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Michael Shafir, who played a key role in Holocaust memory in his native Romania, dies at 78
BUCHAREST (JTA) — When Michael Shafir moved to Israel from his native Romania as a teenager in the 1960s, it wasn’t because the Jewish teen was burning with Zionist fervor. Instead, it was the first country that agreed to take him.
“I would have left for wherever there was no communism, because I could no longer live with the feeling that you say one thing outside the house and another at home,” Shafir once said in an interview with Romanian media.
More than four decades later, Shafir would return to the country where he was born, as a professor of international relations. From his post at Babes-Bolyai University, in northwestern Romania, Shafir studied and published extensively on how post-communist right-wing nationalists distorted the past and trivialized or denied the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.
Shafir, who died Nov. 9 at 78, was known in his work and in his personal life for his straightforward and often humorous presentation of difficult truths.
“He was among the first to see the early emergence of nationalism in the [Romanian] communist regime’s politics,” his friend and colleague Liviu Rotman, an Israeli historian of Romanian Jewry, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Rotman said Shafir’s 2004 book “Between denial and trivialization. Holocaust denial in post-communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe” represented a “real encyclopedia” of Holocaust denial, as it outlined three forms that Shafir observed in post-communist states — outright, deflective (which “minimizes own-nation participation”) and selective (a combination of the other two). Shafir also took aim at what he called “comparative trivialization” of the Holocaust, or denying its uniqueness by equating it with communist crimes.
“I used to joke with Michael and told him that he produced a Mendeleev Table of Holocaust denial,” Rotman wrote on Facebook after his friend’s death, referring to the formal name for the periodic table that organizes elements according to their characteristics.
Known in Romania for his irreverent sense of humor and his chain smoking, Shafir’s massive figure wearing a trench coat — and occasionally a hat — could often be seen in the threshold of the conferences and events he attended.
“He was a person with an exceptional sense of humor, who always sent his friends jokes, who always found things to laugh about,” Jewish studies scholar Felicia Waldman told JTA.
“He liked to share everything he discovered, everything he thought,” added Waldman, who also recalled Shafir’s “undiplomatic” vehemence. “Sometimes that created problems for him.”
Shafir promoted his ideas in books and scholarly writing and conferences, but also in the Romanian press, where he proved to be a redoubtable polemicist. As a member of the International Commission for the Holocaust in Romania, he worked to make sure that people in his country understood the truth about the Holocaust and Romanian authorities’ collaboration with the Nazi regime. That history was obscured during the communist era and contested after it.
The commission was established by Romanian president Ion Iliescu in 2003 and headed by Romanian-born Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Shafir and his fellow commission members concluded that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered in territories under Romanian control during World War II.
In 2004, their report was officially adopted by the Romanian state, which for the first time acknowledged its participation in the destruction of the European Jews.
“Today’s negationism can no longer have the excuse ‘I’ve not read, I’ve haven’t access to information,’” Shafir said in a podcast by the Wiesel Institute in 2021, in which he warns about the crafty and convoluted nature of most contemporary Holocaust denial.
Shafir was still working with the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania at the time of his death, which the institute and his family members confirmed.
Born in Bucharest in 1944, Shafir managed to move to Israel as a teenager in 1961, during one of the periods when Romania relaxed emigration rules for its Jews. He had run afoul of the Communist regime and sought to escape it.
In Israel, Shafir served in the army before moving to Munich, to work as a researcher on audiences at Radio Free Europe, the U.S.-funded radio station for communist Europe. From then on he balanced journalism with academic work: He then returned to Israel, earning a bachelor’s degree in political science and English literature at Hebrew University while directing foreign news at the Kol Israel radio station, a position he held until 1982. He had just earned a political science PhD at Hebrew University after writing a thesis on the Romanian intelligentsia under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Shafir rejoined Radio Free Europe in the mid 1980s and held positions there until well after the fall of the Iron Curtain. His return to Romania and reclamation of his Romanian citizenship in 2005 inspired the country’s progressive left.
“Shafir meant a lot to me; he’s been a reference for his honesty and intellectual courage, and someone capable, like not many others, to review his positions when new data or historical sources asked for it,” Romanian-American software engineer-turned-historian Andrei Ursu told JTA.
Ursu was recently appointed scientific director of the Institute of the Romanian 1989 Revolution, an organization whose mission is to study that year’s Romanian anticommunist revolution. Two of his great-grandparents and a grandfather were killed during the Holocaust.
Ursu — whose father Gheorghe died after being savagely beaten while in politically motivated detention by Romania’s Communist secret police, the infamous Securitate — has been fighting for decades to combat the whitewashing of the Securitate in the country’s public discourse.
He described Shafir as “a person with an endless humor” and “without the exaggerated vanity common to many Romanian intellectuals.” Despite his frail health, Ursu said, Shafir agreed to review part of Ursu’s latest editorial project on the 1989 Romanian anti-communist revolution, “The Fall of a Dictator.”
Like other specialists who collaborated with Shafir, Ursu praised his work ethics and the precision of his sourcing and investigative work.
His media comments and public appearances were frequently peppered with jokes and anecdotes. In 2019, while speaking in an interview about the tens of thousands of Jews whom Ceausescu let emigrate in exchange for cash payments from Israel, Shafir told an old Romanian joke that starts with the Romanian dictator visiting a cooperative producing corn.
“How much do you get for a ton of maize?” Ceausescu asked the apparatchik in charge of the cooperative. “Just that? I get more if I sell 10 Jews.” To which the apparatchik retorts: “Then it’d be good if we start sowing Jews.”
In the interview, Shafir also recalled that the Jewish community headquarters in Bucharest used to display a sign warning gentiles desperate to get a visa to Israel and escape communism that “no conversions are accepted.”
“In the end, a conversion is much less dangerous than crossing the Danube swimming,” Shafir observed.
Although Shafir left Israel, he remained close to his family there and invested in the country’s politics. An activist with Peace Now who defined himself as a “critical Zionist,” Shafir rejected characterizations of Israel as an apartheid state but saw the Israeli continued military presence in the Palestinian territories as incompatible with democracy in the long term.
“He was very much worried about our future here in a country that is drifting to the right,” his daughter, Maurit Beeri, wrote on Facebook after her father’s death. She said he had recently spent time in Israel with his family, including his grandchildren.
Shafir’s body lay in state Nov. 13 at one of his university’s buildings in Cluj, Romania, where he lived with his wife, Aneta Feldman-Shafir.
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Austria once denied its Nazi past. Now it sends young people abroad to confront it.
(JTA) — For decades after 1945, Austrians often emphasized their own victimhood under Nazi Germany.
Only in the 1980s and ‘90s did they formally and informally acknowledge the role of Austrians as perpetrators and supporters of Nazi crimes.
In 1998, at the peak of this reckoning, the Austrian Service Abroad program was established to provide young Austrians the chance to work with nonprofit organizations that preserve the memory of the Holocaust and its victims.
Young Austrians just out of high school can choose the program as an alternative to military service. They work in non-profits around the world for 10 months, 34 hours each week at no cost to the receiving organization.
“It has been a big boon to our work and allows us to greatly expand our Holocaust educational offerings,” said Olivia Mattis, the president and CEO of the Sousa Mendes Foundation, a Long Island-based nonprofit that perpetuates the memory of Holocaust rescuer Aristides de Sousa Mendes. The Portuguese diplomat issued visas to thousands of refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied France.
“There are things we can now do having this extra hand that we were not able to do before,” said Mattis, whose father was rescued by Sousa Mendes.
This year the foundation, which has been part of the program 2022, has welcomed Robin Bigga-Piskernig, 19, as its fifth Austrian participant.
Bigga-Piskernig said he views the program as a way for Austria to “make amends” for its actions during World War II. He’s available for whatever the foundation needs, which includes the production of various educational materials.
“We just now finished new translations for a graphic novel that’s going to be published in an English version as well as French and German,” said Bigga-Piskernig. “Right now there’s a project that involves old passports from the 1940s and an upcoming program about Freud and how he was saved during the Holocaust.”
Jean Lou Cloos, managing director of Austrian Service Abroad, said in an email interview that there is a direct connection between the program and the country’s belated efforts to come to terms with its past.
The program “grew out of Austria’s long and difficult process of confronting National Socialism and the Holocaust,” Cloos said. “For decades after 1945, Austria often emphasized its own victimhood under Nazi Germany. Later, public and political debate became clearer about the fact that Austrians had also been perpetrators, supporters and beneficiaries of Nazi crimes.”
Some 1,323 Austrians 17 and older have taken part in the program since its founding, 85% of them men. Austrians in the program are now in 66 countries, including Germany and Italy.
“Our volunteers work in Holocaust memorials, Jewish museums, archives, research institutions, survivor-related organizations and educational institutions,” he said. “Volunteers serve where memory is preserved, researched and passed on, whether that is Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, a Jewish museum in Europe, or a Holocaust education center in the United States.”
The participants bring a perspective to Holocaust education that is useful in reaching young people like them. As a result of the work of Bigga-Piskernig and his predecessors, Mattis said her organization since 2024 has had an active Instagram account that enables it to post its “hero of the week,” a rescuer during the Holocaust.
Recently it highlighted Michael Ber Weissmandl, an Orthodox rabbi from present-day Solovakia, who helped Jews escape deportation by bribing Nazis and their local collaborators. “He wrote desperate letters through Switzerland to Allied powers asking that they bomb the gas chambers and the train tracks — and of course that never happened,” said Mattis.
Ber Weissmandl is also featured in a set of 52 poker-sized playing cards, each containing a photo of a Holocaust rescue, created and printed by the Sousa Mendes Foundation. The cards would not have been possible without the effort of the Austrian service workers.
“They researched the background of each of the rescuers,” she said.
The Austrian interns were also “absolutely integral” to the foundation in creating graphic novels that tell the story of Sousa Mendes and the families he saved. “We want to get them into bar mitzvah training programs,” said Mattis.
In addition, the foundation helps to produce Sunday film-and-discussion programs on stories of rescue and resistance. It also developed a children’s picture book about Sousa Mendes and his work, and another about Anne Frank and the Anne Frank Sapling Project.
“When she was in hiding with her family from the Nazis in a secret annex in Amsterdam,” Mattis said, “there was only one piece of nature outside that she could see. It was a tree and watching it was how she could mark the change of seasons. It lived to age 170, dying in 2010. At that point, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam took saplings from that tree and sent them to sites of remembrance so the Anne Frank story could travel all over the world.”
One of these trees is to be planted at the Sousa Mendes Museum in Portugal and dedicated in July. The foundations invited 20 teachers to the dedication.
“The reason we were so anxious to get this tree is because Anne Frank had a cousin, Jean-Michel Frank, the first cousin of Anne’s father, Otto Frank, and he got his visa from our hero, Sousa Mendes. So we are combining both Anne Frank and Sousa Mendes through this tree.”
Asked about his experience in Austrian Service Abroad, Bigga-Piskernig said his work and the education he has received at the Sousa Mendes Foundation “has helped me better understand the Holocaust and the role of education in helping to reduce antisemitism.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Jewish day school enrollment is rising across denominations
(JTA) — After decades of declining enrollment in non-Orthodox Jewish day schools, a new report from Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools found enrollment is now growing across denominations.
Within Prizmah’s network of 305 Jewish day schools, which includes 122 nondenominational schools and 153 Orthodox schools, enrollment increased from 94,008 students in the 2021-2022 school year to approximately 101,041 students in 2025-2026, marking an increase of 7,000 students, or 7.5%. In the 2025-2026 school year, overall enrollment grew by more than 1,000 students.
The report found that non-Orthodox school enrollment has increased by 3% from 2021 to 2024, while Orthodox schools have seen a 7% increase. Reform day school enrollment has also risen by 5%, reversing years of declining trends. The report marked the first time that Prizmah had reported growth across decades charting enrollment across the denominational spectrum of Jewish day schools.
Paul Bernstein, the CEO of Prizmah, attributed the growth to several factors, including rises in the Jewish population of some communities, the declining quality of education in certain public school systems and new philanthropic investments in Jewish day schools.
While Bernstein said that there had been an influx in enrollment during the COVID-19 pandemic, spurred in part by parents seeking in-person learning, he said the continued enrollment growth in the years since had reflected a broader shift.
“We’ve had growth in enrolment every single year in the last five years, and that’s because the understanding of the quality of day schools and the value of having an education in a Jewish day school is really much clearer to families,” Bernstein said.
Bernstein noted that until now, enrollment had been declining consistently in the non-Orthodox systems. ”There were people out there who questioned whether day schools, and in particular non-Orthodox day schools, might have a future,” he said.
Indeed, the now-shuttered Avi Chai Foundation reported in its 2018-2019 census of Jewish day school enrollment in the United States that enrollment in non-Orthodox Jewish day schools had fallen by over 16% over a 20-year period.
Part of the challenge with attending day schools has been one of cost, with affordability becoming the defining challenge for many. But some communities have seen heavy investments from local philanthropies as a result, including $90 million from the Mandel Foundation in Cleveland, the Generations Trust in Toronto and tuition subsidy programs in Chicago and Seattle.
Rabbi Mitchel Malkus, the head of school at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland, pointed to cost as keeping away even more prospective students. The average Jewish day school tuition for the last school year was over $23,000, according to Prizmah.
“One reason that we hear a lot that people don’t choose our school is just the cost, that the costs are very, very significant,” Malkus said. “A lot of people who would like to enroll their kids can’t come,”
The Prizmah report found that in Florida, which has statewide private school vouchers, Jewish day school enrollment had increased by 1,370 students, or 15%, from 2021 to 2024.
Bernstein also said some families’ experiences of antisemitism post-Oct. 7 had contributed to a surge in engagement, a trend that has been widely reported by American Jewish philanthropies.
“There is an element of the negative, the experience of antisemitism,” Bernstein acknowledged. “But actually, what the research on the surge really shows, is that actually there’s a real positive involved in this, which is people wanting to be more connected to the Jewish community,”
Rabbi Leonard Matanky, the dean of Ida Crown Jewish Academy, a Modern Orthodox High School in Skokie, Illinois, said that enrollment at his school had risen from 214 in 2021 to 254 last school year, or by just under 20%.
Matanky attributed the consistent growth in recent years to factors including “the quality of education, the desire for connection by parents, and the understanding of the ever-growing importance of being in a Jewish school.”
For some parents, Matanky said, concerns about the broader social climate in public schools had also made Jewish education more appealing for parents.
Last summer, Chicago saw the launch of a new Jewish high school within city limits, a project that some parents said reflected growing demand for Jewish education amid allegations of antisemitism in the city’s private and public schools.
“When you’re living in a society that unfortunately doesn’t always share values, with what used to be assumed values, the public schools are not as safe of an environment as once upon a time,” Matansky said. “It isn’t necessarily physical safety, it can be communal safety, it can be a sense of acceptance.”
The Chicago Jewish Day School, a multi-denominational school that serves junior kindergarten through eighth grade, also reported rising enrollment, from 220 students in the 2024-2024 school year to 254 for the coming year.
Cortney Stark Cope, the director of admissions at the school, said the “unique” amount of growth stemmed from a collaboration between local Jewish day schools in marketing to parents and a new “Tuition Accessibility Program” launched three years ago by the Crown Family Philanthropies that had helped offset tuition costs.
She also said rising antisemitism in non-Jewish schools had spurred some parents to seek alternatives, particularly in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023.
Gila Ogle, a fellow at Prizmah’s Day School Leadership Training Institute and the head of the Silver Academy, a Jewish day school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, said that enrollment had nearly doubled over the past year, from 34 students in the 2024-2025 school year to 64 this year.
“The Jewish engagement we have is a definite factor for families who are looking for a safer environment,” Ogle said. “It’s not just a safe Jewish environment, but a safe environment overall for their kids.”
Looking ahead, Bernstein said he expects to see more of the same if philanthropic investment in day schools continues.
“We’re extremely optimistic that the growth will not only be sustained but actually could accelerate,” Bernstein said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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For Venezuela’s historic Jewish community, the earthquake is a crisis they can’t afford
Less than two hours after two powerful earthquakes left hundreds dead and thousands missing in northern Venezuela, including its capital city of Caracas, families whose homes had been rendered unlivable began to make their way to Hebraica, the Jewish community center in Caracas, where they spent the night sleeping on beach chairs and in cars parked on the center’s football field.
That night, more than 400 people sought refuge.
“Based on all the years of hardships we’ve had — massive power outages and other problems — the community already knows where they can go if something happens,” said Roberto Mishkin, president of the Union Israelita de Caracas, the country’s largest Ashkenazi Jewish congregation, adding that aftershocks are still rattling the area.
“A lot of people don’t want to return because they live on high floors. They’re scared.”
The sprawling campus of Hebraica— built decades ago when Venezuela’s Jewish population numbered around 30,000 — has become an emergency shelter, complete with mattresses, medical care, communal meals and preparations for Shabbat.
According to community leaders, two members of Venezuela’s Jewish community have been confirmed dead, and several others remain missing. Hundreds more are displaced — their houses destroyed or severely damaged.
“People are worried, very worried, very anguished, and a lot of people don’t know if they can go back to their homes,” said Elias Farache, the former president of the Sephardic community in Venezuela and a former leader of the Venezuelan Zionist Federation.
“It’s the club, so people feel very comfortable in this place,” he added, explaining that the tight-knit community has found comfort in gathering together.
Mishkin says Venezuela’s Jews have been in dire straits for years. Before the earthquake, more than 300 Jewish families received food and medicine through local Jewish organizations such as Keren Ezra, which receives support from international partners, including the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, commonly known as the Joint.
Under normal circumstances, Keren Ezra distributes staples such as raw chicken, rice and other groceries. Now, many families no longer have kitchens, so Keren Ezra has been distributing tuna, rice, crackers, cookies, coffee and other emergency supplies to people seeking shelter at Hebraica. Hundreds of displaced people are relying on the organization’s reserves.
“We’re trying to manage the problems as they come, because to be hysterical doesn’t help,” said Syma Farache, a Caracas-based community member and the director of Keren Ezra. “We do have products in stock for emergencies. We buy them four months in advance, but now we realize it’s not enough because we didn’t expect this.”
Several Israeli and international Jewish organizations are working to send aid and rescue teams to Venezuela. Because Israel does not maintain an embassy or consulate in the country (former President Hugo Chávez severed diplomatic ties with Israel in 2009), Jewish community leaders are also coordinating with Venezuelan authorities to facilitate the arrival of these personnel. The first of these organizations began arriving on Friday, with the Jewish humanitarian organization CADENA reaching Venezuela, and an Israeli rescue team expected to arrive on Sunday. Others, including IsraAID and the Joint, remain on standby until Caracas’ airport reopens.
Farache said while there is no shortage of supplies yet, there could be if the airport does not open soon.
For now, community leaders are trying desperately to maintain a sense of normalcy. On Friday, they purchased mattresses so evacuees would no longer have to sleep in their cars or on beach chairs. A rabbi plans to spend Shabbat at the community center, while volunteers prepare cholent, the traditional Shabbat stew, to feed the displaced. Early next week, organizers hope to open a communal kitchen for those who cannot afford to purchase meals.
But addressing the immediate aftermath is only the beginning. Hundreds of displaced people will need housing
“Now everybody here is safe,” Mishkin said. “We’re feeding a few families, and we’re trying to make do, but this is a very poor community.”
He recalled that Venezuela’s Jewish community was once among Latin America’s most prosperous. The community has declined sharply over the past two decades, from a peak of 30,000, as part of a broader exodus that saw 7 million people leave the country due to political, economic and social challenges, including rising antisemitism.
The economy has seen a slight upturn since U.S. forces removed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January, but day-to-day life for most residents remains a struggle. Community institutions have continued to serve members and adapt to the new reality, all while struggling to raise money for social services.
“We used to be a donor community. We sent money all over the world,” Mishkin said. “After 25 years of a complicated country, we have an elderly and not economically prosperous community. Most of the people whose houses are severely damaged are not going to be able to afford to fix them.”
Without property insurance, many families will have few options. Many also lost their businesses.
“They cannot stay on a mattress forever,” Mishkin said. “They cannot afford, on their own, the repairs or a new place to live. That’s our main concern—how to help these families have a decent place to live.”
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