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Standing on Albania’s Jew Street, I learned firsthand the country’s lifesaving culture of hospitality
BERAT, Albania (JTA) — Stone paths wind through the Ottoman-style houses built into the hillside of Berat, Albania. They lead to an imposing 13th-century castle at the peak — the top priority for most visitors to this 60,000-person town 90 minutes south of the capital, Tirana. I had other plans.
Albanians take pride in their ancient code of “besa,” which translates to “keep the promise” and leads them to prioritize guests and religion in their homes. For Albanian Jews or those who fled there from elsewhere in the Balkan Peninsula as German forces advanced during World War II, it promised safe harbor with Albanian families and even throughout entire towns. Albania is the only country in Europe whose Jewish population grew during the war.
Berat’s Solomoni Museum explains this history and that of earlier Jews in the area. At least, so I hear: Under the stone arches off the plaza, I found only locked doors.
Some people collect souvenir spoons or Starbucks city mugs when they travel, others collect memories. I collect fragments of Jewish identity. Planning this trip to Albania with friends, I insisted on a stop in Berat to see the small museum and wasn’t about to give up.
“I’ll call her,” offered the woman behind the desk at the Ethnographic Museum across the street. “Her” referred to the caretaker, the widow of the Orthodox Christian professor who started the museum — Albania’s only one dedicated to Jewish history — as a passion project funded by his pension. After Simon Vrusho’s death in 2019, the museum closed until a French-Albanian businessman heard the story and donated funds for it to reopen in a larger, permanent location.
But the call ended with bad news: The caretaker was sick, and the museum would remain closed. I grimaced. Seeing my reaction, the Ethnographic Museum docent did what all Albanians do — anything she could to make me feel better, to make sure I enjoyed my stay in her town. In this moment, that meant explaining everything she knew about Jews in Albania.
A view of the exterior of the Solomoni Museum, the country’s only museum about its Jewish history. (Naomi Tomky)
Jews first arrived in the country as Roman captives, almost 2,000 years ago. But the first major wave, especially to Berat, came from Spanish Jews fleeing the Inquisition. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled the area at the time, offered nominal religious freedom.
This month, the country’s prime minister announced plans to open a museum in Tirana dedicated to the stories of Albanian citizens who sheltered Jews during the Holocaust, when the country was occupied by both fascist Italy and later Nazi Germany. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance authority, has recognized at least 75 Albanians as Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jews.
“You can see the street where the Jews lived,” the docent noted. I perked up and jotted down her directions.
Six blocks away, I found a simple black plaque with white lettering, barely the size of my forearm and posted high on a white brick wall. It read, “Rruga Hebrentje.” I stared at it. Two millennia of Jewish history in the country, and one closed museum forced me to take heart in a little sign saying “Jew Street.”
A sign in Berat, Albania, reads Rruga Hebrentje, or Jew Street. (Naomi Tomky)
Jews have company in this razing of history: The brutal post-World War II communist regime of dictator Enver Hoxha shuttered all religious institutions in 1967, declaring Albania the world’s first atheist state. His forces destroyed more than 2,000 mosques, churches and other sacred buildings, arresting priests, clerics and imams, many of whom disappeared forever into labor camps and hidden graves. “Religion is the opium of the people,” Hoxha wrote, quoting Karl Marx.
It felt selfish to pout about the lack of Jewish history when so much religion, so many people and huge swaths of Albanian culture had been so recently and violently erased. I joined my friends to explore Berat’s exceptions to the wanton destruction, starting at the Sultan’s Mosque, which dates to the 15th century and boasts an intricately carved wooden ceiling. We expected to admire just the outside, since our guidebook said the doors opened only around Friday prayer.
But as we stared at the somewhat ordinary façade, a friendly gentleman chatted us up. He spoke Albanian, Greek and a bit of Italian, the last of which proved useful at matching up to our Spanish and French. He told us a little about the mosque and the casual styles of observance by most Albanian Muslims, but we only realized he worked there when he invited us inside, retrieving a key when we responded with excitement.
We marveled at the green, red and gold ceiling, illuminated by a round chandelier. He asked if we wanted to climb up the minaret, warning us about the ascent. Narrower than the width of my hips, the tightly coiled spiral of 94 stairs featured a layer of dust and cobwebs that stuck to our bare feet. But at the top, swallowing my fear of heights, confined spaces and bugs, I reaped the reward: a 360-degree view of the “thousand windows” that give the town its nickname, flanking both banks of the Osumi River, and the double eagle of Albania’s red flag flying proudly above it all from the castle.
A view of the ceiling inside the Sultans Mosque in Berat. (Naomi Tomky)
Back on the ground, we thanked the man profusely and dropped donations in the box outside the mosque door as we prepared to say goodbye. Instead, he led us across the square to another building – the Halveti Tekke, or Teqe. Light flowed through the high stained-glass windows onto the walls of the 700-year-old gathering place belonging to the mystic order of Sufi Muslims called Bektashi. Chains hung from the ornate gold-leaf-decorated ceiling over a space where, according to our new friend, the bektashi, or dervishes, used to perform their whirling rituals.
“You want to go up?” he asked my friend’s eight-year-old daughter. She nodded excitedly, and he tossed her a ring of keys, pointing the way to the balcony. As she climbed the stairs, I noticed a pair of six-pointed stars framing the main doorway, a reminder of my original mission, even if they were likely not Stars of David.
But if I felt sad about missing out on the Jewish museum, I was heartened by what I did receive: a first-hand lesson on Albania’s life-saving culture of hospitality.
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Pro-Palestinian rally at Buchenwald memorial is shut down by German authorities
(JTA) — German authorities have shut down a planned pro-Palestinian vigil at the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp memorial after a fierce outcry.
The rally was slated for April 12, marking the 81st anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation by U.S. troops. But the city of Weimar said on Monday it would ban the event on the memorial grounds and offered a square downtown as an alternate location.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald, the group behind the campaign, announced it was challenging the ban in court. The group said it aimed to “commemorate victims of genocide and fascism” and “uplift the fundamental duty to fight against all genocides, particularly the genocide currently taking place in Palestine.”
The planned event had been heavily criticized by German leaders, such as federal antisemitism czar Felix Klein. In an interview with the Jüdische Allgemeine, Klein said he viewed the rally as “disrespectful self-promotion and a perfidious attempt to relativize the murder of over 11,000 Jews in the Buchenwald concentration camp by comparing it to Israel’s actions in the recent Gaza war.”
The campaign was also protested in a joint statement by a coalition of 17 organizations, including several Jewish communal and academic groups. They accused the organizers of “instrumentalizing the Buchenwald memorial site as a platform for anti-Jewish agitation.”
Kufiyas in Buchenwald had support from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the German group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East.
Rachael Shapiro, an organizer with the International Jewish Anti-zionist Network, said the memorial foundation’s “insistence on the singularity and exceptionalism of the Nazi genocide of European Jews” served to “actively provide cover for Germany’s participation in and funding of the mass murder of Palestinians.”
“As Jewish, queer and other anti-fascists, many of us the children and grandchildren of survivors of and those persecuted and murdered in the Nazi genocide, we wholeheartedly reject the German state dictating conditions around commemoration,” Shapiro said in a statement.
The event originated as a protest against a German court’s decision that Buchenwald could refuse entry to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh. Kufiyas in Buchenwald also said the memorial had suppressed other voices that criticized Israel. They cited the treatment of Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a critic of the Israeli government, who was disinvited from giving a commemoration speech at Buchenwald after pressure from the Israeli embassy in Berlin.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald said it continued to call on the memorial foundation to “openly address the genocide in Gaza” and lift restrictions on pro-Palestinian symbols and speech at the site. The group said its demands honored the “Oath of Buchenwald,” a promise spoken by survivors of the camp during a memorial ceremony on April 19, 1945.
These survivors said in six languages, “We will only give up the fight when the last guilty has been judged by the tribunal of all nations. The absolute destruction of Nazism is our device. The building of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Argentina designates Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization
(JTA) — Argentina announced on Tuesday that it had designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, a move that was quickly praised by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar.
The move stems from Argentina’s decades-long investigations into the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, which killed 29 and injured more than 200, and the 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish center, which left 85 dead and 300 injured in what remains the deadliest terrorist attack on Argentine soil.
In a statement, President Javier Milei’s office described the attacks as “two of the most serious terrorist attacks in history, carried out in the 1990s by the IRGC’s operational arm in the region, the organization Hezbollah.”
With Tuesday’s decision, the Argentine government will now include the IRGC in the Public Registry of Persons and Entities Linked to Acts of Terrorism and its Financing, triggering financial sanctions and operational restrictions intended to curb its ability to operate in the country and safeguard Argentina’s financial system from illicit use.
The announcement by Milei, who has stood out as one of Israel’s staunchest international supporters, comes months after his office also designated the Quds Force, the foreign arm of the IRGC, as a terrorist organization in January. In recent years, Argentina has also designated Hamas and Hezbollah as terror groups.
Saar praised the move in a post on X Wednesday, writing that the designation “places Argentina, under [Milei’s] leadership, at the forefront of the free world in the fight against the Iranian regime of terror and its proxies.”
“With this decision, President Milei – one of the greatest leaders of our generation – has once again demonstrated moral clarity and an unwavering commitment to the values of freedom and the fight against its enemies,” Saar wrote.
Last month, just days into the ongoing U.S.-Israel war with Iran, Argentina issued an arrest warrant for Ahmad Vahidi, who was appointed as the head of the IRGC after its previous leader was killed in the first wave of U.S.-Israeli strikes.
Vahidi is currently the highest-ranking Iranian figure accused by the Argentine judiciary. An arrest warrant for him was first issued in 2006 in connection with the AMIA case.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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This isn’t Barbra Streisand’s ‘Yentl’ — it isn’t I.B. Singer’s either
There’s an FAQ on the website of the London theater where the Kadimah Yiddish Theatre of Melbourne’s production of Yentl is running through April 16. The very first item reads:
Is this a stage version of the 1983 musical film starring Barbara Streisand?
No — the London production of Yentl is a play. It is a new adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1962 short story,“ Yentl the Yeshiva Boy“ — just like the Streisand film was at the time.
This explanation does more than relieve box office staff of the tedious duty of informing Mrs. Lipschitz and Mrs. Rosenblatt from the sisterhood that no, they shouldn’t come expecting to sing along to “Papa, Can You Hear Me.” It argues that this theatrical “reimagining” (to use Kadimah’s own term) of Yentl is no less authentically Singerian than the musical. It also hints at how Kadimah prevailed, against considerable odds, in adapting a story whose rights Streisand still owns and fiercely guards.
As Gary Abrahams, Kadimah’s executive director and the director of the production, recently told the Jewish Telegraph, Singer’s estate gave him their approval on the condition that it be a Yiddish language, non-musical production. The London transplant, which comes on the heels of earlier stagings in Melbourne and Sydney, is enjoying a six-week run at the Marylebone Theatre, which is housed inside of an anthroposophical center. Both the limited duration of the run and the Off West End venue were critical to securing the Singer estate’s approval.
Kadimah’s production, a bilingual Yiddish-English chamber piece that has gained a certain notoriety for featuring male and female nudity, is the latest chapter in the long and unruly afterlife of Singer’s deceptively simple tale.
In “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” which first appeared, in English translation, in Commentary in September 1962, a rabbi’s daughter, shut out from the Talmud learning reserved for men, cuts her hair, dons male clothing, changes her name to Anshel, finds a chavrusa, the heartbroken Avigdor, and enters a yeshiva. But Singer’s tale is considerably stranger than both that simple summary and Streisand’s popular version suggest.
Yentl is not simply a tale of female exclusion and feminist defiance. It is also a story of impersonation, erotic confusion, spiritual hunger and metaphysical trespass. Yentl does not cross one line and stop there. Once she begins living as Anshel, all the categories meant to keep life orderly — male and female, study and desire, law and transgression — begin to blur.
That instability may explain why Yentl has proved so durable. Before Streisand made it famous on screen, Singer had already adapted it for the stage in the mid-1970s together with Leah Napolin. The show opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1974 and transferred to Broadway the next year, with Tovah Feldshuh in the title role.
“As a play it is altogether too anecdotal,” wrote Clive Barnes in the 1974 Times review. “The storyline wanders on and on like a river through a landscape, but the landscape happens to be worth looking at.” Napolin, who died in 2018 (and who claimed that Singer didn’t write a single word of the script) suggested that the second wave feminism of the time made the story and its themes feel relevant to contemporary audiences.
“This dark little gender-bending tale had an impact on many people who identified, as I did, with the heroine’s struggle to reinvent herself, to redefine herself,” Napolin once told an interviewer.
Half a century later, Kadimah’s Yentl leans heavily, and not always successfully, into our contemporary discourse about sex and gender. The story reemerges in a markedly — and overtly — queerer form than in previous versions.
Streisand’s film absorbed the title character so completely into her own star persona that for many people Yentl is now synonymous with Babs, not Singer. Her approach is expansive where Singer is compressed, ardent where he is dry-eyed, and schmaltzy where he is severe. Streisand gave the story glamor, emotional clarity and uplift. It also tilted the material away from Singer’s sharper ambiguities and toward the all-American theme of becoming oneself. The film, which Streisand also directed, produced and co-wrote, even ends with Yentl aboard a ship bound for America! (In Singer, Yentl simply ups and vanishes, an ending that has been interpreted as a reference to the legend of the Wandering Jew).
Yet Streisand’s victory over the material came with at an expense. As Linda Besner notes in an essay on Singer and Streisand and published in the Canadian arts review Arcade, the film’s feminist reclamation of Yentl also trims away some of the story’s deepest instability. Singer’s Yentl tells Avigdor, “I’m neither one nor the other,” and the story allows a degree of erotic and ontological confusion that the film flattens into a drama of self-realization.
Kadimah’s production, adapted by Abrahams, Elise Esther Hearst and Galit Klas, starts from dissatisfaction with that inheritance. Hearst has said the team wanted to get back to the story’s darker, more transgressive roots. In an interview with The Times of London, Abrahams said he had been struck by how unlike the movie Singer’s story really was, and described the original as a work about spirituality, identity, gender, sexuality, as well as plain old sex.
Those ambitions are evident from the outset. This is not a shy Yentl. It foregrounds the body, goes hard on the story’s sexual unease and sharpens its queer implications. Amy Hack is alluringly androgynous in the title role, both attracted by and attractive to Avigdor and Hodes (Genevieve Kingsford in a very stiff performance), Avigdor’s erstwhile fiancée, who Yentl marries in bad faith. As in the film, she casts a prurient gaze at the bathing Avigdor (Ashley Margolis bares all onstage, one-upping Mandy Patinkin, whose naked tush is one of the film’s most memorable sights). Singer’s story can accommodate plenty of sexual discomfort and frustration, but Abrahams’ production lays it on too thick. Did he really need to make Avigdor a mikveh peeper?
The production also never settles on a convincing tone and register. The one-set production, with its vaguely Expressionist look, goes for too much shtetl schlock. The acting keeps sliding between modes without enough control to make the shifts meaningful: naturalistic for a few minutes, then suddenly pitched into something like Yiddish melodrama. Additionally, there isn’t any discernible logic to why certain passages are spoken in English while others are in Yiddish (with subtitles projected onto the set). The result is less daring than uncertain. No performance fully steadies the evening, although Evelyn Krape comes the closest. As the spectral “Figure,” she hovers, narrates, inhabits minor roles and hangs over the proceedings like a comic dybbuk. The device of a spectral conferencier does not entirely cohere, but Krape — hammy in a grotesque-vulgar-goofy way — almost pulls it off.
Kadimah’s production was lauded in Melbourne and Sydney but has met with a very different reception in London, which is, of course, a no-nonsense theater town. Despite the tepid and sometimes outright negative reviews (“Even with nude scenes, this is a schlep,” The Times of London’s critic wrote), the Thursday evening performance I attended was nearly full. And, the mostly grey-haired audience members, several of whom I recognized, from a nearby kosher deli where I wolfed down a pastrami sandwich before the show, were enthusiastic. A Yiddish Yentl in London now is enough of an event to draw not only the usual suspects but the theatrically adventurous — and, no doubt, some Streisand fans who should know to check their expectations at the door.
Kadimah Yiddish Theater, which recently passed its centenary, is, by some counts, Australia’s oldest theater company. This Yentl might well be the biggest hit they’ve had in their long history. Despite its shortcomings — and there any many, both in concept and execution — the production shows that the company understands the need to strive for more than nostalgia and sentimentality, à la Streisand, and to be a little impious and even impish.
Today’s most interesting Yiddish theater (and also film, to an extent) inscribes itself within tradition while treating that heritage as unstable, literate and vulgar. That is what makes the Yiddish work of another Australian director, Barrie Kosky, so refreshing and bracingly alive.
Earlier this season, Kosky directed K., a “Talmudic vaudeville” inspired by Kafka’s “The Trial” at the Berliner Ensemble. In interviews, Kosky has spoke of the polyglot, code-switching, cross-dressing Yiddish theater that formed part of Kafka’s world. His haunting and unsettling production moves between German, Hebrew and Yiddish (including a gorgeous translation of Schumann’s Dicherliebe into mamaloschen) and injects intellectual seriousness with showbiz energy.
There’s another reason I bring up Kosky, a prolific, influential, and deeply Jewish theater and opera director. In summer 2027, he will present a fresh musical version of Yentl at the Fisher Center for the Arts at Bard College, created together with Lisa Kron (the Tony-winning writer and lyricist of Broadway’s Fun Home) and Adam Benzwi, one of the director’s regular musical collaborators in Berlin. According to Bard’s announcement, Benzwi’s score will draw on American and European Yiddish theater, music hall and Hasidic choral traditions. That sounds less like an attempt to strip Yentl back to some pristine original than like an effort to push through the whole layered history of the piece and make something gloriously heterodox.
By this point Yentl exists not as a single work. Singer gave it severity, mischief and danger. Streisand gave it melody and yearning. Kadimah has tried, admirably if unsuccessful, to restore taboo, Yiddish abrasion and folkloric unease, sometimes vividly, sometimes crudely. Kosky may prove better placed than most to let those elements collide without trying to reconcile them too neatly.
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