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This Pennsylvania rabbi fuses liberal Judaism with Hasidic Yiddish
When Americans want to learn Yiddish, they usually sign up for classes at YIVO, the Yiddish Book Center or the Workers Circle. But when someone asks Rabbi Cody Bahir, the newly installed head of a Conservative congregation in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he learned Yiddish, he lists a different set of classrooms: a half-dozen Hasidic communities, from Sanz to Satmar.
So how did a Kentucky-born Christian end up with a black homburg and a Southeast European accent in Yiddish?
Born to a Christian mother and a Jewish father who had converted and become a church deacon, Bahir had trouble with the Trinity from an early age. As a child, he would replace the wording “in Jesus’ name we pray” with “in God’s name we pray,” because he reasoned that “we should pray to the boss.”
One day, Bahir’s father received a letter from his grandmother. She explained that she came from rabbinic stock, but because the family had fallen on hard times, she’d married his secular, well-to-do great-grandfather. She wrote that she felt guilty and heartbroken over her grandson’s lost Jewish heritage.
Moved by the letter, Bahir’s father began exploring Judaism and going to shul — bringing young Cody along. The rabbi there lent Cody a copy of Elie Wiesel’s Souls on Fire. Its Hasidic tales ignited a fascination that would change Bahir’s life.
A Kentucky boy at yeshiva
In the years that followed, Bahir pursued a Jewish education. At the age of nine, he underwent a Conservative conversion. He learned to read basic Hebrew at the Louisville JCC, and attended a traditional community Jewish day school for middle school. But he was soon searching for something more intense.
After an Orthodox conversion at age 14, Bahir left for Skokie, Illinois, to study Talmud and learn rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic at a Modern Orthodox yeshiva. But the environment proved too modern for him. “They had color TVs, they wore T-shirts — I was looking for something ekht khsidish, authentically Hasidic,” Bahir recalls. To really join the Hasidic world, however, Bahir would need not only the Talmudic skills he was swiftly acquiring, but also something else: fluent, spoken Yiddish.
Bahir spent the next few years studying rabbinic texts and Hasidic Yiddish simultaneously. He joined a Hasidic yeshiva in Monsey, NY and found a pair of Yiddish tutors from two different sects.
His textbook was a copy of Torah Berura — the Biblical text with a translation in modern Hasidic Yiddish (or “plain Yiddish, as it’s known in the community,” he remarked), rather than the older translations in so-called “bubbe Yiddish”, written in a more formal, literary style.
When even that immersion wasn’t enough for him, he crossed the Atlantic to study in Tsfat, Israel. Learning with two different tutors again, Bahir was able to get his Yiddish to the point where he could join a “fully Hasidic yeshiva where English wasn’t even allowed.”
Reflecting on his learning, Bahir said it was a “figure it out and absorb it” kind of experience. Given little formal grammar instruction, he was expected to read the Yiddish aloud, using the Hebrew for translation. On top of formal study, there was also the school of what Bahir called “full inculturation,” as he was encouraged by his tutors to visit specific shuls in Me’a She’arim, Jerusalem, where people spoke only Yiddish.
At the end of his two years of immersion, however, Bahir had doubts about his faith and lifestyle. The aspirational view he’d formed of Hasidism, as he’d understood it from books, didn’t align with his everyday reality as an adolescent in a yeshiva. He couldn’t reconcile his expectations with his perception of his peers: “They were Hasidish, but they were still typical teenagers.” A few months shy of 17, he cut off his sidelocks, changed into jeans and a T-shirt, threw his beaver hat over the Verazzano Bridge and returned to Kentucky.
A winding Jewish journey
Bahir’s path back to Yiddish and Yiddishkeit in the years that followed would take many curious twists. After yeshiva, he began a BA at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, but the culture shock after his yeshiva years was “extreme.” A year in, he “became a hippie” and tried to “find himself,” but ultimately decided he would need to do something with his life.
He set his sights on the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, which seemed like “the perfect place for a wandering Jew to land, where you had the opportunity to be as Jewish as you wanted to be, and were encouraged to figure that out.” And, he added, AJU “was culturally a lot closer to Boro Park than Kentucky.”
Bahir finished his BA at the AJU and then started an MA in Judaic Studies at Hebrew Union College. While still a student in the program, he joined the faculty. Tasked with creating a beit midrash program, Bahir used a Hasidic model he described in these words: “We pop open a sefer, a religious book, we bang our heads against it, we don’t use the dictionaries, we try to make it work.” He felt it was important to teach the students to “chant” the Gemara the same way he’d learned in yeshiva, rather than only to “learn about it.” His students seemed to appreciate this new kind of experience, and the program continued after he left.
When he finished his MA, Bahir felt his old restlessness kick in. He wanted to learn “something different, something newer, to broaden my horizons.” The result: He learned Chinese, did a doctorate involving six years of fieldwork in Taiwan (where he also met his wife, Sonia), and completed a post-doc on Chinese Buddhism at UC Berkeley. Bahir later returned to Jewish education, teaching Jewish studies at The Kehillah School, a high school in Palo Alto and K-8 students at the Tucson Hebrew Academy in Tucson, Arizona.
A new place for Yiddish
Yiddish, which had been such a major element of Bahir’s Jewish journey years before, would also propel him to the next stage in his Yiddishkeit: becoming a rabbi. At the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, Bahir took up Yiddish as his pandemic project. He downloaded some tkhines, Yiddish folk prayers, along with “a dreadful scan” of a Yiddish translation of the Zohar.
When he finally took a YIVO class — the intensive program had gone online for the summer — his own Yiddish was in for a surprise. “In YIVO Yiddish there’s correct, there’s incorrect. But in Hasidic Yiddish,” he noted, “you can make almost anything Yiddish.”
As he returned to the language of his yeshiva days, Bahir also reconnected with his religious side. “The deepest, most transformative spiritual experiences that I’d had in my life — all those happened in Yiddish. Once I started bringing Yiddish back into life, it was like a memory unlocked.”
By 2021, he’d received rabbinic ordination from Mesifta Adath Wolkowisk, an off-campus ordination program for mid-career Jewish professionals. When he saw a job ad for a rabbi in the Taiwan Jewish community, Bahir didn’t hesitate: it was a perfect fit.
In Taiwan, Bahir was eager to introduce “the joy and inclusivity that is the spirit of Hasidus” to his new congregation: “Clapping, singing, banging on the table, a bunch of kavannah,” or intention. The younger crowd at the shul was taken by everything from Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev’s Kaddish tune to the music of modern Hasidic stars like Avrom Fried and Beri Weber. One of Bahir’s great successes was acquainting Taiwanese audiences with “Silent Tears,” a Canadian musical project based on the Yiddish testimonies and writings of female Holocaust survivors.
Still, by 2025, Bahir and Sonia were ready for their next adventure. Last summer, Bahir became the new rabbi at the Congregation Brothers of Israel in Newtown, Pennsylvania, and has continued to share his style of “progressive Hasid-ish” Judaism there.
Bahir’s vision of Yiddish remains dynamic: “Yiddish as a language is very emblematic of the Jewish people. It’s gone to so many different places. It collects different words, different phrases, different grammar from all sorts of places, just like we do.” He likes to paraphrase Yiddish sources, such as teachings from the Maggid of Zlotchov, in his sermons.
And these days he’s gearing up to teach Yiddish himself: his prospective class on Hasidic Yiddish will include Rav Nachman stories in the original.
Looking forward, Bahir has high hopes for this Newtown synagogue. Energized by the language’s potential, he believes the shul could very well become a “home for Yiddish in Bucks County.”
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At the Vatican with Chicago’s mayor, a rabbi gave Pope Leo a White Sox kippah
(JTA) — Lizzi Heydemann didn’t plan what she was going to say to Pope Leo XIV.
But when the Chicago rabbi found herself face-to-face with the new pontiff during a Vatican visit alongside a delegation of Chicago leaders, she thanked him for the way he has spoken about the war in Gaza.
“I said, you know, it’s been a hard time over these past two years to be a rabbi, but I want to thank you for, in the midst of conflict, holding the humanity of everyone involved in the conflict,” Heydemann recounted.
Leo, the first American pope and a native of Chicago’s South Side, repeatedly advocated after his election last year for the release of the Israeli hostages as well as a ceasefire in the war in Gaza, which he has referred to as “vengeance” and “barbarity.” The comments angered some Jewish leaders who have interpreted them as unfairly targeting Israel, but for others including Heydemann, they have offered a template for how to criticize the war.
“You may be anti-war, but I do not hear you denouncing or degrading people,” Heydemann said she told Leo. “Thank you for holding the humanity of Israelis and Palestinians in the same breath and the same thought. It’s not something that is modeled very often.”
She added, “He seemed grateful, and like he knew exactly what I was talking about.”
Heydemann, the founder and leader of Mishkan Chicago, an independent Jewish spiritual community, had been invited by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to join a delegation of civic, business and faith leaders traveling to Rome last week. (Johnson has been a vocal critic of Israel who has drawn criticism himself from some Jewish leaders in Chicago.) She said she was the only rabbi to take part in the trip.
As she waited for the pope to enter a room where the delegation was assembled on Thursday, Heydemann said she began weeping.
“What I reflected on is that he, maybe more than anyone in the world, is a religious leader with the world’s eyes on him,” Heydemann said. “He is beloved and critiqued constantly, and every rabbi in America has had a little taste over the last few years of that weight.”
While the interaction carried an unexpected emotional weight for Heydemann, it also came with a distinctive Jewish Chicago touch: a White Sox-themed kippah.
She said she included the kippah, which featured the Chicago White Sox logo on the exterior as well as a pomegranate on the inside, in a chest of Chicago-themed gifts presented to the pope on Thursday during the visit as a nod to his lifelong devotion to the baseball team.
“We thought that would be a sweet point connection between me and the pope,” Heydemann said, adding that the pontiff’s typical white zucchetto looks “awfully like a kippah.”
“It brings us all joy to imagine that after a long day at work wearing the cream-colored one that matches his robes, maybe at the end of the day he’ll switch it out for a jersey material, White Sox kippah, and thinks fondly of sweet home Chicago, and the Jewish spiritual community gave it to him,” Heydemann added.
A list of gifts that circulated in local media included another piece of Jewish paraphernalia: a tote bag with the words “Resisting tyrants since Pharaoh.” That’s a catchphrase from T’ruah, the rabbinic human rights group where Heydemann has been on the board. But the rabbi said the inclusion was an error: She was carrying the bag, not giving it to Leo.
Looking back on the meeting with the pope, Heydemann said her experience reflected a broader conviction about “building bridges, even in the presence of difference.”
“There’s too much at stake in our world for us to not be continuing to be in relationship with one another in the presence of differences,” Heydemann said.
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Finalists announced for lucrative Jewish literary award
(JTA) — Amir Tibon’s memoir about his family’s ordeal during the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and Laura Hobson Faure’s history of Jewish children who fled from Germany to France during World War II are among the finalists for the 2026 Sami Rohr Prize.
The annual award — which alternates each year between works of fiction and nonfiction and which honors emerging Jewish writers — is considered one of the most prominent awards in Jewish literature.
The winner of the award, which comes with a $100,000 prize, will be announced on June 16.
A panel of judges will decide among four nonfiction finalists for this year’s award. Since the prize was established in 2006 — the first award was presented in 2007 — Sami Rohr Prize panelists and advisors have included historian and diplomat Deborah Lipstadt, historian Jonathan Sarna and longtime Columbia University journalism professor Sam Freedman.
“What strikes me about this year’s finalists for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature is the remarkable range of stories they tell and the depth of insight they bring to Jewish life and history,” Debra Goldberg, director of the Sami Rohr Prize, said in an email. “Each of the four books explores questions of memory, identity, displacement, resilience and responsibility through deeply personal narratives that feel both timely and enduring.”
The 2026 Sami Rohr Prize finalists are:
Laura Hobson Faure, “Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust.” Faure is a professor of modern Jewish history at Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne. Yale University Press, her publisher, describes “Who Will Rescue Us” as “the first comprehensive study of Jewish children’s flight from Nazi Germany to France — and their subsequent escape to America from the Vichy regime.” It is her second book.
Shaul Kelner, “A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews.” A professor of Jewish studies and sociology at Vanderbilt University, Kelner’s second book details how American Jews transformed a largely overlooked human rights issue into a landmark 20th-century mass-mobilization effort.
Jordan Salama, “Stranger in the Desert: A Family Story.” Salama, an author and contributor to The New Yorker, National Geographic and other publications, traces his Jewish family’s history “from Moorish Spain and Ottoman Syria to Argentina and beyond.” A mix of travelogue, memoir, history and reportage, “Stranger in the Desert” is his second book.
Amir Tibon, “The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.” The first book by the Israeli journalist is a first-person account of his family’s ordeal as residents of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which was violently attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. Alongside accounts of the day’s losses, Tibon also recounts the heroic efforts by his father, a retired major general, to race into the battle zone and rescue his son, daughter-in-law and two granddaughters from Hamas gunmen.
“As the Prize approaches its 20th year, I hope it will continue to support writers whose work expands our understanding of the Jewish experience and sparks meaningful conversation for generations to come,” Goldberg said. “I am immensely grateful to share in the Prize’s mission to honor excellence, nurture talent and connect Jewish voices across the globe.”
The Sami Rohr Prize, named for the late American real estate developer and philanthropist who fled Nazi Germany as a boy, is administered in association with the National Library of Israel. 70 Faces Media, the parent company of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, is the prize’s media partner.
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A decaying historic farmhouse finds a savior in Chabad
A Dutch Colonial home, just one of a handful of pre-Revolutionary War houses left in New York City, has been vacant and decaying for years. The windows are boarded up, signs warning against trespassing cover the property, and chunks of the ceiling are missing inside.
This historic landmark has an unlikely savior: Chabad, the global Lubavitch movement, which is planting one of its thousands of outposts there.
“Dilapidated is an understatement,” Rabbi Zalman Liberow of Chabad of Flatbush said as he gave the Forward a tour.
Chabad of Flatbush, led by Liberow and his wife, Chana, bought the historic Brooklyn property in December 2024 and will soon begin renovations to make the place livable. In the meantime, the couple has already transformed the barnhouse next door into a sanctuary, where a photo of the Lubavitch rebbe hangs on the wall near a compartment once used to store hay.
As other Jewish organizations have shifted toward digital community, Chabad has continued investing heavily in brick-and-mortar real estate, ranging from modest suburban homes to multimillion-dollar towers and converted landmarks. It’s a strategy that anchors Chabad in the communities it serves, but can also be costly: For the most part, Chabad couples — each unit headed by a rabbi and rebbitzin — finance their own operations, raising their own money to buy homes and establish centers of Jewish life.
The Liberows said a generous donation of Bitcoin from a donor, Eliot Stavrach, ultimately allowed them to purchase the 22,000 square foot lot for roughly $3 million, along with securing a high-interest loan to pay the mortgage while the couple awaited the sale of their old headquarters down the street. Last week, that transaction went through and reaped nearly $1.1 million.
The seller had also cut the asking price by nearly half, offloading what had become a white elephant, Liberow said.
“For him, it was a pain. For us, it was good,” Liberow said. “And I thought, even better, this is such an important piece of United States history.”
The prior landlord had reportedly struggled to find a buyer for the landmarked home, which by law cannot be demolished, and any alterations to the facade must be pre-approved by the city Landmarks Preservation Commission. In buying the home, the Liberows are also preventing its further deterioration — to the relief of neighbors who said the abandoned site had become a hotspot for drug use and a symbol of neglect.
“I’m just happy that the house will not be torn down and will actually have a future — a good one, it seems,” said Lori Citron Knipel, a former leader in the Brooklyn Democratic Party who used to frequent the house. “So that absolutely warms my heart, because it’s been breaking every time I pass it.”
The house’s history
The Wyckoff-Bennett Homestead is likely among the ten oldest properties in Brooklyn and the 50 oldest houses in all of New York City, according to Simeon Bankoff, former executive director of the Historic Districts Council.
A 1968 report from the Landmarks Preservation Commission noted that “two hundred years of wear have done little to diminish the simple beauty of its clear-cut profile,” and described it as “the most beautiful example of Dutch Colonial architecture in Brooklyn.”
The house is also notable for its role in the Revolutionary War: During the conflict, it quartered German soldiers fighting for the British, known as Hessians. Two of the soldiers etched their names and units into a windowpane.
A historical marker at the house notes that those troops may have taken part in the Battle of Brooklyn, the first major battle after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
According to Liberow, local legend holds that George Washington once stopped at the Wyckoff-Bennett house for tea — though, “we never did find the teacup,” he joked.
Bankoff attributed the properties’ staying power partly to the fact that prior to a venture called 22nd Street Investors LLC purchasing the lots in 2021, the property had only ever been owned by three families over more than 250 years.
Hendrick H. Wyckoff, son of a Dutch settler who emigrated to New Amsterdam in 1637, is believed to have built the house before 1766. In 1835, Cornelius W. Bennett purchased it, and it remained in the Bennett family for four generations before a Jewish couple, Annette and Stuart Mont, bought the property in 1983.
‘A piece of Brooklyn’s history’
The Monts had a deep appreciation for the home’s history, Citron Knipel said, and often opened it to the community. They hosted political fundraisers, birthday parties, and even a wedding at the house, she said, and they welcomed school groups into their home for local history field trips.
Only the facade of the house is landmarked, making its preservation legally required. But the Monts also preserved its interior details, including furniture from the Wyckoffs and Bennetts, an ornate fireplace framed by decorative tiles depicting biblical scenes, and an antique Richardson & Boynton Co. stove.
“There’s a sense of being part of and having a responsibility to the rest of the community to preserve it and move it forward,” Stu said in the 2013 documentary Living in a Landmark.
“And share it,” Annette added. “Because we have bought a piece of Brooklyn’s history.”
But an effort to secure the home’s legacy fell apart in 2010. The Monts had been in talks with the city to purchase the property, only to withdraw after the city reduced the sale price, deducting the rent the Monts theoretically would have paid to continue living there.
Annette died in 2013 at age 72, and Stuart died three years later at age 76. Their children, Ira and Randi Mont, sold the property to 22nd Street Investors LLC, registered to real estate investor Avraham Dishi, in 2021.
In an interview with the Forward, Ira Mont said he believed at the time of sale that 22nd Street Investors LLC would keep the house in good condition — and was disappointed that they ultimately did not.
Dishi drew two complaints for failing to maintain the Wyckoff Bennett house: one for the poor condition of the fence, still active, and another for the condition of the facade and roof, later withdrawn.
Officials at a Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing in March to discuss the Liberows’ minor proposed changes to the home noted there had been “all kinds of vandalism, fires, squatters, [and] drug users” there in recent years.
The Forward reached Dishi’s office by phone and left a message, but did not hear back.
Liberow said he has big plans for the house pending approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission, including displaying a video in the front yard highlighting Jewish history in the United States. The Commission has already approved plans to install porch railings, a curb cut and a driveway at the site. And like the Motts, the couple plans to open the space up to the public. They’ve already begun hosting Hebrew school and holiday gatherings in the barnhouse next door, which they renovated for about $200,000 with rustic touches including wood paneling, barrels, lanterns and candle chandeliers.
For neighbors, the most meaningful change may simply be that the property is occupied at all.
“We got a very big welcome over here, because everyone’s so happy,” Liberow said. “Someone is going to save the property.”
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