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The real Jewish history behind Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ and the WWII rescue mission that inspired it
(JTA) — While the United States swung its door shut to most refugees during World War II, a young American in France saved thousands, including some of the 20th century’s defining artists and thinkers — such as Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt — from the Nazis.
The rescue mission of Varian Fry, which went largely unrecognized during his life, is the subject of Netflix’s new drama “Transatlantic,” launching Friday from “Unorthodox” creator Anna Winger.
Starring Cory Michael Smith as Fry, the seven-episode “Transatlantic” aims to recreate his operation in Marseille after the Nazis defeated France and before the United States entered the war. Winger has injected several imagined romances, war efforts and characters into the fictionalized series, including one posed as Fry’s lover, named Thomas Lovegrove (played by Israeli Amit Rahav). Although Fry’s son has said that he was a “closeted homosexual,” no such person is known to have existed.
Winger believes these inventions will invite Netflix viewers to learn more about the true story.
“The people who lived through these stories are dying out,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “My job is to bring this to a wide audience, to people who don’t know anything about it.”
The story behind the series
The real Varian Fry, a 32-year-old journalist and suit-clad Harvard graduate, showed up in Marseille with $3,000 taped to his leg and a list of 200 names in August 1940.
After France surrendered to Germany, Fry was among 200 Americans — including journalists, artists, museum curators, university presidents and Jewish refugees — to create the Emergency Rescue Committee at the Hotel Commodore in New York. This group was concerned with Article 19 in France’s armistice with Germany, which required French authorities to surrender any individuals demanded by the Germans.
The private relief organization drew up frenzied lists of anti-Nazi intellectuals who were trapped in France. With the help of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the ERC obtained some emergency visas and sent Fry to lead the rescue efforts in Marseille, a port city in the southern, unoccupied part of France.
What he found there was impossible to manage alone. His mission began in his room at the Hotel Splendide, where long lines of refugees waited in the morning before he woke up and at night after he went to bed. They sometimes walked straight into his bedroom without knocking, Fry wrote in a letter to his wife shortly after he arrived.
Gathering a small devoted staff, including Frenchmen, refugees and American expatriates, Fry moved his office to Rue Grignan and later Boulevard Garibaldi. Outside of Marseille he rented the Villa Air-Bel — colorfully recreated in “Transatlantic” — to house eminent writers and eccentric Surrealist artists waiting for visas.
The group developed legal and illegal branches, with the cover organization offering humanitarian relief while a behind-the-scenes operation flouted the law to help refugees escape. Using Marseille’s lively black market, the staff found hiding places, forged documents and bribed officials. Bil Spira, a Jewish Austrian-born cartoonist, forged passports for the ERC. (He was caught and deported to Auschwitz, but survived.) Resistance fighters Hans and Lisa Fittko devised an escape route to Spain, guiding refugees across the Pyrenees mountains on foot.
By the time he was forced out in October 1941, Fry’s shoestring operation had enabled 2,000 Jewish and other anti-Nazi refugees to flee Europe, including such towering artists as Chagall, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, and intellects such as Arendt, Heinrich Mann and André Breton. It has been estimated that 20,000 refugees made contact with the rescue center in Marseille.
Fry’s illegal efforts made him plenty of enemies from his own country, who accused him of interfering with American neutrality in the war. He angered the state department, officials at the American consulate in Marseille and ERC members in New York. In August 1941, he was arrested by Vichy police and sent back to New York.
Fry died in 1967 at the age of 59. Only a few months earlier, he had received the Croix de Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration of merit — and the only official recognition in his lifetime. In 1994, he became the first American honored by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and history authority, as Righteous Among the Nations.
The Emergency Rescue Committee merged with another relief organization and became the International Rescue Committee in 1942. It is still in operation today and currently led by a Jewish CEO, former British politician David Miliband.
What’s in the show, and why some are against it
Some of Fry’s colleagues are fictionalized in “Transatlantic,” including the Jewish Berliner Albert Hirschman (Lucas Englander), who would become an economist in the United States; the Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs); and the Jewish Austro-Hungarian activist Lisa Fittko (Deleila Piasko). American diplomat Hiram Bigham, who gave Fry crucial help and even hid writer Lion Feuchtwanger in his home, is also a character in the show.
Throughout the seven episodes, rescue missions swirl around a series of fictional love affairs. In addition to Fry’s relationship, a triangle unfolds between Hirschman, Gold and the fictional American Consul Graham Patterson. (There is no evidence that Gold romanced either with her comrade or with any American consul in Marseille.) Lisa Fittko has an affair with the fictional character Paul Kandjo, who organizes armed resistance to Vichy.
Gillian Jacobs as heiress Mary Jayne Gold. (Anika Molnar/Netflix)
Several wartime plot points are also invented, including a prison break at Camp de Mille and Gold’s collaboration with British intelligence.
The degree of fictionalization has angered some people close to the real history. Pierre Sauvage, president of the Varian Fry Institute, called the show’s trailer “shocking.” Born in 1944, Sauvage survived the end of the Holocaust in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, although his Jewish parents were turned down by Fry’s overwhelmed committee. He became close friends with some of Fry’s fellow rescuers in their later years, including the late Gold, Hirschman and Fittko.
“Are there any red lines?” he said. “Can one fictionalize at will, with no concern for the reality of the story, for the false impression that people will get — and for the way it affects the private lives of the families of people portrayed?”
Sheila Isenberg, who documented Fry’s operation in her book “A Hero of Our Own,” has described the series as a “travesty.” Thomas Fischer Weiss, a child survivor who attempted Fry’s escape route through the Pyrenees at 5 years old, also said the historical events needed no embellishment.
“I think you should tell it straight,” he told the JTA.
The legacy of the ‘troublemakers’
Sauvage believes that if Fry and his associates were alive today, they would like to be remembered for their convictions.
“These were people who were sort of in your face,” he said. “People who knew clearly what they felt and expressed it. They would often describe themselves as troublemakers. Mary Jayne [Gold] said about Varian that he was an ‘ornery cuss’ — it took orneriness to stick to your guns.”
That orneriness was critical at a time when many Americans were apathetic to the plight of European Jews — a 1938 poll in Fortune magazine found that fewer than 5% believed the United States should raise its immigration quotas for refugees. By the summer of 1941, it was too late to open the doors. The German policy of expelling Jews had changed into extermination.
According to Sauvage, America’s refusal to accept more refugees had something to do with that shift.
“The Nazis could legitimately come to the conclusion that the world wouldn’t do anything about the murders and wouldn’t really care all that much,” he said. “What the Varian Fry mission symbolizes is people who cared.”
Varian Fry with Miriam Davenport in the first offices of the Centre Américain de Secours in Marseille in 1940. Davenport, a friend of Mary Jayne Gold, also worked in the rescue effort but is omitted from “Transatlantic.” (Varian Fry Institute)
After their year in Marseille, the rescuers settled into more ordinary lives. Hirschman became an economist with appointments at Yale, Columbia and Harvard. Lisa Fittko ended up in Chicago, where she worked hard in import-export, translation and clerical jobs to earn money, eventually joining protests against the Vietnam War. Gold divided her time between New York City and a villa on the French Riviera.
They all remembered the rescue mission as their finest hour. Speaking with Sauvage, Gold called that year “the only one in her life that really mattered.”
A refugee story for troubled times
Fry’s rescue mission inspired Julie Orringer to write “The Flight Portfolio,” a 2019 novel that became the basis for “Transatlantic.” Orringer was captivated by the image of a young man arriving in Marseille, idealistic and unprepared for the depth of anguish he would find.
“The task was way too big,” she told the JTA. “He realized quite early on that he was going to ask for help, that he was going to have to turn to others who had deeper experience. And in collecting this group of incredible individuals around him, he assembled a kind of collective mind that really could make a difference under the very difficult circumstances that he faced.”
She believed that Fry left an example for the inexperienced. “If you‘re the kind of person who wants to take action on behalf of refugees, but doesn’t know how to do it, ask for help,” she said.
Winger, a Jewish Massachusetts native who has lived in Berlin for two decades, conceived of making a series about Fry in 2015. Germany saw an influx of more than a million migrants that year, most of them fleeing Syria’s horrific civil war. She optioned Orringer’s book in 2020.
“I thought a lot about the fact that people like us — artists, Jews, both — had to leave Berlin as refugees, but now there were so many people coming to Berlin as refugees,” said Winger.
Then, just as she started filming “Transatlantic” on location in Marseille, a new war broke out in Europe.
“The war in Ukraine started three days into the production and there was a whole other wave of refugees coming to Berlin,” she said. “Suddenly we were making it in another refugee crisis.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hit close to the show, whose cast and crew hail from across the continent. Winger’s cinematographer is married to a Ukrainian woman. In Berlin, she saw thousands of refugees crowding into the central train station, some without shoes, food or plans for shelter.
“I think it gave us all a strong sense of purpose,” said Winger.
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California Jewish groups decry antisemitic conspiracy theories printed in governor’s race voter guide
(JTA) — As Californian voters checked their mailboxes this week, they found a voter guide containing conspiratorial claims about Israel and antisemitic rhetoric.
The mailer, which was sent by California Secretary of State Shirley Weber to the households of all registered California voters, featured biographical information about candidates slated to appear in the state’s June primaries. In all, there are 32 candidates listed, of whom 10 are considered serious contenders.
Among those who are not: the far-right activist Don J. Grundmann, who is not affiliated with any party and has previously described a group he was affiliated with as a “totally peaceful racist group.” Grundman used his entry in the guide to promote a series of anti-Israel conspiracy theories and antisemitic rhetoric.
His entry claimed that Israel had been behind the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk; purposefully killed U.S. soldiers during an attack on the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967; orchestrated the 9/11 attacks and planned to “suitcase nuke” the United States.
“Israel, the REAL terrorists, created and funds Hamas via Qatar,” Grundmann wrote. “Countless war crimes by lsrael/ Netanyahu. No further funding for Israel. They call Palestinians AND Christians AND America ‘Amalek;—their sworn forever enemy.”
The paragraph, which included a series of links to websites promoting antisemitic materials, also included a series of antisemitic claims about Jewish supremacy.
“We are ‘goyim’ (less than human animals/cattle) that they will enslave. We are stupid chumps,” Grundmann wrote, using the Hebrew word for non-Jews that has been increasingly used by the far-right. “Israel rules our conquered Republic. Talmud—their Bible—says Christ boiling in in Israel allowed/planned/promoted Hamas attack (they murdered their own people) to justify genocide and steal billion$ in Gaza oil/gas rights. Christian Zionism = soul poison. Talmudic Judeo-Christian values’ don’t exist . . .”
In both the print version delivered to voters and the online version of the voter guide, a disclaimer was added for Grundmann’s entry that did not appear for any other candidates: “The views and opinions expressed by the candidates are their own and do not represent the views and opinions of the Secretary of State’s office.” The line also appears on the bottom of each page.
Local Jewish groups, including the Jewish Federation of Orange County, decried the inclusion of the entry, saying in a letter to Weber, “When something appears in an official voter guide, it carries a level of legitimacy and reaches millions.”
Added the groups, including the federation, the Anti-Defamation League of Orange County/Long Beach, the Jewish Community Action Network and Israeli American Council, “By including a statement containing antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories in an official voter guide, the State has effectively provided a government platform for rhetoric that fuels division and undermines the safety and dignity of Jewish communities.”
The groups called on Weber to explain how the statement was approved. They contended that the entry violated the guidelines by making “extensive reference to third parties” and using “largely of inflammatory and conspiratorial claims unrelated to any permissible category of content” included in the provisions.
“At a time of rising antisemitism, including rhetoric rooted in antisemitic tropes in a state publication is deeply concerning,” read the letter. “This isn’t about limiting speech—it’s about enforcing neutral standards and maintaining the integrity of our election materials.”
The voter guide comes as antisemitism has emerged as a notable issue in the upcoming California governor’s race, with several candidates staking out their approach to rising antisemitism in the state at a candidate forum in February. The primary is on June 2.
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Matan Koch, disability advocate who urged Jewish communities to ‘let everyone in,’ dies at 44
(JTA) — Matan Koch needed little introduction as he rolled up to the podium to speak at his synagogue’s Disability Shabbat service in October. His wide smile and power wheelchair made him well known to many his Los Angeles congregation, Ikar.
Still, Rabbi Sharon Brous, beaming at him, described her congregant warmly before ceding the microphone.
“The most important thing for you to know about Matan is that he is a deeply soulful, profoundly decent, and incredibly kind human being. And every single day that you have been in our community, you have made our community better,” she said. “It’s an absolute joy and honor to dive in with you, to call you a friend, and to have you as a beloved member of our community.”
In the sermon that followed, Koch described times that he had felt excluded from Jewish communities, or struggled to be included, because of his own disabilities. He urged his fellow congregants to change the way they think about inclusion.
“Every time you’re looking for one more participant, one more volunteer, one more Torah reader, think about who is excluded from our community by disability or any other reason — and think about how we would be enriched if only they were here,” he said. “Then let that motivate us to create an inclusive community that truly lets everyone in.”
It was a synopsis of the mission that Koch carried with him in his personal and professional life. Koch, who used a wheelchair throughout his lifetime, and who was respected as an accomplished lawyer, a passionate advocate for people with disabilities, and a committed member of Jewish communities, died Friday in Los Angeles, after a brief but fierce battle against stomach cancer. He was 44.
“His condition declined far more quickly than he, and we, had hoped,” his family wrote as they shared the news of his death on his Facebook page, filled with remembrances from hundreds of friends and followers from across the country.
“Ever optimistic, he pushed to squeeze every drop of love and connection and intellectual engagement out of life,” they added. “Even as options narrowed, Matan remained focused on staying present and connected to the people he loved.”
At the time of his death, Koch was the Los Angeles’ ADA compliance officer and director of its disability access and services division, ensuring that the city comported with the requirements of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.
In the last post he authored earlier this month, Koch expressed both anger about his illness and appreciation for the many people who were contributing to a crowdfunding campaign to allow him to die with dignity at home. He said he was feeling “fury that my life has been cut so tragically short, euphoric overwhelming at the outpouring of love and support, and awe and gratitude for my family as they work with all of you in a full court press to see my needs met.”
Born in 1981, in New Milford, Connecticut, Koch was both brilliant and precocious and from an early age moved through a world not built for his body with clarity and determination, according to Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, one of his four siblings.
Born prematurely, he had cerebral palsy, a neurological condition that severely limited his mobility and required him to use a wheelchair.
It was just a few years after the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which reshaped the requirements for schools to serve students with special needs. Yet his parents, the late Rabbi Norman Koch and Rosalyn Koch, a Jewish educator, had to fight for services from their local public schools.
Koch advanced to Yale University at age 16 and went on to Harvard Law School when he was just 20, graduating in 2005. He held numerous appointments on disability rights committees, first at Yale and then as vice president of the New Haven Disability Commission. In 2011, President Barack Obama tapped him to serve on the National Council on Disability.
“His whole life was breaking glass ceilings,” Epstein told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a phone conversation just hours before Matan’s death.
“He had a body that was built for a world that doesn’t yet exist and he spent his whole life working to build systems that recognize ability, expand access and include people across the full spectrum of disability,” Epstein said, adding, “He sees the goodness in every person he meets, and he sees the possibility.”
The family of five kids grew up in a deeply Jewish home. Epstein recalled her younger brother having deep conversations about Jewish values and ideas with her and their father.
“That was something very important to Matan. He really loved to learn and loved to sing. He sang with gusto. And he loved camp,” added Epstein, who serves as executive director of Atra, the Center for Jewish Innovation.
Their parents were leaders at Camp Eisner, the Jewish summer camp in the Berkshires, and the family spent their summers there. “The Jewish community is his home,” she said.
Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and senior vice president for the Union for Reform Judaism, was the director of education at Camp Eisner when Koch was a camper. He recalled a time when Koch asked Pesner to help him to go to the bathroom.
Koch led Pesner back to the bunk and explained step-by-step, how to assist, with laughter and without making Pesner feel self-conscious. “From the earliest age, Matan was engaging, mature beyond his years and non-judgmental,” Pesner said.
After graduating from law school, Koch worked first as an associate at major law firms before striking out on his own as a consultant working to help businesses and nonprofits become more inclusive. From there, he joined a disability rights organization called Respectability, moving to Los Angeles to become its local director.
Many people assumed that because he was quadriplegic, Koch must be helpless, according to Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, the Jewish activist who co-founded the group, now known as Disability Belongs. In fact, she said, his abilities were remarkable.
She recalled the role Koch played during the Covid-19 pandemic, a perilous time for people with disabilities, who faced high mortality rates if they became ill from the virus.
Many of his staff were disabled. They — and countless other disabled people — couldn’t risk going to a grocery store before vaccinations were available.
Koch’s team partnered with Los Angeles and the federal government to change the regulations to allow SNAP beneficiaries to have their groceries delivered in California and in several other states. “That was huge,” Laszlo Mizrahi said.
In Los Angeles, Koch was an active and beloved member of Ikar. In his Disability Shabbat sermon, he recalled an experience in college that led him to take a deep dive into a Talmudic debate on excluding people who might be distracting from leading the priestly blessing, he told them. Ultimately, the rabbis reasoned their way into acceptance.
“In using that text, Matan acknowledged the reality of how a community might interact with someone with a disability,” recalled Morris Panitz, the congregation’s associate rabbi. “People might be uncomfortable at first. But the work of the community is to get to know the person.”
Koch delivered his sermon with conviction, but gently, with his warm smile, Panitz said. This was true of him generally. “He invited people along for the journey,” he said.
“Matan Koch left an indelible mark on our community,” the synagogue told its members in an email on Sunday that added, “Matan’s persistent belief and tireless work to ensure that everyone feels welcomed and known will endure as a moral vision in our community. We will miss Matan’s enthusiastic davening, wide smile, and generous love.”
Koch could hold court in meaningful conversations as easily with heads of businesses as with Jewish texts, said Jack Rubin, one of his closest friends since they met their first week at Yale. Until Koch could not anymore, they talked for hours at a time.
“Nothing was outside the bounds of his intellectual curiosity or his capacity to wonder,” said Rubin, whose family spent the first of Passover with Koch at Koch’s home earlier this month.
“We had seder with him, for as long as he had the energy. He asked my kids questions. It was amazing,” Rubin said, holding back tears just a few hours before Koch died.
Although Koch possessed a unique ability to persuade people to embrace inclusion and implement meaningful opportunities for disabled people, according to those who knew him well, he did face limits in his own life.
At one time, Koch hoped to attend Hebrew Union College and become a rabbi, Pesner recalled. He and others tried for a long time to make it happen. But Koch’s complex medical needs couldn’t be overcome within the school’s physical and programmatic constraints at the time.
“It’s the biggest regret of my career that we could not figure out how to get him rabbinic ordination,” Pesner said. “I think it was a loss for the Jewish people.”
Yet Koch never stopped pressing Jewish communities to rethink how they treat members with disabilities, challenging up-and-coming leaders at the Reform movement’s youth conference and being honored in 2016 by the Jewish disability inclusion organization Matan.
“Sometimes you can be a change-maker and be a person who’s putting out really big ideas, but sometimes it can come with a sharp edge,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs said in a movie compiled to honor Koch at the time, which also included a tribute from the actress Mayim Bialik. “With Matan, it comes with love, and he raises people up.”
Meredith Polsky, the director of the organization Matan, said in an email that her group would continue the mission of the friend and advocate who shared its name — a name meaning “gift” in Hebrew.
“Though his final breath came far too soon, we carry that charge forward, committed to building a Jewish community that reflects his vision of true inclusion and belonging,” Polsky wrote.
Koch’s father Norman died in 2015. Koch is survived by his mother, Rosalyn Koch, siblings Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein and Jason, Yonatan Koch, Adina Koch and Aytan Koch; nieces and nephews Amichai, Kobi, Avigayil, Duncan and Jason and his honorary family: Martin Smith, Jack and Stephanie Rubin and their children Olivia and Edward.
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Assault outside synagogue and rock thrown through Judaica shop window ratchet up Toronto Jews’ concerns
(JTA) — A pair of incidents took place outside of Jewish sites in the Toronto area over the weekend, adding to a series of attacks that have left the city’s Jewish community unnerved.
During Shabbat services on Saturday, a man tried to force his way into the Sephardic Kehilah Centre, in the suburb of Vaughan. After the man was turned away by security, he reportedly encountered a father and son on their way to the synagogue and punched the father in the face. The father was left with no serious injuries.
The following day, photos circulated after a rock was hurled and broke the window of Aleph Bet Judaica, a shop on the heavily Jewish Bathurst Street corridor. Police did not confirm which business was hit, but confirmed that a rock was thrown at a business near Bathurst Street and Regina Avenue, and that the Hate Crime Unit “was consulted and is aware.”
No suspects have been identified in either incident.
Unlike other recent attacks on Toronto synagogues and Jewish businesses, which were carried out late at night, these two incidents took place in broad daylight, both around 9:30 a.m.
The UJA Federation of Greater Toronto wrote in a statement that the Sephardic Kehilah Centre incident, which is being investigated by the police’s Hate Crime Unit, reflected “a continued pattern of antisemitic violence targeting our community.”
In March, three synagogues across the Toronto area were hit with gunfire. In the last couple of months, a restaurant owned by a Jewish pro-Israel advocate was shot at twice, at two of its locations. And in 2024, a Jewish girls’ elementary school was hit by gunfire on three separate occasions.
“As these incidents become more normalized, they erode public safety and our way of life as Canadians,” the UJA’s statement read. “This cannot be tolerated.”
The Canadian Jewish News reported that the suspect was turned away by synagogue security on Saturday for “suspicious behavior,” according to an email from the rabbi, and told security that he was Middle Eastern and not there for prayer services. After the man left the building, according to the email, he threw away torn pieces of paper which looked to contain verses of Psalms.
B’nai Brith Canada blasted “people in positions of authority” who it says have “responded with hesitation, weak enforcement, and political platitudes while Jewish communities continue to pay the price.” It also thanked Vaughan Mayor Steven Del Duca, who wrote that “we must be vigilant and do everything possible to support and protect our Jewish residents.”
The group called for the federal government to take eight specific actions to combat antisemitism, including establishing a national antisemitism task force, providing emergency funding for the protection of Jewish institutions, and prosecuting the repeated gunfire attacks as acts of domestic terrorism.
On Monday, B’nai Brith also released its annual audit of antisemitic incidents, which found that there were 18.6 antisemitic incidents reported per day across Canada in 2025, a 9% increase from 2024.
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