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With goblins, spellcasters and delis, board game makers are imagining new Jewish worlds
(JTA) — Running a not-so-Zagat-rated deli, dropping into a Chinese restaurant for Christmas Eve dinner and acting out a bat mitzvah that involves a vampire — for contemporary board game fans, those can be all in an evening’s play.
That’s because a crop of new games aims to merge Jewish ideas and experiences with the aesthetics and language of games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Dream Apart places players in a fantastical reimagining of a 19th-century shtetl, for example, while J.R. Goldberg’s God of Vengeance draws inspiration from the Yiddish play of the same name. In the games in Doikayt, a collection released in 2020, players can literally wrestle with God.
Known as tabletop role-playing games because they ask players to take on a character, these games and their creators imagine exciting new worlds, subvert classic tropes in fun and irreverent ways, and reinterpret Jewish history and identity.
Tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu have exploded in popularity over the past several years, with many — including at least one group of rabbis — picking up the Zoom-friendly hobby during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the new Jewish games aim to do more than just provide a diversion or even an escape.
“Depending on your family, depending on your synagogue, depending on your community, you may have gotten more or fewer options of what Jewishness could mean in your imagination,” said Lucian Kahn, who created a trilogy of humorous Jewish role-playing games.
“What some of these games are doing is opening that up and pointing to alternate possibilities of imagining Jewishness, not as a way of converting anyone to anything else, but just as a way of showing the tradition is enormous,” he added.
Kahn is the creator of If I Were a Lich, Man, a trilogy of humorous games whose name is a mashup between a “Fiddler on the Roof” song and an undead character, the lich, that frequently appears in fantasy fiction and games. In the title game, players are Jewish liches — spellcasters whose souls, in the lore of Dungeons & Dragons, are stored in phylacteries, the Greek word for tefillin used by Jews in prayer. Representing the four children of the Passover seder, they debate how their community should address the threat of encroaching holy knights.
In some cases, the association of Jews with monsters has given rise to charges of antisemitism — the goblins of “Harry Potter” offer a prime example. But Kahn said he sees Jewish-coded monsters, and queer-coded villains, as figures of resistance.
“There’s a long tradition of looking at the monster and seeing that the reason why these are monsters is because the people who have oppressive power have decided that these are going to be the enemies of the ‘good’ oppressive powers,” Kahn explained. “But if you don’t agree with their ideology, if you’re seeing yourself as being a member of a marginalized community and being in opposition to these oppressive powers, then you can look at the qualities assigned to these monsters and some of them are qualities that are good.”
For Kahn, Jewish-coded monster characters also provide more of an inspiration than the archetypes of more traditional games.
“Maybe somebody thinks they’re insulting me or insulting Jews,” he said. “My response is: I like vampires and liches and trolls and goblins and think they’re much more interesting than bland white muscular humans running through the fields with a cross on their chest hacking at the same things with a sword over and over again.”
Kahn’s outlook has resonated in the tabletop role-playing game community. In February, he and Hit Point Press launched a Kickstarter to fund production of If I Were a Lich, Man. The campaign smashed its $5,000 goal, raising $84,590, enough to hit one of the campaign’s stretch goals of funding a grant to support independent zines about tabletop role-playing games.
The successful campaign means that Kahn’s three games will go into production. In addition to the game about liches, the trilogy includes Same Bat Time, Same Bat Mitzvah, in which players act out a bat mitzvah where one guest has been turned into a vampire, and Grandma’s Drinking Song, inspired by how Kahn’s Jewish great-great grandmother and her children survived in 1920s New York City by working as bootleggers during Prohibition.
In Grandma’s Drinking Song, players write a drinking song together as they act out scenes. Kahn, the former singer/songwriter and guitarist for Brooklyn Jewish queercore folk-punk band Schmekel, wanted to carry over elements of music into this game.
A throughline in all three games is the power of creative resistance to authority — a narrative that Kahn said strikes him as particularly Jewish.
“There are all these stories in Jewish folklore that are really overtly about finding trickster-y or creative ways of fighting back against oppressive and unjust governmental regimes, evil kings, bad advisors,” Kahn said. “One of the first stories I ever heard in my life was the Purim story, so it’s very embedded in my mind as a part of Jewish consciousness, when evil rulers come to power and try to kill us all, we’re supposed to find these outside-the-box ways of preventing that from happening.”
For some Jewish creators, Jewish holidays are an explicit inspiration. Like many Jewish kids of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Max Fefer, a civil engineer by day and game designer by night, grew up loving the picture book “Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins,” which remains a popular festive text. But as Fefer notes, goblins are often associated with antisemitic stereotypes. Fefer’s first Jewish game, Hanukkah Goblins, turns the story on its head — players interact as the jovial goblins, who are here not to destroy but to spread the spirit of Hanukkah to their goblin neighbors.
Last year, Fefer launched a successful Kickstarter for another Jewish holiday-inspired tabletop role-playing game, Esther and the Queens, where players assume the roles of Esther and her handmaidens from the Purim story, who join together to defeat Haman by infiltrating a masquerade party as queens from a far-off land.
Esther and the Queens channels Fefer’s Purim memories and includes carnival activities, including Skee-Ball; a calm, relaxing Mishloach Manot basket-making; and a fast-paced racing game.
“All of our holidays, they’re opportunities for us to gather as a community in different ways,” Fefer said. “Watching this satirical, comedic retelling of the story of Purim and the Esther Megillah and coming together into a theater, in a synagogue, to watch these spiels and laugh together and spin the graggers when we hear Haman’s name — all of those things help us build identity and community, and I think games in particular surrounding identity, that’s a great way for a Jewish person themselves to feel seen in a game and reinforce their identity, and share their background with friends.”
Another pair of Jewish game creators, Gabrielle Rabinowitz and her cousin, Ben Bisogno, were inspired by Passover.
“The seder is kind of like an RPG in that it’s a structured storytelling experience where everyone takes turns reading and telling, and there’s rituals and things you do at a certain time,” Rabinowitz said. “It’s halfway to an RPG.”
The game became a pandemic project for the two of them, and alongside artist Katrin Dirim and a host of other collaborators, they created Ma Nishtana: Why Is This Night Different? — a story game modeled on their family’s seder. The game follows the main beats of the Exodus story, and in every game, there will be a call to action from God, a moment of resistance, a departure and a final barrier — but different characters and moments resonate depending on the players’ choices.
As an educator at the Museum of Natural History, Rabinowitz said she is often thinking about how to foster participation and confidence, and she wanted to create a game-play mechanic to encourage players to be “as brazen as her family is.” The result was an in-game action called “Wait! Wait! Wait!” — if players wish to ask a question, make a suggestion, disagree with a course of action or share a new perspective, they can call out “Wait! Wait! Wait!” to do so.
The game also includes a series of scenes that are actively roleplayed or narrated, and each includes a ritual — one that can be done in-person or an alternate remote-friendly version. For example, at one point each player must come up with a plague inspired by the new story they’re telling together, and in the remote version, players go camera-off after reciting theirs.
“The fact that it was created during the pandemic and a way for us to connect and other people to connect with each other is really the soul of the game,” Rabinowitz said. “After each person tells a plague, by the end, all the cameras are off and everyone stays silent for another minute. It’s a hugely impactful moment when you’re playing remotely. The design is interwoven in the game itself.”
Rabinowitz said by playing a story of a family undergoing these trials, the themes of family and identity deepen every time she plays the game.
“A lot of people say, ‘Wow, I’ve never felt more connected to this story,’” she said. “Embodying these characters gave me a feeling of relevance and that makes it feel important as a Jewish precept.”
For other creators, that deep connection comes in more lighthearted scenarios. Nora Katz, a theatremaker, game designer and public historian working at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life (ISJL) by day, created the Jewish deli-centered game Lunch Rush, which was included in the Doikayt anthology.
“There’s also types of institutions that come up a lot in [tabletop role-playing games], especially sort of high fantasy,” she said. “Everyone meets in a tavern, there’s an inn, things like that. So the idea of a deli as a central gathering place in a world like that felt fun to me.”
An important element of Lunch Rush is that players must be eating while playing, so for Katz’s first round with friends, they got together with chocolate chip ice cream and dill pickle potato chips. She said the deli is a shared language, and her fellow players were all bringing in their own favorite things about delis they loved into the fictional place they were building together.
Tabletop role-playing games “at their core are about collaboration and relationships and storytelling and community, and for me, all of those things are also what Jewishness is about, to me they totally go hand in hand,” Katz said.
The games are not meant to be for Jewish players only. Rabinowitz said the guidebook for Ma Nishtana includes essays to encourage people to further engage with the narrative.
“Jewish players, non-Jewish players, priests, non-religious people, all different people have played it and almost all of them have told us it’s given them a new way of thinking of how they relate to religious tradition, and I didn’t really set out to do that,” Rabinowitz said. “I feel really privileged to have helped create that space.”
Rabinowitz and Bisogno also commissioned other creators to build alternate backdrops for their game, so it can be repurposed to telling the story of another oppressed people’s fight for freedom. Players can interact as embattled yaoguai, spirits from Chinese mythology; explore a Janelle Monáe-inspired Afrofuturist world; play as Indigenous land defenders; or unionize as exploited workers at “E-Shypt.”
Fefer, who has been amplifying the work of other Jewish creators in the tabletop role-playing game space, said the harm of stereotyping and reinforcing negative tropes is still present in the industry, and not just for Jewish people. For example, fans recently criticized Dungeons & Dragons publishers Wizards of the Coast for reinforcing anti-Black stereotypes in the descriptions of a fantasy race, the Hadozee.
“I think it’s a process of talking to people who are from these groups and bringing them onto your teams and making sure you’re incorporating their perspectives into, in the example of Dungeons & Dragons, a hundred-million-dollar industry, being intentional about that design and looking at things from lots of different angles,” Fefer said. “How could our branding, our games be reinforcing something we’re not even aware of?”
Fefer hopes people who play Hanukkah Goblins and Esther and the Queens feel seen and have moments of shared joy, and also that they learn something from these games — about the antisemitic tropes in fantasy, or about underrepresented groups within the Jewish community. With Esther and the Queens, Fefer collaborated with a writer and artist, Noraa Kaplan, to retell the Purim story from a queer and feminist lens, drawing on Jewish texts that the pair said shows the long presence of queer and trans people in Jewish tradition.
“We have a lot of richness within Judaism to share our culture and share our upbringing but also just be representation,” Fefer added. “We’re living in a time of heightened antisemitism and the world being a gross place to be at times, and we can really bring the beauty of Judaism into game design and create experiences for people that are both representative of Judaism and also just very Jewish experiences.”
But for all the important conversations and learning experiences that can come from Jewish tabletop role-playing games, Katz said the goofiness and joy is important, too.
“We live in such a horrendous society that is of our own making,” she said. “If you can, for a little while, enjoy an anticapitalist fictional deli that you and your friends live in, I think that’s great.”
—
The post With goblins, spellcasters and delis, board game makers are imagining new Jewish worlds appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Anti-Israel Republicans tests their strength in Florida primaries
Some insurgent Democrats have found success by making criticism of Israel central to their campaigns. Now a group of Republican candidates is trying to tap into a similar movement on the right, even if they are unlikely to win.
That divide is on display in Florida’s Republican primaries, set for Tuesday, where several long-shot candidates are challenging the party’s traditionally strong support for the Jewish state. Congressional candidates Dan Bilzerian and Jake Lang and gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback have made opposition to Israel and AIPAC part of their political identity. But they have also gone further than most progressive critics of Israel, using rhetoric that has been widely condemned as antisemitic.
Bilzerian is a professional poker player and a social media personality once known as the “King of Instagram” for flaunting a lifestyle of luxury, fast cars, women, and guns. He is challenging incumbent Rep. Randy Fine, one of four Jewish Republicans in Congress. Fine has made support for Israel central to his political identity, while also drawing condemnation for inflammatory rhetoric about Muslims and Palestinians.
Fine is a favorite to win reelection, has the endorsement of President Donald Trump and has a large fundraising advantage. He represents District 6, which is located just under the northeast part of the state and includes Daytona Beach, and is facing four primary challengers. Among them are Aaron Baker, an “America First” candidate who has criticized the “influence of foreign lobbies” and what he calls America’s “endless wars.” Baker also said he would oppose providing Israel with offensive weapons.
But Bilzerian’s attacks on Fine, who often wears a yarmulke in public, have gone well beyond criticism of Israel. He has repeatedly promoted conspiracy theories about Jews, including that Jews killed President John F. Kennedy. On social media, where Bilzerian has more than 30 million followers, he has asked if Adolf Hitler was a “good person,” has called Jews “dumb,” Judaism a “terrible” religion and referred to Fine as a “fat Jew.”
Bilzerian’s campaign treasurer, Patrick Krason, also served as treasurer for Kanye West’s short-lived 2024 presidential campaign. The rapper, who changed his name to Ye, engaged in a spate of antisemitic remarks and Holocaust denial in recent years. A Combat Antisemitism Movement report found that 33% of Bilzerian’s content on his campaign account was anti-Israel and antisemitic.
In recent days, Bilzerian posted antisemitic dog whistles, including that Florida’s “District 6 understands the Jewish problem,” and that “a vote for Randy is a vote for Israel.”
The imagery in Bilzerian’s closing campaign message has become quite provocative. In one AI-generated video, Bilzerian accuses Fine and his wife of engaging in “transgender pride groups that perform for children.”
Another AI video, posted Thursday, says Fine “wants you to die for Israel” and calls the congressman a “psychopath” who wants to watch “goyim cattle” die. He labels Fine a “Jewish supremacist” and “Satan’s creepy little minion” and says that the “fat Jew Randy” needs to be “tarred and feathered.” The video also includes AI-generated imagery of Fine dressed in a cheerleader’s outfit emblazoned with the Israeli flag and says it’s time for voters to “throw out Shylock and all his tricks.”
Fine said the video is “celebrating Hitler,” adding: “We have a choice on Tuesday, to embrace the kind of Nazism that led to the Holocaust or to repudiate this filth and reaffirm American values and character.”
Wonder if I can get them to play this on the radio in the district pic.twitter.com/IAXVV7pNp7
— Dan Bilzerian (@DanBilzerian) August 13, 2026
Other Republican primaries
A similar, if less blatantly antisemitic, theme is also showing up in the Republican primary for Marco Rubio’s former Senate seat.
Jake Lang, a far-right provocateur who was pardoned by Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, is running for the Senate seat held by Republican incumbent Sen. Ashley Moody. Lang, who said his mother is Jewish, renounced his connections to Judaism and Israel and built an online following around Christian nationalism and attacks on both Muslims and Jews. This included performing a Nazi salute outside AIPAC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., and an “anti-Islamification” rally against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani outside Gracie Mansion.
In the crowded Republican primary for governor to replace the term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis, James Fishback has made opposition to Israel and AIPAC central to his campaign. Fishback, who said “Americans shouldn’t die for Israel,” has attacked the frontrunner, Rep. Byron Donalds, over support from pro-Israel donors. Fishback, who is polling at 18%, promised to pull Florida’s investments from Israel Bonds. Running what The New York Times described as a “rage bait” campaign, Fishback has associated himself with antisemitic personalities on the far-right. He also criticized politicians who “visit another country” only to end up “kissing a stupid wall,” a reference to prayer visits to the Western Wall.
Florida Republicans are not expected to abandon their party’s longstanding alliance with Israel when they vote in Tuesday’s primary. But these long-shot candidates have large online followings, and their campaigns are testing whether the growing anti-Israel movement on the right can also find its place in electoral politics.
In his recent memoir, Vice President JD Vance recounted a conversation with conservative activist Charlie Kirk months before he was fatally shot, in which Kirk warned about a growing strain of anti-Israel sentiment on the American right that has at times slid into outright antisemitism.
Fine’s stance
Meanwhile, since winning the special election in 2025 to replace now-Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz, Fine has made his Jewish identity and support for Israel central to his political persona. Fine also served as Ron DeSantis’ Jewish outreach chair during the 2018 gubernatorial election.
Known for his combative nature, Fine has built his political brand as one of Israel’s most outspoken defenders in Congress, frequently using social media to target his critics. He has also said he began wearing a yarmulke in solidarity with Jewish students facing antisemitism on college campuses after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Last week, vandals spray-painted a swastika on one of Fine’s campaign signs outside an early voting location in Flagler Beach. Police are investigating the vandalism, which Fine described as an antisemitic attack.
There are roughly 750,000 Jewish residents in Florida, making it the third most-populous Jewish state after New York and California. Jews make up 4% of the Florida electorate. Nearly 60% of the state’s Jewish electorate identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, according to the American Jewish Population Project at Brandeis University.
Some Florida Democrats have also shown less interest in following the anti-Israel shift seen among progressives elsewhere, like in the Michigan Democratic primary win of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed for U.S. Senate.
Last week, the Hillsborough County Democratic Party canceled a planned keynote address at its annual gala by former New York Assemblyman Michael Blake, who made attacks on AIPAC a major part of his unsuccessful congressional campaign against Rep. Ritchie Torres. The Florida event also featured Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former Rep. David Jolly, a longtime supporter of Israel.
The contrast ahead of Tuesday’s primary is striking: In Florida, the loudest challenge to bipartisan support for Israel is coming not from the progressive left, but from the Republican right.
The post Anti-Israel Republicans tests their strength in Florida primaries appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish watchdog urges NYPD to use cutting-edge detection tech after synagogue attack
(JTA) — A Jewish security watchdog is doubling down on safety measures in the wake of a Friday night attack against worshipers at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, calling on police to identify cutting edge tactics to identify hot spots for potential hate crimes and to place more officers in those areas.
But Mitchell Silber, CEO of the Community Security Initiative, acknowledged that preventing situations like Friday’s is not straightforward.
“It’s difficult, because you’re trying to balance being open for the public for worship, and at the same time, keeping our sanctuary safe,” Silber told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday.
On Friday night Larry Montes, 46, was able to make his way into Central Synagogue’s main sanctuary before he disrupted the service with antisemitic slurs and was apprehended by a security guard. Silber said he’s been in contact with Central Synagogue security leadership about the incident and understood that Montes had not initially raised any red flags when he entered the building.
“There wasn’t something so out of place that it required them to pull him aside, but they noticed him as not someone they were familiar with,” he said. According to CSI, the synagogue’s team was able to quickly defuse the situation anyway due to the training it had received.
In the wake of the incident, Silber said the CSI is sending a bulletin to synagogues about steps to improve synagogue safety, a copy of which was shown to JTA.
The CSI has begun discussions with the NYPD about using tools like “datamining, crime cluster mapping and pre-emptively deploying against hot spots” in order to prevent hate crimes before they can happen. The CSI coordinates security for Jewish institutions and communities in the New York area, and is jointly funded by the UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council. (70 Faces Media, the parent company of the JTA and New York Jewish Week, receives UJA funding.)
The CSI bulletin is also encouraging other synagogues to partner with the Community Security Service, another Jewish nonprofit that trains congregants to volunteer as greeters who can provide more personalized discernment of possible threats.
“Central Synagogue isn’t Park East, Park East isn’t KJ, KJ isn’t Congregation Beth Elohim — they’re all so different, and that’s why having members of the synagogue trained can really be a force multiplier,” Silber said, listing some of the city’s most prominent congregations.
In the incident on Friday night, Montes yelled during the service, disrupting it, and then struck a 63-year-old congregant and headbutted a member of security personnel who was escorting him out.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the congregation’s senior rabbi, was away for a family event when the incident occurred on Friday, according to The New York Times. But she wrote on Instagram that the security director “heroically restrained and escorted” Montes out of the synagogue, which occurred within one minute of him disrupting the service.
Montes has three previous arrests in New York City, each for a robbery between 2019 and 2023, according to police.
He was arrested at the scene and arraigned in criminal court immediately that night, where, according to police, he was charged with four counts of assault as a hate crime, two counts of assault, criminal mischief as a hate crime, criminal mischief, disruption of a religious service, criminal trespassing as a hate crime, two counts of aggravated harassment and two counts of harassment.
The District Attorney’s office requested bail at $50,000 cash with $150,000 bond and the judge set bail at $10,000 cash with $30,000 bond. Montes’ next court date is August 20, according to the DA’s office.
The attack comes as antisemitic hate crimes against Jews in New York City have risen by 8.5% compared to 2025, as of the end of July. Debate has swirled this year over whether North American synagogues need to step up their security in the mold of European congregations in the wake of attacks like the attempted one in West Bloomfield, Michigan, in which a man drove a fireworks-laden truck into a synagogue.
A number of politicians have weighed in to condemn Friday’s attack.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the U.S., wrote, “When American Jews say they feel unsafe, this is why. Antisemitism is real and it’s increasing by the day.”
Some have ascribed a lack of safety to rhetoric used by the city’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a longtime Israel critic who turned heads with his recent video panning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, called the attack “a direct result of Mayor Mamdani’s sustained campaign of incitement” in a post on X.
Meanwhile, some of Mamdani’s Jewish allies have pointed out that a Facebook profile that appears to belong to Montes has shared a number of posts criticizing the mayor.
Mamdani wrote that he was “horrified by the assault” at the synagogue, and that all New Yorkers “must be able to observe their religion without fear of violence.”
Montes’ social media posts include sharing a video of a Prager U commentator taking down Israel critics and multiple photos that suggest support for Israel, including a hand shaded with the Puerto Rican flag shaking another hand shaded with the Israeli flag.
His aunt, who lives in Puerto Rico, told the New York Post that her nephew “might not have been in his right mind,” and that he has expressed a desire to become Jewish.
“I told him he had to be careful with that because those things are sacred — you have to approach them seriously,” she told The Post in Spanish.
A woman named Michele Anenberg-Poma posted a photo of herself on Instagram with wounds on her lip and arm, and wrote, “I am the woman who was assaulted last night at Central Synagogue.”
She added, “You will not punch out our Jewish light. You will not stand and cause harm to our eternal light.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish watchdog urges NYPD to use cutting-edge detection tech after synagogue attack appeared first on The Forward.
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How a 19th century murder introduced Americans to a Jewish funeral
In June 1857, newspapers from Philadelphia to St. Louis carried reports of a shocking crime in western Massachusetts. Isaac Jackson, a 17- or 18-year-old German Jewish peddler from Westfield, was shot and robbed while traveling his route between the towns of Westfield and Russell. His body was dragged to the bank of a river, concealed beneath stones and debris, and not discovered until the following day. Contemporary newspaper stories described it as one of western Massachusetts’ most notorious murders in half a century.
The crime quickly attracted national attention as accounts proliferated, sometimes differing on details such as Jackson’s age. Reporters described the search for his body, the arrest of Charles Jones, known to readers as the “ministerial burglar,” and the growing public anger that led some spectators to openly discuss lynching the accused before he could stand trial.
The attention came decades before mass migration from Eastern Europe transformed American Jewish life. The country’s Jewish population numbered no more than 200,000. Yet Jackson’s murder became national news, and newspapers far beyond Massachusetts used the story of his funeral to explain Jewish burial and mourning customs to their readers.
After Jackson’s body was recovered, it was taken to Hartford, Connecticut, for burial, “there being no synagogue at Westfield.” His funeral was held at Touro Hall, home of Congregation Beth Israel, which had only recently converted the former North Baptist Church into a synagogue with the help of a bequest from the Jewish philanthropist Judah Touro.
According to an account first published in the Hartford Times and widely reprinted in newspapers across the country, the body was washed and clothed in white linen garments “expressly made by Jewish women,” who considered it a final act of kindness toward a fellow Jew. Earth was placed beneath the head “to indicate that all cometh from the earth and returneth thither again.” The head was turned toward the east, symbolizing, the newspaper explained, “the great reverence of the Israelite towards the land of his nationality,” and the hope that “as the sun rises to revivify all creation so will the dead finally rise to everlasting life.”
As the coffin was lowered, those gathered prayed, “May the soul of the departed come to its resting place in peace.” Each mourner then placed earth upon the grave before reciting the words, “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”
The funeral itself was not the only moment that revealed how Isaac’s family mourned.
When word reached Westfield that a peddler had been murdered along the road to Russell, “there was a great rush in that direction, and at least one hundred persons were promptly there. Among them were Coroner Abbott, Justice Lewis, and other prominent citizens.” Isaac’s brother Joseph also hurried to the scene. At first, according to one newspaper account, he refused to believe the victim could be his younger sibling. But when he saw the wagon, he recognized it immediately and “burst into tears.”
As the body was recovered from the stream, Joseph, the newspaper reported, performed what it described as his “first duty as a Jew,” removing from Isaac’s pockets the tefillin he carried “to bind around his forehead and arm each morning upon rising.”
The newspapers also offered small glimpses of the life that had ended so suddenly. Isaac was the youngest of four brothers, whose family operated a store in Westfield and maintained traveling peddler wagons throughout the surrounding countryside. On the morning of the murder, he left carrying dry goods, jewelry and ready-made clothing. Among the possessions later identified by his brother was his watch.
The burial rites did not end with the funeral.
Several weeks later, the Springfield Daily Republican published a brief account, later reprinted in the Boston Evening Transcript, about one of Isaac’s brothers while he was again traveling as a peddler with the same wagon. As he unfolded a piece of cloth for a customer, he noticed a single drop of blood. Overcome with emotion, the newspaper reported, he “cried for a few moments like a child,” then folded the cloth and declared that he must return to Hartford so the bloodstained cloth could be buried with his brother. According to the account, everything bearing Isaac’s blood that had been found after the murder had already been interred with him, per Jewish tradition.
Isaac Jackson still rests in Hartford’s Zion Hill Cemetery. Much of his life has been lost to history. But the newspapers that reported his murder preserved something that endures: a careful record of the customs through which his family and community buried him.
The post How a 19th century murder introduced Americans to a Jewish funeral appeared first on The Forward.
