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Rabbi Mayer Moskowitz z”l, on Hasidic life in pre-war Czernowitz
[The following is an English version of the original Yiddish article, which you can read here.]
Rabbi Mayer Moskowitz, a beloved longtime educator at the Ramaz School in New York and the Hebrew-immersive Camp Massad, and author of the book A Memoir of Sanctity, has passed away.
In 2010, I interviewed Rabbi Moskowitz to learn what the Hasidic community was like in the city where he was born and raised — Czernowitz (Chernivtsi), then part of Romania, and today Ukraine.
Most contemporary scholars of East European Jewish history focus on prewar Czernowitz as a hub of intellectual and cultural Jewish life; as the location of the first Yiddish conference in 1908; as the milieu where the poet Itsik Manger and fabulist Eliezer Shteynbarg produced their greatest work.
But as the oldest child of the Shotzer Rebbe — Avrohom Chaim Moskowitz, Mayer Moskowitz had a very different perspective of the city, describing it as a center of five Hasidic dynasties and a vibrant Orthodox Jewish community.
I met Rabbi Moskowitz through my son, Gedaliah Ejdelman, who was a student in his class on halacha (Jewish law) at Ramaz Upper School. The following anecdote gives you an idea of the kind of person Rabbi Moskowitz was:
On the day before the final exam, one student asked if he could write his answers in English rather than Hebrew. Half-jokingly, the rabbi told the students that they could respond in any language they wished.
Gedaliah raised his hand and asked if he could write in Yiddish. “Sure,” Rabbi Moskowitz said. So Gedaliah did, citing Rashi and other commentators in mame-loshen. Moskowitz was so delighted by the Yiddish responses that he shared them with his colleagues.
When I met with Rabbi Moskowitz in his Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan, I asked him what life was like in Czernowitz. He told me he was born in 1927, a son — in fact, the only son — of the Shotzer Rebbe, Avrohom Chaim Moskowitz. He explained that Czernowitz had no less than five Hasidic dynasties. Besides his father, there was the Boyaner Rebbe; the Nadvorner Rebbe; the Zalischiker Rebbe and the Kitover Rebbe.
“All the Rebbes were related because the marriages of their children were arranged solely with other rabbinical families in Czernowitz,” he said.
Every Rebbe had his own court of Hasidim but there were marked differences between the Rebbe and his worshippers. The former wore beards and peyes (Yiddish for sidelocks) and donned a shtreimel for the Sabbath and holidays, while their worshippers, seeing themselves as “modern Jews,” were clean-shaven and came to services wearing a tsilinder (top hat) and tailcoat.
“I myself had little peyes,” Rabbi Moskowitz said.
His family lived in the same building as his father’s shul. His mother, Alte Sheyndl, was a daughter of the Pidayetser Rebbe, so she wore a sheitel. But, like the other rebishe kinder (Rebbe’s children), she was apparently influenced by the cosmopolitan character of the city. In contrast to her husband who spoke Yiddish with their children, the Rebbetzin spoke German. She went to the theater, read secular Yiddish poetry and shook men’s hands. On Mother’s Day, little Mayer would bring her a bouquet of flowers and on New Year’s Eve the Rebbetzin and the other daughters of rabbinical families threw a party.
“On New Year’s Eve they came to our apartment on the second floor, elegantly dressed, ate and spent many hours together,” Rabbi Moskowitz said. “Although they didn’t drink any alcohol, the daughters-in-law of the Bayoner Rebbe smoked thin cigarettes.”
Rabbi Moskowitz recalled his first day in cheder at the age of three: “My parents never walked together in public but on that day they dressed me in completely new shorts, shoes and a talis-kotn.” The latter is the traditional four-cornered fringed garment that Orthodox men and boys wear under their shirt.
His parents walked him, hand-in-hand, to the cheder. When they arrived, his father wrapped him in a tallis and carried him inside. On the table, little Mayer saw the diminutive of his name, ‘Mayerl,’ written with large golden letters.
The teacher asked him to repeat each Hebrew letter and its corresponding sound. Every time little Mayer correctly repeated it — “Komets alef ‘o’ … komets beyz ‘bo’ — a honey cookie dropped onto the table in front of him.
“I really thought it was falling from the heavens,” Rabbi Moskowitz said. “As it says in Proverbs: ‘Pleasant words are as a honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.’”
When he was five, Mayer began learning khumesh, the Bible. “It was shabbos afternoon. My relatives, family friends and all five Rebbes came. They lifted me onto the table. I was wearing a brown velvet suit. Each grandfather gave me a golden watch with a little chain and attached it to my suit. Then they asked me: ‘What are you learning in khumesh now?’”
After the quiz was over, the guests began dancing and singing, eating cake and fruit. All the Rebbes wore shtreimels as they sat at tables surrounded by their Hasidim and handed out shirayim — remnants of the blessed food that a Rebbe would give his followers, who believed they would receive a spiritual blessing by eating it. Mayer sat between his grandfathers.
Every morning Mayer went to cheder and three afternoons a week he attended a Zionist Hebrew-language school. In 1936, at the age of ten, he was sent to the city of Vizhnitz (today — Vyzhnytsia, Ukraine) to learn in the yeshiva of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe. He came home only four times a year: on the shabbos of Hanukkah, Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot.
Rabbi Moskowitz remembers Sukkot in Czernowitz: “All year, men and women ate together but not on Sukkot. My mother blessed the holiday candles, came into the sukkah for kiddush and hamotzi but then went back into the house where she ate in the company of the other women in the family.”
The sukkah was large. His father’s Hasidim would gather around their Rebbe’s tish (table) on the second night of Sukkot for the all-night celebration called simkhas-beis-hashoeivah. About 150 men would squeeze into the sukkah. But contrary to tradition, no one slept in it. “It was cold and a bit dangerous,” Rabbi Moskowitz said.
The Shotzer Rebbe’s house also served as an inn for rebbes from surrounding towns, when they needed to come to Chernovitz to see a doctor. Simple Jews, who leased land from non-Jewish noblemen would also come to the inn to see their rebbes. “They were common people, wore workboots and would bring fruit from their fields as a gift for the Rebbe,” he explained.
Many times, impoverished Jews would come to his father’s door asking for money. “One of them, called Fishele, used to say ‘I love you’ to my mother. She was indeed a beautiful woman. So my family would invite him in and feed him the same food we were eating.”
In describing these simple everyday events of his childhood in Czernowitz, Rabbi Moskowitz did a true mitzvah: He enabled us to see the city not only as a magnet for Yiddish writers and cultural activists, but also as a large, thriving Hasidic community.
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‘The first time my band ever encountered such hostility’
[On Aug. 2, a performance by the klezmer band Dobranotch at a large folk festival in Galicia, Spain, was cut short when pro-Palestinian members of the audience began heckling the musicians and then throwing stones and other objects at them, targeting the band over recent concert appearances they made in Israel.
Afterwards, the festival organizers released a statement, explaining that they cancelled the concert out of concern for the musicians’ safety. The organizers also condemned the fact that “an event historically rooted in peaceful cultural exchange, community gathering, and musical celebration was disrupted by violence.”]
Dobranotch has a special connection with Galicia. In the early years of the band, we visited and performed there many times and developed a deep affection for its traditional music and culture. After many years away, we were glad to be invited back to perform at Festival de Pardiñas, a large local folk festival.
A few months before the event, the organizers informed us that the festival supported Palestine and that some members of the audience might display Palestinian flags. They asked how we would feel about this, given that our music is associated with Jewish culture. We replied that we had no objection, but did not want to be pressured into making political statements from the stage. This appeared to be fully understood.
We received a warm welcome, and the festival was well organized, with several thousand people in attendance. When we stepped onto the stage, a couple of Palestinian flags were visible in the audience. During our performance, more flags were attached to the barrier in front of the stage, and an enormous Palestinian flag was unfolded. A small but very vocal group at the front of the stage began chanting and held up handwritten signs demanding that we “say something about Palestine.”
I do not usually make political statements from the stage on behalf of the band. However, as the pressure continued to grow, remaining silent no longer felt possible. I therefore decided to share my personal views. I said that we are living through a period of growing polarization and radicalization in many parts of the world, visible in very different contexts, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and political divisions in the United States. My message was simple: We need to be kinder to one another.
But the pressure only intensified. They wanted me to speak more, and they tried to hand me a Palestinian flag to wave from the stage. I tried to explain that, in my view, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complicated — and the moment I said the word “complicated,” the crowd erupted.
I wanted to continue my statement, but I was not given the chance to do so.
A group of people shouted, insulted us and made hostile gestures. A person carrying a flag managed to get onto the stage. Objects began flying towards the stage, including stones. One of my fellow musicians was hit by a stone. At that moment, we realized that the situation had crossed a line and decided to stop the concert.
escândalo em Pardinhas, algum sionista no palco pic.twitter.com/yh6JNZDZEY
— maNu 🌰 (@nuMaGz) August 2, 2026
As we were leaving the stage, someone from the festival team, obviously shocked by the situation, suggested that I simply say “Free Palestine” so the performance could continue.
I support the right of all people, including both Israelis and Palestinians, to live in freedom, dignity and safety. But repeating political slogans under pressure would have been both meaningless and unacceptable.
The organizers subsequently announced that the concert was being stopped for safety reasons and reiterated the festival’s support for Palestine.
After the concert, we discovered evidence suggesting that the protest had been planned and coordinated in advance. We found social-media posts published before the festival accusing us of having performed in “occupied Palestine,” apparently referring to a previous concert in Tel Aviv, and calling for a boycott of our performance.
This was the first time Dobranotch had encountered such hostility, whether as a group performing Eastern European Jewish traditional music or as anti-war emigrants from Russia. It is deeply regrettable and disturbing that such a radicalized and hostile atmosphere could have developed at a traditional culture festival.
The incident shows how difficult public discussion has become when artists are expected to repeat prescribed political formulas rather than being allowed to express a thoughtful position — or simply to choose not to make political statements from the stage at all.
We look with deep sadness at the amount of violence and radicalization in the world, and we wish for peace, safety and freedom for everyone. We believe that our music can do more to bring people together than political arguments ever could. This is where we want to focus our energy.
The post ‘The first time my band ever encountered such hostility’ appeared first on The Forward.
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After settling antisemitism claims, Columbia now faces lawsuit from Palestinian students
A group of current and former Palestinian students and faculty at Columbia University filed a lawsuit this week, alleging that the university discriminated against them because of their Palestinian identity and treated them less favorably than other students engaged in political advocacy.
Filed in New York State Supreme Court, the complaint accuses the university of encouraging the mistreatment of Palestinian students by holding “unfair and biased disciplinary hearings” and creating a “hostile and unsafe environment” following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel that sparked university-wide protests and tensions on campus. The lawsuit alleges that the university “actively participated in and amplified the racially, ethnically, and politically motivated targeting of Palestinian students, staff, and faculty.”
The case is the latest in a string of legal battles born out of Columbia’s handling of campus protests. In July 2025, the Ivy League university on New York’s Upper West Side agreed to pay $21 million to settle charges by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that alleged a hostile work environment for Jewish employees as a part of its federal resolution agreement with the Trump Administration.
In February 2026, the university also settled with a group of Jewish plaintiffs that had alleged the university failed to protect them from antisemitism. As a part of that settlement, Columbia agreed to implement additional programming to address antisemitism.
The new lawsuit alleges that Columbia discriminated against Palestinian students by, among other things, retaining private investigators to surveil students involved in a March 2024 “Resistance 101” teach-in. The event featured Khaled Barakat, whom the U.S. State Department has identified as a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization. Following the event, the lawsuit states that six students were suspended from the university and evicted from Columbia housing.
The suit also accuses the university of failing to treat physical assaults of Palestinian students seriously, citing alleged incidents where keffiyehs were forcibly removed from Palestinian students, and an incident where a student sprayed a foul-smelling substance at pro-Palestinian demonstrators in January 2024.
That incident was initially investigated by the New York Police Department as a possible hate crime, with some claiming that the substance was a military grade chemical weapon, but Columbia later announced that the substance was a legal, non-toxic novelty fart spray. The students involved were suspended, but eventually reached a settlement with Columbia after arguing that they had wrongfully portrayed the incident as a chemical attack rather than a “harmless expression of his free speech.”
It also challenges Columbia’s decision to call in New York police to clear protest encampments and arrest demonstrators in the spring of 2024.
Plaintiffs include lecturer and former anthropology student Hadeel Assali, who allegedly canceled her classes so that students could attend Pro-Palestinian protests and who made headlines earlier this year when she gave a talk at the City University of New York’s law school called “The Underground in Gaza.” That lecture, and her dissertation at Columbia overseen by Mahmood Mamdani, father of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, sought to examine “the history and usage of tunnels in Gaza, focusing on land use and social organization in resistance to colonization,” apparently referring to the Hamas tunnel network.
Other plaintiffs include Bahia Munem, a former lecturer at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race; Mahdi Sabbagh, a Ph.D. student; Maryam Alwan, who graduated from Columbia in 2025 and was a student leader in the pro-Palestinian movement who was arrested during the encampment protests; and Layla Saliba, who earned a master’s degree in social work from Columbia in 2025.
In April 2025, the Columbia office of Institutional Equity investigated Saliba and Alwan for their role in writing an op-ed in the campus newspaper Columbia Spectator that called on the university to stop admitting Israeli students who had served in the Israel Defense Forces. The university later dropped its investigations into the two activists.
The lawsuit seeks monetary damages under New York City Human Rights Law, which prohibits discrimination or harassment based on race, creed, national origin, immigration status, or citizenship.
Columbia University did not immediately respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
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Francesca Hong, pro-Palestinian democratic socialist, polling far ahead in Wisconsin governor’s race
(JTA) — One week after notching a significant primary victory in a Midwestern purple state, pro-Palestinian progressives are looking to repeat their success in Wisconsin.
The Badger State’s chaotic Democratic primary for governor ends Tuesday with state Rep. Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, polling comfortably in the lead. Despite the best efforts of the state’s Democratic establishment, and the concerns of Wisconsin Jewish groups, Hong appears well positioned to win the primary — leaving many in the state concerned about her electability in the general.
Hong’s record on Israel and antisemitism is of concern to Wisconsin Jews, as well as Democratic figureheads more broadly. She has appeared on livestream fundraisers with Hasan Piker, the left-wing strident Israel critic who has also rallied with Hong, as well as twice with Michael Beyer, a.k.a. “Mike from PA,” who has called Jewish identity “a constructed ethnicity, this demonic ethnicity, wholly invented.”
On one of her appearances with Beyer, Hong urged constituents to fundraise for people on the “front lines in Gaza.”
A poll of likely voters one week before the race, conducted by nonpartisan outlet State Navigate, showed Hong with a commanding lead. Forty-four percent of those surveyed said they favored Hong, twice the total who backed Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the next-closest candidate. Only 17% of the same voter sample said they identified as democratic socialists, possibly indicating that Hong — whose platform has emphasized working families, healthcare, and data centers — has found wider appeal beyond her movement.
The party’s left flank is buoyed by Abdul El-Sayed’s victory last week in the U.S. Senate primary in Michigan, and hopes that a repeat success is possible in a neighboring Great Lakes state with a similarly purple voting bloc. But El-Sayed performed far short of the comfortable victory many polling outlets had predicted, squeaking a winning margin of just under 1%.
That may not be the case this time. Polling from Marquette Law School, considered the gold standard in the state, has also consistently shown Hong with a wide lead. Despite entering the race with little name recognition, Hong has benefitted from both a national progressive populist push and a crowded, musical-chairs Democratic field that burst with seven candidates at its peak.
The race has today whittled down to four candidates, with Crowley having re-entered the field after previously suspending his campaign. The flip came after Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, the preferred candidate of Crowley and many other institutionalist Democrats, dropped out of the race following an accounting scandal. Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the party’s 2022 U.S. Senate nominee and a once-promising figure in the state, also dropped out after failing to gain traction.
During her campaign, Hong apologized for having called the police on a vandalized Israeli flag in her district in December 2023, which at the time she had called “highly antisemitic” and urged to be investigated as a hate crime.
Explaining why she now regrets making the call, Hong recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “The image was cropped and incomplete to misrepresent anti-Zionism as antisemitism – a distinction I take seriously.”
Hong’s impact on Israel policy as governor of Wisconsin would be limited. But she has called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “genocidal” and pushed the state to overturn a ban on government contracts with businesses that boycott Israel. She has also criticized Wisconsin’s current moderate Democratic governor for backing the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s controversial definition of antisemitism.
Hong’s general-election success may hinge on the broader electorate’s views of the Democratic Socialists of America. This week a co-chair of the DSA drew further concern from Jewish Democrats after appearing in a viral interview on The New Yorker’s podcast. Megan Romer called the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel “largely inevitable” and said she “probably would have” joined a pro-Palestinian rally in New York the day after the attacks if she’d been able to attend.
Prior to Oct. 7, Hong’s state house campaigns had expressed some positive feelings toward Jews and Jewish causes. In January 2023 her campaign sold a Hebrew-language shirt, with proceeds going to Jewish Social Services of Madison.
“Team Hong has upped our commitment to uplifting multiculturalism,” Hong’s campaign wrote on Twitter at the time. She included praise of the symbolic significance of the number 18 in Hebrew and of the Hebrew phrase “L’chaim.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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