and meaningful and deep. That was an enormous discovery for me. From the other side, I learned the importance of the connection between Israel and outside of Israel.
I made Aliyah when I was 5, from Ukraine, and like a lot of immigrants I tried to be more Israeli than the Israelis. This trip changed my perspective: there’s a big Jewish peoplehood, and Israel is not the only place. It may be the shelter, the biggest center, but it’s not the only place. It shaped my professional path — for the past 10 years I’ve dedicated my life to the Russian-speaking community in Israel, to issues like conversion and the grandchild clause, which we have to guard, because it’s the only law that gives people who intermarried the chance to come back in a time of need, when antisemitism rises, as we see now in New York.
One of our meetings during the fellowship was with candidates for Congress and people who worked in government — the first time I met high-ranked elected people, and I saw how much good they can do and how much power they have in their hands. It felt like it was in the touch of my hand: if I can meet them, I can be them. It was really empowering, even before I met Israeli officials. I have a picture of myself standing in a meeting room with a U.S. flag, in a very warm coat, at the speaking point, proud and excited — it opened something in my mind.
For me the U.S. is a sister country. Part of my heart is being ripped apart and lives in the U.S. now, with friends who’ve left. The U.S. is the best friend we ever had, and probably ever will have, and we have to do everything we can to save this friendship and this alliance.
Lior Soroka
Lior is a freelance journalist and screenwriter based in Tel Aviv. He reports for The Washington Post, covering the conflict in the Middle East. He is currently writing a play for the Haifa Theatre and co-writing a television series.
It was pretty long ago — back in 1999. I was a teenager then, in 11th grade, and it was a very unique experience going to meet the Jewish communities in the States. In Israel the boundaries of Judaism are very clear: there is a clear boundary whether you’re secular, or religious, or ultra-Orthodox. It felt like in the States there are more possibilities to experience your Jewishness. Part of it, I think, is because in Israel, Judaism and the state are intertwined. You feel that in recent years, even the tension between the different denominations is growing, and I felt it less while I visited the States.
As a Jewish person who lives in Israel, I always felt this deep connection between Israel and the diaspora. It always felt like Israel can be a safe place for Jews, and the Jewish community abroad is also there to support Israel from afar. But recently, since the war broke out, I think a lot of things have changed. Many Jews abroad and in Israel are asking about the path that Israel is taking in the last years, and how it influenced this unique relationship between Israel and the diaspora. Israel needs to remember it, so it won’t lose this strong ally we have with the Jews who live in the States — because some of them are saying they don’t want anything to do with Israel now. It’s becoming harder to identify yourself as a Zionist or pro-Israeli. We don’t need to take this relationship as granted, because we can really lose it.
As a journalist, the main thing is to be curious, and my visit taught me a lot about how things work in the States — it was a first glimpse into American politics and the connection between Jews and the United States. We visited D.C. and met some Congress people, we went to the Holocaust Museum, we met different denominations in New York. It’s better when you see things with your own eyes.
The most meaningful part was a meeting at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the LGBTQ+ community in New York. As a teenager in the closet at 17, to see how Judaism and being gay can go together was very meaningful. A couple of years afterward I came back by myself for a huge Yom Kippur service, thousands of LGBTQ Jews gathering together. In Israel you hear people like Bezalel Smotrich saying these things cannot go together — and in the States, you see how it can work, and does work.”
Hadas Semo
Hadas, 20, studied at Ulpana Tzvia Afula. After national service at Amal High School in Ashdod, she began working in the field of education as a youth counselor.
It was about January 2023, and it was just a wonderful experience. I’d never been abroad before. Everything about the program made it more special, because it was all about our identity as Jews. At the meetings with the people who were from America and were Jews — I was mesmerized most of the time. That’s what stood out to me the most.
Before, I didn’t really think about what the U.S. meant to me; I felt like it was something not connected to me in any way. But when I came there, I felt connected, because I saw the Jews there — it’s not only Israel that has this special energy and this special history. That was the first time I felt like this and saw it with my own eyes, and I feel the connection now. I saw New York as this big city from the movies, so I was very excited, and everything just felt magical.
In my experience as an Israeli Ethiopian, a Black Israeli, I had some thoughts and conflicts being in the program. It’s one thing to be Black in the world and another to be Black in Israel itself, because of all the difficulties we have with racism and fitting into society. When I came to Bronfman I was myself, I sometimes felt a little unconnected to the people, because everyone was a specific type of energy, the way they grew up, and a little white. It was always in my head: I’m a Black Ethiopian in this group. I was the only one — you can tell just by looking. I started wondering who I would be in the U.S., whether I’d just be seen as a Black person there — what they see is what they see, nobody knows I’m a Jew.
In the U.S., the manager of the fellowship arranged a meeting for me with a former fellow who’s biracial, and she told me about her experience as a half-Black Jew in America — the conflicts, the things that come with it. I felt like I needed someone who was like me, who understood me. We had so much fun, and something clicked. It helped me accept who I am and where I am, and understand that no matter what and who and how I am, I’m good as I am — it doesn’t matter the color, or where I came from, or what happened to me before.
The post They traveled to the U.S. as Jewish teens. Here’s how these 4 Israelis see America now. appeared first on The Forward.
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Why I yelled at God on Kol Nidre
Last Kol Nidre, I yelled at God.
My husband was in the hospital. He had been since the day after Rosh Hashanah. I sat in services and thought of a friend of mine’s interpretation of the binding of Isaac: that it had been a test that Abraham had failed, because the whole point was that Abraham was supposed to argue back, and that’s why Abraham and God don’t speak after that moment. “You want me to argue back? Fine,” I snapped in my head to the God I otherwise think of as a metaphor. “Give him back to me.” I choked back tears as the congregation prayed to be inscribed in the Book of Life.
I had really been looking forward to those High Holidays. More specifically, I was looking forward to filling out the little prompts that Reboot sends out every year during the Days of Awe encouraging you to reflect on the year that was and the year that is to come. The year before last, I had written a lot about how badly I wanted a baby. Last year, I had one. My husband and I had welcomed our wonderful son into the world several weeks prior. And unlike most things in life, having a baby was as good as I thought it would be. Better, even. Some days I thought I would crack in half from so much happiness. Not all day, every day, of course. In week 10, in a little postpartum discussion group I’d brought him to, I cried at how much he cried. But the overwhelming mood was one of unbelievable happiness and gratitude. I was looking forward to taking stock of, and basking in, my joy over the course of those 10 days.
On Rosh Hashanah, we brought him to a service for babies and small children. I came home and drank tea with honey and cuddled him and watched the little video I had taken of him cooing as I encouraged him to “say” “Shanah Tovah” and he smiled.
In the next room, my husband was in pain. That night, he was sick. The next day, he went to the hospital. We thought he’d be home that afternoon. Instead, he was there for three weeks. The last of those was largely spent in the ICU, which is where we celebrated our five year wedding anniversary and our son turning three months old. The latent kidney issues we’d always known he had had were now acute. He would be on dialysis and would need a kidney transplant.
For the first couple of months, this seemed strangely manageable. He went to dialysis but he also still went to the office for work. We could still go up and back to New York City from our home in Washington, DC to see our families. We spent Thanksgiving and the holidays with them. We still talked about things like buying a bigger place and going on vacation to different countries and having a second baby.
Then, in the winter, his eyes became yellow. After several months and a genetic test we learned that he had a rare genetic mutation. It was responsible for his diabetes and his kidney issues and, we learned in the spring, for his liver issues, too. He would need not a kidney transplant from a live donor but a kidney and liver transplant from a deceased one.
It took several additional hospital stays to get that answer. Each time, he lost more weight and developed health complications even as the doctors aimed to solve the big ones. I wrote my little articles at various bedsides. I sometimes feel powerless in writing about antisemitism and illiberalism, but that was nothing next to the frustration I felt at my failure to move him through medical morass more quickly, or to magically make him well again.
I made compromises in my head. I would give up this or that. I would take on more of the childcare or housework or whatever else by myself because he couldn’t. I pushed my book deadline back. I pushed it back again. Fine. Take it. Just let me keep my family.
In all of this, our son did not remain a crying 10-week-old. He became, despite everything, a very happy baby, and his every little development—crawling and clapping and cruising—made me happy, too. I watched as he played with his toy cars and flipped through his board books, giggling to himself, and as he grabbed his stuffed Grover in his little hands with dimples on the knuckles. Once, while I was putting him down to sleep, he grinned then blew a raspberry at me. I blew one back. We went on like that, quietly in the dark, making funny noises with our lips and tongues. My husband was in one of his many hospital stays that night and I marveled at how this moment of perfect wonder could be happening amidst my despair.
Our son made everything easier to navigate: I had a purpose and also a daily package of the affirmation of life and mischief. The contrast also made everything hurt. Our baby was so good. Why couldn’t everything be?
I made myself ask for, and accept, help. One friend accompanied my husband to medical appointments when I couldn’t be there. Others babysat our son. Another took our dog to the animal hospital one morning so that I could take our baby to his music class. People baked challah and cooked dinners and sent money for groceries and I hated saying yes but was so grateful that there was so much to say yes to. It won’t always be like this, my husband told me. He said that one day one of our friends will need help and we will know how to be there for them. I tried to remember that it would not be us asking for help forever, and that, in any case, asking for and receiving help was also part of what it meant to have built and be part of a community. That this, too, was what it meant to have a life that is part of a larger whole.
Various people mentioned the Book of Job to me. In some ways, I felt strangely jealous of Job, who at least has the opportunity to argue with the power responsible for his misfortune. If God appeared before me to taunt me, I wouldn’t just sit there and take it, I said. Someone told me that was the whole point. No one was showing up to take the blame because part of what was frustrating was that there was no one, really, to blame. Lots of people told me how unfair this all was. Of course it was. But so what? It wasn’t fair and that was that. Lots of things aren’t fair. Our situation was still more fair than many. The country and the world felt like they were falling apart. I wasn’t special. Lots of people yell at God on Kol Nidre and every other day. Or ask or beg God. And the universe and genetics and their husbands’ doctors, too.
The other thing about the Book of Job, I realized, is that Job had been happy. Did that past happiness make it more painful for him to sit there and listen to God talk about how He, and not Job, had made the oceans? Who cares who made the oceans? Job loved his wife and his children and then they were gone. Some people told me that all of this would make me appreciate what I had. But I had appreciated my little family.
What I had failed to appreciate, despite worrying theoretically about health as much as I did during pregnancy, was how little I had had to think about health in a terrifying and tangible way. An Uber driver on one of my seemingly countless trips to the hospital (why hadn’t I learned to drive?) told me that you have 1000 problems until you get sick, and then you just have one. I wanted to call my other 999 problems back. I missed them. I wished I could go back to when I thought there were books besides the Book of Life.
When he was finally listed for his transplant, we were told it would be a matter of weeks, soon, any day now. Days came and days went and he did not get the call. He ended up in the hospital for a week at a time, twice, for relatively minor complications. The doctors told us how sorry they were that he was there. I thought, but did not say, that the more time he spent in the hospital for reasons that weren’t a transplant and recovery, the harder it was to believe that things would ever get better.
On one of those hospital evenings, we asked each other how much more of this we could take. We wondered aloud whether he would ever get his transplant. And then, hours later, he got the call. About a day later, he had his surgery. Eleven hours after the procedure started, the surgeon told me that it was over and that my husband was fine.
For the first week, I waited every day for some surprise piece of bad news to come. The first week turned into a second week, at the end of which he came home. The first few days were very hard — recovery is a long and arduous process — but I watched my husband work his way back into walking again with a cane at one end of the room while, at the other, our son, armed with only a toy lion in each hand and evolutionary instinct, started to take wobbly steps.
I know this is not the end of the story, and I may never stop expecting things to once again become perilous. We are still in the middle and I don’t know how it will end and nobody can tell me. But I also know now that it is no small thing that a story gets to continue.
I have such grief for the year I thought I was going to have and didn’t. I have such jealousy toward people who get to be parents of babies and not have to think about medical crises. And I feel such joy when I think of our son’s playfulness and curiosity and even his stubborn streak and how he gets it from his father.
I don’t really know what I will take with me from this year into the next, but I know that, as we near these High Holidays, I’ve been thinking of the other story of the season: not Abraham and Isaac, but Jonah. I understand the story differently now.
Often people told me that they didn’t know how I was keeping it together. They wouldn’t be able to, they said. But I knew that they would. They would for the same reason I was able to: I had no other choice. I had to for my husband and my son and, yes, for myself. For as long as you’re alive, you have to keep it together, keep pressing forward, keep pushing, pushing, pushing, heaving yourself out of the belly of the giant fish. “You may not like cold water,” my mother told me the night before my husband had his surgery, “But if your boat is sinking, you need to jump and swim.”
We swim. We try to hold onto light in the dark and we wait for joy to come in the morning. Some days, the joy is just that there is another morning. It hurts so much. But to hold onto yourself and each other and jump and swim is also, I think, what it means to be in love, and to care and be cared for. It is, in other words, what it means to be inscribed in the Book of Life.
The post Why I yelled at God on Kol Nidre appeared first on The Forward.
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Adidas apologizes for campaign with Israeli veteran amputee after calls to boycott
(JTA) — Adidas has apologized for featuring an Israeli former soldier and amputee in a campaign advertising its service for people with missing legs, which sparked calls for a boycott.
Shalev Biton, who lost his left leg during the 2021 Israel-Gaza conflict, appeared in a promotional video for the sportswear company’s Single Shoe service. The program was introduced in Europe earlier this year to allow amputees to buy just one shoe.
The campaign, filmed in Hebrew, showed Biton trying on a single sneaker at a store in Israel and running outside. It did not mention his army service or how he lost his leg. Biton was in a military vehicle that was hit by a missile while on a protective patrol of villages on the Israeli side of the Gaza border, according to Israel’s Channel 12.
After the video circulated widely online, pro-Palestinian activists called for a boycott of Adidas, referencing Gaza’s high number of amputees created by Israeli attacks since October 2023.
Adidas apologized for the campaign on Monday in a statement on the Adidas Arabia Instagram account.
“We recognize that an image used in a recent local activation has raised concerns and strong reactions,” the company said. “It was never our intent to cause offence, and we apologize for anyone affected. We acknowledge the concerns that have been raised and are taking the feedback seriously.”
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, said the apology from Adidas was insufficient and demanded that the company “immediately remove the Israeli soldier from all Adidas promotional material and channels.”
“Those ‘affected’ are millions of Palestinians living under Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, its illegal military occupation of Palestinian territory, and its decades long settler-colonial apartheid regime,” PACBI said in a statement.
Biton said on his Instagram account that he received “an insane wave of hate” over recent days. In an appeal for support, he told viewers, “I want to feel that you are here with me.”
Gaza has recorded over 5,000 limb amputations due to traumatic injuries, according to a May report from the World Health Organization. The United Nations reports that it has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world.
Adidas weathered another controversy in 2024 for advertising sneakers based on a model first released during the 1972 Munich Olympics, when 11 Israeli athletes were killed by a Palestinian terrorist group. The company faced backlash from Israel and various Jewish groups for choosing Bella Hadid, a Palestinian-American model and vocal pro-Palestinian advocate, to front the campaign. Adidas subsequently dropped Hadid, prompting criticism from pro-Palestinian voices.
Adidas and Biton could not immediately be reached for further details.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Adidas apologizes for campaign with Israeli veteran amputee after calls to boycott appeared first on The Forward.
