Winter 2025
Table of Contents
- Ain’t No Back to a merry-go-round: Desegregating Glen Echo Amusement Park
- YIVO at 100: Preserving Ashkenazi Culture of the Past for the Present and Future
- Israel’s “Lone Soldiers” Are Not All Alone
- B’nai B’rith Magazine Winter 2024 Issue Wins Journalism Prize
- A Dead Sea Journey: Biking Through the Negev
- The Jews of Kenya: Two Different Paths
- Students Confront Anti-Semitism on College Campuses in None Shall Be Afraid Essay Contest
- Favorites in Jewish Media from 5785: Our Staff Picks
Ain't No Back to a merry-go-round: Desegregating Glen Echo Amusement Park
By Deborah Lynn Blumberg
Photo: Courtesy of National Park Service
At Glen Echo Amusement Park in suburban Bethesda, Maryland, in the 1950s, squealing children rode rabbits, reindeer and tigers on the carousel, crashed bumper cars with abandon and spun themselves silly on the Tilt-O-Whirl. But only white children.
Black people were blocked from entering. “It’s strictly for white patrons,” deputized security guard Francis Collins told Laurence Henry, a 26-year-old Howard University student, as Henry stood at the gates of the amusement park one hot, humid day in June 1960 trying to get in. What followed was a summer-long campaign by Henry and his classmates—plus a group of nearby allies—to bring down the racial barrier.
Howard students banded with residents from the nearby Bannockburn neighborhood, many of them Jewish. Side by side, students and suburbanites, many pushing strollers, spent weeks in the sweltering sun picketing outside Glen Echo. Ultimately, ahead of the park’s 1961 spring opening, owners announced Glen Echo would be open to all. The seminal moment in U.S. history—well before civil rights activists’ sit-ins and freedom rides accelerated countrywide—is the subject of a documentary by Ilana Trachtman. As a producer and director, Trachtman has created Emmy award-winning nonfiction programs for PBS, HBO Family and Discovery on topics including the legacy of slavery in Latin America and activism among Gulf Coast shrimpers. Her personal projects include “Praying with Lior”—a portrait of a boy with Down syndrome preparing for his bar mitzvah—and “Mariachi High”—a year in the life of a South Texas high school champion mariachi ensemble.
“I’m attracted to rich worlds populated by good people who want decency,” Trachtman said. “I have to fall in love with the characters, and all of my films are always, always character-driven.” In “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round,” Glen Echo is very much a character in its own right, one Trachtman first encountered in the ’70s and ’80s, growing up in Montgomery County, Maryland, near the then-abandoned park turned arts center operated by the National Park Service. (Privately owned Glen Echo closed in 1968 after declining attendance.)
As a child, Trachtman attended theater classes and performed in plays at the center. Walking through Glen Echo, she imagined the fun and merriment of the bygone era, smelling the popcorn and hearing the happy notes of carnival music.
“We imbue places with meaning,” Trachtman says. “For some people, it’s a childhood bedroom, or maybe a particular hike in the woods. It’s your magical place, especially as a child. And so, that’s what Glen Echo was to me. It was a window to this beautiful, wholesome, happy aesthetic and interesting Americana. It was like peering into a Norman Rockwell painting, and probably the most real window that I had into the past.”
Trachtman’s chance encounter with a Glen Echo park ranger decades later, however, shook the very foundation of her perception. In winter 2008, Trachtman and her fiancée (now husband) toured the park as a possible wedding venue. Jewish U.S. Park Ranger Sam Swersky, who possessed a wealth of Glen Echo stories, told the couple about Bannockburn resident and former protester Hyman Bookbinder, past AFL-CIO lobbyist and assistant to the Secretary of Commerce in the Kennedy administration.
Later in life, Bookbinder—also the American Jewish Committee’s longtime Washington representative—told Swersky during daily Glen Echo walks with his wife, Ida, that the picketing was the proudest moment of his career. Upon hearing about the protest, Trachtman was shocked and even a little ashamed at what she calls her own ignorance.
“It was suddenly having a sense of the fullness of what Glen Echo was—this wholesome place of delight for Washingtonians, and simultaneously a place of exclusion and a place of pain and a place of actual real ugliness in terms of what humans can do,” she says.
She knew she had to make a film.
Trachtman began her research in 2013 with a DVD Swersky had made of a reunion of Glen Echo protesters he helped organize in the early 2000s. She dug into archives—in the Rockville Public Library, Glen Echo Town Hall and the Library of Congress—perusing newspaper clippings, photographs, and audio and video recordings.
“Then I tracked down and talked to every single person that I could find who had been there,” she says. Finding the over 100 people she interviewed entailed scouring phonebooks, neighborhood rosters, and church and synagogue records.
Filming started in 2014, and for a decade Trachtman worked on her passion project alongside her other film work. “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round” premiered in May 2024 at the Maryland Film Festival. She took the title from Langston Hughes’ 1942 poem “Merry-Go-Round.” It reads, “On the bus we’re put in the back—But there ain’t no back/To a merry-go-round! Where’s the horse/For a kid that’s black?”
Photo: Courtesy of George Meany Library/Ilana Trachtman
At the gates of Glen Echo
In the D.C. area in the ’50s and ’60s, segregation was part of daily life, with Black-only schools and bathrooms and white-only water fountains and lunch counters. Bannockburn was different. It began in 1946 as a collectively owned community fueled by utopian postwar dreams. Families moved into mid-century modern homes on the site of a former hilly golf course just east of Glen Echo. Many of the progressive residents—among them a sizable number of Jews—had migrated to Maryland from up north to work in the federal government.
In February 1960, Howard students watched along with the rest of the country as four Black college students at the “whites only” Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, asked for service and refused to leave when denied.
The protest inspired six students from Howard’s Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), a student-run protest group aimed at ending segregation, to stage a similar sit-in at Cherrydale Drug Fair in Arlington, Virginia. Within two weeks, lunch counters Arlington-wide were desegregated. Next, they turned to Glen Echo, known for its catchy radio jingle and “Come one, come all” print ads that they knew didn’t apply to them.
Some 60 NAG members joined Henry at Glen Echo’s gates in 1960 along with primarily white suburbanites, many of whom had appealed to local government for years to pressure park owners
to desegregate.
Clutching tickets purchased by white protesters, Black protesters streamed into the park. Several sat on the carousel. Arrests followed. But students—and Bannockburners—returned the next day, and the day after that, for nine hot weeks. As they marched and sang, they faced enraged counterprotesters, including American Nazi Party members.
“The faces were so angry,” says Tina Clarke, one of the Black protesters, in the film. She recalls riding the streetcar past Glen Echo, nose pressed to the glass. White kids laughed and swam in the pool. On the picket lines, “the eyes would be bulgin’, face all red and it’s like they were like crazy people, just calling you filthy names.”
Bannockburn resident Esther Delaplaine, a white Philadelphia transplant, took her five kids to the picket lines. Bannockburners brought lemonade and cookies to share. “The youngsters I think were wondering, whose picket line is this?” she says in the film. Students were cautious but welcomed residents’ support.
Teenagers participated too, and lifelong friendships formed between Black and white protestors. Bannockburner Loren Weinberg was 17 when he ran messages between protestors after school and his job at a D.C. aquarium shop. “The Road to Hell is Paved with Little Rocks,” read his picket sign, referring to the segregationist resistance at Little Rock
Central High School, Arkansas, three years earlier.
“Racism was no stranger to me, I saw it all around me,” Weinberg said at his home in Boulder. Glen Echo “was a big part of my life. I was proud of what I was doing.” Weinberg went on to picket at the nearby Bethesda-Hiser Theatre, which also desegregated after protests. Later, he became a flagship faculty member at Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia), which served primarily working-class Black students.
New York University political science professor emeritus Martin Schain was a college junior when he and colleagues at his D.C. summer trade union job joined picketers. “It became a kind of habit—every day after work I went out and picketed,” he tells B’nai B’rith. Schain rode the carousel with Howard students and was arrested. “It actually became a badge of honor,” he adds. “When I look back, I really feel honored to have been a part of that movement. It gave me a wonderful feeling about America.”
The protest gained national attention—congressmen participated; Sammy Davis Jr. promised to put on a benefit show for demonstrators. Finally, on March 14, 1961, a Washington Afro-American headline shocked protestors by announcing, “Glen Echo says come one, come all and means it,” signaling an unexpected end to what many had thought would be months more of picketing. “Glen Echo gave me a determination to not accept being mistreated because of my color,” Deborah Swedenburg Willis, who lived near the park, says in the film. Protesters Black and white went on to participate in freedom rides, endure arrests and inspire others in the civil rights movement.
“Press on, press on, that is a lesson from Glen Echo,” says Clarke, who joined the picketing from her Black community of Jerusalem, near Poolesville in Maryland, some miles from the park.
For Trachtman, the film’s message that ordinary peoples’ actions—especially diverse groups uniting—can drive significant, positive change feels even more salient today than when she started making her film in 2014, when Barack Obama was president, she says.
“It’s just so easy to say, I’m not capable, I’m not as talented, that’s not my path, or nothing that I do is going to make a difference,” says Trachtman. But “every single person has the capacity to be the change. We have to because we can, because there is nobody else.”
Visit aintnoback.com for information about upcoming screenings in your city.
YIVO at 100: Preserving Ashkenazi Culture of the Past for the Present and Future
By Beryl Lieff Benderly
The names people give their children can say a lot about their values and identities. So when, between the two world wars, in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), a Jewish teacher, journalist and activist named Aron Mark and his wife, Fania, gave their first-born son the unusual name of Yivo, everyone could see that they strongly favored strengthening the Yiddish language and the secular, modern, Yiddish-based Jewish culture then flourishing in Eastern and Central Europe.
That’s because YIVO is the acronym (in both Yiddish and English) of the Yiddisher Visenshaftlecher Institut (Jewish Scientific Institute), then a relatively new organization committed to studying and strengthening the Ashkenazi Jewish culture of Eastern Europe and its thousand-year-old native speech. At the time, European Jews were struggling to figure out their place in a rapidly changing world. Was the right linguistic choice for the Jewish future Yiddish, modern Hebrew (to serve a growing Jewish presence in what was then British Mandatory Palestine), or the languages of the Gentiles they lived among? YIVO, which came down strongly on the side of a modernized “mamaloshen,” had strong appeal for Yiddish supporters like Aron Mark.
Tragically, though, Yivele, as his parents called him, and many of his relatives and neighbors, were among the tens of thousands murdered at the Ponary forest killing site that the Nazis used between 1941 and 1943, as historian Katherine Lebow notes. Yiddish, with 11 million pre-World War II speakers, was then world Jewry’s most prevalent language. Today, it is essentially gone from daily use except among ultra-Orthodox Jews. But Yivele’s eponym lives on, and, headquartered in Manhattan, constitutes what journalist Alyssa Quint calls “the brick-and-mortar memory of East European Jewry.” This year, the organization that the Marks so ardently supported celebrates its centennial.
The physical memory consists of YIVO’s 24 million documents and artifacts, which comprise the most extensive collection of materials related to Jewish Eastern Europe on earth. YIVO is one of five partner organizations that share the Center for Jewish History on West 16th Street. The door between the Ionic columns on the building’s brick Palladian façade leads to modern facilities including a two-story great hall; storage and conservation areas for the priceless collections; a bright, book-lined two-story reading room; multiple gallery spaces for public exhibitions; and an auditorium seating over 200.
Since World War II, YIVO has actively increased its holdings while continuing to advance knowledge by publishing pivotal journals and books, both scholarly and popular. Beyond that, a widely used system of standard spelling devised by YIVO scholars has dramatically increased consistency and clarity of written Yiddish, a language long composed of multiple dialects. And though YIVO remains “[d]edicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jewry worldwide,” according to its Facebook page, it also uses 21st century technology to bring that linguistic and cultural heritage to new, overwhelmingly non-Yiddish-speaking generations around the globe.
“YIVO was founded in 1925 with the support of prominent intellectuals and scholars, including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, in Berlin, Germany, and Vilna, Poland—today’s Vilnius, Lithuania,” noted New York Mayor Eric Adams in a proclamation marking March 24, 2025, as “YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Day.” Relocating its supposedly temporary wartime headquarters from Vilna to New York, Adams added, YIVO continued telling “the story of the Jewish people: what they have cherished and endured, and how they have persevered.”
Though a New York branch existed in the organization’s early days, Vilna, for centuries a revered center of Jewish learning, was where the founders did their “scientific,” i.e., systematic and modern, research into the life, culture and language of prewar East Europe’s Jews. Helping a small cadre of pioneering scholars examine sociology, demography, economics, linguistics, and cultural and religious life were thousands of volunteer zamlers (collectors) in shtetls and cities across the region and beyond. They sent in all kinds of then-contemporary data, documents, artifacts, folklore and linguistic information, sometimes along with (usually) small donations.
YIVO under attack
In September 1939, Poland suffered the twin calamities of both German and Soviet invasions. Vilna first came under Soviet occupation and YIVO became part of its institute for Lithuanian studies. Seizing control in 1941, Germany began looting YIVO’s collections, forcing Jewish intellectuals to work at extracting valuable and noteworthy items for a planned “Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question” in Frankfurt, with the remainder slated for destruction. Vilna’s Jews were meanwhile confined to a ghetto that the Germans largely liquidated by late 1943 by starvation and disease, at the Ponary Forest, or by transport to death camps. Instead of following orders to plunder YIVO’s collections, however, courageous Jewish workers calling themselves the Paper Brigade risked their lives to hide or bury books and papers in the ghetto.
When the war began, YIVO’s director, the eminent linguist Max Weinreich—whose Vilna apartment served as the organization’s first headquarters—happened to find himself, along with his son Uriel, himself a future prominent Yiddish linguist, at a linguistics conference in Denmark. Reaching New York with Uriel, Max arranged the supposedly temporary wartime headquarters in 1940. Restoring the Vilna center after the war proved impossible, leaving New York as YIVO’s main location. In the immediate postwar years, YIVO succeeded in retrieving many hidden documents and, with the help of the U.S. Army, some of the materials the Nazis took to Germany. YIVO also made a concerted effort to document the Holocaust with original materials, some of which served as evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. But, with the Soviets’ tightening grip on Eastern Europe and crackdown on Jewish culture in the late 1940s, heroic Paper Brigade members who had survived and returned to Vilna had to flee.
Although only a portion of YIVO’s original wealth of documents, books, newspapers, diaries and more remains, it forms the foundation of YIVO’s New York collections. Besides continuing to gather materials, YIVO also continued its scholarly work and publication, producing books and journals and organizing conferences. It also offered Yiddish language courses and an expanding array of classes and cultural and educational events that attracted a growing non-scholarly audience.
The numbers of those studying, researching and learning from and about YIVO’s treasures have drastically expanded in recent years. When its holdings were only on paper, says CEO and Executive Director Jonathan Brent, “about five to seven thousand people annually would come to the YIVO building in New York.” But then it began digitizing materials and putting the Vilna collections online, which brought in over 750,000 digital visitors from around the world.
The COVID-19 lockdown forced online the Yiddish language courses formerly offered only in person in Manhattan, revealing a large international population eager to learn to speak and read over Zoom. Now, dozens of virtual Yiddish classes engage learners ranging from college students to octogenarians who are located in North America, Europe, Latin America and beyond. YIVO study tours also take travelers from around the world to the sites of European Jewish history. (Full disclosure: I traveled to both Lithuania and Poland and study Yiddish online with YIVO.)
These people—many of them new to Yiddish—form part of a larger renaissance of interest in the language and its culture, as many Jews—and some non-Jews—seek greater knowledge and understanding of the world their grandparents and great-grandparents inhabited. Interest extends well beyond Jewish descendants of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Just as origins in Poland, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine are central to the identity of countless Ashkenazi Jews, so, Brent says, has the millennium-long Jewish presence been gaining awareness in those countries since the Soviets stopped trying to erase it.
Building relationships
Strengthening these shared and mutually enriching connections is an important goal. In 2023, Brent and YIVO Chief of Staff Shelly Freeman traveled to Kyiv concerning “a major initiative underway in Ukraine”—despite the war—to ensure that an important archive that survived both a world war and the Soviets is “protected from Russian aggression,” Brent notes. Collaborations also extend to Poland and to a partnership with Lithuania, where Vilnius is now the national capital. On June 20, 2019, during a YIVO study tour, my husband and I witnessed the dedication of a plaque at the site of YIVO’s long-destroyed building in Vilna. Dignitaries present included Lithuania’s ministers of culture and foreign affairs and Vilnius’s mayor. “YIVO’s merits and contribution to studying and preserving the Jewish heritage and the heritage of our multinational society are invaluable,” noted Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius.
Two weeks later, on July 6, after we tourists returned home, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite bestowed on Brent a high national honor, the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania, for his work building cooperation among institutions in preserving the historic record of Lithuanian Jewry and, specifically, the partnership among YIVO, the Lithuanian Central State Archives and two major national libraries in digitizing vast holdings in New York and Vilnius, and making them available in a dedicated internet portal through the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project.
Lithuania “puts the preservation of Jewish heritage high among its priorities, and appreciates the work that YIVO has been doing,” declared the National Library of Lithuania on Facebook. Further emphasizing their cooperation in cultural preservation, in 2023, YIVO and the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania jointly established an award “for Contributions to the Development of Relations and Understanding between Lithuania and the Jews,” naming it for Antanas Ulpis, a non-Jewish library chief who, in 1948, risked his life to supervise the rescue of thousands of Jewish documents and books destined for Soviet destruction by hiding them in a cavernous, disused Catholic church.
Then, as YIVO’s centennial year approached, the Embassy of Lithuania in Washington, D.C., held its own celebration on Dec. 9, 2024. Featured speakers included Brent, who outlined YIVO’s history, and Ambassador Audra Plepyte, who saluted “the history of YIVO and the bravery of the people who heroically preserved the documents keeping so many stories of the past alive.” Thanks to them, “the rich history of Litvaks survived to this day” and forms “an enormous part of our history and common heritage.”
YIVO’s own anniversary celebration has included conferences in New York and Vilnius, a book on YIVO’s history slated for publication in 2026 and an exhibit featuring 100 significant objects from YIVO’s collections. Other initiatives underway include “the first learning and media center devoted to the Eastern European Jewish history in the world,” and plans for “what we hope to be the first master’s degree program in Yiddish language and civilization,” Brent says.
Aron and Yivele Mark would likely not recognize the transformed world that YIVO functions in today. But the enduring goals of learning, teaching and preserving Yiddish culture and language would be familiar indeed.
Artifacts from the book and exhibition “100 Objects from the Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research”
All photos: Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Banner of the Hebrew Actors Union. Organized in 1900, this group became the world’s first official union of performing artists, as noted by YIVO’s curators. An artifact of the Yiddish theater, the banner also evidences the key role played by Jewish men and women in advancing the reforms of the labor movement, which revolutionized the rights of working people and mandated improved working conditions in the United States.
A page of notes dated August 1941, from Otto Frank’s National Refugee Service Case application files. This document reveals the tragic fate of Otto Frank and his family, which included his daughter, Anne, all of whom could have immigrated to the United States. The papers poignantly represent the files of countless others who had obtained sponsorship qualifying them to apply for refugee status but who nonetheless were refused.
Manuscript page from “Funem Yarid” (Back from the Fair) by Sholem Aleichem, 1915. Publishing under the pen name Sholem Aleichem, Russian-born Shalom Rabinovitz (1859-1916) is recognized as one of the world’s greatest, and most beloved, writers, in Yiddish or any other language. Marking changes to “Funem Yarid,” Sholem Aleichem edited his unfinished memoir to conform to the fictionalized version of shtetl life with which his works are identified. His Tevye stories became the basis for the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Israel’s “Lone Soldiers” Are Not All Alone
By Michele Chabin
In 2024, more than 7,000 designated “lone soldiers” served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Of the total, 2,850 came from more than 60 countries. To fit the label, they had to be estranged from
their Israeli parents, be orphans, or have no family connections in their adopted land.
Generations of soldiers in countless wars around the globe have adapted to such conditions where “home” was but a distant dream inaccessible from the front and available only to those assigned to domestic duties, where weekend leaves offered some relief and perhaps even a home-cooked meal.
Israel, however, has adopted an entire support system for those deemed “lone soldiers” to ease their military duty in times of war and peace. Since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza, the need has grown and the system has kicked into high gear.
The IDF even has a “Lone Soldier Desk” devoted to their welfare.
It’s Thursday afternoon, the time when many of Israel’s soldiers have weekend leave. Those who live with their parents arrive home to find fridges stocked and a hot meal in the oven. They can head straight to the shower and, with their family’s encouragement, maybe even take a nap.
But life for “lone soldiers” is markedly different.
Sgt. First Class Reut Engle, 24, is one. After emigrating from England to Israel in 2020 and serving as a combat medic during her regular military service, she was called up for reserve duty on Oct. 7, 2023, the day Hamas invaded Israel, murdering as many as 1,200 civilians and taking hostage 251 more.
“During my regular service I had incredible support from an Israeli family that ‘adopted’ me,” she said. “Now, as a reservist in Gaza,” life is different. On leave she has no adoptive family but shares an apartment with other young people. If she gets out on a Thursday, she has time to shop for food. “If I’m released on Friday,” she said, “I have no way to make Shabbat.”
This week, when Engle left her army base for the weekend, she headed straight to the Michael Levin Base in Jerusalem, named for a paratrooper from Pennsylvania killed in the Second Lebanon War in 2006. With its old sofas, computer stations, library, TV, ping-pong table, PlayStation, kitchen, laundry room and well-stocked pantry, the facility feels like a basement back home. About 2,500 young people utilize the nonprofit center.
Located near the Mahane Yehuda Market, “the Base” is manned by a small paid staff and volunteers who offer advice, weekly Shabbat meals and Thursday-night activities. Open seven days a week, it is the place to grab a bite to eat, hang out with friends and stock up on army socks.
“This is my place to sit, to be,” Engle said, her voice barely audible above the boisterous chatter of two dozen high-spirited young adults enjoying their weekend leave. “These people are my biggest support system. They also feed me,” she said. “It’s hard coming out of Gaza and being alone. My non-army friends don’t know anything about my life.”
Lizzie Noach, co-director of the “the Base,” said it has become more popular since the war began. “We’re seeing more former lone soldiers, especially guys back in reserve duty. One came with a friend and the friend asked, ‘Can I have a hug?’ Sometimes these big burly guys still feel like kids, but their mothers aren’t here.”
While the services offered to lone soldiers by the IDF and non-governmental organizations have improved dramatically over the past 15 to 20 years, the Gaza war has placed an unprecedented strain on active-duty soldiers and reservists and the institutions that assist them.
“The needs of lone soldiers have grown since the war started,” said Maj. Lior, head of the IDF’s Lone Soldier Desk, who asked that only her first name be used, in accordance with IDF protocol.
While having a support system is vital for any soldier, the fact that lone soldiers cannot rely on their parents “creates additional pressure,” Maj. Lior said. The demands of wartime affect every soldier, “but they affect lone soldiers more.” During wartime, she said, other soldiers see their families every few weeks. Meanwhile, lone soldiers from abroad, who are normally entitled to a month’s leave every year to visit their families, may not be permitted to leave the country.
In the best of times, lone soldiers face special challenges, especially if they’ve recently moved to Israel, Maj. Lior said. “Often, they’re dealing with a different culture, a different language, and being in the military is a unique experience that their peers and family back home aren’t going through. Soldiers who go home to a family that supports them have it easier.”
Highly motivated to join combat units, many lone soldiers have been killed or injured during the war. At least 24 active-duty lone soldiers from abroad and an undetermined number of lone soldier reservists have died in uniform, according to the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration.
Since the early days of the war, the Lone Soldier Desk has arranged emergency flights for parents of deceased soldiers. Staff members have called injured soldiers every day and visit them at least once a week. “We track their health situation with the hospital, and ensure that once they’re released they are in a supportive environment,” Maj. Lior said.
As supportive as the IDF tries to be, it doesn’t provide 24/7 coverage, so others try to fill the gaps. When a lone soldier in a tank brigade was badly injured, the Israel-based parents of his fellow soldiers took shifts at the hospital until the soldier’s parents could arrive from South America.
When a lone soldier dies, calls go out over social media, asking the public to attend the funeral. Thousands typically come to pay their respects at the cemetery and during the shiva.
It wasn’t always this way. “When I was a lone soldier more than 40 years ago, I was basically on my own,” said Milty Levinson, a longtime IDF reservist who has advised hundreds of prospective soldiers. “Today the assistance they get, the guidance, is way beyond what the army did before.”
Lone soldiers receive stipends to cover food and rent, expenses that would ordinarily be covered by their families. In some cases, the IDF provides housing through the Soldiers Welfare Association, or coordinates with Garin Tzabar, an organization founded in 1991 that provides lone soldiers with kibbutz-based accommodations and an adoptive family. HaBayit Shel Benji, a lone soldier facility named in memory of Maj. Benji Hillman, killed in action during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, houses 87 lone combat soldiers.
Although all combat commanders and IDF welfare officers receive training on the rights of lone soldiers, non-combat unit commanders do not, said “T,” a religious female lone soldier from the Midwestern United States who serves in a classified non-combat air force unit. On this particular Thursday, she has traveled quite a distance to the Base to hang out with friends.
“My personal commander is a guy who had never commanded a lone soldier before,” she said. “He didn’t know he has to give me one day off per month. He didn’t know that I live on my own, so I can’t leave base too late. I have to cook, do laundry, buy groceries.”
That lone soldiers receive any special assistance is partly the legacy of Michael Levin, the fallen lone soldier who died nearly two decades ago. The Michael Levin Lone Soldier Foundation established in his memory funds several organizations, including the Base and HaBayit Shel Benji that help lone soldiers with logistical support, mental health counseling or housing.
“Michael faced a multitude of challenges as a lone soldier,” said Harriet Levin, his mother. “His Hebrew wasn’t great and he needed help with filling out documents.” When Michael saved up his weekend leave so he could spend time with his mother when she visited Israel, “he said his commanders wouldn’t let him out. They thought he was a rich American and was taking off time just for fun. That’s how they viewed lone soldiers back then.”
During his brief breaks, Michael turned to Tziki Aud, a Jewish Agency employee who assisted lone soldiers.
“The idea of a lone soldier organization was Michael’s idea,” Harriet Levin said. “He and Tziki discussed opening a lone soldier center once Michael completed his service.” After Michael was killed and his name became synonymous with lone soldiers, “there was a new respect for lone soldiers that didn’t exist then. Israelis finally realized that these kids from abroad don’t have to do IDF service. That they’re doing this for the love of Israel.”
That idealism has enabled tens of thousands of lone soldiers to weather the vicissitudes of army life and the challenges of integrating into a new country.
“Whether working in a kitchen feeding 3,000 soldiers at a time or serving in special forces, the pressure isn’t something anyone who hasn’t been in the army has experienced,” Levinson said, which is why Israeli recruits are required to share their health records, including treatment for anxiety or any other mental health problem. Unless lone soldiers from abroad provide their health records, the IDF must rely on what soldiers choose to reveal.
“It’s an age group where many kids aren’t comfortable speaking to people about their mental health,” reservist Levinson said. “With lone soldiers there is the additional element of feeling the need to prove themselves once they’re in the IDF. Many don’t feel comfortable telling their commanders that something is wrong.”
Instead, they may turn to organizations like KeepOlim in Israel, which runs a hotline for immigrant soldiers who are hesitant to seek help from IDF resources directly. Some have expressed suicidal thoughts, according to LiAmi Lawrence, the CEO of the nonprofit.
Maj. Lior said she doesn’t know how many of the soldiers who have died by suicide were lone soldiers, but that “we do everything possible to identify troubles before they get worse and deal with them as much as possible.”
Data is scarce. However, a 2019 report by a mental health NGO found that “Lone soldiers make up roughly 4% of active-duty soldiers in the IDF, yet in the past year they have accounted for 30% of all suicides.”
Despite the challenges, most lone soldiers emerge from their service emotionally and physically stronger.
Engle, for one, said she has no regrets. She smiled as her friends at the Base devoured pizzas and discussed weekend plans.
“Even though we all come from different places around the world,” she said, “we’re all going through the same thing. They’ve got my back.”
We are proud to publish the eclectic B’nai B’rith Magazine, and we are delighted that our excellence has been recognized year after year by the American Jewish Press Association in its competitive Simon Rockower Awards contest for excellence in Jewish journalism. Our 2024 winter issue received four awards, as follows:
“Gross Breesen: A Temporary Haven From Hitler” by Heidi Landecker received a second-place award for Excellence in Writing about Jewish Heritage and Jewish Peoplehood in Europe.
“American Jewish Orphanages Housed the Most Fortunate Unfortunates”
by Marlene Trestman garnered a second-place award for Excellence in North American Jewish History.
Our Winter 2024 issue won second place for Excellence—Publication Design, special credit to art director and graphic designer Simeon Montesa.
“Canadian-Israeli Cyclist Gets Good Mileage” by Jennifer Lovy received an Honorable Mention for Excellence in Writing about Sports.
Read them here: https://bit.ly/48v4gl7
A Dead Sea Journey: Biking Through the Negev
Discovering beauty, fragility and danger in Israel’s desert frontier
By Uriel Heilman
It’s late morning at the lowest place on Earth, and I’m getting ready to begin a two-day bicycle journey at the Dead Sea.
The desert springs and waterfalls of Ein Gedi are on my right, and to my left is the glistening sea at 1,400 feet below sea level. It’s said to be one of Israel’s most unique and beautiful sites.
But just 50 yards away lies an apparent post-apocalyptic landscape: a closed-off road with buckled and cracked asphalt, sinkholes where the surface of the earth has collapsed, abandoned buildings sitting at odd angles. “Do Not Enter” signs everywhere warn of danger.
This is exactly why I’ve come.
The Dead Sea has been in rapid retreat for decades, ever since Israel, Jordan and Syria began diverting freshwater upstream and depriving the sea—technically, a saline lake—of inflows from the Jordan River. Mineral extraction and climate change accelerated the shrinkage, and about 40 years ago the sea’s southern basin dried up to the point that it effectively split from the north.
Today, the southern Dead Sea is something of a mirage: It’s actually a series of evaporation pools controlled on the Israeli side by Dead Sea Works, the mineral-extraction company that harvests potash, bromine, magnesium and salt from the sea. The pools are connected to the genuine Dead Sea by a narrow manmade channel lined with land mines on its eastern side, flanking Jordan.
I’d come to learn more about the distinctive geological features of this rapidly changing landscape, the challenges to wildlife and the environment, and the new post-Oct. 7 security concerns in the Israeli communities along the Jordanian border.
My journey would take me along the sea’s western shore and, eventually, into the desert at Mt. Sodom—where a great salt pillar called Lot’s Wife connects the area’s geography to the Bible. I’d end my trip at the remote desert border town of Ein Tamar, where four months earlier a pair of terrorists disguised in Israeli army uniforms snuck across from Jordan and opened fire, injuring two Israeli soldiers before being shot dead.
The greatest hazard
Before leaving, my wife and I discussed what constituted the greatest hazard of my solo ride: Rockets from Yemen? My journey took place in late March, when the Houthis were attacking Israel almost daily. Sinkholes? Dehydration? Snakes?
No, I said: Israeli drivers. Route 90, which runs beside the sea, is notoriously deadly. I wasn’t planning on biking on asphalt, but between sinkholes and the Judaean Mountains, there wasn’t much room to maneuver.
Riding south from Ein Gedi, I find a dirt path that seems far enough from the sinkholes, whisper a prayer for a safe journey and set off.
Almost all the Dead Sea’s estimated 6,000-8,000 sinkholes are in the north. Swallowing up beaches, roads, buildings and a derelict water park, they’ve rendered much of the Dead Sea unapproachable.
The shrinking sea, which retreats at a rate of about three feet annually, causes fresh groundwater to well up, dissolving the salty ground and triggering unpredictable collapses at the surface. The sinkholes, which can be over 130 feet wide and 80 feet deep, have destroyed farmland once used to grow dates and have deterred tourists, who can no longer access the sea.
“If we don’t do anything to save the Dead Sea, people won’t be able to live in places like Ein Gedi because there will be no agriculture and no tourists,” warns Nadav Tal, water officer at the environmental organization EcoPeace Middle East. “The Dead Sea is retreating because of man. We caused this thing. We have a responsibility to fix it.”
At the current rate, Tal says, the sea will continue retreating for another century. Then, at about 1,740 feet below sea level, evaporation essentially will cease because it will be so salty.
Despite the name, the area around the sea is brimming with life. Freshwater pools fed by underground springs are home to species of fish and microorganisms not found anywhere else on Earth—such as the endangered Dead Sea toothcarp, a tiny silver-colored fish.
Because the harsh conditions in this arid environment make it uninhabitable for most animals, it paradoxically serves as a predator-free haven for other species conditioned to live in the desert.
The mountain canyons are filled with ibex, wolves, hyenas, deer, foxes and porcupines. Among the animals unique to this area are caracals, a feline species; the desert tawny owl, a nocturnal predator; and the Caprimulgus, a nocturnal bird found almost exclusively in the salty areas near Sodom.
“They have adapted to the extreme conditions of the desert, and here they don’t have a lot of competition from the more generalist animals,” said Oded Keynan, a researcher with the Dead Sea-Arava Science Center.
“The life in the desert offers them a real advantage: They can live with very little water, salty water, high temperatures,” said Keynan, who lives in Ein Tamar. “The same thing with the flora. Plant life here produces materials that enable them to deal with highly saline water and dryness and sun and high temperatures. Studying them, we’ve found they have medicinal properties that could help us. We’ll lose that medical knowledge if we don’t protect the nature.”
On to Masada
Biking south, the sinkholes give way to flat terrain and I soon reach Masada, the hilltop fortress where 2,000 years ago an outnumbered Jewish community under attack by Roman legionnaires committed mass suicide rather than falling victim to their enemies. After the Oct. 7 atrocities, I realized for the first time how this seemingly confounding choice could be a preferable alternative to falling into enemy hands.
Today, Masada also marks the Dead Sea’s southern terminus, although your atlas might show it as the lake’s midpoint.
After a lunch break at the Bar Yehuda Airfield near Masada, I apply a fresh layer of sunscreen, resume riding and soon spot the turquoise channel that connects the Dead Sea proper to the evaporation pools in the southern basin.
My tires suddenly sink into the salty mud of the seabed, and I must traverse the area by foot. When I reach the saltwater channel, the water looks so inviting—even as I know it’s just an oleaginous, manmade conduit that helps maintain the fiction that the Dead Sea hotels are beside the sea. The channel is some 20 feet wide and lined with signs warning of land mines. The Israel-Jordan border runs through the dried-up lakebed.
I cycle along for about 10 miles, alone except for a pair of tan-and-white gazelles, who blend in seamlessly with the desert.
As the hotels at Ein Bokek come into view, the “sea” suddenly reappears. It’s Evaporation Pool No. 5, but for most tourists the illusion perseveres: The water looks like the sea, there’s a picturesque boardwalk, waves lap up against salt formations along the shore and the water is dotted with tiny salt islands that have become Instagram favorites.
I roll toward the hotels on a paved beachside bike path and head for my hotel spa, where two warm saltwater soaking pools—and freshwater hot tubs—await. At sunset, jackals howling in the mountains serenade me to dinner.
The last remaining wilderness
The next morning, refreshed and rehydrated, I leave the Dead Sea behind, taking a single-track bike trail, Nahal Pratsim, deep into a desert canyon where the only sign of civilization is a surveillance blimp in the sky watching over Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility. In this tiny country, the desert is the last remaining wilderness, and much of it is set aside for military use.
The trail narrows and the canyon’s walls close in, offering me some rare shade. But I dare not dilly-dally in the shadows: The sandy canyon walls are so brittle they can collapse at any moment.
I follow the serpentine route for over an hour until the “flour caves,” where I rise up onto the desert plateau. I pedal toward a distant sign where I find an old army artillery box labeled “Trail Library.” It’s filled with books.
Soon I see the Dead Sea Works factory, with its dystopian-looking pipes and smokestacks. At the Moshe Novomeiski Visitor Center, guide Leon Romanchuk demonstrates the processes by which Dead Sea Works’ parent company, ICL Group (formerly Israel Chemicals Ltd.), extracts minerals from the seawater.
Romanchuk blames the sea’s shrinkage primarily on upstream diversion of freshwater for drinking and agriculture; ICL returns to the sea about two-thirds of the water it extracts, accounting for “just” 25% of the sea’s annual retreat. If not for the channel ICL built to ferry water from the northern Dead Sea to the evaporation pools, he says, there’d be no water where the hotels are located and tourism would dry up.
The salt ICL brings in with that water creates another problem, however: salt buildup on the seabed. That raises water levels, threatening the hotel zone with flooding. In 2012, Israel’s government ordered ICL to scrape out the salt, and today ICL removes some 565 million cubic feet of salt from the sea annually. Environmentalists and the company are at odds about where to put it.
Meanwhile, the minerals ICL extracts make their way into everything from mobile phones to food—hauled away via an 11-mile conveyer belt, then to trucks and finally onto ships at Ashdod’s port.
ICL’s work is not without controversy. An Israeli State Comptroller’s report in March cited the company for burying waste byproducts, water leakage from its evaporation pools and ecologically damaging seepage of potash from its conveyer belt. Critics want more protection for local wildlife habitats.
“We need to find the balance between society, economy and nature,” Romanchuk says, echoing the company line.
Back on my bike, I head to my final destination: Ein Tamar, an isolated town of 350 flanked by the Jordanian border. Despite the barbed-wire fences, mines and army patrols, it’s not a hermetic border: Smugglers have long trafficked illicit arms and drugs through the area.
Since Oct. 7, the main concern is security. Iran has been using the Israel-Jordan frontier to smuggle weapons to Palestinians in the West Bank in a bid to radicalize the region, and the specter of Ein Tamar being infiltrated or overrun by terrorists is omnipresent. If Islamic extremists were to topple the monarchy in Jordan, whose population is 50% of Palestinian origin, the danger would be acute.
As I bike around Ein Tamar, I encounter a member of the local security squad, Michael, sitting on his front porch, his automatic weapon by his side. His job is to defend the town, but he’s also protecting his family. Just yards away is the town’s perimeter fence, which is full of holes.
The border is three miles away and there’s military in the area, but not as much as he’d like.
“We feel a greater military presence but also more tension since Oct. 7,” said Michael, who withheld his full name.
It’s getting late and I need to catch the last bus northward before dark. My legs throbbing, I cycle out of town past a hidden spring, hiking trails that snake into the desert and a wildlife sanctuary with stunning views. The setting sun paints Jordan’s mountains a brilliant red.
The peaceful vista belies the hidden dangers at the Dead Sea—for border communities vulnerable to terrorists, animals at risk from industrial manufacturing and beaches threatened by sinkholes.
But for the moment the breathtaking vista blots out these concerns. All I can think of is planning my next desert adventure
The Jews of Kenya: Two Different Paths
By Sandra Gurvis
The small East African country of Kenya is not widely associated with the Jewish Diaspora; neighboring Ethiopia is much better known for its indigenous Jews, thousands of whom have fled famine and civil war and sought refuge, assistance and citizenship in the State of Israel.
Yet, Kenya has a small, and divergent, Jewish population estimated at 300 to 500, with two congregations: The larger in the capital city of Nairobi is composed mainly of white expatriates from the United States, Israel and elsewhere, while a smaller community of native Africans in the country’s remote highlands seeks to formalize its ties to the religion.
Their stories reflect both the diversity and the adversity of small Jewish communities struggling to survive, and even to thrive, as a tiny minority in a country of over 57 million.
The primarily white Orthodox Nairobi Hebrew Congregation (NHC) has its origins in colonialism and fluctuates at around 300 members “depending on whether there are Israelis and Americans in town, either working or visiting,” says longtime congregant Hannah Schwartzman, who herself arrived from Israel with her husband and young family over four decades ago.
The second is an offshoot of Messianic Judaism, which claims thousands of followers in Kenya. Their history stems from a Christian evangelist who in the late 1800s studied in then Palestine and traveled to Kenya to baptize people. Some of their descendants more recently renounced Christianity and now comprise the Conservative Congregation of Ol-Kalou, with about 200 members.
In 2017, invited by a Conservative yeshivah to study Judaism in Israel, Yehudah Kimani, community leader of the native Congregation of Ol-Kalou, was refused entry to Israel, then deported to Ethiopia. Although the Israeli government claimed that Kimani had failed to disclose denial of an earlier visa request, the incident made headlines, resulting in outcries of racism. “But it also put the Kenyan community on the global map of Judaism,” observes Bonita Nathan Sussman, president of Kulanu, an organization that supports some 33 Jewish communities in developing countries, including Kenya.
Ethiopian Jews have garnered far more attention. Among the oldest Diasporan communities, Beta Israel, as Ethiopian Jewry is often called, harks back to the local Agau tribe, who began converting to Judaism a few centuries before the Christian Era. Today, most live in Israel; some 170,000 according to The Times of Israel.
Roots in Zionism
On a safari trip to Africa, I visited the Nairobi Hebrew Congregation. Located in the heart of the city and designed by the British architectural firm Robertson, Gow and Davidson, it opened in 1913; the new building was completed in 1955. Set far back from the street, the gated compound is not easily accessible. Guards, employed by the Kenyan police, escort visitors into the synagogue.
Surrounded by verdant gardens with stained-glass art and spaces for reflection, the synagogue harks back to Kenya’s past as a British colony. For Jews, the turn of the 20th century meant pogroms and rising anti-Semitism, resulting in the Zionist movement and the search for a Jewish homeland. Although Palestine was the obvious candidate, Madagascar, Argentina, Angola, Tasmania, upstate New York and Kenya were also in the mix.
In 1903, Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the British Colonies, including Asia, Africa and others, crafted the “Uganda Proposal” for a possible Jewish homeland. He proclaimed the Uasin Gishu region, which had been recently removed from the Uganda Protectorate and incorporated into the Kenya British East Africa Protectorate, to be an “excellent climate suitable for white people,” according to the EastAfrican newspaper.
When a commission arrived several months later to investigate, it found “Maasai in war regalia, tales of man-eating lions, and fierce opposition from white settlers,” writes historian Lotte Hughes in The Elephant, an online publication focusing on “African analysis, opinion and investigation.” Not surprisingly, in 1905 the Seventh Zionist Congress rejected this option.
But Jews came to Nairobi anyway, with the first, J. Marcus, emigrating from India in 1899. “An entrepreneur, he began to export local produce, mostly potatoes,” states The EastAfrican. “Two years later, the Jewish population in Nairobi doubled when M. Harrtz arrived to open a tinsmith business.”
About 20 families followed, and within a few years had built the NHC. More arrived, mostly from Europe, to escape persecution, especially during and after WWII. In 1947, the British government deported Zionist insurgents from Palestine to an internment camp in nearby Gilgil. By several accounts, the Nairobi Jewish community rallied around them to improve their living conditions; most prisoners returned to Israel when it was established a year later.
Kenya became an independent nation in 1963. “Israel helped Kenya as it was working towards and establishing independence, and the two countries still enjoy a strong relationship,” writes Sussman, in “Jewish Africans Describe their Lives.”
By then, however, European-based Jewry in Nairobi had peaked. In 1955, with some 500 members, worshippers built a new synagogue on the original site. Two years later, congregant and board president Israel Somen was elected mayor of Nairobi, the first Jew to hold that position.
Since then, the population has declined. While some remained, “sometimes they or, more often, their children immigrated to Israel or other countries with more Jews,” says Schwartzman.
Still, the well-maintained synagogue remains the heart of the Jewish community. It is adorned with crystal chandeliers, stained-glass windows and gleaming wooden benches; the synagogue boasts a social hall as well as a mikvah in a separate building. Today, along with weekly and High Holy Day services and bar/bat mitzvahs and other special events, the temple hosts well-attended children’s activities to commemorate holidays. “We actually have more young children than teenagers, although the number fluctuates, depending on who is in town,” says Schwartzman.
And they do come “from all walks of life,” Schwartzman says. “They work at embassies, in government, as contractors or have businesses. Although the synagogue is Orthodox, we are open to all affiliations.”
Congregation Ol-Kalou: Rejecting Messianic Judaism
Located about 100 miles north of Nairobi in the remote village of Kasuku is the native Conservative Congregation of Ol-Kalou, also known as Kehillat Israel. A catastrophic rainy season had washed out many of the surrounding dirt roads, making a visit impossible. The community was also struggling to rebuild from damage caused by major flooding.
Its center is a one-story cinderblock building painted in Israeli blue and white. Congregants “often arrive by foot or catch rides with friends or relatives,” says leader Kimani, son of a founder and who many say is the community’s heart and soul. Yet they are Jewish in almost every way, from the plastic-topped, waterproof bema and the open-air Jewish star and menorah windows to the shofar blown on Yom Kippur to the yarmulkes and tallit worn by congregants.
Observance is a mixture of invention and practicality. “Because we don’t have a shohet who can slaughter beef or chicken, it’s very difficult to keep Kosher,” notes Kimani. “So, some of us have become vegetarian.” The synagogue also recently acquired a Torah donated by the former president of a defunct temple in Massachusetts. “Before that, we used a small ‘practice’ Torah from Israel that I got off eBay.” But formalities hardly matter. “We make sure there is a [seat] for everyone.”
An offshoot of Messianic Judaism, also known as “Jews for Jesus,” Kehillat Israel shed its affiliation in 1999, when a rabbi came to Kasuku to check on the Jews of Kenya. The rabbi pointed out the differences between the Messianic practices and beliefs and traditional Judaism. “He told us we weren’t really Jews,” adds Kimani. Learning this, Kimani, along with his family and about 15 others, broke from the Messianic group. “We set out to learn how to be Jewish and what it means to become a Jew.”
Lack of internet and the support of an established community made the change difficult but not impossible. “Eventually we connected with the Nairobi synagogue, and they lent us two books,” says Kimani. They made photocopies, then passed them among the members so they could take turns reading and studying.
The congregation also heard about an indigenous Jewish community in Uganda affiliated with Kulanu, through which Kimani became acquainted with the late Harriet Bograd, past president and a champion of African Jews. “Harriet made sure there was a technology fund for computers, cell phones, solar panels and the like,” said NHC president Sussman. “She gave Yehudah a computer and helped him access the internet.” In 2016 Kimani traveled to the United States to study Judaism at the Brandeis Collegiate Institute in California. Kimani also created a Facebook page focusing on Kehillat Israel and related activities, which as of this writing has some 4,400 followers.
Kimani and his congregation hope to have a rabbi when his brother Samson, who is currently studying overseas, is ordained in 2028. The community, whose members are mostly farmers who grow and sell their own food, is looking to expand, by not only having more children but also encouraging young adults to marry other Jews, including Kulanu members from other countries.
“We are working on attracting more congregants and educating children so they can inherit Jewish traditions when their fathers and mothers are gone,” says Kimani.
And although the NHC and Kehillat Israel communicate infrequently, they share the same ideals and goals. “Our future is in engaging families and children,” adds Schwartzman.
Students Confront Anti-Semitism on College Campuses in None Shall Be Afraid Essay Contest
Anti-Israel protests and anti-Semitic slogans and innuendos have become disturbingly common on college campuses. Many Jewish students have come to expect such encounters.
As the Israel-Hamas conflict evolved, anti-Semitism in the U.S. surged, with universities becoming battlegrounds and Jewish students facing unprecedented levels of hate and hostility.
This year, B’nai B’rith invited college students to share personal stories of confronting anti-Semitism on campus through our fourth annual None Shall Be Afraid Essay Contest. Students from across the country submitted essays describing how they experienced, witnessed and responded to such bias—and its emotional and social toll. Judges reviewed more than 150 essays that also addressed how universities can address and combat such verbal threats on campus. The top three winners were awarded scholarships of $2,500, $1,000 and $500, respectively.
In his first-place winning essay, Camilo Rey, an international student from Colombia and a sophomore at Florida International University, shares how he banded with his campus Hillel to create a safe space for non-Jewish students to ask questions about Judaism and Israel. Working with staff and student government, they persuaded the administration to take reports of religious bias seriously.
Second-place winner Cooper Wright, a junior at East Carolina University, wrote about how, as a non-Jew, he was able to challenge anti-Semitic statements from other students expressing stereotypes during classroom discussions.
Madison M. Fernandez, a freshman at the University of Alabama who is not Jewish, earned third place for sharing how she stood up for a Jewish student whose campaign posters were defaced during student government elections. The incident prompted her school to create a Rapid Response Team and expand Jewish history in the curriculum.
To learn more about B’nai B’rith’s None Shall Be Afraid initiative, visit bit.ly/4kpMsdi.
Winning essay, by Camilo Rey
Florida International University, Class of 2028
Every day I put on my Star of David necklace. I don’t want to hide—not because I’m trying to get attention. I never thought a little symbol could inspire such hatred. However, being openly Jewish on campus has changed over the past year from a silent act of identity to a silent act of resistance.
As an international student, I came to the U.S. with hope: hope of freedom, education and safety. I never expected that I’d see echoes of the same hatred my grandparents fled decades ago.
It wasn’t a dramatic outburst the first time I felt it. It was barely audible. I heard one student murmur “Here come the colonizers” as I passed a group of students after Shabbat dinner. I froze. I continued to walk, uncertain, wondering if that was truly aimed at me or at us. However, the uncertainty was more significant than the insult. The murmurs became louder over time. Anonymous flyers were displayed in the library accusing Jews of controlling the media. When a group of students chanted slogans, I felt uneasy crossing the campus. The thing that hurt the most was seeing my former classmates participate in those demonstrations and post online anti-Israel content with overtones that bordered on anti-Semitism. Instead of staying silent, I acted.
I started by contacting my campus Hillel and joining a group of Jewish and allied students who wanted to educate rather than retaliate. During campus cultural week we set up a table called “Ask Me Anything,” where students could freely ask Jewish students questions concerning anti-Semitism, Israel, Zionism and Judaism. Some showed up to argue. Others arrived to gain knowledge. However, we were present, composed, arrogant and obvious. That was relevant.
After that, I collaborated with our student government and faculty to suggest a system for reporting instances of bias and hate speech including anti-Semitism as a university-wide policy. I assisted in setting up a forum where Jewish students told their stories to be heard, not to win sympathy. Our collective voice took the place of the silence in which we had once suffered. A few months later the administration announced the establishment of a task force to combat religious bias and anti-Semitism on campus. Not much, but progress nonetheless.
I discovered that you don’t have to yell to fight hate. When the time is right you must speak. You have to come. I didn’t want to be removed from the discussion even though I might not have convinced everyone.
These days anti-Semitism is not always accompanied by a swastika. Sometimes it’s a sarcastic comment, a meme or a slogan. Its effects are genuine. I have witnessed the fear it instills in the eyes of students. However, I have also witnessed the power it evokes. The generation we belong to will not reveal who we are. It will be us who confidently and clearly stand, speak and declare: “No one shall be afraid.”
Favorites in Jewish Media from 5785: Our Staff Picks
Working at a Jewish organization, we at B’nai B’rith Magazine are avid consumers of Jewish-related media. Here are our recommendations from the past year’s crop
Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures, © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
A Real Pain (Movie)
“A Real Pain” dives into the space between connection and isolation. In this impactful movie, two cousins with very different approaches to life join a Holocaust history tour of Poland to share their grief over the loss of their grandmother. Each cousin confronts and manages his grief in a unique way. Even while they share their grief, sometimes it divides them. This movie highlights the role of community and experience in a world where people often feel disconnected and lonely. This is a memorable story of personal loss, resilience and compassion.
—Sharon Bender, Vice President of Communications
Eminent Jews (Biography)
Mini biographies of Mel Brooks, Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein and Betty Friedan are to be found together in one volume—essayist David Denby’s “Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer.” Denby’s personal interactions add depth, especially with comic Brooks, whose profile stands out as the most authentic and is fun to read. What fascinated me was their common roots in the shtetls of Central and Eastern Europe. But Denby, as did I, finds them now thoroughly American while still displaying varying degrees of Yiddishkeit.
—Eugene L. Meyer, Editor, B’nai B’rith Magazine
Hollywood’s Unofficial Film Corps: American Jewish
Moviemakers and the War Effort (Nonfiction Book)
Appointed by Washington officials to lead Hollywood’s World War II propaganda activities, gifted Jewish writers and directors would change cinema history. They produced films of exceptional quality about battles on land and sea, and about life on the home front, spurring audiences to do their part to achieve victory. Relying on primary sources, historian Michael Berkowitz explores the reasons why they concealed their important roles in the making of these movies, intended for both the public and the military, which are now considered classics.
—Cheryl Kempler, Picture Editor
The Rehearsal (Docuseries)
Deadpan comedian Nathan Fielder takes his simulations to a new level in his documentary comedy series “The Rehearsal.” This season is all about aviation and Fielder’s quest to help co-pilots speak up in the event of a crash. Hijinks ensue as he conducts multiple meticulous made-up scenarios to relate to pilots, and even two episodes where he all but calls the streaming service Paramount+ anti-Semitic. The platform removed an episode of his previous series that centers around Holocaust awareness due to “sensitivities” surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, which he, of course, used as the basis for several reenactments in Season 2.
—Juliet Norman, Deputy Editor