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The mysterious disappearance of Yemenite children in Israel is the focus of a new play
(New York Jewish Week) — Shortly after the State of Israel was founded, Shanit Keter-Schwartz was born on a dirt floor, in a hut made of aluminum siding outside the burgeoning town of Tel Aviv. She was the second of six children, the daughter of Yemenite Jews who had recently immigrated to the new country. They’d faced discrimination and violence in their country of origin, so when Jewish emissaries turned up in 1949 to bring 50,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel as a part of “Operation Flying Carpet,” they were all in.
Unfortunately, Keter-Schwartz’s upbringing in Israel was no magic carpet ride. “[Yemenite Jews] were seen as savages, primitive, inferior in the eyes of the Ashkenazi Jews,” Keter-Schwartz recalled in an interview with the New York Jewish Week. “They were not sophisticated or educated. It was a cultural domination, a collective trauma in Israel. They faced war, hunger, poverty, and living in very harsh conditions.”
The worst, though, wasn’t near-starvation due to rationing, or the harsh conditions of the shanty towns that these new immigrants were placed in, or the way European children wrinkled their nose at her and called her smelly. No, the worst was when the government stole her sister, Sarah, whom Keter-Schwartz never saw again.
In what has become known as the Yemenite Children Affair, more than 1,000 children of Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan descent were separated from their children during the first decade of Israel’s existence. The families and their advocates have long insisted, over denials by officials, that the children were taken from their families by the Ashkenazi government during the first decade of Israel’s existence. More often than not, parents were told their children had died when they had, in fact, been given to families of European descent for adoption, according to Amram Association, one of several organizations dedicated to documenting these abductions and advocating for victims’ families.
Now, Keter-Schwartz — a writer and performer who lives in Los Angeles, and a mother to two grown daughters — has brought to life her family’s story and her search for her missing sister in the form of a one-woman show. Premiering on Thursday at New York City Center, and running through May 15, “Daughter of the Wicked” chronicles her family’s journey from the Yemenite ma’abarot (refugee camps) to shikunim (government housing projects), where they lived in a tiny two-room apartment amid a melting pot of Jewish immigrants who were often at odds with one another.
“It is overcrowded, and the people who live here come from many different places. In their countries they were… respected by their communities,” she says in the show, which is named after one of the many Yemenite curses her mother would hurl at her when she’d done something wrong. “But here [in Israel] they are forced into stereotypes.”
“Israel had no choice but to bring the Jews from the Arab countries because the European Jews population had been greatly diminished after the Holocaust, but they didn’t want us,” Keter-Schwartz told the New York Jewish Week. “They took control of our lives, tried to assimilate us, wanted the whole country to be secular and uniform. They made all the decisions for us.”
One such “decision” made by the government, she said, was to remove her oldest brother, Yossi, from the family home to “re-educate” him at an Ashkenazi kibbutz. It worked: Yossi returned as a proud secular farmer, disdainful and ashamed of his spiritualist, religious family and their traditional ways.
The disappearance of her baby sister, Sarah, inspired Keter-Schwartz’s play, which is also informed by the kabbalistic teachings of her father. (Russ Rowland)
In the case of Keter-Schwartz’s sister, the abduction occurred directly after she was born. “When my father went to the hospital to pick up the twins, my siblings, he returned only with David. They told him that the girl, Sarah, was sick, and he should come back the following day. But when he came back, they told him that she had died,” Keter-Schwartz said. “Being naive, he didn’t question this. He didn’t ask to see a death certificate. He didn’t even know [a certificate] existed. He didn’t demand to see her body, didn’t think to bury her or give her funeral rites. He never suspected for a minute they could deceive him.”
This story, and others, is conveyed in “Daughter of the Wicked” through a series of monologues, each tied to an idea from Kabbalah,the Jewish mystical tradition. Keter-Schwartz defines each concept — like ahava (love), metsuka (hardship), busha (shame) — then tells a personal story that relates to the topic.
With this framework, Keter-Schwartz pays homage to her father, a spiritualist rabbi who spent his days poring over holy texts and divining the true meaning of the universe. She reads from his writings — which were collected and published towards the end of his life as a book, “Nachash HaNechoshet” — detailing her complex relationship to a man who was both an inspiration and, at times, inscrutable to all around him.
“The play is set in a hotel room, while I’m waiting for my sister to show up,” Keter-Schwartz explains. “As I wait, I tell my life. Behind me, on three screens, there’s archival footage from the 1950s that I got from Steven Spielberg’s archive. That footage tells the story, too, and so does the music.” The accompanying music, which transitions the audience from segment to segment, was written by Israeli composer Lilo Fedida, using traditional Yemenite melodies and instruments.
“We lived with this [tragedy] all my childhood, and I’ve been wondering all these years about my missing sister,” said Keter-Schwartz. “If I see her on the street, will I recognize her? Where does she live? Is she happy? I felt guilty that I never really tried to find her, I was so busy with my own life. But now I need to know.”
As a young woman, Keter-Schwartz said she went to great lengths to distance herself from her family’s tragedies. She lived in Amsterdam, London and New York, finally finding her footing in Los Angeles. She changed her name — from Shoshana to Shanit — and declared herself a new person in a new land. It was only when she lost all but one of her siblings, as well as both parents, that she felt an urge to revisit the past. When her last surviving sibling got so ill he almost died, she swore to search for Sarah. Initially, the idea was just to hire a private investigator to try to locate her. During her search, though, she began to feel an urge to share her story.
“I’d never written a play, so it took me two years [working] with coaches,” says Keter-Schwartz. “I’ve been an actress all my life, I’ve edited other people’s scripts, I produced movies, but to actually write — ha! I had amazing coaches. I’m especially grateful to Yigal Chatzor, the Israeli playwright. He brought the Israeli spice and the humor, which is wonderful now because now the play is balanced. It’s heart-wrenching and it’s hysterical. It’s everything, you know.”
The Yemenite Children Affair has never been formally confirmed by the state of Israel, which maintains the position that most of the babies died of malaria or malnutrition and were not, as some have proposed, sold to Ashkenazi families in exchange for donations to the young country. Several government-led commissions have claimed that there was no official wrongdoing, but testimonies continue to emerge that suggest otherwise. According to a 2016 article in Yediot Ahronot, a prominent Israeli news source, the government has sealed the official records of these disappearances until 2071, despite ongoing demonstrations and demands for actions.
In 2021, the Israeli government authorized tens of millions of dollars in reparations to families whose children disappeared while in government care. Nonetheless, no official admission of guilt or apology has been issued, a fact which caused many affected families to reject the plan, calling it “hush money.” Only a fraction of the affected families are eligible for these payments and, according to recent reporting, very few have claimed the money. Less than 1% of the allocated funds have been distributed thus far.
For Keter-Schwartz, no amount of money could compensate for the loss of her sister. She’s more interested in creating connections with others who lost family members and bringing awareness to this chapter in Israeli history. “Going back to my roots, revisiting the past, is an act of forgiveness,” Keter-Schwartz said in a statement. “By writing this play, I was able to forgive and accept the past. I hope that when audiences see my play they come to terms with their own history, and that they feel a sense of what it means to be free, and the challenges that confront us in maintaining that freedom.”
That is a major throughline of “Daughter of the Wicked”: Keter-Schwartz does not forsake the country that gave her her identity and childhood; rather, she insists on loving it while demanding recognition of past wrongs. Towards the end of her show, Keter Ashkenazi raises both arms to the sky and screams at those who wronged her: “My country! I blame you, shame on you for forsaking us, shame on you!”
But then, she lowers her arms and says, voice cracking with heartbreak: “I love you, I blame you, I love you. My country, I love you.”
—
The post The mysterious disappearance of Yemenite children in Israel is the focus of a new play appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100
The television entertainment personality Gene Shalit, who celebrated his centenary on March 25, semaphored a Jewish appearance for decades to viewers of NBC’s early morning gabfest The Today Show.
With his Jew-fro hairstyle that fascinated celebrity interviewees and his abundant mustache that outdid Groucho Marx’s mere greasepaint simulacrum, Shalit was one of a kind. Born in New York City in 1926, he clearly aimed to be recognizable even through half-opened bleary eyes of half-asleep viewers. And audible too. Shalit’s precise pronunciation, always at a vigorous decibel level, sought to be comprehensible even during voiceovers. The Canadian comedian Eugene Levy, transfixed by this persona, imitated him on SCTV roaring at high decibel levels.
In one skit, Levy embodied Shalit with haimish affection, hawking a remedy for a migraine presumably caused by his own bellowing. In another, Levy spoofed Hollywood celebrities who were notorious fressers at local restaurants, including the American Jewish actress Shelley Winters (born Shirley Schrift). In still another lampoon, Levy-as-Shalit danced and also kibitzed with the late Catherine O’Hara as the Jewish gossip columnist Rona Barrett (born Burstein).
Shalit apparently kvelled at the notion that he was prominent enough in media culture to be affectionately kidded like other Jewish noteworthies Levy imitated, including Howard Cosell, Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Milton Berle, Judd Hirsch, Jack Carter, James Caan, Lorne Greene, Norman Mailer and Neil Sedaka.
Years later, Levy recalled that when the SCTV comedy troupe was invited to appear on The Today Show, before the segment was filmed, chairs were arranged so that Catherine O’Hara was seated next to Shalit. Suddenly Shalit exclaimed: “Wait a minute, shouldn’t the person who [imitates] me be sitting beside me?” Another Jewish comedian, Jon Lovitz, would likewise attempt to imitate Shalit on Saturday Night Live, but without the zest of Levy’s indelible incarnation.
Shalit once told showbiz reporter Eileen Prose that at first, his looks limited him to radio jobs in more conventional times for TV talent. By the more liberated late 1960s, when long hair and a hirsute upper lip were more common, he was hired as quasi-permanent house Jew on The Today Show. Although his mustache fit the counterculture in the mode of Jewish activist Jerry Rubin’s, Shalit as an aspiring journalist may have grown his facial hair more in tribute to earlier literati like the playwright William Saroyan or the eminent humorist Mark Twain.
At times, Shalit’s appearance could be clown-like or cartoonish, so it was natural that characters inspired by him would appear on animated series such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Family Guy as well as The Muppet Show.
Famous interviewees like Peter Sellers were plainly at ease with Shalit’s persona. A conversation filmed shortly before Sellers’ untimely death was cordial, with the sometimes tetchy actor on his best behavior, acknowledging Shalit as a fellow entertainer. And with Mel Brooks in 1987, Shalit looked to be in paradise.
A warm-hearted empathizer and enthusiast, Shalit was more suited to promoting films than criticizing them. In 1989, a tzimmes occurred when a memo drafted by Bryant Gumbel, a Today Show colleague, deemed Shalit a “specialist in gushing over actors and directors” and added that Shalit’s interviews “aren’t very good.” To his credit, Shalit minimized the controversy, telling The Los Angeles Times that Gumbel’s disses were “not big whacks.”
“Listen, I’ve been interviewing people on the show for 17 years,” Shalit said. “I must be doing something right.”
Part of his inspiration was a sincere appreciation for humor, Jewish and otherwise. His 1987 anthology, Laughing Matters featured contributions by Jewish wits such as Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Woody Allen, Fran Lebowitz, Samuel Hoffenstein, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, George S. Kaufman, Milt Gross, Arthur Kober, Leo Rosten, Allan Sherman, Max Shulman, Calvin Trillin, Rube Goldberg, Sam Gross, Roz Chast, B. Kliban, Robert Mankoff, J. B. Handelsman, Jules Feiffer and George Burns. The volume was dedicated to, among others, the Jewish screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who was Shalit’s instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His visceral reaction to Jewish parody was such that during one commuter train ride, Shalit admitted in a preface, Perelman’s story “No Starch in the Dhoti, S’il Vous Plait” caused a conductor to lean down with concern, stating: “A passenger says you’re crying.” To which Shalit retorted, choking and rubbing away tears: “I’m laughing.”
The subliminal message of Shalit’s book was that without Jews, America would have distinctly fewer tears of laughter. And he regretted not being able to include funny Jews like Jack Benny and Ed Wynn whose performances could not be transferred to the printed page.
Shalit also reviewed books for years. Sticking firmly to the content of cultural products with a few brief hints of value judgment, Shalit seemed to have neither the time nor presumably the inclination to subject new items to analysis of Freudian intensity. He clearly preferred boosting things to panning them, and when a film displeased Shalit, he could be uncomfortable saying so.
One occasion when Shalit raised hackles was his response on The Today Show to the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. Shalit described one of the gay characters as a “sexual predator.” The LGBTQ media group GLAAD objected to Shalit’s characterization as a homophobic stereotype. Shalit’s son Peter wrote an open letter to GLAAD, identifying himself as a gay physician with a Seattle practice helping the gay community. Peter Shalit admitted that his father “did not get” the film in question, but was “not a homophobe.” He might have added that his father had even included an excerpt from Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy in the aforementioned humor collection.
Shalit followed up with his own apology, stating in a mensch-like way that he did not intend to cast “aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself.” When Shalit finally retired from broadcasting at age 84, with the Yiddish-inflected declaration: “It’s enough, already,” he left behind admiring viewers and decades of bonhomie as one of morning television’s most genial protagonists.
Mazel tov, Gene Shalit. Biz hundert un tsvantsik (May you live until 120)!
The post Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100 appeared first on The Forward.
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How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay
I’m almost positive I heard about the old lady who swallowed a fly before the father who bought a goat for two zuzim.
This occurred to me a few years ago while riding in my sister’s minivan. My niece was in her car seat fidgeting with a toy that plays a catalogue of public domain children’s songs. But unlike the version I’d grown up hearing, where the old lady’s ravenous habit of devouring ever-larger animals is met with the prognostic shrug of “perhaps she’ll die,” the refrain was changed to the more kid-friendly “oh me oh my.”
The Seder tune “Chad Gadya,” which involves a quite similar conceit, has no such timidity when it comes to the ravages of death.
Jack Black once described it as the “original heavy metal song” for the way it progresses along the chain of life from a little goat bought for two zuzim, to the cat who ate the goat, to the dog who bit the cat, all the way up to the angel of death. (“Very Black Sabbath.”)
It is pretty metal — in a kosher Kidz Bop, tot Shabbat kinda way. But why we sing it should, in Jewish circles, be as popular a seasonal question as what a bunny with a clutch of eggs has to do with Jesus’ resurrection. (Some Haggadot explain the greater significance of “Chad Gadya;” my Maxwell House does not.)
Dating the song or rooting out its precise origins is not easy.
As historian Henry Abramson wrote, scholars have noted the song’s similarities to a late Medieval German folk rhyme. While the fact that it is mostly in Aramaic, not the vernacular in Europe in the Middle Ages, suggests an earlier provenance, it is missing from extant Sephardic and Yemenite Haggadot, where one would expect to find texts originating in the language, and the Aramaic itself has many errors.
Abramson reasons that, given the surviving written versions, it was likely adapted sometime in the 14th century from a German children’s rhyme called “The Foreman that Sent Jockel Out,” about an idler named Jockel who a foreman tries to rouse to fieldwork with an escalating series of messengers, ending with a hangman. (Abramson notes the original is characterized by “some Teutonic weirdness,” like a witch sent to subdue a vulture.)
“Chad Gadya” belongs, like its Seder companion “Echad Mi Yodea,” to a genre called “cumulative song,” where verses build with new information a la “12 Days of Christmas.” But “Chad Gadya” stands out for its strangeness and its more oblique message.
Abramson and others see the goat, small and vulnerable, standing in for the Jewish people, and the ensuing parade of antagonists corresponding to historical enemies (Assyrians, Babylonians) and periods of time (Exodus, various conquests), ending with redemption in the Messianic age when the Holy One smites death.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in a commentary for his Haggadah, the song “teaches the great truth of Jewish hope: that though many nations (symbolized by the cat, the dog, and so on) attacked Israel (the goat), each in turn has vanished into oblivion.”
That this truth is conveyed in song, with much banging on the table or animal noises, speaks to the centrality of children in the Passover Seder. And, some think, its inclusion serves a practical purpose: keeping the kids awake through the last leg of a long ritual meal.
My own interpretation is admittedly less lofty. I don’t think of Israel’s tribulations. I do think of the abundance of stray cats in Jerusalem, said to have originated during the British mandate when the city had a rat problem.
And, in the years since my own days as designated Four Questions asker, I’ve been reading “Chad Gadya” into non-Jewish contexts. “The White Cat,” off of Mitski’s new album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, contains a lyric that recalls the song, only altered to be a metaphor for the predations of capitalism.
In it, the speaker says she must work to pay for the cat’s house and “for the bugs who drink my blood/and the birds who eat those bugs/so that white cat can kill the birds.”
These cycles speak across cultures and time because they represent a fundamental rule of nature: There’s always a bigger fish (or cat or dog or stick).
To erase death from the equation, like my niece’s toy does with that hapless, insect-ingesting pensioner, is a concession to today’s sensitivities. That’s not to say “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” represents anything more homiletic than a choking hazard warning, but in the case of “Chad Gadya,” death is the story, and an end to death is the hope.
“The Haggadah ends with the death of death in eternal life,” Rabbi Sacks concluded his drash on the song, which ends when God strikes down the Angel of Death. “A fitting end for the story of a people dedicated to Moshe’s great command, ‘Choose life.’”
I know it’s a principle of faith all over the Haggadah, but I’m more agnostic as to that Messianic promise and maybe more in the camp of our old lady. My understanding of Jewishness, which accords with Moshe’s command, says life is best lived knowing that — perhaps — we’ll die.
The post How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay appeared first on The Forward.
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Katz: ‘Israel’s Goal in Lebanon is to Disarm Hezbollah’
Then-Israeli transportation minister Israel Katz attends the cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Feb. 17, 2019. Katz currently serves as the foreign minister. Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz held a situation assessment Friday with senior military and defense officials, reiterating that the country’s policy in Lebanon remains focused on disarming Hezbollah by military and political means. Katz emphasized that the goal applies “regardless of the Iran issue” and pledged continued protection for Israeli northern communities.
Katz said the Israel Defense Forces are completing ground maneuvers up to the anti-tank line to prevent direct threats to border towns. He outlined plans to demolish houses in villages near the border that serve as Hezbollah outposts, citing previous operations in Rafah and Khan Yunis in Gaza as models.
The Defense Minister added that the IDF will maintain security control over the Litani area and that the return of 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon who had evacuated north will not be permitted until northern communities’ safety is ensured. Katz also reaffirmed that the IDF will continue targeting Hezbollah leaders and operatives across Lebanon, noting that 1,000 terrorists have already been eliminated since the start of the current campaign.
“We promised security to the northern towns, and that is exactly what we will do,” Katz said. He further warned that the IDF will act decisively against rocket fire from Lebanon, stating that Hezbollah “will pay heavy prices.”