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What is the state of American Zionism today, and how did we get here?
As long as Jews have been Jews, from God’s call to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, our identity has been measured by way of geographical and spiritual proximity to the land. A first principle which – and I can’t help myself – New York’s Mayor-elect elides and ignores when he calls himself an anti-Zionist but not an antisemite.
From Joseph being sold down to Egypt in this week’s Torah reading, through our wilderness wanderings, the first commonwealth, our laments by the rivers of Babylon, the second commonwealth and subsequent exile – whether exile be due to the hands of our oppressors, or, for the theologically minded, mipnei hata·einu, due to our own sins – our eyes and hearts have turned to Zion.
In good times and bad, as Jewish communities flourished in Bavel, in Spain, or anywhere else, by way of halakhic literature, poetry, or breaking glasses at weddings, we are ever reminded im eshkakhekh, If I forget thee. The foundation of Jewish existence has always been a connection to the land – when we were in the land, and when we were not.
– The emergence of Zionism –
As the limitations of the Enlightenment and Emancipation became evident in the second half of the nineteenth century, what was a distant hope for return took on new urgency with individuals like Leon Pinsker (Auto Emancipation, 1882), Theodor Herzl (The Jewish State, 1896), and Max Nordau (Jewry of Muscle, 1903). It was time for Jews to become the subject of their own sentence rather than the object of someone else’s.
As I always remind the rabbinical students I teach, Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism are but three of a handful of responses to the challenge of modernity, the question of how to be a Jew in the modern world. The most famous and perhaps most successful response to the Jewish question, as Herzl best understood, is Zionism, a vision by which a Jew could be fully Jewish and a full citizen of the world, the Jewish people a nation like other nations.
No matter the passion of Zionism’s founding idealogues and the courageous first waves of aliyah, the vast majority of Jews did not heed the Zionist rallying cry, but instead emigrated to American shores or, as in the case of my grandparents, to the United Kingdom. The story of American Jewry is largely (but not entirely) the tale of two million Jews (out of 20 million immigrants) who arrived in America around the turn of the twentieth century in search of a better life for themselves and their descendants – seeking to balance the hyphen of American-Jewish identities.
It was not then, nor is it now, a straightforward proposition to hold multiple hyphenated identities – never mind loyalties. I think of Theodore Roosevelt’s infamous 1916 address entitled “America for Americans,” where he proclaimed: “I stand for straight Americanism unconditioned and unqualified, and I stand against every form of hyphenated Americanism.” Roosevelt decried what he dubbed the “moral treason” of anyone acting or speaking as a German-American, Irish-American, English-American, or any other hyphenated identity.
It was this context – the challenge of hyphenated identities – that was the backdrop for Justice Brandeis’s 1915 insistence that Zionism was consistent with American patriotism, in a landmark Zionist speech that was delivered to a group of Reform rabbis who feared that supporting the Yishuv (the early settlements in then Palestine) would be perceived as somehow incompatible with the aspiration of being accepted as an American. For American Jews, the task was a tricky one. A not-yet-established American Jewish community fearing the charge of dual loyalty figuring out what to do with the not yet established Yishuv.
– American Zionism takes root –
No discussion of American Zionism can occur without mention of Henrietta Szold. More than Brandeis, more than Stephen Wise or Abba Hillel Silver, it is Szold, the founder of Hadassah, to whom all American Zionists owe a debt of gratitude beyond repayment. Szold delivered her first lecture on Zionism in 1896 – prior to Herzl’s publication of Der Judenstaat.
As the daughter of Russian immigrants, Zionism held a central place for Szold and her conception of Judaism, a belief that Judaism could only be in “full flower” when normal human life was built around Jewish principles – Hebrew language, Hebrew literature, and beyond. Perhaps more importantly, it would be the organization that Szold established – Hadassah – that would forever change the face of American Judaism and American Zionism.
Hadassah grew from the shattered shards of Szold’s broken heart, founded by Szold with six other women in the vestry room of New York’s Temple Emanuel. Because while Brandeis was off telling people that patriotism and Zionism were compatible one with another, Szold and her Hadassah compatriots were showing people how it could be done.
In Francine Klagsbrun’s words: “Unlike male Zionists, with their often grandiose political and nation-building objectives, these women could identify with the down-to-earth goals and skills . . . that Hadassah emphasized.”
The cause of medical care in Palestine (Hadassah’s first hospital was dedicated some 100 years ago), the cultural work, the philanthropy, eventually youth aliyah – Hadassah provided a vehicle by which American Jews could do the pragmatic work of Zionism without living in Zion itself.
As Klagsbrun points out, the effects of Hadassah were not solely to elevate the lives of those in the Yishuv. Their work provided an organizing principle, a civil religion, that enhanced the lives of American Jews.
As Szold wrote privately in her diary: “We [American Jews] need Zionism as much as those Jews do who need a physical home.”
Not just women’s organizations, but every American Jewish organization aimed at the building up and uplifting of Jewish life in the Yishuv and subsequently Israel owes a debt of gratitude to Szold. The critical point, to which we will return soon enough, is that the work of Hadassah, as much as it was in service to Jews in Palestine, was also in service to American Jewry. A faith, a civic faith, by which American Jews, in doing good work on behalf of Jews in Palestine, could bring spiritual renewal to themselves.
American Zionism was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a given. Reform, Orthodox, and my own denomination, Conservative Judaism all had non-Zionist devotees. While there are books written on the subject, my favorite story comes from my alma mater, the Jewish Theological Seminary, in 1945.
Then chancellor Louis Finkelstein understood JTS and, for that matter, Judaism as whole to have a universal mission: to be, in his words, “a civilizing influence on the modern world.” Which also meant that his views on Zionism were lukewarm at best. Despite his love for the Jewish people Finkelstein could never quite square the circle of a Jewish nation-state.
Having come of age during the Great War, Finkelstein bristled against nationalisms of all kinds. As the head of the leading Jewish educational institution of America, his bets were on Jewish life in the diaspora, not Palestine; as a human rights advocate, he would only support a Jewish state that conferred equal status to Christians and Muslims; not to mention that Finkelstein’s fundraising base was dependent on Arthur Hayes Sulzberger and Lewis Strauss – two anti-Zionist JTS board members.
Thus, despite the Zionism of most American Jews, the rabbinical leadership of the Conservative movement, and the student body of the Seminary itself, Finkelstein stayed firm in his non-Zionism. So adamant was Finkelstein’s position, that at the 1945 pre-state JTS graduation, the students’ request to sing Hatikvah at commencement was turned down. In an act of defiance, the students arranged with the carilloneur at Union Theological Seminary across the street to play the melody so it could be heard during their processional.
A younger generation of students protesting the older generation for being too soft on Zionism. History, it would seem, has a wicked sense of humor.
– Zionism in the diaspora –
Oscar Wilde once said something to the effect of “there are two tragedies in the world – one is not getting what you want and the other is getting it.” The establishment of the state of Israel – l’havdil – marked an unprecedented opportunity and challenge for American Jewry as we finally “got” that which we had sought over the millennia.
When Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion established the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, it was both a culmination of and a break with thousands of years of Jewish history. For those who lived in Israel, of course, but also for those who did not. Israel was no longer an abstraction. How would diaspora Jews orient themselves to the living, breathing Jewish state as they opted not to live there?
Prior to statehood, the term “Israel” referred to the entire people of Israel, wherever they might dwell. Following May 14, 1948, as Ben-Gurion made clear in a famous exchange with Simon Rawidowicz, Israel became a specific geographic and statist designation – no longer the name for the global people of Israel.
How does a Jew living in Moscow, Milan, or Milwaukee support the Jewish state while remaining a proud citizen of their own country of residence and citizenship?
Up until 1948, Zionism, loosely defined, stood for supporting efforts to establish the Jewish state in the land of Israel. In 1961, when Rabbi Joachim Prinz proclaimed to the AJC, “Zionism is dead – long live the Jewish people,” he did so because he believed that with the establishment of Israel, Zionism had fulfilled its purpose and what was needed was “a new and dynamic movement to preserve Jewish peoplehood and create an independent and positive link between American Jewry and Israel.” The landscape had changed.
“What is the new definition of Zionism for the person who has chosen to opt out of settling in the land?”
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
What is the new definition of Zionism for the person who has chosen to opt out of settling in the land? To what degree may, or must, a diaspora Jew engage with, support, defend, or critique the actions of the Jewish state, a state that, no different from any other state, makes both good and bad choices? Is Israel the Jewish state, or the state of the Jews – all Jews, wherever they may be? What does all this mean in practice?
From Israel’s founding, this debate over American Jewry’s relationship to Israel has taken many guises. In 1950, for instance, Ben-Gurion and Jacob Blaustein, the then president of the American Jewish Committee, agreed that Ben-Gurion would both tone down his calls for diaspora emigration and refrain from intervening in American Jewish life. In exchange, Blaustein (speaking on behalf of American Jewry) stated that while American Jewry could offer advice, cooperation, and help, it would not attempt to speak for Israel. The importance of the Ben-Gurion–Blaustein agreement is not so much its durability, but, with the hindsight of the last 75 years, that it is a benchmark more honored in the breach than in its observance.
The 1950s would see the building of a Zionist consensus for American Jewry. With the establishment of the State of Israel, any lingering non-Zionism had become a moot point. By 1952, Finkelstein was awarding an honorary doctorate to Ben-Gurion. The establishment of the Conference of Presidents, the registering of AIPAC as a lobbying organization, and for American Orthodox, the gushpanka (stamp of approval) of Soloveitchik’s Kol Dodi Dofek in the midst of the Suez Crisis – all signaled the Zionist transformation of American Orthodoxy.
In the wake of the Shoah, Israel’s founding had profound implications for the self-perception of diaspora Jews. At its most basic level, Israel provided refuge for world Jewry should they need it. Never again would Jews, as was the case in the Shoah, be denied safe harbor from their oppressors. But Israel was more than that. In diaspora hearts and minds, it was a source of pride: a new and more assertive identity that served as a counterpoint to the vulnerability of the Shoah and the thousands of years of pogrom-filled exile that preceded it. While opting out of living in Israel, diaspora Jews derived vicarious confidence as the first stages of Israel’s existence unfolded. Whether we were safer because Israel existed or not was beside the point; we felt safer because we lived in a time of a Jewish state.
– Israel became a secular religion –
American Jewry’s engagement with Israel became a constituent building block of American Jewish identity, a civil religion to complement our religious religion.
The pulpit of my synagogue, like so many others, is adorned with an Israeli flag, and the prayer for the State of Israel is central to our liturgy. Curriculum teaching the history of Zionism and modern Israel is integrated into congregational schools, Jewish day schools, and Jewish camping. In times of both comfort and crisis, American Jews raised vast sums of money for Israel. Summers in Israel, gap semesters, and gap years became normative expressions of Jewish life.
Politically, American Jews were expected to support elected representatives who prioritized the defense of Israel, important acts unto themselves but also a rallying cry to unify American Jewry in all its political and religious diversity. As the slogan goes, “Wherever we stand, we stand with Israel.” Two of the most impactful achievements of American Jewry over the past half-century are AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Birthright Israel, offering a free ten-day trip to Israel to all Jewish young adults, ages eighteen through twenty-six. Both efforts centered on Israel engagement.
In ways Henrietta Szold could not imagine, Israel came to serve as the bonding agent to keep American Jewry together. It focused our energies. We were proud of our Israeli cousins and wanted to help them, and the fact that we could provide Israel with philanthropic and political support served their needs and ours. Israel missions, Israel education, Israel advocacy — in good times and bad — became a secular religion for American Jews, sometimes supplanting Judaism itself. It is easier, after all, to write a check than it is to keep our children home on Friday night to light Shabbat candles. It is easier to call someone a self-hating Jew than to worry about your children or grandchildren’s non-observance.
Uninspired by the prayerbook, unfamiliar with the Talmud, American Jews became adept at new Jewish topics of conversation: how our elected leaders vote on legislation regarding Israel’s security or the terms by which the United States should or shouldn’t enter into a deal with Iran. The dividing lines between us no longer fell along the various levels at which we observed the Sabbath or dietary laws, or our beliefs as to whether the Torah is or isn’t of divine origin. Our views on Israel took the place of these. The decisions being made in a sovereign Jewish state in which we do not live, vote, pay taxes, or serve in the military became the basis of a new Israel-based religion.
And in many respects, engagement with Israel became more than a religion; it became an orthodoxy. Again, it makes perfect sense that the imperfect policies of Israel (or any state) might be worthy of objection – by Israelis, Israel’s Jewish supporters, or anyone – but sense has very little to do with it. For an American Jew to suggest that this or that policy of the Israeli government was not in the long-term best interest of Israel came to be understood by the American Jewish establishment as a form of betrayal.
As the late Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg once observed, “The lack of support for Israel [is] the only offense for which Jews can be ‘excommunicated.’” Israel, the thinking goes, does not lack for external enemies. Because we have opted out of the opportunity to live in Israel, American Jews must forgo our right to critique Israel because any such criticism will become fodder for Israel’s real enemies.
“American Jews feel that the Israel they love so much does not love them back or even care that we exist.”
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
To make matters even more complicated for American Jews, while our Jewish identity obligates us to engage with Israel, for most of us it is a religious identity that is not recognized by Israel itself, where all matters of personal status (birth, marriage, conversion, burial) fall under the authority of the Chief Rabbinate.
The irony, of course, is that so much of my energy as an American rabbi is devoted to supporting and defending a Jewish state which neither supports, defends, nor recognizes Judaism as I teach and preach it.
A state of affairs whose effect is to make American Jews feel that the Israel they love so much does not love them back or even care that we exist.
I recall the shock and dismay my daughter shared upon returning from her Israel gap year, discovering that her Israeli pre-army mechina peers, on whose condition so much of her Jewish education had been directed, expended zero psychic energy on the well-being of diaspora Jewry.
And then, we have the nerve to send that kid to a college campus expecting her to defend the policies of a government that does not reflect her values or recognize her Judaism as Judaism. I myself may be constitutionally incapable of walking away from Israel, but others have and will continue do so – before October 7th and all the more since. There is a limit to the self-flagellating exercise of supporting a state that neither recognizes you nor represents your values. For the coming generation of American Jewry, the loyalties of yesteryear will no longer suffice.
– The Palestinian-Israeli conflict & Oct. 7 –
And of all the points of difference between the “civil religion” of American Jewry and the reality of Israel, none loom as large as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For the post-Shoah generation of American Jewish leadership, Israel’s claim to the land and need for a sovereign state were obvious, a simple matter of survival.
In the first decades of Israel’s existence, persistent Arab hostilities sidelined any concerns American Jewry might have harbored about the democratic rights of the indigenous Palestinian population. The facts didn’t help.
Arabs had long rejected any Jewish claim to the land, and mainstream American Jewry paid little attention to Palestinian aspirations to nationhood, focusing instead on the pressing needs of the Jewish people. Expressions of concern for the Palestinians and the conditions they lived in were beyond the bounds of Jewish communal discussions.
But the past fifty-plus years of Israeli settlement expansion have radically changed the facts on the ground and American Jewry’s perception of Israel as a Jewish and a democratic nation. Whether American Jews know about, or care to understand, the events leading up to the Six-Day War, through which Israel gained control of the territories known as the West Bank, matters little.
What matters is that Israel continues to occupy the territories. Whatever justifications (theological, historical, security, or otherwise) have been and continue to be marshaled in support of Israel’s ongoing presence there, in the eyes of American Jewry, the West Bank settlements and the illiberal policies they represent pose a threat to Israel’s founding promise – its commitment to democracy.
“For the coming generation of American Jewry, the loyalties of yesteryear will no longer suffice.”
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
For a progressive American Jew, the thinking goes that if the project of Israel is to provide a homeland and security to a historically vulnerable Jewish minority, then how can the state not respond to the needs of the vulnerable minority in its midst?
Leaving aside the role of historical revisionism and progressive identity politics, the unresolved status of the Palestinians – lacking as they are in freedom of movement and access, self-determination, and other accoutrements of sovereignty – forms a wedge issue between an increasingly liberal-leaning American Jewry and an increasingly right-leaning Israeli Jewry.
The mainstreaming of Jewish fundamentalism in Israeli society and government further compounds the problem. The fact that the same government that fails to recognize American Jewry also fails to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination only serves to increase American Jews’ sense of estrangement.
And now, into the mix, October 7th and the war. Over 1,200 killed, brutally and viciously, and 251 taken hostage. A trauma beyond words, a trauma that continues to this day. Israel surrounded by Iran’s self-proclaimed ring of fire – Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and beyond. The threats are real and existential, well beyond a debate about this border or that border or who is to blame for the latest cycle of hostilities.
Ours is a time of threat, for the 47% of world Jewry who live in Israel and – with the porous and pernicious blurring of line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism – for American Jews.
Traumatic and threatening as October 7th was – and remains two years later – I would reflect that it is a trauma that has been experienced differently by American Jews. Full throated as my defense is of Israel, unflinching as my advocacy on its behalf, I know, for reasons that I have just named, not every Jew holds as I do.
For a young person today, Israel is the Goliath to the Palestinian David.
Israel’s decades-long expansionist settlement policy is perceived to have precluded the emergence of a Palestinian state, and the only Prime Minister that anyone really knows is one who either is a part of or is beholden to extremist parties whose views are antithetical to pretty much every value that liberal American Jews have championed these past decades. One’s perception is one’s reality, and you can’t blame a person for when they were born.
Painful as October 7th was for Israel, real as the marginalization felt by way of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, for many American Jews October 7th was a marginalization twice over. First the horrific attacks of October 7th and the hatreds subsequent to it. And second, a marginalization from the organized Jewish community itself in whose presence a muzzling – implicit and explicit – occurred. An entire generation disenfranchised by the prior one.
You may not like the fact that 30% of New York Jews voted for Zohran Mamdani, but you shouldn’t be surprised by it. For a liberal Zionist disillusioned by the Israeli government, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is a difference of degree, not of kind. He understood the fissures of our community better than we did. The question we face now is what we will do about it.
“For a young person today, Israel is the Goliath to the Palestinian David.”
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
A good starting point would be for the American Zionist community to engage in heshbon ha-nefesh, self-audit, as to how – by making unconditional support for the Israeli government a litmus test for Jewish identity – we ourselves have inflicted harm on the Jewish future.
Lest we forget, in 2023 prior to October 7th, the pro-democracy movement against judicial reform brought millions of Israelis into the streets to protest the Israeli government out of love for country.
For the first time in my memory, Israelis called on American Jews to engage in the process of advocating that Israel remain a state both Jewish and democratic. No different than my criticisms of this or that US administration come from a place of my patriotism, so too my critique of Israel.
The argument that it is somehow treasonous to criticize this or that Israeli policy simply no longer holds – as long as that criticism comes from a place of love, loyalty and investment in the well-being of the State of Israel.
And the heshbon ha-nefesh, goes both ways and on both sides.
For such a time such as this, when Israel is surrounded by enemies, Jewish critics of Israel need to be judicious in how they voice their dissent. It is one thing to attend a pro-democracy rally in a sea of Israeli flags that begins and ends with the singing of Hatikvah. It is another thing to stand in an encampment next to someone calling for global intifada.
October 7th did many things to us as American Jews, one of which is that it exposed a fault line that we have long avoided addressing. I would readily turn back the clock and forgo any wisdom wrought from these past two years. But if one outcome is that we can be more intentional about how we voice support and dissent, how we speak to each other, and how we seek to mend the rifts within our people – that is something I would readily welcome.
For such a time as this: A new chapter of American Zionism infused with an appreciation of our internal pluralism, whereby we avoid the reductive and destructive tactic of labeling people with whom we disagree either as self-hating Jews or colonialist oppressors. A big tent American Zionism, wide enough to house a diversity of views, as does Israel, on how best to secure a Jewish and democratic state of Israel. An American Zionism that recognizes that the Upper East Side is not the Middle East and must therefore be infused with a sense of humility.
No statement, to channel Emil Fackenheim, should be made about Israel’s war with Hamas that would not be credible in the presence of an IDF soldier who has risked life and limb fighting a merciless enemy, defending his own life and that of his fellow soldiers in the pursuit of liberating his captive kin.
An American Zionism that is capacious enough to hold multiple views at once: the just cause of securing Israel’s defense and standing, and an empathy-filled response to the horrific sufferings of Gaza. The knowledge that if every hostage’s life is of infinite worth, so too is the life of every Palestinian child. The understanding that while we champion the IDF, that support does not come with a moral blank check, and that support need not extend to every policy of the Israeli government before, during, or since October 7th. Against those who stand outside our tent, we must hold the line. And for all who seek to dwell within our tent, we must expand it. We need to do both; in short, we need to walk and chew gum at the same time.
For such a time as this. A new chapter of American Zionism that boldly asserts support for Israel as a constituent building block of contemporary Jewish identity but does not see Zionism as synonymous with Jewish identity. For far too many Jews, support for Israel became a vicarious faith, a civil religion masking the inadequacies of our actual religion. The only way Israel will learn from, listen to, or care about American Jews is if we show ourselves to be living energetic Jewish lives. In 1915 Brandeis said, “to be good Americans, we must be better Jews.” In 2025 I would say, “to be good Zionists, we must be better Jews.” A robust American Jewish identity can weather policy differences with this or that Israeli government; a paper-thin Jewish identity cannot.
For such a time as this. An American Zionism that refuses to let the ideological, institutional, and philanthropic extremes define the field of play and terms of debate. We who live between the forty-yard lines, who are capable of holding multiple views at once, who stand by our convictions and know we need to expand our tent – we have a unique role to play in American Zionism today. We can defend Israel, support religious pluralism and encourage efforts to achieve Arab-Jewish coexistence and dialogue. Because the stakes are so high, the sane center must speak with passion and with volume. We must be the change we seek to see in this world. We must protect each other from the ideologues on the extremes, rallying men, women, money, and discipline for a cause that is just.
If Zionism has a catchphrase or watchword, it is Herzl’s immortal line from Altneuland: “If you will it, it is no dream.” The English translation, however, misses the point – what Herzl first wrote in German, and what Sokolow then translated into Hebrew. Im tirtzu, if you – plural, all of you – will it, eyn zo Aggadah, then it is no dream.
The future dream of American Zionism depends not on my vision, or yours; not on the right or left, religious or secular. It is a dream that depends on all of us, together. An American Zionism for such a time as this – bold enough to embrace the voices, complexities, paradoxes, and even contradictions of our age. A Zionism of love and engagement: with Israel, with our tradition, and – perhaps above all – with one another, as we carry the dream forward together.
The post What is the state of American Zionism today, and how did we get here? appeared first on The Forward.
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Hebrew Union College claims Ohio’s charity-law suit violates its First Amendment rights
(JTA) — The Reform movement’s central rabbinical seminary filed a motion to dismiss the state of Ohio’s lawsuit against the school Friday, claiming the suit violates “foundational Jewish religious doctrine.”
It was the latest escalation in a pitched battle between Hebrew Union College and the state attorney general’s office, which has accused HUC of violating nonprofit law by shuttering degree-granting programs on its historic Cincinnati campus.
The suit, HUC argues, “violates the First Amendment by entangling government and religion.”
The suit was originally filed in April by then-Ohio AG Dave Yost — his second against the college related to its controversial plan to wind down its Cincinnati operations in favor of its New York and Los Angeles campuses. Yost claimed HUC’s actions in Cincinnati misled its donors by leaving a city where they were actively fundraising to support operations, and also violated its charter, which states that the school would “permanently maintain” a residence there.
The state seeks to seize HUC’s assets in Ohio and redirect them to a new, yet-to-be-decided nonprofit with a similar mission; an upstart rabbinical school founded by HUC alums says it wants them.
Such a move “is an unconstitutional and illegal governmental assault upon religion,” HUC’s strongly worded motion reads.
It continues, “The Attorney General has no role in dictating the religious affairs of institutions like HUC. The Court should reject his overreach into religious matters and should dismiss the Complaint because it is unconstitutional and unlawful.”
HUC also argues its vote to shutter the Cincinnati campus was done in full compliance with the law, adding that it intends to maintain the campus’s other assets, including the Klau Library, the American Jewish Archives and the Skirball Museum. In addition, citing a passage in the Torah that states “God will come to his people wherever they welcome him,” the school argues that considering “Jewish demographic realities” is part of its religious mission.
“These decisions were made thoughtfully and responsibly to ensure the long-term success of the institution and our ability to continue graduating strong Jewish leaders,” HUC president Andrew Rehfeld said in a statement accompanying the motion. The lawsuit, he added, “improperly seeks to interfere in the decisions of a religious organization, and this cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.”
Yost himself resigned as AG this week to join the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group that, in 2022, represented a Tennessee adoption agency that refused to foster a child to a Jewish couple. The suit against HUC continues under the state AG’s office.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hebrew Union College claims Ohio’s charity-law suit violates its First Amendment rights appeared first on The Forward.
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6 months after her father was killed at Bondi Beach, Sheina Gutnick has become a leading antisemitism advocate in Australia
(JTA) — MELBOURNE — Six months ago, Sheina Gutnick was a 31-year-old mother of three at the end of her maternity leave. She had degrees in social science and psychology, and several years of experience worked at a Jewish school. She was an average mother looking to get back into a 9-to-5 routine after her baby started daycare.
Then, on the first night of Hanukkah, everything in her life changed.
Gutnick was at a Hanukkah party in Melbourne, Australia, with her husband and three children when she crossed paths with a friend from Sydney. He looked ghostly white and told her there had been a shooting at a Hanukkah party in Bondi. Her parents, who were visiting Sydney from their home in Melbourne, had been planning to attend.
“I immediately called my dad, but he didn’t answer. Then I called my mum and she answered and I could hear shooting, and she was screaming and told me they are shooting people on the beach and that my dad is running after the terrorists,” said Gutnick.
Her father, Reuven Morrison, would be one of 15 people murdered on Bondi Beach that night. Before he was killed, Morrison was filmed throwing a brick at the terrorists, charging toward them with whatever he could find, trying to shield his community with his body. The footage of his bravery against the terrorists would be seen around the world within hours. After diverting the terrorist’s attention from others, Morrison bled out on the beach after being shot 11 times. He was 62.
“At 7:13 p.m. I found out that my dad is no longer alive, and my first reaction was to tell my husband to get me on a plane to Sydney,” she said. “As I was standing at the doorframe to leave the house before I went to the airport, I turned to my husband and said, ‘This is the day our lives have changed.’”
Gutnick boarded the last flight from Melbourne to Sydney that night. She couldn’t stop crying, and a flight attendant asked what was wrong. “I told her that my dad had just been killed in Bondi,” she recalled. “She didn’t really know what to say, but told me, if you need vodka let us know, we’ll sort you out.”
Six months after the attack, the deadliest antisemitic incident in Australia and one of the bloodiest anywhere in recent history, Australia is still reeling. A royal commission is unearthing searing allegations of antisemitism and accounts of Jewish fear, and has started rolling out recommendations designed to shore up public safety and cohesion.
Gutnick, meanwhile, has vaulted into public view not just at home but abroad. This week, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt posted a picture of himself with Gutnick on social media.
“I was honored to meet with Sheina Gutnick, daughter of Bondi hero Reuven Morrison z”l,” Greenblatt wrote. “Since Sheina’s father and 14 others were murdered by terrorists on Bondi Beach during Hanukkah, Sheina has tirelessly and relentlessly demanded that Australia take action against antisemitism. She is an inspiration.”
After throwing herself into speaking about her father, her experience and the challenges facing Australian Jews, Gutnick has now joined an international coterie of advocates transformed by their proximity to historic antisemitic violence.
“I get people saying to me, ‘Aren’t you exhausted?’” she said. “But the truth is, I get energy from it. I’m not a person that can sit when something has happened to me.”
The path that made Gutnick who she is was forged first in the former USSR, which Reuven Morrison left at 14 for Australia. Like many Soviet Jewish emigres, he knew little about Judaism when he arrived and for a time did not have much connection to Jewish practice in his new country, either.
But he became more religiously observant later in life, affiliating with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement that emphasizes outreach to Jews of all levels of observance. He became heavily involved in building Chabad of Bondi, a synagogue and community center in Sydney’s iconic beachfront neighborhood, helping to fight several legal battles while getting the building permits approved.
More than a decade ago, he moved to Melbourne. But the Sydney Jewish community, and especially Chabad of Bondi, remained close to his heart and he visited regularly. Its Chanukah by the Sea celebration, he decided, was one he would not miss.
Gutnick arrived in Sydney at 10 p.m., just a few hours after two men opened fire on the celebration, killing 15. Her father’s body still lay on Bondi beach, covered by a sheet, unable to be released for burial until all evidence had been collected from the scene of the massacre by Australian homicide detectives. She made her way to her uncle and aunt’s home, where her traumatized mother was waiting.
That night, nobody slept — and stories began trickling in.
“When I got there, we began hearing that my dad threw a brick at the terrorists. A lot of people started messaging me that he saved their lives based on actions that he took that night,” Gutnick recalled. “My mum had been on the beach and saw him running, and she saw when he went down, and she saw no one was helping and he ran to step in, but she hadn’t seen what he had actually done.”
An Australian homicide detective arrived at 1:30 a.m. to formally advise Gutnick and her mother Leah that Reuven had been murdered, and to explain the process for releasing his body back to the family for burial. It was slightly complicated, the detective told them, because this was Australia’s first major terrorist attack. The protocol was still being clarified.
“At this point, pure adrenaline and pure rage was running through my body, that this had actually happened. The fact that it was Bondi and it was my dad,” Gutnick recalled.
Gutnick returned to the apartment her parents owned in Sydney, situated right behind the Chabad of Bondi building, to collect a few things her mother needed. Outside, members of the Sydney Jewish community stood on the footpath alongside news crews and photographers. People on the street were crying.
Inside, Gutnick found her parents’ dog Simba who had come to Sydney with them, hungry and bewildered that he had been left alone since the night before. According to Jewish law, a Hanukkah menorah must be lit by each person in the place where they are spending the night. Reuven Morrison had set his up before leaving for the beach. On the table, it sat exactly where he had placed it, ready, unlit.
All the while, Gutnick’s phone kept ringing, with journalists asking her for comment. She felt, she recalls, like she was floating outside her own body.
“My mum was completely broken. Her world was torn apart; she has been with my dad for 42 years,” she recalled. “Every semblance of normal life was gone, she’s all of a sudden alone, she’s impacted in this way that is not humanely possible to comprehend.”
With dozens of media requests already flooding her phone, Gutnick ignored all of them — until she spotted one that was framed very differently.
The message came through Facebook from a producer at CBS News in the United States on Monday night, more than a day after the massacre, and it changed her life.
“I still hadn’t spoken to any media. They prefaced their message and said that they needed to help tell the world about my dad’s bravery, that they had seen the footage of him throwing a brick at the terrorists and they wanted to publicise it, so everyone knew about him and what he had done,” Gutnick recalled.
She felt compelled to respond: “It hit me so crushingly hard there is no one else to tell my dad’s story but me, so if I don’t do this, no one will hear about him and his bravery.
She messaged back, saying they could come to interview her the next morning. But CBS suggested they come right over immediately, in the middle of the night, so her interview could be aired on American prime time news. At 1 a.m., a full media crew arrived and Gutnick sat in front of lights that made her room feel like it was the middle of the day.
In the hours that followed, she wrote a personal reflection about what she believed her father’s death represented: a direct result of an Australian government that had been weak on antisemitism. After she circulated it, a prominent local Jewish figure whom she did not then know, the former treasurer of Australia, Josh Frydenberg, shared it on X, and it was republished widely. More media requests started flooding in and Gutnick started speaking about her dad.
“I realized how much I have on me to carry on my father’s legacy,” she said.
In between the interviews, she and her husband were on the phone to the Australian coroner and the chevra kadisha, the Jewish burial society, demanding that Australian authorities release her father’s body. A family friend, not knowing when the body would be released, flew his private plane from Melbourne to Sydney, ready to accompany Morrison home the moment his body was released. When that finally happened, a special flyover was arranged with the air controllers in Sydney so that the private plane with Morrison’s body could circle over Bondi Beach, in a final farewell to the place where Morrison had met his wife 42 years earlier.
Nobody who knew Sheina Gutnick Dec. 14 would have predicted what she’s done since. She says wouldn’t have predicted it either.
When Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese initially declined to call a royal commission into the Bondi attack and the broader rise of antisemitism in Australia, Gutnick, alongside other victim families, went to the front page of all of Australia’s major newspapers and called on him to reconsider. After weeks of lobbying, the prime minister relented.
When the royal commission convened, Gutnick was the first witness called to testify.
She described hearing “Free Palestine” shouted on the streets of Melbourne, chants that she said “not political expression but is explicit, targeted hatred and is designed to intimidate.” She recalled fearing the treatment her child would receive while undergoing surgery at a hospital where nurses had been fired after posting a viral video saying they would not treat Israeli patients. And she recounted being called a “f—ing terrorist” by a man she said had pointed at her Star of David necklace.
It was only one of countless stops to share her story. In the last six months, Gutnick has taken dozens of flights to meet with parliaments and groups to speak about her father and about Australian antisemitism. She has written in major national and international newspapers about her father and spoke at the Sydney reception for Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
She and her mother received condolence letters from across Australia and beyond. The one from King Charles, she said, was especially comforting. “He has an excellent team around him clearly, because it was such a beautiful, personalized letter, the one we received,” she said.
Her advocacy has been noticed at some of the highest levels within Australia’s Jewish community. “Sheina Gutnick never sought the public spotlight. She was thrust into it by the horrific murder of her father, and has responded with remarkable courage, dignity and moral clarity,” Jeremy Leibler, the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, told JTA. “Her advocacy has resonated because it is authentic.”
Alex Ryvchin, the co-chair of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the peak body for Australian Jews, knew Reuven Morrison for years before he was killed. “He was an outstanding human being and now Australia knows him as a hero who gave his life to save others,” he told JTA. “Sheina honours his memory and legacy and I’m proud to stand with her in the fight against antisemitism.”
Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, the rabbi of Chabad of Bondi, whose son in law Rabbi Eli Schlanger and many close friends and congregants were murdered Bondi Beach also has deep appreciation for Gutnick’s advocacy.
She “emerged as one of the most compelling and eloquent new voices in Australia’s fight against antisemitism, transforming personal tragedy into sustained public advocacy,” he said.
After booking dozens of engagements independently, Gutnick was offered a role as the first public affairs officer of the recently established Australian branch of the Combat Antisemitism Movement, an international advocacy organization.
The group’s supporters argue that CAM is responding to a genuine rise in antisemitism and see it as trying to address problems that existing Jewish groups have failed to solve. They also argue that the group’s efforts to push back against anti-Israel sentiment are justified because anti-Zionism is often used as a vehicle for anti-Jewish prejudice.
CAM has indeed attracted criticism from other Jewish groups and civil liberties advocates who argue that it takes an overly broad approach to antisemitism and too often conflates anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
In Australia, the organization has also faced scrutiny over its political alliances, including relationships with some conservative and right-wing groups, as well as criticism that it imports American culture-war politics into debates about antisemitism.
Gutnick is aware of some of this criticism but isn’t really bothered by it. “Every organization has its controversial moments, so this stuff — it doesn’t really concern me,” she said. “The work CAM is doing now is so relevant in our lives in a post Oct.-7 world and a post-Bondi world,” she said.
In fact, she is grateful for the many connections they have helped her with both in Australia and around the world as well as their extensive research into antisemitism. “They gave me the ability to tell my dad’s story in many public spaces,” she said. “I continuously say, as Jews, we need to know the facts and figures on the ground about antisemitism, and what resolutions and legislation we need to have in place, and as an international org, CAM has the ability to help me do this.”
The royal commission has presented its first recommendations, designed to improve the processes that left the Bondi Hanukkah celebration with inadequate police protection despite the known threats. Soon, it is expected to say more — with a backlash to follow from those who believe that antisemitism is getting outsized attention and who say that efforts to address it will likely inappropriately constraint anti-Israel protest.
Gutnick doesn’t know exactly what the future will hold for her, but she knows that she will never return to where she stood six months ago — a spot that, in retrospect, feels like it may have been on the sidelines of the fight for Jewish security.
“As Jews, we are being faced with so much darkness,” she said. “I have gone through the worst thing — my father was killed for antisemitism — so I have become stronger, wanting to spread the message that no matter what happens, as the Jewish people we are one people, part of one faith, and although it’s terrible, this is something we have faced before.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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13,000 Jews were driven out of Poland in 1968. Now, some are returning to tell their story.
(JTA) — In March 1968, Rachelle Halpern walked into her university in Szczecin, Poland, and found a group of her classmates gathered around a newspaper. She asked what they were reading about. The answer came: “Zionists.”
Halpern didn’t understand. Who were the Zionists? One classmate said, “The Jews.”
“But I’m a Jew,” said Halpern. Her classmates looked at her in disbelief. She couldn’t be, one said. She had no horns.
Halpern was about to be swept up in a spiral of social and political crises in communist Poland, culminating in a government-sponsored antisemitic campaign that stripped Jews of their jobs, schools and citizenship, forcing some 13,000 to leave the country. Within months, Halpern would find herself renouncing her Polish nationality and leaving everything she knew for a new life in the United States.
At that moment, when her classmates read the word “Zionists” and looked up at her with horror, she felt a shift.
“It sort of evoked a lot of distrust and fear, that somehow there were all these people around that were going to do some harm to the Polish people,” Halpern told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Now 79 years old, Halpern joined a group of Polish emigrants and their children who traveled to Poland in April to unwind the trauma of 1968. Their meeting was organized by the Engaged Memory Consortium, a collection of organizations dedicated to Polish Jewish heritage, and funded by Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It was the first time that the government paid for a trip to reckon with the events of 1968 and invited the Jews whose lives were upended, according to the program’s coordinator, Patrycja Dołowy.
The nine participants came from Sweden, Denmark and the United States. Over eight days, they visited Jewish sites and community groups in Warsaw, Wrocław and Łódź. These three areas hosted the largest groups of Jews who remained in Poland after the Holocaust, where they decided to rebuild — and where their communities were decimated again in 1968. Though the members of the trip had never met, their memories overlapped, patching together a dark open wound in the history of Polish Jews.
It’s a chapter that remains obscure among many Poles and Jewish communities around the world, partly because of a myth that Jewish life was wholly extinguished by the Holocaust, according to Karen Auerbach, a historian of Polish Jews at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“There’s such limited understanding of the fact that there was a Jewish population in Poland after the Second World War, that this doesn’t rise to the surface,” said Auerbach.
The Jewish flight of 1968 started with two words from Władysław Gomułka, then the leader of communist Poland. Days after Israel’s victory over Soviet-supported Arab countries in the Six-Day War of 1967, Gomułka said that Poland would not tolerate a “fifth column” of Polish Jews. The phrase signaled that Jews could be loyal to Israel and treasonous to Poland. Soon after, the communist secret police purged Jews from state and party apparatuses, especially the army.
This campaign exploded after Poland, like other countries across the globe, was rocked by youth uprisings in March 1968. Polish students demonstrated against state censorship and the growing restriction of their civil liberties under Gomułka. Thousands were detained, expelled from universities and dismissed from their jobs in the ensuing government crackdown. Some of the students were Jewish. That became the pretext for Polish authorities to accuse them of “Zionism,” pinning the demonstrations on a global Jewish conspiracy.
The government organized “anti-Zionist” rallies and stoked fear of “Zionists” in official propaganda, avoiding the word “Jew.” Newspapers outed “Zionists” to their neighbors. A new wave of purges expelled thousands of Jews from their jobs and exposed them to antisemitic attacks in their cities and towns. Jews were pressured to leave the country, and when they applied for exit documents, they were forced to renounce their Polish citizenship.
The purges were not only executed by government order, but also by ordinary Polish citizens who took advantage of the campaign and antisemitic sentiment to further their careers, said Dariusz Stola, director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
“It was opening opportunities for many people for advancement,” said Stola. “Say you compete for a position in your institution, and you have a Jewish colleague, why not accuse him of being a hidden Zionist? Or you have some accounts to settle from the past — you don’t like someone — let’s accuse him of Zionism, because the burden of proof he is not is on him.”
By the early 1970s, half the country’s Jews were gone, crushing a community that was tenuously growing back decades after the Holocaust. The campaign effectively ended organized Jewish life in Poland.
Fifty-eight years later, Dołowy guided Polish emigrants and their descendants through cultural institutions that have emerged to preserve Jewish history, culture and communal life since the fall of the Soviet Union, from the Polin Museum in Warsaw to the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź. She also introduced them to Jews, like herself, whose families remained in Poland after 1968.
Rachelle Halpern, right, and other participants in the Miszpucha Foundation trip visit the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. (Adam de Kaminski)
Dołowy is the former head of Warsaw’s Jewish Community Center and the founder of the Miszpucha Foundation. A part of the Engaged Memory Consortium, this foundation aims to strengthen ties between Jews in Poland and Jews who left, particularly those driven out in 1968. Dołowy arranged meetings between the emigrants and Jews who stayed in Poland — artists from the Kultur-Lige network in Wrocław, cultural event organizers for the nonprofit HaKoach in Łódź, and Jews in Warsaw who ranged from academics to entrepreneurs to JCC coordinators.
In 1968, Dołowy’s father was expelled from his university and lost permission to continue his PhD. The question of whether to stay or leave Poland split her parents from their families and friends. Half the Jews they knew chose to leave, dividing what she called the “miszpucha” — the Polish spelling of the Hebrew “mischpacha” and the Yiddish “mishpokhe,” meaning “family.”
Despite this rupture, Dołowy said she rarely saw the antisemitic campaign reflected in Polish history, beyond the hushed stories in Jewish families. Shame and confusion swirled around the events of 1968 for many Jews who considered themselves Polish, but were told by their government and their neighbors that they were not.
“I believe that this generation’s story is still something really silenced,” said Dołowy. “We don’t really talk about 1968, or if we talk about it, we don’t really know the words to describe what actually happened to us, to our community.”
Halpern was 22 when her family left in December 1968 to join a relative in Boston. Despite the Soviet propaganda that said Polish Jews harbored a suspicious bond to Israel, only some 3,000 actually went there. Most of the 13,000 emigrants fled to Sweden, Denmark and the United States, where Cold War-era programs welcomed political refugees from the communist bloc.
Waves of Polish Jewish survivors had migrated to Israel after the Holocaust. But many of those who remained by 1968 were secular and committed to life in Poland, with dwindling ties to Jewish religion, Israel and Zionism, according to Stola. Many were dedicated communists or socialists.
“We know that only a minority of them went to Israel, despite attempts to convince them,” he said.
To obtain exit permits, Halpern and other Jews were forced to declare the intention of going to Israel. Then they received a travel document that rendered them stateless.
“It looked like a regular identity document — a photograph, first name, family name, date of birth,” said Stola. “And the most important part of the document were letters at the bottom of the page saying, ‘The bearer of this document is not a citizen of the Polish People’s Republic.’ To my knowledge, this is the only identity document that says who you are not.”
Halpern gave up her Polish nationality together with her sister in an emigration office. She remembers everything as “gray” — the day, the Polish official and the room with a small window.
“We were looked at as if we were hostile people, enemies,” she said. “We had to stand there, and you had to raise your hand and say that you are renouncing your Polish citizenship. We cried and cried and cried.”
Still, Halpern almost stayed in Poland. Just before her family left Szczecin on an overnight train to Warsaw for the first leg of their journey, she ran away. Seized by fear and anxiety about losing the world she knew, she slept at a friend’s house that night. She woke up in the early hours with the realization that she had nothing left in Poland — no citizenship, no money, no university and no family. She caught up with her parents just before their next train departed from Warsaw to Vienna.
Halpern went to medical school in Boston and made her career as a doctor in California, then Colorado. She did not visit Poland again until 2007, nearly 40 years later.
Other young Jews leapt at the opportunity to leave in 1968. Wladimir Mietek Szpirt, another participant in the Miszpucha Foundation trip, was just starting medical school in Szczecin at 18 years old. He found a hostile environment at the university. When he heard Gomułka threaten the “fifth column,” he decided to apply for asylum in Denmark. For him, leaving the Soviet Union meant the chance to freely study medicine, develop his career and build a stable life.
But Szpirt’s parents were stuck. They lost their jobs as accountants at state institutions, and authorities said they knew too much state information to leave the country. Szpirt emigrated alone, uncertain when he would see his parents again. Nearly two years later, they managed to follow him to Denmark.
Szpirt recently retired from his long career as a doctor in Copenhagen. Like Halpern, he returned in April to the place where the first chapter of his life closed. Now in his later years, Szpirt reflected on growing closest to his origin by leaving it behind.
“In Denmark, I was always accepted as a Pole,” said Szpirt. “The funny thing is that for the first 18 years of my life, I was not accepted as a Pole in Poland. But in Denmark, I became a doctor who was born in Poland. I was not a Jew from Poland.”
Wladimir Mietek Szpirt at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland. (Shira Li Bartov)
Many Jews never went back to Poland after the antisemitic campaign. Eliza Fishenfeld grew up in New York City with parents who fled in 1969 and 1974. The Miszpucha Foundation offered her first trip to Poland as the child of emigrants who were “very angry and very hurt,” she said. They decided not to return.
Fishenfeld lived in a displaced Polish Jewish world in New York. All of her parents’ friends were other Polish Jews affected by 1968, she said. They connected through the network of Jewish schools and camps from their childhood in Poland.
“I know they loved Poland before ‘68, because they told me so many stories about it and they were always so happy, and all their friends were from Poland,” said Fishenfeld. “Our community was the Polish Jewish emigré community.”
Fishenfeld said that arriving in Poland felt like a “homecoming of sorts,” though it was nothing like the communist country her parents remembered. She called them daily to describe the trip, but at their age now, she said they no longer travel.
The campaign didn’t only destroy Jewish communities. It also hollowed out Poland’s cultural and intellectual life, as Jews disappeared from universities, medical schools and hospitals, according Joanna Podolska, the former director of the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź. She said their absence left visible holes in the city.
“We didn’t have so many well-educated people, so it was a difficult moment,” said Podolska. “Young people who could work for the city, for Poland, they became citizens of other countries. They were doctors, filmmakers, advocates, chemists, researchers, artists. Probably, Poland would be much richer as a country — more important — with these people who left.”
Decades after the 1968 campaign, it remains a sensitive subject in Polish politics. From 2015 to 2023, Poland was governed by the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party, which promised to revive Poland’s pride in its past and eradicate what officials called a “pedagogy of shame.”
The narrative stifled research into Poland’s Holocaust history, particularly concerning instances of Polish antisemitism and Polish people who killed Jews or cooperated with the Nazi regime. Poland passed a law in 2018 that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes.
But the government also lashed out at a 2018 exhibition about 1968 in the Polin Museum. The exhibition called “Estranged” closed with a wall of quotes, which combined antisemitic and xenophobic statements from 1968 and 2018. Though the quotes were unattributed, two belonged to members of the ruling party.
The exhibition infuriated government officials, and former culture minister Piotr Gliński accused Stola of imposing “very aggressive politics” on the museum. Stola was pushed out as the director in 2019 despite winning a competition to extend his tenure. (In March, he was reinstated under Poland’s new government, led by centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk.)
Anat Plocker, a historian of Eastern Europe at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, said that Polish officials in 1968 defined a form of antisemitic rhetoric that echoes among Polish nationalist politicians to this day.
“The way they talk about the memory of the Holocaust, Jewish power, questions of who is really behind what’s going on in Poland — it’s really the Jews or it’s really a conspiracy of the West against Poland — all of this discourse became so important in Polish politics in ‘68,” said Plocker. “So what we see is that politicians are repeating, really sometimes word by word, the same phrases that were used against Jews in ’68.”
Eight years after the backlash to “Estranged,” Dołowy said she was proud to have garnered funding from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Miszpucha Foundation trip. She hopes to arrange more trips for 1968 emigrants, so they can share their long-obscured stories while they still have the chance.
“These emigrants from 1968 became the generation of grandparents, so this is actually a very good moment for them to tell the story to be listened to by our children,” said Dołowy.
In 2007, Halpern learned about the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków and went to Poland for the first time since leaving home. She has returned since then to attend the festival and Holocaust commemoration events, but she found that most of the other attendees were also visiting from abroad. “They are not people that are actually being Jews here,” she said.
That was why Halpern joined the Miszpucha Foundation trip. She was not interested in rehashing her parents’ Holocaust survival or reliving her own loss in 1968. Instead, she wanted to meet people like Dołowy — the other half of the “miszpucha” who stayed and created new lives.
“I didn’t really want to repeat the story of what happened to my mother, what happened to my father, what happened to the families,” said Halpern. “It was all more walking on people’s destroyed lives. So I wanted to see what is alive.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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