Uncategorized
Soviet Jewry protest leaders in San Francisco secretly recruited help from Jews for Jesus, FBI file says
(JTA) – Organizers of protests on behalf of Soviet Jewry in San Francisco in the early 1970s might have bolstered crowds by secretly recruiting participants from Jews for Jesus.
The explosive revelation that Jewish leaders turned to a Christian missionary group for help appears in a 1973 FBI memo that the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently obtained through a freedom of information request.
The FBI file details an apparent relationship between Martin Rosen, the founder of Jews for Jesus, and Joel Brooks and Harold Light, two prominent San Francisco Jewish leaders at the fore of local efforts in the movement to get Soviet authorities to end restrictions on the emigration of the country’s Jewish population. The relationship outlined in the declassified memo has not appeared in scholarship on the Soviet Jewry movement, nor is it known to activists of the movement who were interviewed by JTA. Light, Brooks and Rosen are deceased.
If the FBI’s intelligence is accurate, a successful and cherished social movement that unified much of the global Jewish community in common purpose for decades relied at least to some extent in San Francisco on the support of a group, rejected by nearly all of that community, whose mission is to proselytize to Jews.
“The first thing I thought of was, I’m reading something from ‘The Twilight Zone’ — in my many years in the Soviet Jewry movement, I don’t know if I’ve seen a document as strange as this,” said Morey Schapira, who served in leadership positions in the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews, and the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews. “The idea of working with a slimy group like Jews for Jesus, it’s beyond my comprehension.”
The public can request any FBI files that may exist pertaining to deceased individuals. An FBI memo relating Rosen arrived last November in response to one of about 50 freedom of information requests on prominent figures in recent Jewish history submitted by JTA almost two years ago. Most of JTA’s requests are still pending. TO DOWNLOAD THE FBI FILE, CLICK HERE.
Dated May 24, 1973, and written by an FBI informant whose name was redacted by staff at the U.S. National Archive, the memo focuses on Brooks, who was the Northern California director of the American Jewish Congress for about 30 years starting in 1967.
“[Brooks] has heavily utilized the services of the young Jews in the Jews for Jesus group,” the informant wrote. “[He] has used these services to turn out people in his Soviet Jewry demonstrations.”
The informant also cites Brooks as saying that Light, leader of the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jewry, used members of Jews for Jesus in a “hush-hush way” to distribute leaflets and participate in demonstrations.
The memo spells out why such an arrangement would be best kept out of the public eye.
“All of this, of course, is secret, because organized Jewish groups, and the various rabbinical councils have proclaimed that Jews for Jesus are no longer Jews but have become apostates, and should not be palled around with, nor buried in Jewish cemeteries,” the informant writes.
Martin “Moishe” Rosen, founder of Jews for Jesus in 1975. (Denver Post via Getty Images)
The upside for Rosen was obvious: His group would gain a foothold in a popular Jewish movement, offering a potential avenue toward legitimacy and a pool of possible recruits. In his 1974 memoir, titled “Jews for Jesus,” Rosen openly discussed being accepted into the movement by Jewish organizers, but he did so without naming Brooks, Light or any others.
He wrote that Jews for Jesus were invited because of their reputation as the “best qualified, best disciplined demonstrators in the San Francisco community. We’ve had more experience than other Jewish groups and are familiar with the applicable laws and regulations.”
Rosen’s group committed to not use the demonstrations as an opportunity to evangelize and didn’t bring any Christian literature or wear outfits that would identify them, according to the memoir.
“Many Jews for Jesus believe in the freedom of Soviet Jewry just as strongly as any other Jews, and we want to be as effective as possible when we demonstrate to support that cause,” Rosen wrote.
To Schapira, who led the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews for years and knew both Brooks and Light, however, it’s unclear why the Soviet Jewry movement would have wanted or needed Jews for Jesus. Schapira didn’t recall it ever being especially difficult to turn out demonstrators organically. There didn’t seem to be a need to resort to secret deals.
“If you look at the picture of the rallies in those days, they even had people like [American folk music legend] Joan Baez,” Schapira said. “They developed a relationship with her and she would come to the rally and bring her guitar and sing songs for freedom.”
He added, “If we needed an instant rally, we were a grassroots organization and we could produce 10 or 12 people, which might be enough to send a message to the Russians and get some publicity in the local papers.”
At least a few people in the Bay Area’s Jewish community caught wind of the secret relationship between Brooks and Jews for Jesus at the time, according to the memo.
Stephanie Rodgers was a coordinator of the Jewish Defense League, an extremist right-wing Jewish group that was under heavy FBI surveillance. Founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, the JDL applied its often violent tactics to resist Jews for Jesus’ public campaign to convert Jews. Rodgers visited Brooks’ office ahead of a planned demonstration in front of the Soviet consulate in San Francisco and asked about his connection to Rosen and Jews for Jesus, according to the memo.
After Brooks explained how they had been useful, Rodgers “smiled and was very pleasant on the surface,” the memo says. But at the demonstration, Rodgers and a group of other JDL activists showed up even though they said they would stay away, and they found Rosen in the crowd and proceeded to attack him and “kicked him in the groin.”
JDL regularly disrupted Jews for Jesus events; the organization would ultimately claim responsibility for firebombing a bus operated by Jews for Jesus in Brooklyn and abducting an adherent. In the Bay Area, where both groups were active, tensions were particularly high; the Jewish Defense League would sue the local Jews for Jesus chapter over what it charged was the group’s misuse of the JDL’s name and imagery.
Brooks, meanwhile, had more affable ties with Jews for Jesus. It’s unclear how or when Rosen and Brooks developed a relationship, but Brooks noted in a July 25, 1972, letter he wrote to the office of the American Jewish Congress in New York that their ties had started “some time ago.” The letter is found in the records of the Northern California branch of the American Jewish Congress, which are archived at the University of California Berkeley’s library.
A prominent advocacy group in its heyday, the American Jewish Congress — not to be confused with the American Jewish Committee — took a more liberal political stance than that of Jewish establishment groups on many issues.
Brooks had learned that his organization’s national headquarters wanted to undertake a study of Jews for Jesus and he wished to provide insight. He was under no illusion about the group’s objective: “The sole aim of these men is to enlist new converts to Christianity,” Brooks wrote in the letter.
“Through contact with Rosen I have developed a great deal of insight into how his organization operates, their source of funding, budget, etc. which I wish to share with you,” he added.
Then as now, members of Jews for Jesus and other Messianic groups felt unfairly rejected by the Jewish world, arguing that their Christian beliefs should have a place in the community.
In the early 1970s, when Jews for Jesus’ conversion drive was prominent and well funded, Brooks was perceived as more lenient, according to the foreword to the 2017 book “Converging Destinies: Jews, Christians, and the Mission of God.”
“Brooks tried to keep some of us connected to the Jewish community and Jewish life,” Calvin J. Smith wrote in the foreword. “I remember going with another Jew for Jesus to a Jewish consciousness raising session he held at a home in Marin County in the early 1970s.”
Glenn Richter was one of the founders of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and operates as a walking encyclopedia of the movement.
Protestors dressed as prisoners behind bars, alongside a man holding a placard reading “Solidarity with Soviet Jews,” stand together with members of New York’s Jewish community as they take to the streets during the Solidarity Sunday for Soviet Jewry demonstration in protest at the Soviet Union’s treatment of Jewish people, in New York City, April 18, 1975. (Images Press/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
He said the movement did collaborate with many Christians outside of Jews for Jesus. For example, he said there were Scandinavians, who, on weekend trips to Leningrad (today St. Petersburg), brought in Jewish material that was banned in the Soviet Union. Others set up safe houses in Finland in expectation of fleeing Soviet Jews. And the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews raised millions of dollars from evangelicals to help transport Soviet Jews to Israel.
“Of course, among these goodhearted souls are those who have conversion of Jews in mind, but I suspect most have wanted to fulfill their prophecy of ingathering Jews to Israel so that a Christian messiah could return,” Richter said.
In his eyes, Jews for Jesus represented a red line.
“Our Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry office on Manhattan’s West 72nd Street was down the block from a church with a Jewish Messianic constituency, and we would never, ever, try to work with them,” Richter said.
Andrew Esensten contributed research to this story.
—
The post Soviet Jewry protest leaders in San Francisco secretly recruited help from Jews for Jesus, FBI file says appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The original anti-Zionists have been all but forgotten. Molly Crabapple wants to change that.
I first met nationally acclaimed artist and journalist Molly Crabapple in 2020 during the dark days of COVID. After discovering that we had both studied Yiddish at YIVO, albeit in different classes, we did a socially distanced fresh-air visit to Mt. Carmel, the Jewish cemetery in Queens where Sholem Aleichem is buried. Many tombstones there are inscribed not in Hebrew but in Yiddish. They include the graves of people who, in life, belonged to the Bund.
Founded in 1897 in Eastern Europe, the Bund was a socialist revolutionary group whose name, translated from Yiddish to English, is General Jewish Labor Union (“bund” is Yiddish for union). By the 1930s, Bundism in Poland, where most Ashkenazic Jews lived, had grown bigger and more politically powerful than Zionism. The group was a tireless promoter of Yiddish as the linguistic and literary underpinning of Jewish peoplehood. Bundists also fiercely opposed Zionism and a Jewish state; they believed in fighting for democracy and inclusion in the countries where Jews already lived.
The organization ended up being destroyed not just by the Nazi Holocaust but also by Stalinism. Except for people like me, who’ve been ensconced in the Yiddishist world, it is nearly forgotten today by all but a few academics. But by the time we met, Crabapple was writing a book about the Bund.
Almost six years later, she has finished it. Titled Here Where We Live is Our Country, it is part hefty historical documentation, part loving family memoir, and part literary nonfiction. Thoroughly engaging throughout, it moves back and forth from the author’s lefty-artsy life in contemporary New York City to earthshaking events in vintage Jewish Europe. Crabapple has disinterred the memory of a once-vibrant movement that waned even as its nemesis, Zionism, waxed.
I met her last month in her fifth-floor walkup apartment in Williamsburg to talk about how she made her book. Our conversation is edited for length and clarity.
Here Where We Live devotes significant space to the saga of your great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort. As a young man in 1904, he immigrated from the Pale of Settlement to New York City, under somewhat murky circumstances that he barely discussed after the move. In America, he made a living as a self-taught artist, including on a dairy farm in the Catskills, an egg farm in Long Island and in a big house near Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. But he died over a decade before you were born. When did you first realize he’d been an interesting guy who you wanted to tell the world about?
I was fucking born knowing he was interesting! My mother and my great-aunt and my dad told me about him constantly. I was surrounded by his paintings and stuff that he said. After he died, my great-aunt Ida still lived in his house. As a child, I would visit and it was exactly like when he was alive. I remember the pigments and oils still on the palette in the basement.
How did you find out he’d been in the Bund?
I’d always known he was involved in something illegal before he came to the United States. It was a cool family anecdote. In a book from 1952 that he published about his art, he wrote that as a teenager and young man he hadn’t known much about girls because “I was in the underground.” Another book, a catalogue of his art from a show, said he’d been in the Bund. My mom had a million of those catalogues in a bookcase, and I’d been looking at them since I was 11 or 12 years old. I also saw one of his watercolors, of a woman throwing a rock. He’d titled it “Itka the Bundist Breaking Windows.”
I had very little idea then of what “the Bund” was. But as an adult, one of my bad habits has been that sometimes when I get drunk, I Google things. That might be how I first understood.
From his own unpublished writing, you later found evidence suggesting that Sam might have fled to America at age 22 because he’d joined other Bundists in shooting a Tsarist policeman during a state-encouraged pogrom. You also read the yizkor book for Volkovysk, a town in what is now Belarus. It was Sam’s hometown. He is cited in the book as having helped produce its chapter about the Bund.
Look at this! [She walks me to her bedroom and points to an antique photograph on the wall.] When I was younger I’d always only thought of this as a very cool old picture that my mom had. But this same photo is in the yizkor book! It says it’s the members of the Volkovysk Bund in 1905. It’s Sam’s friends a year after he left for America. Look at this guy in the photo — he’s hot! Which one do you like the best?
The blonde.
Ugh!
I got really obsessed trying to track down these guys. When I went to the cemetery where my great-grandfather is buried I saw the tombstone of one of them. Later, in a box of family memorabilia, I found a photo of this same person in an old Yiddish news clip about people in New York City who were in the Workmen’s [now Workers] Circle’s Volkovysk branch. I asked the cemetery who was paying to maintain the grave. It was this guy’s grandson. I contacted him and he said his own father was still alive but very old. “Can you just ask him to look at this photo and see if that’s his dad?” I asked. I said I was writing about a revolutionary group. He says, “My grandfather never would have been involved in that! He was a truck driver.” And he hung up.
Why couldn’t the grandson entertain this history about his grandfather? Why did he not know it?
The Bund was an organization incredibly devoted to Yiddish language and literature. But it was also a socialist revolutionary political party. One thing I’ve noticed about how it has been written about is that certain things are de-emphasized and certain things emphasized. In the 1950s in the U.S. in the McCarthy years, Bundist survivors of the Holocaust were terrified they would be accused of being Communists, and deported. They had no faith that Americans would know the difference between a socialist and a communist. I think that sometimes the Bund’s’ Yiddishism is emphasized far more than the fact that they were revolutionaries. To focus on linguistic and cultural things is safe. To talk about revolutionaries as internationalists — and as people who always opposed Zionism — is dangerous.
Were you raised Jewish?
My father is Puerto Rican and a Latin American studies professor who’s a Marxist. He told me about Marx’s theory of surplus value when I was 6 years old. I’ve been a leftist in a leftist family all my life! My mother — Sam’s granddaughter — is very strongly culturally Jewish. When I was a child we’d do Hanukkah lights, and she made the best latkes. We were not religious, but I identify strongly as a secular Jew. I studied Yiddish in order to do research for the book. I’m not so good at Yiddish, but I can work my way through a socialist text using a dictionary.
I remember when we were at the cemetery and you were so excited about having just discovered that the political work of some Bundists in Poland was armed self-defense. They fought in militias, with their bodies and with weapons, to protect Jews from murderous pogroms, murderous Communist Party violence against socialists, and, finally, murderous Nazis. You called these militia members “thugs.”
I loved them!
You mentioned their resistance in a piece you wrote in 2018 for the New York Review of Books about the organization. I’ve heard that many people were astounded and very happy to learn about this self-defense and to discover the Bund.
Especially young Jews, like in their 20s. They had no idea that Jews had fought back in Europe even before the Holocaust, or they had only vague ideas about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and that Bundists played a major role in it. It was very meaningful for them.
So much for the idea that only Zionists have been modern Jewish fighters.
Zionists have tried to say that they were the only tough Jews. Which is utterly untrue.
What do you think is most original about your book?
It’s very concerned with the emotional life of being in a movement. I think that sometimes the way that leftist movements are written about is as a series of conferences and decisions that are written down as texts, and people sign onto a resolution because that’s what they are thinking. The writing doesn’t show any awareness of emotional life. The love affairs, the gossip, the beefs that are going on, the thrill of thinking that you can change the world. I was much more concerned with that.
And as I worked on the book I quickly realized that I wasn’t just writing about the Bund. I was writing a history of the 20th century from the point of view of the defeated. The work was a form of necromancy. I would go to people’s graves and take dirt, and light candles in front of it and try to ask them if I could tell their story. At Ponary Forest, [near Vilna, where at least one prominent Bundist leader, a woman, was massacred by the Nazis in World War II and dumped into a mass pit] I went to the bottom with flowers and played Di Shvue [Yiddish for “The Oath,” the Bund’s anthem] on my phone.
What do you mainly hope that your book will accomplish?
I want leftists to know about something from our shared international history as leftists. I want young Jews to get to know their ancestors.
The Bund was anti-Zionist, of course, and many young American Jews are now also rejecting Zionism.
Yes. A lot of them were sold a bill of goods about their history, and when they reject that bill of goods, there’s a big hole in them. They don’t have any actual, positive Jewish history. They just have shit they’re ashamed of, because they realize [that Zionism] was actually a history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. One of the things my book does is give them ancestors.
I’m an anti-Zionist. Whenever you have an ethnostate project, it always does unspeakable crimes. If Jewish institutions in America keep conflating Jews here with a state that is doing a livestreamed genocide and is now primarily known for the most heinous shit possible, it’s extremely dangerous for us Jews, as a small minority in America.
Some people internationally have been starting new Bund groups. What future do you see in that? And can you imagine Yiddish being resurrected as a secular Jewish language?
It’s hard to imagine huge numbers of people adopting Yiddish. But I think about a Jewish literary figure in the 1930s whom Isaac Deutscher quotes in his book The Non-Jewish Jew. He said that Yiddish was a dying language. But he didn’t mind, because Greek and Latin are dead languages, yet many people study them anyway, to access their linguistic treasures. And God bless everyone who’s doing leftist, anti-Zionist organizing and cultural work reclaiming our heritage! But is there a future for the Bund? The thing I’ve learned both from reading history and being a participant is, you never know what the spark is going to be. So you should always avoid making prognostications.
The post The original anti-Zionists have been all but forgotten. Molly Crabapple wants to change that. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Georgia political candidate apologizes for Passover ad that featured challah
(JTA) — When readers of the Atlanta Jewish Times opened their Passover edition last week, they saw something surprising: a fluffy challah.
The leavened bread, forbidden for Jews to consume during the holiday, appeared in an ad placed by Nathalie Kanani, a candidate for state Senate in a Metro Atlanta district.
“Have a blessed Passover,” the ad said, over an image of a challah draped in an Israeli flag alongside two towering candles. “Wishing you a Passover rich in divine love and blessings.”
The ad quickly drew ridicule online, particularly after Greg Bluestein, a Jewish Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, tweeted about it on Saturday, writing, “It’s the thought that counts, I guess.”
That night, Kanani issued an apology, calling the inclusion of challah in the ad “an oversight that should not have happened” and saying that her campaign was instituting new processes to prevent similar snafus in the future.
“My intent was to honor our Jewish neighbors and friends. We are all human, and even with the best intentions, honest mistakes can happen,” she wrote. “I believe in meeting those moments with grace and using them to bring people of different cultures together, not tear them apart.”
Kanani added, “While this content was created by a consultant working with my campaign, I take full responsibility for everything shared in my name. We are implementing stronger review processes to ensure this does not happen again. As always, my campaign stands for inclusion, respect, and bringing all people together.”
The incident is also spurring potential reforms at the Atlanta Jewish Times. “The ad should not have passed proofing checks,” Michael Morris, the newspaper’s owner and publisher, wrote in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday.
Kanani’s apology earned the Democrat dozens of supportive comments on Facebook — as well as constructive criticism that highlighted the complexity of Jewish American identity.
“We all make mistakes and learn from the[m],” wrote one man. “If you want to honor your Jewish neighbors, however, you might also want to rethink using a foreign flag. While many (though not all) of us, myself included, feel close ties to Israel (if not its government and policies), American Jews are Americans, not foreigners.”
Another woman offered an opposing take. “If you want to reach out to the Jewish community then you need to hire a Jewish consultant for Jewish content. Not only was the picture a big gaffe that you are undoubtable being mocked relentlessly for, but the wording sounds Christian,” she wrote. “But I do appreciate the Israeli flag.”
Kanani’s ad is not the first Passover bread to ignite a social media firestorm: The sight of leavened bread at Christian seders, which have surged in recent years, has generated sharp criticism in the past.
Unlike the Christian seders, which are widely denounced as appropriative, Kanini’s ad also elicited appreciation at a time when antisemitism is making many American Jews feel insecure.
“Unpopular opinion: we shouldn’t dunk on non-Jews who are trying to be nice to Jews,” tweeted David Greenfield, the head of a Jewish anti-poverty organization in New York City.
Kanani is a former prosecutor who is running in the May primary against Kevin Abel, who says his values are rooted in his identity as a South Africa-born Jew whose grandfather escaped Nazi Germany. Abel has chaired the American Jewish Committee’s local antisemitism task force.
Esther Panitch, a Jewish member of the Georgia House, urged her followers to back Abel when criticizing Kanani’s ad.
“Bless her heart, someone put challah in a Passover ad. This candidate wants to be my senator,” she tweeted on Saturday. “As the only Jewish member of the Georgia General Assembly, I am available for holiday consults — or you could just consider a candidate who knows the difference, whose ad is just a few pages after this one.”
After Kanani’s apology, Panitch said she had heard from Kanani’s campaign.
“I appreciate Nathalie Kanani’s campaign reaching out and taking responsibility for the challah-in-a-Passover-ad mix-up,” she wrote on Facebook. “Mistakes happen. What matters is how you respond, and she responded with grace. This is how we build understanding across communities. My door is always open for holiday consults. 
“
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Georgia political candidate apologizes for Passover ad that featured challah appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
4 killed in Haifa strike as Trump issues ‘you’ll be living in Hell’ ultimatum to Tehran
(JTA) — Four people — including a couple in their 80s — were killed when an Iranian missile crashed into their home in Haifa on Sunday, in the latest direct strike in the month-old U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
The missile was not intercepted because it had broken off from a larger munition, determined Israeli authorities, who said the people killed were not in their building’s bomb shelter at the time of the strike.
The strike brings the civilian death toll in Israel to 18 as uncertainty reigns about the future of the war, with U.S. President Donald Trump threatening multiple times over the weekend to pummel Iran imminently if it does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipping imminently.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social early Sunday. “Open the F–kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Iran offered no indication that it would meet Trump’s deadline, which comes as the president has extended previous deadlines for action by Tehran. A top Iranian official said the regime would respond “crushingly and extensively” to further attacks on civilian targets, including power plants and bridges. And a spokesman for the foreign ministry responded to questions about a reported framework for a ceasefire by saying, “Negotiations are in no way compatible with ultimatums, crimes, or threats of war crimes.”
The sparring comes after a dramatic weekend in the war. U.S. forces rescued an airman whose plane had been shot down during a commando raid in rural Iran, while Israel said it had killed the intelligence chief of the Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guards during a strike on an office building in Tehran.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post 4 killed in Haifa strike as Trump issues ‘you’ll be living in Hell’ ultimatum to Tehran appeared first on The Forward.