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Recalling Millie Baran, whose mark on the Yiddish world lives on
Millie Baran, a Holocaust survivor who served for many years as a “camp mother” at the socialist Yiddish summer camp, Hemshekh, and spoke publicly, even on television, about her Holocaust experiences, passed away on April 3. She was 100 years old.
Millie, whose late husband, Mikhl Baran, was the camp’s director, was known for her warmth and mentshlekhkeyt (kindness). As many former Hemshekh campers will tell you: Nishto keyn tsveyte — no one could replace her.
Born Mila Persky in 1926 in the town of Oszmiana (Oshmene in Yiddish) in what was then Poland and is now Belarus, she attended a Tarbut school, a secular Zionist Hebrew-language school. An ardent Zionist herself, she often praised the education she received there.
After Millie’s passing, her daughters, Ruth Baran Gerold and Janice Baran Blatt, talked about her fluency in both Yiddish and Hebrew in an interview with the author. “She spoke a beautiful, elegant Yiddish,” Ruth said. “In fact, her Hebrew education at Tarbut enriched her Yiddish.”
During the war, Millie was interned in the Oszmiana ghetto, the Vilna ghetto and several labor camps. She credited her survival to a specific forced labor detail on a Polish farm where the prisoners were permitted to eat the apples that had fallen on the ground.
“My mother said, ‘This farmer wasn’t the worst, and this guard wasn’t the worst, so they let us eat,’” Ruth said. “This source of nutrition was key to her survival.”
One day, when Millie’s hands became bloody from shoveling, a Polish woman, also a slave laborer, approached her. “She heard Millie singing and was so captivated, she offered to do Millie’s shoveling if Millie would sing as they worked,” Ruth said. “Throughout her life, she always emphasized that even the smallest acts of kindness from strangers could have a tremendous impact.”
Despite starvation rations, Millie would not eat the meat given to the prisoners in their soup, since it wasn’t kosher. She valued Jewish tradition even in the most dire conditions, trading the non-kosher dish for a piece of bread, or whatever another prisoner would be willing to exchange for it.
Many years later, this devotion was apparent to Forverts editor Rukhl Schaechter.
“Millie was very principled, whether it was about supporting Israel or keeping Jewish traditions,” Schaechter said. “When I worked with her husband Mikhl at Camp Kinder Ring during the 1980s, Millie, who would come up on weekends, always asked the waiter for a fish or pasta meal; she never ate the chicken or meat dishes. I once asked her if this was because she was vegetarian, and she said no, she simply didn’t eat meat in a non-kosher establishment. I was still a secular Jew then and was in awe of her willpower. Little did I know that many years later, I would do the same.”
After the war, Millie and Mikhl, who was also from Oszmiana, encountered each other in Lodz, Poland, a city that drew many survivors. They fell in love and married. In 1949, they emigrated to the United States.
As a camp mother, Millie’s loving nature impacted the lives of hundreds of children of survivors. One former camper, Moish Russ, recalled her warmth and gentleness when he was a young boy in the 1960s. “I was still homesick at times. Millie was extraordinarily kind and carried herself with a confidence and gentleness I didn’t know in my own mother. The feeling of her comforting, soapy hands was a joy. I felt loved.”
“I remember her examining my fingernails to be certain they were clean,” said another former camper, George Rothe. “Years later, whenever I saw her, I’d hold out my hands to let her inspect them. It became a joke between us.”
Millie’s daughters both spoke of their mother’s elegance and fastidious nature, even in the clothes she wore as a prisoner in the ghettos and labor camps.
“Millie always made sure she kept a needle,” Ruth said.“She hid it in her blanket. Even in the camps, she made sure she never had a dropped hem.”
That commitment to dressing properly came up again years later, after Millie and Mikhl had immigrated to New York. Janice, then six, was sitting with her mother on the bus when a woman passed by with her hem undone. “Can you believe it?” Millie said, “She’s free here, and yet she goes around like that!”
While Millie had an enormous impact on the campers and staff at Camp Hemshekh, admiration for her goes far beyond. Her life inspired a jazz collaboration by Albert Marques and Amplify Voices called “Mir Zaynen Do” (“We Are Here”) that was performed at the iconic Joe’s Pub in January 2025.
Millie’s and Mikhl’s stories also made their way onto television when they were invited to share their Holocaust experiences on The View in 2020. After Millie’s passing, The View’s host Whoopie Goldberg shared the sad news on the show and paid tribute to Millie’s accomplishments.
Millie never took her freedom for granted, Ruth said. “Her favorite holiday was pesakh (Passover), and she died right before pesakh. Every year, she would stand by the kids’ table and say, ‘We were slaves in Egypt and I was a slave by Hitler. Now I’m an American and a free Jew.’ ”
In addition to her daughters Janice and Ruth, Milllie is survived by grandsons Ben, Jonathan, and Sam, and great-grandchildren Sophia, Joshua, Ava, Olivia and Billie.
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PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors
(JTA) — The president of PEN America resigned over the weekend in protest of a report on boycotts targeting Jewish and Israeli authors, part of yet another round of internal division over Israel at the literary free-speech institution.
Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and Bard College professor, told The Atlantic he was stepping down because he believed the PEN report, “A Silent Moratorium,” failed to defend the free-speech rights of participants in the movement to boycott Israel.
“It’s the First Amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu told the publication. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
The author did not respond to multiple Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment, but in an Instagram post Monday alluded to an interest in creating a new organization to rival the prominent nonprofit, which defends the free expression rights other writers.
In response to an interview request, PEN sent a statement to JTA saying it was “grateful” for Mengestu’s leadership and would “respect” his decision. The statement also alluded to PEN’s own past turmoil: “We tell hard stories, in politically challenging moments, about writers from a range of perspectives, even when it’s uncomfortable for us given our own recent history.”
In its report, published on its blog, PEN described “Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.” Interview subjects include several Israel critics, as well as literary agents who assert that they face more difficulties signing Jewish authors after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and amid the subsequent war in Gaza. The report also repeatedly cited a JTA report about a 2024 viral list of “Zionist” authors to boycott.
Among other details, PEN’s report revealed that Israeli novelist Etgar Keret and public radio host Ira Glass had cancelled a planned live event in Australia over fears of threats and protest.
“This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all,” according to the report.
In addition to the report, PEN also altered its institutional policy toward cultural boycotts, which the organization has long opposed. Although its report on Jewish authors asserted that boycotts “threaten the free expression rights” of their targets, the revised guidelines say that the group will also defend the right of writers to participate in boycotts.
Mengestu’s resignation comes at a perilous moment for Jews facing cultural boycotts, both within the standard-bearers of PEN and elsewhere. PEN’s Jewish former longtime CEO stepped down in 2024 following months of blowback from rank-and-file authors who felt the organization was insufficiently critical of Israel and caused PEN to cancel a festival for global authors.
Since the leadership change, PEN leadership has published and retracted a condemnation of a boycott effort trained at an Israeli comedian and also published a report cataloguing Israel’s “cultural destruction in Gaza.”
Mengestu had assumed the role of board president in 2025. But PEN’s report about Jewish and Israeli writers on Thursday, he wrote, “makes clear that [change] will not happen.”
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “deeply troubled” by Mengestu’s resignation Monday. “Freedom of expression means opposing efforts to boycott, silence, or exclude writers because of their identity or nationality,” the organization tweeted, saying that the author’s decision to leave PEN over his objections to the report on Jewish authors “sends a chilling message.” Jewish authors also objected.
“Imagine running a free expression org and resigning because it refuses to blacklist authors based on their nationality,” the author David Zweig wrote on X, musing whether Mengestu would object to boycotting authors from his birth country: “Ethiopia doesn’t exactly have a good human rights record.”
In response to The Atlantic’s story that quoted sources from inside PEN who were critical of his resignation, Mengestu wrote a lengthy Instagram post Monday in which he stated, “This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” criticized past PEN reports critical of the BDS movement, and added, “What PEN America fails to understand is that boycott is a form of dialogue.”
He announced his intention to “help make something better,” receiving affirmative comments from notable authors including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Angela Flournoy, Jewish pro-Palestinian novelist Jess Row and Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Moser, author of a forthcoming history of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Other Jewish authors on the left were among those defending Mengestu’s decision to step down.
“Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows,” author Sarah Schulman wrote on Facebook. Calling PEN’s blog about Jews “one of those fake anti-semitism pieces,” Schulman added, “If PEN wants to survive, they have to get out of the Israel/Zionism business.”
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Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide
(JTA) — The Church of England’s legislative body voted Monday to encourage churches across England to engage with a document produced by Palestinian Christians that accuses Israel of genocide despite requests from Jewish organizations and Britain’s chief rabbi to reject it.
The document is titled “Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide” and is also known as Kairos II, after the Palestinian Christian movement Kairos Palestine that produced it. It describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide, states that Israel is a “colonial enterprise built on racism,” and says decades of “occupation,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The vote on Monday does not adopt the accusations as church doctrine but says the church should hear the documents as “heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians,” and to engage with them in order to better understand the conflict.
Ahead of the debate in York, several Jewish organizations expressed concerns, and Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis asked Synod members to reject the amendment. Mirvis called Kairos II “deeply concerning” and that it “risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building” between Christians and Jews.
“It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood,” he said.
Afterwards, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Phil Rosenberg, issued a statement calling the passage of the motion “highly problematic.”
“Kairos Palestine may come from a place of genuine pain, but the falsehoods and distortions of Kairos II, including its erasure of Jewish identity and experience, is a prescription for more division and not the answer to conflict in the Middle East,” he said.
“This document reflects the pain and trauma of the Palestinian people. As a pastor, I hear the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers — a cry that rises from the ruins of Gaza, and from the violence and oppression of the West Bank,” she said.
She added, ”I also hear the concerns of the chief rabbi, the co-leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, and the Board of Deputies, and I thank them for their honesty.” She said the church remained opposed to antisemitism and committed to safety for Israelis as well as Palestinians.
The Synod debate followed Mullally’s visit to the West Bank in June, where she met Palestinian Christian communities in Birzeit. During the visit she said, “I will use my role as Archbishop to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve.”
The debate marks the ascendance of Israel-related issues in another major church, after the Catholic Church’s Pope Leo XIV angered Jewish groups soon after being elected last year by endorsing an investigation into whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
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Mike Pence denounces alleged arson of Israeli flag in his Indiana hometown
(JTA) — Former Vice President Mike Pence has weighed in against antisemitism after officials in his Indiana town say a costly fire may have been caused by arson to an Israeli flag displayed on a local barn.
The alleged arson broke out early Friday morning, damaging a historic home in Zionsville, Indiana, where Pence lives, and causing an estimated $150,000 in damages, according to the Zionsville Police Department.
Zionsville Mayor John Stehr said during a press conference on Friday that officials believed the fire began when an individual set fire to an Israeli flag that had been displayed outside the building alongside an American flag. The town later announced that the FBI had joined the investigation and that officials were examining whether the arson “may have been motivated by bias” but said no determination had been made.
“Absolutely despicable,” Pence tweeted on Sunday. “There can be no tolerance in America for Antisemitism or political acts of violence, and it is heartbreaking to see in our adopted hometown of Zionsville, Indiana. We thank God no one was hurt and urge anyone with information to contact law enforcement.”
Pence has long cast himself as a staunch supporter of Israel, including after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, and has also repeatedly spoken out against antisemitism in the conservative movement and beyond.
Republican Indiana Sen. Jim Banks also condemned the alleged arson in a post on X Saturday. “Antisemitism will not be tolerated. Not in Zionsville. Not in Indiana. Not anywhere,” Banks wrote. “Thank you to the federal, state, and local officials working to bring the perpetrators of this despicable arson attack to justice.”
On Sunday, the Jewish community in central Indiana hosted a rally condemning the alleged arson attack, chanting, “We will stand up,” according to local outlet Fox 59. While Zionsville does not have a large Jewish community of its own, other suburbs of Indianapolis have significant Jewish populations, and Zionsville is also the longtime home of a Reform movement summer camp, the Goldman Union Camp Institute, which is in session now.
“The founding fathers founded a country where we have the ability to resolve differences among each other; we don’t do it by firebombing homes,” rally organizer David Schiller told Fox 59. “It’s inexcusable and unacceptable.”
The Zionsville Police Department did not respond to an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the status of the investigation on Monday.
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