The Dayton Jewish Observer, June 2023

Temple Cultural Juneform 11 p.p.222 David MossIsrael's designsJewish Grace After MealsFestival, in comic book

THE DAYTON Published by the Jewish Federation of Greater Dayton

June 2023 Sivan/Tammuz 5783 Vol. 27, No. 10

OBSERVER

The Miami Valley’s Jewish Monthly • daytonjewishobserver.org

It's JCC Film Fest time

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Daytonians and the Holocaust

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Dayenu

What did we know?

How did we respond?

These reports and several others about the extermination of the Jews under Nazi control were carried prominently in The Dayton Daily News and The Dayton Herald in 1942.

Dayenu’s Rabbi Laura Bellows at a Washington, D.C. rally

Celebrating the Class of 2023

Address Service Requested

Jewish Federation of Greater Dayton 525 Versailles Drive Dayton, OH 45459

23

DAYTON Marshall Weiss

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PAGE 2

Programs in partnership with Dayton's Jewish community Americans and the Holocaust, on display at the Dayton Metro Library's main library through June 21.

The traveling version of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Americans and the Holocaust exhibit is on display at the Dayton Metro Library's main library through June 21.

Dayton Metro Library is one of 50 academic and public libraries in the United States — and the only one in Ohio — to host Americans and the Holocaust for its initial tour.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. opened the original exhibit

Related More about the film Charlotte.............Page 26

in 2018 to mark the museum’s 25th anniversary.

Museum staff and curators collaborated with Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein for their 2022 PBS documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust.

Dayton Metro Library will host four programs at the main library connected to the exhibit in June: • Daytonians and the Holocaust: The View From Here, a talk

by Dayton Jewish Observer Editor and Publisher Marshall Weiss, at 7 p.m., Monday, June 5; • The JCC Jewish Film Fest screening of Charlotte, at 7:15

Temple Israel's Jewish Cultural Festival June 11

p.m., Thursday, June 8; • The second day of a conference for Holocaust educators, on Wednesday, June 14 (June 13 at Wright State University); • Belonging Versus Othering, a panel discussion on immigration, at 6 p.m., Thursday, June 15.

Volunteer docents will lead several 25-minute guided tours of Americans and the Holocaust in June; the complete schedule is at daytonmetrolibrary.org.

The main library is located at 215 E. Third St. Registration is requested for all tours and programs, at daytonmetrolibrary. org.

— Marshall Weiss Andy Snow

Temple Israel’s Jewish Cultural Festival returns Sunday, June 11 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Food will be available for purchase from El Meson, Brock Masterson's, and My Favorite Muffin.

Also available will be treats from Graeter’s, Temple Israel’s bakery, and The Dayton Beer Co. Entertainment includes The Flying Klezmerians, Mary “Mahira” Rogers with Steve Wyke and Marc Gilbert, the Shimmy Cats, the Dayton Metro Barbershop Chorus, and the Miami Valley Symphony Orchestra.

The children's area, near the open-air vendor marketplace, will include a petting zoo, sto-

ries, games, and crafts.

The schedule of speakers inside the temple includes: • Jayne Klose and Bonnie Beaman Rice, Combatting Stereotypes and Antisemitism, 12:30 p.m.

• Meredith Moss Levinson moderating Diversity of Jewish Culture and Tradition, 2 p.m.

• Tom Bainbridge, Vicki Kemmerer, and Jese Shell, Jews Can Be Farmers Too, 3:30 p.m.

• Rabbi Karen BodneyHalasz, Diversity of Jewish Practice in America, 5 p.m.

Nonprofits at this year’s Mitzvah Alley are Sidewalk Soldiers, Montgomery County Prevention Coalition, Brunner Literacy Center, and the Soroptimists.

The festival is held at Temple Israel, 130 Riverside Dr., Dayton.

Admission is free. For details, go to tidayton.org/festival.

Arts & Culture.........................26 Calendar..................................19

Family Education....................25 Obituaries...........................31

Opinion.........................20 Religion.......................... 24

Carol Graff (L) and Linda Novak take bakery orders at the 2022 JCF

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

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Daytonians and the Holocaust – What did we know? How did we respond?

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Dayton Daily News front page, Nov. 10, 1938, with Associated Press coverage of Kristallnacht. The Dayton Herald ran United Press coverage of Kristallnacht on its Nov. 10, 1938 front page.

Nazis' atrocities against the Jews.

By Marshall Weiss, The Observer An examination of local daily newspapers of The traveling version of the U.S. Holocaust that time period shows that Daytonians were Memorial Museum's Americans and the Holocaust exhibit, on display through June 21 at the Dayton kept well informed of Nazi Germany's antisemitic rhetoric, edicts, and actions against Jews Metro Library's main library, poses questions under its control, from the rise of the Third Reich to those who take it in — What did Americans in 1933 through the Nazi genocide of more than know? What more could have been done?

6 million Jews by the time of The exhibit's lead historian, Daytonians were kept Nazi Germany's surrender in Rebecca Erbelding, has said it challenges people regardless of well informed of Nazi May 1945.

These news reports, usually their preconceived notions.

Germany's antisemitic from wire services, were present“If you come in thinking the United States did everything rhetoric, edicts, and ed with frequency and promioften on the first page or it could to stop the Holocaust, actions against Jews nence, in the first few pages of the front you’re going to get challenged. under its control section of Dayton's daily newsThat preconception will not be papers. They were augmented by with you when you leave. If you think the United States could not have done any- strong editorials, opinion pieces, and syndicated thing, you’re going to be challenged as well," she columns denouncing the actions of Nazi Germany against the Jews of Europe. told The Observer in a previous interview.

If newspaper readers living in Dayton in the Here, The Observer looks at what Daytonians knew and how they responded to reports of the Continued on Page Four

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The enormity of the Holocaust has the potential to render it unknowable.

So we listen to the stories. We understand the stories as best we can, as pieces in a mosaic. Especially crucial Marshall is to apply what we learn about the Weiss Shoah to the ethical challenges we face today. With that in mind, be sure to take in the Americans and the Holocaust exhibit, participate in its programs, and mark Thursday, June 15 at 6 p.m. on your calendar to attend Dayton Metro Library's panel discussion on immigration. Belonging Versus Othering will feature UD Sociology Prof. Theo Majka, Dayton Metro Library Newest American Specialist Gabriela Pickett (also a Dayton Public Schools board member), Welcome Dayton's Desire Ntwayingabo, and Eichelberger Center For Community Voices/WYSO's Neenah Ellis. Amaha Sellassie, director of the Center for Applied Social Issues and assistant professor of sociology at Sinclair College, will serve as moderator.

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

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PAGE 3

DAYTON Dayton Liederkranz-Turner Collection/WSU

Holocaust

OBSERVER

Continued from Page Three 1930s or 1940s claimed they didn't know what the Nazis were doing, they would have been in denial or willfully ignorant.

Though some in Dayton's German community showed their support for Nazi Germany and Hitler's fascist regime, their attempts to organize were short-lived and solidly denounced by the organized German community here.

For its part, Dayton's organized Jewish community mobilized to provide what relief it could for the persecuted Jews of Nazi Europe. Dayton's Jews prepared to receive and provide for its share of what would turn out to be the very few European Jewish refugees who could flee and make their way to America.

Germans and Jews in Dayton

Dayton's YWCA reported in 1910 that the city was home to 5,816 people of German origin and a Jewish population of 4,500.

Eastern European Jews lived in the neighborhood of Wayne Avenue and Wyoming Street in the East End, as did German immigrants and their adult children.

"If you were lucky, your mother gave you a penny, and you could buy a single piece of candy, or better yet, a large, soft pretzel on which you spread thick mustard, at one of the two corner stores — Motzel's or Schommer's," Dayton Daily News sportswriter Si Burick recalled of the old neighborhood of his childhood in a 1971 column. Those corner stores were German-owned.

Burick's father was the rabbi at Beth Abraham Synagogue, which dedicated its new building at 530 S. Wayne Ave., across from Jones Street, in August 1918.

The synagogue had hired Becker's German Band for the procession to the new building.

"As they approached the edifice built for the preservation of Orthodox Jewish tenets and ethics, the bandsmen proudly burst into an enthusiastic rendition of Onward, Christian Soldiers," Burick added.

Near Beth Abraham Synagogue, at 610 S. Wayne Ave., stood Liederkranz Hall, the base of operations for Dayton's celebrated German men's chorus.

Burick remembered that Jews in the neighborhood would rent

PAGE 4

THE DAYTON

daytonjewishobserver.org Editor and Publisher Marshall Weiss mweiss@jfgd.net 937-610-1555 Contributors Candace R. Kwiatek Rabbi Levi Simon

Advertising Sales Executive Patty Caruso, plhc69@gmail.com Administrative Assistant Samantha Daniel, sdaniel@jfgd.net 937-610-1555 Billing Sheila Myers, smyers@jfgd.net 937-610-1555 Proofreader Rachel Haug Gilbert Observer Advisor Martin Gottlieb

The Dayton Liederkranz choir poses for its annual portrait on the steps of Beth Abraham Synagogue, 530 S. Wayne Ave., 1937. Liederkranz Hall was then located at 610 S. Wayne Ave.

Liederkranz Hall for meetings, Yiddish theatre productions, charity balls, and weddings.

Jewish-owned businesses also bought ads in Dayton Liederkranz's concert series program books. Among them were Cincinnati Bakery, O.K. Bakery, The Metropolitan, Israel Brothers Scrap Metal, and attorney Sidney Kusworm Jr. Liederkranz chorus members admired the stately beauty of the new Beth Abraham building. The ensemble began taking its yearly publicity photos on the steps in front of the synagogue.

The 1928 book, German Pioneers of Montgomery County, Ohio: Early Pioneer Life in Dayton, Miamisburg, Germantown, based on the lectures of H.A. Rattermann, a scholar of the history of Germans in the United States, includes a photo of B’nai Yeshurun on Jefferson Street (now Temple Israel) on a page along with images of Dayton’s Holy Trinity Church, St. Mary’s Catholic Church, and Emmanuel Catholic Church.

Rattermann considered the temple to be among the German houses of worship here.

There was a history of social overlap among Germans in Dayton and Dayton's Jews from Germany, who settled here mainly between the 1840s and 1870s and had established B'nai Yeshurun downtown.

In 1911, for example, The Dayton Daily News reported that "about 1,000 people enjoyed a genuine old German evening at the Allen School. (B'nai Yeshurun's) Rabbi David Lefkowitz

delivered an interesting address supplemented with stereopticon views of German scenes, and Mrs. Lefkowitz rendered a number of German songs."

In a 2018 interview with The Observer, a person who used to be responsible for the Liederkranz-Turner archives, which is now at Wright State University, related that one year, when the Nazis were in power in Germany, a member of the Liederkranz chorus held up a small Nazi flag when the group took its portrait on Beth Abraham Synagogue's steps.

She noted that she had included that photo in the Liederkranz-Turner archival collection when it was given to Wright State in 2013. Despite repeated attempts to locate that image in the collection, The Observer has not been able to find it.

In 1936, an ad in a Dayton Liederkranz concert program featured the endorsement of a Republican candidate for Congress by Father Charles Coughlin of Detroit, whose virulently antisemitic broadcasts reached more than 3.5 million Americans over the radio.

What we know from the papers

The Dayton Daily News (Democratic and owned by James Cox) and The Dayton Journal and The Dayton Herald (Republican and both owned beginning in April 1935 by Frank Knox, owner of the Chicago Daily News) would cover Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust thoroughly, though the Daily News did so nearly from

the beginning of Hitler's rule in January 1933.

The Daily News relied on Associated Press as its wire service; the Journal Herald often used United Press.

The Daily News distributed a March 28, 1933 AP story about an overflow rally of 57,000 at Madison Square Garden sponsored by the American Jewish Congress to protest the mistreatment of Jews in Germany.

Along with the story, the Daily News published an unsigned editorial taking Hitler to task for raving against Germany's Jews and for censoring news in Germany, though it still expressed the belief that "now that he has the people in his power, (Hitler) has no real desire to carry out his promises to persecute the Jews."

A year later, the Daily News and the Herald reported on Germany's continuing persecution against the Jews.

"Hitler tells the world that 'the National Socialist revolution is over. It has fulfilled all its hopes.' When the concentration camps have been emptied, In conjunction with the Americans and the Holocaust exhibit at the Dayton Metro Library's main library, Marshall Weiss will present the talk Daytonians and the Holocaust: The View from Here at 7 p.m., Monday, June 5 at the main library, 215 E. Third St. The free program is also presented by Miami Valley Jewish Genealogy & History.

Reservations are requested at daytonmetrolibrary.org.

Published by the Jewish Federation of Greater Dayton Mary Rita Weissman President Dan Sweeny President Elect Marni Flagel Secretary Neil Friedman Treasurer Ben Mazer VP Personnel Teddy Goldenberg VP Resource Dev. Dr. Heath Gilbert Immediate Past Pres.

Cathy Gardner CEO The Dayton Jewish Observer, Vol. 27, No. 10. The Dayton Jewish Observer is published monthly by the Jewish Federation of Greater Dayton, a nonprofit corporation, 525 Versailles Dr., Dayton, OH 45459.

Views expressed by columnists, in readers’ letters, and in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the opinion of staff or layleaders of The Dayton Jewish Observer or the Jewish Federation of Greater Dayton. Acceptance of advertising neither endorses advertisers nor guarantees kashrut.

The Dayton Jewish Observer Mission Statement To support, strengthen and champion the Dayton Jewish community by providing a forum and resource for Jewish community interests.

Goals • To encourage affiliation, involvement and communication.

• To provide announcements, news, opinions and analysis of local, national and international activities and issues affecting Jews and the Jewish community.

• To build community across institutional, organizational and denominational lines.

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THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

DAYTON their right to earn a livelihood is being taken the torturing of dissenters and Jews stopped, from them. Deprived of such right to earn Hitler will be believed," a Sept. 7, 1934 Dayton their own bread, the Jews are being forced into Daily News editorial stated. the lowest forms of degradation possible."

Two months after the Nuremberg Race The rabbi added that German nationalism Laws were enacted against Germany's Jews, "honestly believes that it will teach the nations on Nov. 27, 1935, the Herald published United how to get rid of the Jew on the basis of their Press' interview with Hitler in Berlin in which blood, his race blood." the dictator equated Bolshevism with JudaThe United Jewish Council campaign also ism. provided funds for local and national Jewish "The necessity of combatting Bolshevism organizations. However, at the end of 1936, is one of the fundamental reasons for Jewish its board agreed that "every appeal be cut to a legislation in Germany. This legislation is not minimum in favor of the overseas emergency." anti-Jewish but is pro-German. Through these From then on, 70 percent of the money laws, the rights of the Germans shall be proDayton's United Jewish Council collected each tected against destructive Jewish influences." year went to relief for Jews in Nazi Europe. By The Observer looked at local newspaper 1943, the annual campaign raised $56,450 — coverage at key points in Hitler's path to his $984,186 in today's money. mass extermination of the Jews: the invasion The council also approved Witt's motion in of Austria and the Kristallnacht pogroms June 1938 that "where an affidavit is furnished in 1938, the invasion of Poland in 1939, the by an individual or individuals necessary for herding of Jews into ghettos in 1940 and 1941, an emigrant or emigrants to immigrate to our and news of the Final Solution trickling out as community, that it is the responsibility of the early as March 1942.

Jewish community, provided such affidavit is

By Kristallnacht — Nazi Germany's attacks on Jews, their property, businesses, and syna- Temple Israel President Samuel Thal (R) greets Temple Israel Rabbi Louis Witt and approved by the Jewish Federation for Social the rabbi's wife, Myra, at Dayton's Union Station, Sept. 21, 1935, on the couple's Service and furnished at its insistence." gogues on Nov. 9 and 10, 1938 — the Herald return from a three-month study trip to Europe. The Dayton Herald article with this Rebecca Erbelding, lead historian of the matched the Dayton Daily's coverage. The photo carries the headline, 'Situation in Europe grave, rabbi asserts.'

Americans and the Holocaust exhibit, explained papers also ran wire photos of the damage in to Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe. that local organizations such as Dayton's Jewthe aftermath of Kristallnacht.

In its coverage of that 1933 campaign, the Dayton "World indignation over persecution of Jews in Gerish Federation were generally not permitted to sponmany has had the effect of hastening solutions for this Daily essentially reprinted the entire speech given to sor individuals or groups directly. It was groups such aspect of the refugee problem," read a hopeful Nov. 18, the gathering by JDC's chairman, Rabbi Jonah Wise, as the National Council for Jewish Women, Hebrew who detailed the desperate needs of Germany's Jews.

1938 Dayton Herald editorial.

Immigrant Aid Society, the American Friends Service A year later, the campaign drive was reorganized "Before the closed gates of the world, another perseCommittee, and the National Refugee Service that helped connect refugees with willing sponsors. cution appeals," a Nov. 26, 1938 Dayton Daily editorial into the United Jewish Council, an annual campaign, with former Ohio Gov. James Cox — publisher of the Then, organizations such as Jewish Federations "aslamented. "Nazi Germany lays savage hand upon its Daily News — as a key speaker. fewer than a million Jews. Poland makes life hard for sisted with resettlement — with finding jobs, enrolling In the summer of 1935, Temple Israel's Rabbi Louis its 3.5 million Jews. Fascist Italy starts persecuting the in school, obtaining retraining, and general 'AmericanJews. Wanted: A land of refuge for 5 or 6 million Jews! Witt traveled across Europe to learn about the plight of ization,'" Erbelding said. its Jews.

There are still vast, empty spaces on the earth. Where Dayton's United Jewish Council and Jewish Federa"The cold, planned persecution of the Jews in is one such to serve as a refuge for the Jews?" tion — along with regional Jewish organizations and The Herald published that editorial a day after it ran Germany is far more sinister than any bloody pogrom national umbrella organizations for Jewish rescue and that might be instituted," Witt told those at the opena UP news story that "The British government canrelief — attempted to prepare an infrastructure to acnot increase Palestine emigration at present because it ing event of the 1935 United Jewish Council campaign, cept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. according to the Daily News. might prejudice the forthcoming Jewish-Arab conferIn 1939, Dayton's United Jewish Council and Jewish "The right to live is being denied the Jew, in that Federation agreed to accept a refugee family and a ence, Malcolm MacDonald, colonial and dominions JFGD/WSU refugee child each month, and to secretary, told parliament...'when provide them with medical and we promised to facilitate a nadental care, furnishings, food, tional home for Jews in Palestine light, and rent. we never anticipated this fierce But between 1938 and 1941, persecution in Europe. We made Dayton was only able to resettle no promise that Palestine should 70 Jews who had escaped the be a home for everyone seekNazis. The vast majority of Jews ing escape from such a calamity. in Nazi-occupied territory had no Palestine's rather meager soil canway out. Few nations would take not support more than a fraction them in. of the Jews who wish to escape According to the U.S. HoEurope.'" locaust Memorial Museum, between 1938 and 1941, 123,868 Dayton's Jews Jewish refugees immigrated to the organize relief United States. And after July 1941, Three hundred members of emigration from Nazi-occupied Dayton's Jewish community met territory was virtually impossible.

July 10, 1933 to launch a camImmigration of Eastern Eupaign for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to ropeans had been virtually shut feed, clothe, and shelter "the Jews down to "undesirables" by the who have been driven by the HitU.S. Congress in 1924. And yearly allocations of U.S. visas from ler edict from their homes in GerGermany and Austria were locked many and forced to seek humble in at 27,370. abode in the slums of the cities," Even so, numerous news The Dayton Daily News reported. accounts in the aftermath of The $10,000 raised (equivalent Kristallnacht reported that the to $231,575 today) would also be United States and England in parused for Jewish emigration from After a 1933 emergency fundraising campaign for the Jews of Europe, leaders of Dayton's Jewish community Germany, though the United ticular considered expanding the organized the United Jewish Council in 1934 with President Raymond Adler, General Chairman Joseph Thal, Continued on Page Six States remained virtually closed and Budget Committee Chairman Samuel Finn to continue and expand the work into an annual campaign.

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

PAGE 5

DAYTON

Holocaust

behest of a Jewish judge in New York City.

In mid-February 1938, the Dayton Continued from Page Five Herald and Dayton Daily News annumber of immigrants allowed in from nounced that a national Bund leader, Germany and Nazi-controlled Austria.

G. Wilhelm Kunze, was scheduled to It didn't happen.

In November 1938, following Kristall- speak in Dayton on March 17 at Liederkranz Hall, and that "plans have been nacht, a Gallup poll asked Americans discussed for opening a Nazi camp in if they approved or disapproved of the this vicinity."

Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany.

A day after the report, the Dayton Ninety-four percent disapproved, six Daily ran an update that Liederkranz percent approved. society officials had reversed course.

When asked, “Should we allow a "Members of the Dayton Bund enlarger number of Jewish exiles from gaged the hall for the speech about four Germany to come to the United States weeks ago, according to Christ Koerner, to live,” 71 percent said no, 21 percent Liederkranz secretary who booked the said yes, and 8 percent had no opinion. meeting. In the light of the widespread Jews who sought to flee the Nazis antagonism which Kunze's addresses were thwarted at every turn by the U.S. have aroused, however, Henry Funder, State Department and its byzantine, president, and Carl ever-changing, ever-tightening obstaShultheis, treasurer, cles to emigration from Germany and conferred with Koerner Nazi-occupied lands.

Tuesday morning and arrived at the decision The German American Bund to cancel the lease of the comes to Dayton hall."

In the 1930s, more than 12 million The Herald reported people of German origin lived in the on March 16, 1938 that United States. Of them, the U.S. HoloKunze would arrive in Dayton the next caust Memorial Museum estimates that 25,000 became members of the pro-Nazi day as originally scheduled, but that he would only meet with members of the paramilitary German American Bund Dayton Bund and its president, William after it was established in 1936. The G. Ruhnke, along with a small group of Bund as it was called, was in league invited guests in a private session. with Jew-baiting radio broadcaster FaThe update added that "the Dayton ther Charles Coughlin and his Christian Bund has severed connections with Front group. In Dayton, listeners could the Federation of German Societies, it tune into Coughlin's broadcasts on WHIO radio, also owned by James Cox, was learned, in order not to embarrass members of organizations affiliated even as Cox's Dayton Daily lambasted with the Federation."

Coughlin in a Dec. 2, 1938 editorial for Also prior to and because of Kunze's telling his listeners after Kristallnacht that the Jews had inspired and financed visit, the Dayton Daily printed a statement on March 12, 1938 from six the Russian Revolution. local veterans groups expressing their A year later, the National Associa"avowed opposition," albeit indirectly, tion of Broadcasters established its own to "certain movements which they term self-regulating code committee to force 'un-American.'"

Coughlin off the air.

The Dayton Bund held the private Officially, Bund members were supmeeting on the evening of posed to be American citiThursday, March 17, 1938 zens of German lineage. at the Gibbons Hotel.

Most were German citiPresent were 15 lozens. The Bund claimed it cal Bund members, five had no direct connection invited guests including to Nazi Germany. It did.

American Legion Post 5 In his book Gangsters Vs Commander and Steele Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters High School Principal Jay Battled Nazis in Wartime William Holmes, and one America, Michael Benson reporter each from the writes that "the distinction Daily News and the Dayton was legal as well as moral.

Journal.

The instant that the Bund In an interview more admitted to representing than two decades ago with a foreign power, it would The Observer, Maxwell lose the protections of the National German American U.S. Constitution."

Bund leader G. Wilhelm Kunze Nathan said the Journal assigned him to cover the Daytonians read in meeting at the insistence of the Dayton their local dailies about violence and Bund. It would only allow him, a Jew, riots at Bund meetings across the to cover the meeting for the Journal, country, that members of the American with no explanation given.

Legion would show up and physically Nathan's March 18, 1938 piece reattack Bund members. ported that Kunze outlined the Bund's What Daytonians didn't know was purposes and delivered an "antisemitic that Jewish mobsters and their Jewish attack" at the meeting, "an attack on an muscle men disguised as American 'atheist and international movement' Legion members would assault Bund described as threatening the United members, and that it was at the secret

an enemy agent and deported to GerStates."

The Dayton Daily's coverage quoted many after the war. G. Wilhelm Kunze Dayton Bund President Ruhnke as saywas indicted for membership in a Nazi spy ring in 1942. He was sentenced to ing the session "was purposely made a federal prison and released in 1945. closed meeting after conferences with The U.S. government outlawed the the American Legion's Holmes."

Bund in December 1941, when the U.S. Kunze wore a gray shirt with "an entered World War II. emblem in his tie pin." He opened his address with the Nazi salute, which he explained was also, "in the case of the America First's turn Bund, the greeting from one Aryan to To Nazi Germany, the German another."

American Bund had become an embarAs the newspapers reported, Amerirassment. Germany then encouraged Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in the can Legion Post Commander Holmes United States to support the America followed Kunze's talk with his own comments about what patriotism meant First Committee, which began in 1940 as an isolationist movement to keep the to Americans, and that his high school United States out of the war in Europe. was "made up of all races and creeds, It started as a movement of college and the finest traits and characteristics students and grew into a grassroots were found in no one class or group, mobilization of Americans who recalled but in all of them." the horrors that American boys faced A week later, Dayton Bund in World War I. America First would President Ruhnke resigned become infiltrated by Nazis and Nazi his post and said he would supporters. quit the organization when his Instructions from the Nazi governmembership expired a week later. ment to its America First operatives: Ruhnke told the Dayton stick to the single message of keep Herald that his resignation and America out of the war. America First withdrawal from the Bund membership peaked at "had nothing to do with an about 800,000. investigation of the organizaIts most famous spokesperson was tion instituted at Columbus American aviation by (state) Attorney General hero Charles LindHerbert S. Duffy."

In response to the accusabergh. His speech in Des Moines, Iowa on tion that the national Bund Sept. 11, 1941, went had plans for three camps to "off message" when he open in Ohio, including one said, "The three most in Dayton, Ruhnke told the important groups who Herald that the report was have been pressing this "the silliest thing ever." country toward war Carl Shultheis, treasurer of are the British, the Jewthe Dayton Liederkranz sociIsolationist Sen. Gerald Nye, ety, published a letter April ish, and the Roosevelt an America First supporter 22, 1938 in the Dayton Daily in administration." his role as president of the Federation of Lindbergh added that he could not German Societies of Dayton, compriscondone "the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany," but that the Jews, "ining 20 local German organizations.

"The German American Bund has no stead of agitating for war, should be opconnection whatever with any of the posing it in every way, for they will be German-American societies in Dayton," among the first to feel its consequences." he wrote.

Daytonians read about it in the Daily "The Federation had nothing whatNews and the Herald.

Eight days later, on Sept. 19, 1941, ever to do with the engagement of WilU.S. Sen. Gerald Nye of North Dakota liam Kunze in Dayton recently, and is spoke to 2,500 people at Memorial Hall not interested in or connected with the movement in which Kunze is engaged... in Dayton as part of a meeting of the local committee of the America First it takes no part in the propagation of movement. any foreign doctrine of any kind what"Local members of the CIO (Congress ever."

Journal reporter Maxwell Nathan told of Industrial Organizations) formed an 18-man picket line in front of the The Observer that was the last he ever hall before and after the meeting," the heard about the Bund in Dayton.

Daytonians would read an AP report Journal Herald reported. "The signs carin the Nov. 19, 1938 Daily News, 10 ried anti-Nazi and anti-America First days after Kristallnacht, of a speech in statements."

Queens, N.Y. by Bund national head The most applause of the evening, Fritz Kuhn, proclaiming that the Bund lasting for two or three minutes, The "is out to do for this country what Hitler Journal Herald reported, was given to the is doing for Germany, namely, rid it of name of Charles Lindbergh. the Jews."

In an interview with the Journal Membership in the Bund across the Herald after the speech, Nye said he United States shrank after Kuhn was approved of Lindbergh's Des Moines convicted in 1939 of embezzling Bund speech a week earlier. funds and was sentenced to prison. On "I agree with Lindbergh that the his release in 1943, he was rearrested as Jewish people are a large factor in our

'Plans have been discussed for opening a Nazi camp in this vicinity.'

PAGE 6

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

DAYTON movement toward war," Nye said. "This is only natural. The Jewish people have suffered under the Nazi regime and they wish to see the Nazis defeated. For the same reason that the Jewish people in this country are among the leaders of the war movement, the German people in this country are often found in the ranks of those who wish to avoid entanglement."

In his speech, Nye said that neither Lindbergh nor any other leaders of America First were antisemitic.

"The Nazis have not been working secretly in America for nothing in the decade past," a Nov. 10, 1941 Dayton Daily editorial stated about America First.

"There is a relatively small but highly vocal element here which wants Hitler to win the war. To that end, they want America to help, not hinder, Hitler's fight...

The sincerely pacific (pacifist) members of America First have found themselves, by their affiliation, helping Hitler. They discover that the leaders with which they find themselves associated in America are heroes in Berlin."

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 and the United States' entry into World War II marked the dissolution of the America First Committee.

Dayton attorney Irvin G. Bieser, a leader with Dayton's America First Committee, was quoted in the Dec. 8, 1941 Journal Herald: "The time for argument concerning national policy is passed. Now we must join together and prosecute the cause of the war to its fullest extent."

The genocide of Europe's Jews

It was in January 1942 when the Nazis formulated the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," the mass murder of all Jews in the lands it held. Confirmation to the outside world came on Aug. 29, 1942 from the World Jewish Congress' representative in Switzerland,

are substituted, these sources say. who attempted to telegram the information to World "Polish sources insist the Nazis are using portable Jewish Congress President Rabbi Stephen Wise in gas chambers in some sections...one such instance New York.

The U.S. State Department intercepted the telegram, was reported at the village of Chelmno, near Lowcalling it a "war rumor." Wise received the message icz, where Jews were crowded 90 at a time into the from another source, and in November 1942 informed chamber." the press in the United States of the Final Solution and American Jewish organizations appealed to Jews that the Nazi regime had already slaughtered more across the world to observe Dec. 2, 1942 as a day of than 2 million Jews in its grasp. mourning and prayer for the victims of Hitlerism, the In Dayton, elements of the big picture came through Dayton Daily News reported. news reports beginning as early as "The appeal pointed out that 2 million In Dayton, elements Jews March 16, 1942, when the Dayton already had died and that 5 million Herald carried a UP report from Stock- of the big picture others are threatened with exterminaholm, Sweden that "Neutral sources under a new Hitler order...The orgacame through news tion said today that Germans had started a nizations pointed out that the 'greatest new systematic mass extermination of reports beginning calamity in Jewish history' had occurred Jews in western (white) Russia and the that millions of Jews now 'live in the as early as March and Baltic countries and that the victims inshadow of impending doom.'"

By the end of the war in Europe, more cluded many Jews just deported from 16, 1942 than 6 million Jews would be extermiGermany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and other occupied countries," including 86,000 Jews in nated at the hands of the Nazis and their accomplices.

Minsk, tens of thousands in Lithuania and Latvia, and At Passover 1943, the Dayton Herald's April 22 that in Estonia, the entire Jewish population of 4,500 editorial read, "In time to come the people of a later had been killed. generation will read with greater horror than we The Herald carried a report on June 26, 1942 discan now anticipate the bloody record of our age, on which the darkest blot will be the wholesale extertributed from London by its owner, the Chicago Daily News, that "out of the gray horror the Nazis have mination of the Jews in Nazi-conquered lands. This made of Poland came new evidence today of the sysslaughter has been largely overshadowed by the clash of armies in global war, but it will not be overlooked tematic extermination of the Jewish population with when the history of our era is recorded. For it was the death toll from various causes now estimated at with the massacre of the Jews that Adolf Hitler began more than 700,000." his assault on our civilization."

"According to a special report sent through secret channels to representatives of the Polish national council here, disease and starvation are allowed to Marshall Weiss is editor and publisher of The Dayton operate to the fullest extent. Where these means are Jewish Observer and project director of Miami Valley considered insufficient or slow, massacre tactics often Jewish Genealogy & History.

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PAGE 7

DAYTON Photos: Peter Wine

Greater Dayton

Yom Hashoah Observance

April 23, Temple Beth Or Holocaust survivors shared their stories as part of the commemoration (L to R): Ira Segalewitz, Henry Guggenheimer, Felix Garfunkel, Renate Frydman, Robert Kahn, 2nd-generation survivor and Yom Hashoah Committee Member Mark Gordon, and Larry Katz at the podium.

Shamos and 3rd-generation survivor Hannah Dritz watches as 2nd-generation survivor Joel Guggenheimer lights a candle on the Dayton Yom Hashoah Candelabra.

Some of the winners of the 2023 Max May & Lydia May Memorial Holocaust Art & Writing Contest.

Survivor Eva Clair and 2nd-generation survivor Helene Gordon, members of the Yom Hashoah Committee, read a book and introduce a craft about how to spread kindness, at a PJ Library and PJ Our Way program concurrent with the observance.

Dissolve by Ocean Brown, 10th grade, Stivers School for the Arts, 2023 First Place, Division II, Max May Memorial Holocaust Art Contest.

The Dayton Jewish Chorale

Max May & Lydia May Memorial Holocaust Art & Writing Contest 2023 Winners Division I Art, Grades 5-8 1st Place: Mallory Mitchell, Brookville Intermed.

2nd Place: Noah Levinson, Hillel 3rd Place: Malaya Maldonado, St. Anthony Catholic Hon. Men.: Megan Luebke, Brookville Intermed.

Division II Art, Grades 9-12 1st Place: Ocean Brown, Stivers 2nd Place: Olivia Neises, Stivers 3rd Place: Vina Osborn, Stivers Hon. Men.: Acelyn Troyer, Stivers Hon. Men.: Alexia Nalls, Stivers

PAGE 8

Division I Poetry/Prose, Grades 5-8 1st Place: Tommy Coplin, Hastings 2nd Place: Owen Dinsmore, Hillel 3rd Place: Noah Levinson, Hillel Hon. Men.: Evan Waugh, Northmont Hon. Men.: Evan Robinson, Northmont Division II Poetry/Prose, Grades 9-12 1st Place: Seth Trent, Stivers 2nd Place: Sophie Behnke, Stivers 3rd Place: Seth Gibson, Stivers Hon. Men.: Promiss McCoy, Stivers

Children and parents work on a tzedakah box craft to learn about acts of lovingkindness as part of the PJ Library and PJ Our Way program concurrent with the Yom Hashoah Observance. Before the observance, Holocaust educator Renate Frydman met with area teenagers for a talk about hate.

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

THE REGION

Czech Torah scrolls focus of reunion event

By Becky Raspe Suburban Temple-Kol Ami Cleveland Jewish News in Beachwood, Jewish Senior On April 23, The TempleLife-Prentis Apartments in Tifereth Israel in Beachwood Oak Park, Mich., Congregation brought together 19 Czech ToBeth Shalom in Pittsburgh, and rah scrolls as part of a reunion Temple Sholom in Blue Ash and celebration of their surnear Cincinnati. vival of the Holocaust, their reEach Torah scroll was discovery and repair in 1963 by paraded through the sanctuthe Memorial Scrolls ary before being Trust, and how displayed together they’re now cared at the front of the for by congregations room, with each and organizations all scroll being called to around the world. the bima (stage) by As part of the its community name program, scrolls with a representative were gathered from from its custodial entities throughout organization. Each Ohio, Michigan, and representative then Pennsylvania. read a line from The Participating comTemple’s scroll as munities included part of the program The Temple Conwith the help of The gregation Shomer Temple-Tifereth Emunim in Sylvania The Czech Torah at Israel clergy Rabbi near Toledo, Kness- Dayton's Temple Israel Jonathan Cohen eth Israel Temple and Cantor Kathryn in Wooster, Temple Israel Wolfe Sebo, who also sang a in Dayton, Temple Israel in song with The Temple’s orphan Columbus, Temple El-Emeth scroll. in Youngstown, The TempleCreated by The Temple Tifereth Israel in Beachwood, member Ed Magiste, with Temple Israel Ner Tamid in the help of Memorial Scrolls Mayfield Heights, B’nai JeshuTrust volunteer and Fairmount run Congregation in Pepper Temple member Susan RinPike, Anshe Chesed Fairgel, the program also featured mount Temple in Beachwood, speeches from Cleveland State Gross Schechter Day School University Prof. Mark Cole and in Pepper Pike, Temple Beth Memorial Scrolls Trust trustee Israel-Shaare Zedek in Lima, Lois Roman.

Roman described these efforts, and that of the work MST does, as “four miracles,” starting with their collection and storage, followed by the fact only one World War II bomb landed in Prague leaving the synagogue they were housed in relatively untouched even though Czech Jewry was “decimated,” that they were rediscovered and sold to a London investor, and then landed in the hands of what would become Memorial Scrolls Trust.

In 1942, the Nazi officials in charge of the Czech “Protectorate” created the Central Jewish Museum in Prague, and shipped over 10,000 ritual objects from liquidated Jewish communities and synagogues to the museum, including ceremonial objects, books, pictures and embroidered vestments.

The museum curators, who were later taken to Terezin and Auschwitz, cataloged the collection. As part of that cataloging process, approximately 1,800 Torah scrolls were taken to the museum with the hope they’d be returned to their communities.

After World War II, those scrolls were taken to the abandoned Michle Synagogue in suburban Prague. They stayed there, in disuse in the 18thcentury stone building.

Through the effort of what

is now MST, 1,564 scrolls were packed and sent to London to be restored, and in 1964, the Westminster Synagogue was selected as trustee and the Memorial Scrolls Committee was established to distribute the repaired scrolls on permanent loan to communities around the world.

Each scroll is numbered according to its listing with Memorial Scrolls Trust, and is also labeled with the community it came from, if that information is available. There are 1,400 scrolls in circulation, with the collection dating from the 1200s to the early 20th century.

“All of the scrolls you see here today have this shared legacy, but each has a unique back story, written for a specific Jewish community in

a small town or a large city that was lost in the Shoah,” she said. “Today is not just a reunion of Torah scrolls – it is a commemoration of dozens of lost Jewish communities that were vibrant and active before the Holocaust.”

Editor's note: At the reunion, Rabbi Karen Bodney-Halasz represented Dayton's Temple Israel with its Czech Torah, believed to be from the town of Ceske Budejovice and written in the middle of the 19th-century. The day of the reunion, Temple Beth Or in Washington Township hosted the Dayton Area Yom Hashoah Observance. Its Czech Torah — from Klatovy, a town in southwest Bohemia — remained in the congregation's holy ark for the commemoration.

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PAGE 9

THE WORLD

‘Iran is 50 North Koreas,’ Netanyahu tells bipartisan congressional delegation led by Rep. Mike Turner U.S. Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio, 10), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, led a bipartisan congressional group of House Intelligence Committee members that met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on May 4.

“Iran is 50 North Koreas. It is not merely a neighborhood bully like the dynasty that rules North Korea,” Netanyahu told the visiting lawmakers, according to the prime minister’s office. “This is an ideological force that views us, Israel, as the small Satan, and views you as the Great Satan.”

Netanyahu warned that a nuclear Iran, which could threaten and blackmail every U.S. city, would amount to “a changing of history,” per Netanyahu’s office.

Last year, Turner urged U.S. President Joe Biden to support the Abraham Accords.

“The geopolitical and economic impacts of the Abraham Accords have created waves of change towards peace and progress throughout the Middle East and around the world,” Turner wrote at the time.

Turner has also criticized the “deeply flawed” Iran deal, under former President Barack Obama.

According to Turner, the delegation of 11 members of Congress — six Republicans and five Democrats — met with directors of the Mossad and Shin Bet "to discuss the regional security concerns of a nuclear Iran, operations of Iranian-backed terror groups, the deepening Russian-Assad alliance in Syria, and China’s attempts to integrate further into the Middle East."

A key objective of the trip, Turner wrote in an opinion piece distributed by Ohio Jewish Communities

AMERICANS AND THE HOLOCAUST WHAT DID AMERICANS KNOW? WHAT MORE COULD HAVE BEEN DONE?

Dayton Metro Library · Main Library

PRESENTED BY:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with (L) U.S. Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) and U.S. Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) during a meeting in Israel on May 4.

on May 22, was "to build relationships between our committee...and the intelligence services of U.S. allies in the region."

"In our meeting at the Knesset with members of the Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, it was a discussion on how the U.S. and Israel can further support Ukraine in the face of its greatest aggressor, Russia, that demonstrated the depths of our nations’ shared values and unwavering support for democracy," Turner wrote.

Those on the weeklong trip also visited Jordan and Egypt to meet with heads of state and their intelligence services.

— JNS.org and The Dayton Jewish Observer

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THE WORLD Fethi Belaid/AFP via Getty Images

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Tunisian soldiers secure an area near the Ghriba synagogue in Djerba, following a shootout on May 9. A Tunisian police officer shot dead four people at Africa's oldest synagogue in an attack the day before that sparked panic during an annual Jewish pilgrimage.

By Ben Sales, JTA When a security official opened fire outside a Tunisian synagogue during a pilgrimage the night of May 9, killing two Jewish pilgrims and two security guards, he shattered what was meant to be a day of sacred celebration for the country’s Jews and their compatriots around the world.

The shooting at the synagogue in Djerba, an island in Tunisia, is the deadliest attack on the holy site in more than 20 years. It brought tragedy to a public celebration of Jewish life at Africa’s oldest Jewish house of worship.

Here’s an introduction to the Jews of Tunisia, the annual pilgrimage to Djerba, and how the community is reacting to the attack.

Who are the Jews of Tunisia?

Jews have lived in Tunisia since ancient times. Archaeological evidence has shown that there was a Jewish community in the area that once surrounded the Roman city of Carthage, and Jewish life continued to exist there as the territory was conquered by Muslim empires, France, and Nazi Germany. During the Holocaust, the Nazis seized Jewish property, put thousands of Jews in forced labor camps, and persecuted them in other ways.

Tunisia gained independence in 1956. During and after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, Jews endured an increasingly hostile environment, including antisemitic riots and the torching of a synagogue in Tunis.

In the years that followed, the vast majority of the coun-

try’s Jews emigrated, shrinking a Jewish population that once may have numbered more than 100,000 to around 1,000-1,500 today.

What is the Djerba synagogue, and why does it host an annual pilgrimage?

Tradition has it that the synagogue on the island of Djerba was founded at the time of the destruction of the First or Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in either 586 B.C.E. or 70 C.E., and contains a stone from the temple. Today the synagogue, which was rebuilt in the 19th century, has rows of benches, brilliant whiteand-blue arches, as well as

an outdoor arcade and other resplendent design features.

The synagogue’s name, El Ghriba, means “the isolated one” and comes from another legend. According to A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations, published in 2013, local Jews long ago found the body of a girl who lived and died alone — but whose body was miraculously preserved.

That incident was also the inspiration for the annual pilgrimage on the holiday of Lag B’Omer, which takes place each spring, a little more than a month after the beginning of Passover. Pilgrims who come to the synagogue pray, dance, Continued on Page 31 Wikimedia Commons

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PAGE 11

THE WORLD

Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action

Dayenu

‘We owe it to our families to take care of them.’

— Gayle & Irvin Moscowitz with their parents, Milton & Harriet Moscowitz & Edward & Frieda Weisbrod

B

efore a vacation to New Orleans, Irvin Moscowitz researched Ancestry.com to find the cemetery where his great-grandparents were buried. “I have pictures and heard stories about my family, but standing by their graves from 1840 made me feel like I was right there with them. That’s when I knew we needed to maintain our cemeteries for future generations.”

Closer to home, Irvin and his wife, Gayle, visit their parents and his grandparents at Beth Jacob’s cemetery in Dayton. They contributed to the Jewish Cemeteries of Greater Dayton campaign to “guarantee that we can take care of the people who took care of us.”

As a Kohen, Irvin kept clear of cemeteries for a long time. “I’ve made peace with the ways in which I could get close to the people that mean the most to me,” he said. “I figured out a way not to trample on my heritage but to fulfill my need to be respectful and honor my family. When I walk through a wellkept cemetery, I get a feeling that I’m actually close to someone who’s no longer here. I’ll put a stone on the headstone to let them know I’m there. It always brings back a lot of warm memories.”

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Rabbi Laura Bellows, now Dayenu’s director of spiritual activism and education, waves matzah as she encourages major financial organizations to divest from fossil fuels at a rally in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2022

By Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA For a decade starting in 2002, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi devoted herself to pro-Israel advocacy. After that, the Jewish philanthropist and activist from Annapolis, Md. went all in to fight for disability rights, working in the field for the next decade. Now, Mizrahi is focused on climate change.

“Let me put it this way: In 2021, we donated to one climate organization, and in 2022, we donated to 17 of them,” Mizrahi said, referring to the small charity fund she runs with her husband, tech entrepreneur Victor Mizrahi. This year, the couple made their largest climate-related donation yet, sending a group of nine climate reporters to Israel to meet tech startups working on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Mizrahi and her husband have also begun commercially investing in such startups.

“I was hoping other people would solve it,” she said. “But the pace of the change is not nearly meeting the demand at the moment. I felt that even though I don’t know the subject, I’m just going to have to do it because I have kids and I don’t want this world to fall apart.”

Climate change has long ranked at or near the top of a list of issues concerning Jews in the United States, according to multiple surveys, and Jews have been heavily involved in the wider climate movement.

But until recently, the issue had a marginal place on the agendas of Jewish communal organizations, which neglected climate even as the subject took on importance in the activism and policies of other religious communities and in the larger philanthropic world.

Mizrahi’s newfound emphasis on climate is an early example of a larger shift that is underway in Jewish philanthropy, a multibillion-dollar world made up of thousands of individual donors, charitable foundations and nonprofit organizations.

“It’s the beginning of what will become a more widespread focus among Jewish groups,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, the founder and CEO of the Jewish climate group Dayenu. “We’re seeing an awakening to this as a profoundly Jewish issue, and awakening to the role that the Jewish community has to play in addressing the climate crisis.”

Scientists say that decisions regarding carbon emissions made in the next few years will affect life on Earth for thousands of years to come. The most recent warning came in March, when leading global experts with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report, stating that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”

The coastal United States is vulnerable to extreme storms, sea-level rise, severe heat and other weather disruptions — a situation dramatized in the recent Apple television series Extrapolations, in which a rabbi contends with rising sea waters infiltrating his Florida synagogue.

Meanwhile, Israel is experiencing a slew of impacts from drought and floods to security threats tied regional climate-related instability.

The last few months have seen a flurry of new initiatives aimed at both greening Jewish institutions and directing collective action on climate.

In December, for example, Rosenn’s group published a report calculating that endowments of Jewish organizations, from family foundations to local Jewish Federations, are invested in the fossil fuel industry to the tune of at least $3 billion. The report launched an ongoing campaign called All Our Might that urges Jewish leaders to withdraw these investments and put the money toward clean energy instead.

Meanwhile, many of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the country — representing local Jewish Federations, Hillel chapters, summer camps, com-

'We're seeing an awakening to this as a profoundly Jewish issue, and awakening to the role that the Jewish community has to play in addressing the climate crisis.'

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

THE WORLD munity centers, day schools, and nearly every religious denomination — had already joined a new green coalition organized by another Jewish environmental group and were preparing to unveil pledges to do more in the fight against climate change.

The unveiling of the climate pledges happened in March, under the leadership of Adamah, a nonprofit created through the merger of two stalwarts of Jewish environmentalism, Hazon and the Pearlstone Center.

“Climate and sustainability have not been on the list of priorities for the vast majority of Jewish organizations; this coalition and these climate action plans reflect a deep paradigm shift and culture change moving forward,” Adamah CEO Jakir Manela said at the time.

The commitments made by members of Adamah’s Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition include sending youth leaders to global climate summits, reducing emissions of buildings and vehicles and lobbying the federal government to pass climate policies.

More than 300 congregations and nonprofits have joined. For Earth Day, Adamah announced a million-dollar fund offering interest-free loans and matching grants to Jewish groups for projects to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

If any single event can be said to mark the debut of the climate issue as a top Jewish communal priority, it is probably the recent annual conference of the Jewish Funders Network, which took place in March in Phoenix, bringing together thousands of donors and charity executives.

For the gathering’s first event, before the formal opening of the conference, a group of participants went on a field trip to downtown Phoenix to learn about the local effects of the climate crisis.

Far more people signed up than organizers anticipated, and with about 55 passengers, the tour bus chartered for the occasion reached capacity. Mizrahi, who was among the participants, said the trip was helpful as a networking opportunity for like-minded philanthropists.

Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz,

the founder of the activist group Arizona Jews for Justice, took the group to a local church where immigration officers drop off asylum seekers, so that conference attendees could hear about how environmental disasters drive cross-border migration. The trip continued with a visit to a downtown homeless encampment known as the Zone, where participants were invited to imagine the challenge of spending the summer season outside, with temperatures sometimes reaching 120 degrees. The conversation eventually turned to the issue of water scarcity across the state.

“We wanted to expose them to how the existential threats posed by climate change are not long term, but are already here,” Yanklowitz said.

“People down in the Zone are dying every summer from heat exhaustion and dehydration.”

Based on his debrief with the group afterward, Yanklowitz feels the trip left an impact on participants.

“I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘Oh, I’m changing my commitments.’ But I did get the sense that climate change was kind of abstract for many people, and that now it really hit home,”

The Jewish world is, in many ways, still lagging behind the larger climate movement.

Dayenu

Environmental activists hold a Dayenu banner at a rally urging New York State lawmakers to pass the Climate and Community Investment Act in New York, April 7, 2021.

Yanklowitz said.

The rest of the conference featured multiple talks and gatherings dedicated to climate, including on the main stage, and an announcement that Birthright, which offers free trips to Israel for young Jews, was increasing its own climate activism with the help of a new donation.

In an interview, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, children of Birthright founder Charles Bronfman, said their $9 million gift is meant to honor their father on the occasion of his 90th

birthday, while also bringing Birthright more in line with the values of a new generation that is environmentally minded.

Birthright organizers will use the funding to develop programming focused on climate that could, for example, expose participants to Israel’s clean tech scene.

The money is also intended to help Birthright lower its own carbon footprint, potentially by switching to electric buses or adding more vegetarian meals.

The Bronfmans hope that Birthright’s significant purContinued on Page 14

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DOWNTOWN DAYTON

Catering & Online Delivery Available

Greene Town Center

Lawn at Levitt Pavilion Dayton This organization was awarded the Ohio Art Council’s ArtSTART award for 2023

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

72 Plum Street Beavercreek, Ohio 937-429 9000 www.pashagrill.com

PAGE 13

THE WORLD Yossi Aloni/Flash90

Climate crisis

list are defined as faith-based orgaContinued from Page 13 nizations, but only chasing power in Israeli tourism will three are Jewish: nudge the industry toward more ecoKolot Chayeinu, a logically sustainable practices. congregation in Park “To me, Birthright is like Walmart Slope, Brooklyn; the — everyone wants to do business with Reform movement’s them,” Stephen Bronfman said. “They pension system; and have the power to dictate terms to their the American Jewish service providers and affect the supply World Service, a chain.” global justice group.

The widespread interest in climate Adamah’s own mobilization among Jewish groups climate plan doesn’t comes after years in which the issue lan- include a pledge to guished outside the mainstream. divest but only a Rosenn, the head of Dayenu, who promise that it will has attended about 15 conferences of investigate the opthe Jewish Funder Network, noticed a tion of doing so for change this year. its endowment and “There used to be half a dozen peoemployee retireple at a breakfast before the program ment funds. Instead, talking about climate. And it wasn’t the plan touts the even climate, necessarily — it was the group’s education A flooded road after heavy rainfall in the central Israeli city of Lod, Jan. 16, 2022. environment writ large,” she said. and advocacy efforts, Jewish community is much less cenThe Jewish world is, in many ways, and focuses on remilestone when 12 of the 20 founding tralized with communal assets spread still lagging behind the larger climate ducing emissions at its retreat centers. members of Adamah’s climate coaliacross many endowments, making the movement. Divesting endowment Adamah’s chief climate officer, Risa tion said in their climate plans that actions of any single group relatively funds from the fossil fuel industry, for Alyson Cooper, acknowledged that they would consider amending their example, is seen as a bold step among Jewish community institutions have financial practices. That was significant, less impactful.

“Adamah had done some really Jewish groups even though at least been “largely absent” from the divestshe said, in light of the organization's important work to change individual 1,590 institutions representing nearly ment movement and said her group complex and deliberate governing behavior and grow people’s connec$41 trillion in assets have already pubregards divestment as one of several re- structures, which can make executing tions to the environment, but the bigger licly committed to doing so, according quired tools for addressing the climate such changes onerous. piece of bold collective action to fight to a website tracking such pledges. crisis.

“While the Jewish community may the climate crisis was missing,” KahnAbout a third of the groups on the She said the Jewish community hit a have lagged behind in years past, we Troster said. “The are catching up overall community quickly,” Cooper is late to respond to said. the urgency of the Such a shift ® problem. But I do would mark not think that the work only a milestone Business Advisors of Southwest Ohio of these organizafor Jewish climate tions is very signifiactivism but also WHETHER SELLING cant, so I’m excited a departure from to see it.” how the Jewish YOUR BUSINESS NOW OR Kahn-Troster’s community has IN THE FUTURE, YOU NEED historical view is historically done informed by the philanthropy, said EXPERTISE YOU CAN legacy of her father, Rabbi Rachel KahnRabbi Lawrence Troster, executive Troster, an environmental activist who vice president of the Interfaith Center had pushed for communal Jewish acon Corporate Responsibility. tion on climate, and by the passion for She said wielding financial holdings climate justice displayed by her 15-yearfor social impact has been a hallmark old, Liora Pelavin, a member of the Jewof advocacy by Christian groups.

Last Selling a business is often the most important financial decision in an ish Youth Climate Movement, an arm of year, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) owner’s life, which is why you need experienced business brokers Adamah. opted to divest from fossil fuels in light you can trust. Sunbelt Business Advisors of Southwest Ohio will “Finding a meaningful Jewish space of the climate crisis. assist you every step of the way with exceptional integrity, to do grassroots-level climate advocacy The Jewish community, meanwhile, that many young people are demandprofessionalism, and confidentiality, to build value and has tended to act primarily through ing has been really important to Liora,” charitable donations.

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The Jewish community is much less centralized, with communal assets spread across many endowments, making the actions of any single group relatively less impactful.

Weekly podcast

The Jewish News Hour with The Dayton Jewish Observer’s Marshall Weiss

Search for The Dayton Jewish Observer in Spotify podcasts and subscribe THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

June 2023 JEWISH FEDERATION of GREATER DAYTON & ITS AGENCIES

SUN

4

MON

5

TUE

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WED

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THU

FRI

SAT

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— UPCOMING EVENTS —

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WEDNESDAYS, 12:30PM-3:30PM Canasta THURSDAYS, 3PM-6PM Mah Jongg THURSDAY, JUNE 1, 6:30PM-9PM JCC Film Festival Opening NightPersian Lessons MONDAY, JUNE 5, Camp Shalom Begins MONDAY, JUNE 5, 7PM-8PM JG&H – Daytonians and the Holocaust: The View From Here TUESDAY, JUNE 6, 7:15PM-9PM JCC Film Festival - Where Life Begins THURSDAY, JUNE 8, 7:15PM-9PM JCC Film Festival - Charlotte TUESDAY, JUNE 13, 7:15PM-9PM JCC Film Festival - Reckonings THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 7:15PM-9PM JCC Film Festival - Exodus SUNDAY, JUNE 18, 7:15-9PM JCC Film Festival - Karaoke TUESDAY, JUNE 20, 10AM-12PM JCC Film Festival - iMordecai TUESDAY, JUNE 20, 7PM-9:30PM Camp Shalom and JCC at the Dragons THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 7:15PM-9PM JCC Film Festival - The Man in the Basement SUNDAY, JUNE 25, 8AM-5PM JFS Drive-Thru Mitzvah Mission

CONNECT WITH US! CHECK OUT OUR EVENTS. FOR MORE INFORMATION, SEE OUR CALENDAR AT JEWISHDAYTON.ORG.

SUNDAY, JUNE 25, 7:15PM-9PM JCC Film Festival - Marrying Myself TUESDAY, JUNE 27, 7:15PM-9PM JCC Film Festival - America THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 7:15PM-9PM JCC Film Festival Closing Night Farewell Mr. Haffman

Camp Shalom is planning a summer full of excitement!

JUNE 5 – JULY 28 SPOTS ARE FILLING UP QUICKLY. REGISTER YOUR CAMPER TODAY!

We offer a variety of specialty camps including tennis, golf, magic, art and theatre. We have field trips planned to fun destinations throughout the Miami Valley.

And we’ll celebrate Israel’s 75th birthday!

Register at app.campdoc.com/ register/jccgreaterdayton.

See jewishdayton.org for more information.

Do you know someone 16 or older who is looking for a meaningful, challenging and FUN summer work experience?

CAMP SHALOM IS HIRING SUMMER STAFF! Interested candidates should contact Meryl Hattenbach at mhattenbach@jfgd.net or 937-401-1550.

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

PAGE 15

Opening NIGHT Opening NIGHT THURSDAY, JUNE 1 6:30PM OPENING PROGRAM WITH DESSERT RECEPTION 7:15PM FILM

THE PLAZA THEATRE 33 S. MAIN ST. MIAMISBURG 45342

2023

PERSIAN LESSONS PLAZA THEATRE JUNE 1 Reception 6:30PM | Film 7:15PM Occupied France, 1942. Gilles is arrested

by SS soldiers alongside other Jews and sent to a camp in Germany. He narrowly avoids sudden execution by swearing to the guards that he is not Jewish, but Persian. This lie temporarily saves him, but Gilles gets assigned a shocking mission. Can he devise a strategy to endure under these conditions? A satisfying thriller of resistance, resilience, and courage in the face of evil. Loosely inspired by a short story from German writer, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Persian Lessons is an award-winning film that will inspire discussion about ingenuity, memory, and survival.

$18.00 per person includes dessert

2023 LINE UP

WHERE LIFE BEGINS JUNE 6 - 7:15PM AT THE NEON Online June 6–8 (7PM)

KARAOKE JUNE 18 - 7:15PM AT THE NEON

MARRYING MYSELF JUNE 25 - 7:15PM AT THE PLAZA Online June 25-27 (7PM)

CHARLOTTE JUNE 8 - 7:15PM AT THE DAYTON METRO LIBRARY Free admission.

Online June 8-10 (7PM)

iMORDECAI JUNE 20 - 10AM AT THE NEON In partnership with Hadassah.

9:30AM coffee reception.

Online June 20-22 (7PM)

AMERICA JUNE 27 - 7:15PM AT THE NEON Online June 27-29 (7PM)

RECKONINGS JUNE 13 - 7:15PM AT THE NEON

FAREWELL MR. HAFFMANN

CLOSING NIGHT

MAN IN THE BASEMENT JUNE 22 - 7:15PM AT THE NEON

JUNE 29 - 7:15PM AT THE NEON

EXODUS 91 JUNE 15 - 7:15PM AT THE NEON

TICKETS $18.00 OPENING NIGHT In person only $12.00 ALL OTHER NIGHTS In person and/or online

To purchase tickets or a festival pass, visit jewishdayton.org. All ticket and festival pass purchases will be through Eventive.

For more information or assistance, contact 937-610-1555.

Jewish Community Center OF GREATER DAYTON

THANK YOU TO OUR FESTIVAL SPONSORS!

$85.00 FESTIVAL PASS Includes Opening Night and can be used for either in person or online films PAGE 16

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

June 2023 JEWISH FEDERATION of GREATER DAYTON & ITS AGENCIES

YO M H A ' AT Z M AU T Yom Ha’atzmaut was a day to remember! We had booths filled with innovation, great food and music, a technology scavenger hunt, and an IDF obstacle course. We played board games invented by Israelis and tried our hand at Israeli trivia. It was a fun afternoon with new and old friends.

The JCC thanks all its partners and our guests for helping us celebrate Israel’s 75th birthday!

This program was proudly supported by the Israel Engagement Fund: A JCC Association of North America Program Accelerator, and the Dayton Sister City Committee.

Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of Israel’s Independence THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

PAGE 17

June 2023 JEWISH FEDERATION of GREATER DAYTON & ITS AGENCIES

Legacies, Tributes, & Memorials FEDERATION JEWISH COMMUNITY RELATIONS COUNCIL In Memory of Martha Jacob’s mother, Maurine Moody Scott

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION COMMITTEE In Honor of Renate Frydman, Named a Dangerous Dame of Dayton

Susan and Jonas Gruenberg

CAROL J. PAVLOFSKY LEADERSHIP FUND In Celebration of the Wedding of Jackie and Jake

Beverly Farnbacher

Sheila Myers Heath Gilbert Samantha Daniel Gary and Mary Youra Debby and Bob Goldenberg Dick and Pat Jones

Phil and Louisa Dreety

JOE BETTMAN MEMORIAL TZADIK AWARD In Memory of Dr. Charlie Knoll

AUDREY MACKENZIE JCC MEMORIAL FUND In memory of Audrey MacKenzie

Jean and Todd Bettman Elaine Bettman

Marilyn and Larry Klaben

HOLOCAUST PROGRAMMING FUND In Memory of Rick Fishman

EARLY CHILDHOOD FUND In Memory of Audrey MacKenzie

JOAN AND PETER WELLS AND REBECCA LINVILLE FAMILY, CHILDREN AND YOUTH FUND In Memory of Charlie Knoll Congratulations, Linda Engel, for being honored by Echo

The Harvey Family Cindy and Doug Turner and Family The Compton Family Arthur and Sandra Hanson Jane and Gary Hochstein Michele and Jay Dritz Karen Sisco Karen Steiger

Wishing Judy Lipton a speedy recovery Joan and Peter Wells

CALLING ALL SOCIAL WORKERS & COUNSELORS! DID YOU KNOW THAT JEWISH FAMILY SERVICES IS PART OF A TRAINING COLLABORATIVE WITH CATHOLIC SOCIAL SERVICES OF THE MIAMI VALLEY, FAMILY SERVICES, AND GRACEWORKS LUTHERAN?

Each year, our Training Collaborative plans workshops on critical topics to enhance your knowledge and toolbox to support you as you support the community. Check out the sessions we are offering for CEUs and consider registering!

2023 COMMUNITY TRAINING COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL SUMMER WORKSHOP SERIES WHEN: The second Friday of every month, May–September, from 8:45 AM to Noon COST: $35.00 per session REGISTER: https://e.givesmart.com/events/wqN/

Sunday, June 25 From 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | Boonshoft CJCE | No cost Back by popular demand, JFS is hosting another Drive-Thru Mitzvah Mission! Help us feed guests at St. Vincent de Paul’s shelters and provide high-need items for Brigid’s Path. JFS will take your donations and provide you with a sweet treat in return.

If you have questions, please contact Jacquelyn Archie, JFS Administrative Assistant, at jarchie@jfgd.net or at 937-610-1555.

HIGH-NEED (NEW) ITEMS FOR BRIGID’S PATH Dr. Brown’s bottles, 8 oz; baby wash; baby lotion; hooded towels; and preemie diapers – Huggies, Pampers or Luvs.

• 1-1/2 lbs (24 oz) elbow macaroni • 2 lbs cheese, melted •1 can (10.5 oz) cream of celery soup • 2-1/2 cups milk

Prepare frozen, unbaked macaroni and cheese casseroles following the required recipe and these directions. Cook macaroni and drain. Melt cheese separately and add to macaroni. Add milk and soup. Mix well. Pour into sprayed pan. Cover loosely and place in refrigerator until completely cooled. Then cover tightly with sturdy foil lid and freeze.

Casserole should be frozen for 36 hours.

JEWISH FAMILY SERVICES of GREATER DAYTON PAGE 18

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

CALENDAR Classes

Beth Jacob Classes: Sundays, 10 a.m. & Wednesdays, 6 p.m.: Beginners Hebrew. $100. Beginning Sun., June 11.

Sundays in person, Wednesdays on Zoom. Tuesdays, 7 p.m.: Torah Tuesdays on Zoom w. Rabbi Agar. Thursdays, 7 p.m.: Thursdays of Thought — Jewish Law on Zoom w. Rabbi Agar. 7020 N. Main St., Harrison Twp. bethjacobcong.org.

Call to register, 937-274-2149.

Chabad Classes: Sundays, 8:15 a.m.: Deep Dive Into Inner Torah Teachings of Rebbe Rashab on Zoom. Sundays, 10:15 a.m.: Maimonides' Law Code on Zoom. Sundays, 4:15 p.m.: Reading Biblical Hebrew on Zoom. Sundays, 7 p.m.: Exodus on Zoom. Wednesdays, 8 p.m.: Chasidic View of the Parsha on Zoom. Saturdays, 8:30 a.m.: Chasidic Insights on the Parsha in person.

2001 Far Hills Ave., Oakwood. chabaddayton.com. 937-6430770.

Temple Beth Or Classes: Sun., June 11, 18, 25, 12:30 p.m.: Adult Hebrew. Thurs., June 8, 7 p.m.: Chai Mitzvah.

5275 Marshall Rd., Wash. Twp. 937-435-3400.

Temple Israel Classes: Wed. June 7, 14, 21, 10 a.m.: Social Justice Commentary w. Rabbi Bodney-Halasz at home of Cathy Lieberman. Saturdays, 9:15 a.m.: Virtual Torah Study.

Sat., June 24, 9:15 a.m.: Hybrid Virtual Torah Study on Zoom. 130 Riverside Dr., Dayton. tidayton.org. 937-4960050.

Family

Temple Israel Prayer & Play: Sat., June 24, 10 a.m.: Infants2nd grade. Contact Rabbi Sobo, educator@tidayton. org for more information. 130 Riverside Dr., Dayton.

Children & Teens

JCC Camp Shalom: June 5-July 28. At Temple Beth Or, 5275 Marshall Rd., Wash. Twp. jewishdayton.org.

Men

Chabad Bagels, Lox & Tefillin: Sun., June 4, 9:30 a.m.

937-643-0770. 2001 Far Hills Ave., Oakwood.

Adults

JCC Open Mah Jongg: Thursdays, 3-5 p.m. Boonshoft CJCE, 525 Versailles Dr., Centerville. 937-610-1555.

Temple Beth Or Exploration of the Jewish Short Story: Wed., June 28, 7 p.m.: Register at templebethor.com or 937-435-3400. 5275 Marshall Rd., Wash. Twp.

Exhibit

Americans & the Holocaust Exhibit: Through June 21.

Free. Dayton Metro Library, 215 E. Third St., Dayton. 937463-2665. daytonmetrolibrary. org.

JCC Film Fest

For complete schedule, see Page 16.

Community

Beth Jacob 3rd Annual Jewish Women Inspiring Jewish Women: Sun., June 4, 11 a.m.: $18. RSVP to 937-2742149. 7020 N. Main St., Harrison Twp. Chabad 30th Anniversary Gala: Sun., June 4, 6 p.m.: $100. RSVP at chabaddayton.

com. 937-643-0770.

Dayton Metro Library Americans & the Holocaust Exhibit Programs: Mon., June 5, 7 p.m.: Daytonians & the Holocaust: The View From Here w.

The Dayton Jewish Observer's Marshall Weiss. Thurs., June 8, 7:15 p.m.: JCC Jewish Film Fest screening of Charlotte w. speaker Edna Carter Southard.

Thurs., June 15, 6 p.m.: Belonging Versus Othering panel discussion on immigration w. UD's Theo Majka, Dayton Metro Library's Gabriela Pickett, Welcome Dayton's Desire Ntwayingabo & Eichelberger Ctr. & WYSO's Neenah Ellis.

Moderated by Amaha Sellassie. 215 E. Third St., Dayton.

Reservations requested at daytonmetrolibrary.org.

1555. Boonshoft CJCE, 525 Versailles Dr., Centerville.

Temple Beth Or Adult Ed. at National Underground Freedom Center: Wed., June 14, 10 a.m.: Free, limited spots.

Register at templebethor.com/ event/adult-education-eventfreedom-center. For info., contact Ruth Shumacher, ruth. schumacher@wright.edu. 50 E. Freedom Way, Cincinnati.

Jewish Family Services Drive-Thru Mitzvah Mission: Sun., June 25, 10 a.m.-noon.

RSVP at jewishdayton.org.

Boonshoft CJCE, 525 Versailles Dr., Centerville. Call Jacquelyn Archie, 937-6101555.

Temple Israel's Jewish Cultural Festival: Sun., June 11, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Free. tidayton. org/festival. 130 Riverside Dr., Dayton. 937-496-0050.

Jewish Dayton Dreams Big Community Video Screenings: Wed., June 14, 21, 28, 8:30 a.m.: Free. RSVP at jewishdayton.org or call 937-610-

2313 Far Hills Ave., Oakwood 937-293-1196 www.oakwoodflorist.com family owned and operated military discount

Congratulations to the 2023 Hillel Graduates.

Now accepting K-6 applications for the 2023-2024 school year.

Alden Pachman will attend The Miami Valley School.

Prevella Folley will attend Dayton Early College Academy.

Academically driven, culturally inspired for more than 60 years.

Accepting resumes for Hebrew and aftercare teachers.

daytonhillel.org • 937.277.8966 • asmith@daytonhillel.org THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

PAGE 19

OPINION

Ohio Senate Biden challenges FDR Bill 83 will ban on not bombing Auschwitz free speech, not defend it whitehouse.gov

By Addison Caruso Ohio Senate Bill 83, which seeks to stifle discussion in the classroom and increase university costs, has faced widespread opposition from students, professors, and citizens.

The bill, introduced by State Sen. Jerry Cirino (RKirtland) in early 2023 and passed May 17, follows a litany of legislation proposed and enacted in other states, like Florida and South Carolina, which backers say defend free speech. This bill will ban free speech.

Senate Bill 83: • Proposes limitations on faculty speech, • Bans labor strikes from faculty, • Bans diversity training with few exceptions, • Requires annual faculty evaluations which weight student evaluations as only 50 percent of the teaching assessment, • Increases bureaucratic and administrative costs for universities, which will have to pass those costs onto students.

The vague language in the bill has also created fears among professors and students that discussion in the classroom would be chilled, potentially leading to self-censorship for fear of lawsuits or job repercussions.

The Ohio State University is so concerned that its board of trustees released a rare public rebuke of the bill. The bill’s broad language has also sparked concerns from Jewish groups that it would require teaching “both sides” of the Holocaust.

Ohioans recognize the damage this bill could cause and are overwhelmingly opposed to the bill. During its initial hearing on April 18, over 500 opponents testified against the bill and only eight testified in favor and this opposition has continued with the new bill.

The breadth of this opposition from students, faculty, administrators, and citizens shows that Ohioans value our institutions being able to have robust conversations, which this bill threatens to chill with its vague limitations on speech in the classroom. If law schools and other higher-education institutions cannot discuss divisive concepts and challenge students to think critically, students will also choose to attend schools in other states and may not return to Ohio.

In our world, the true competition is for talent, and to get the best and the brightest, Ohio must have an education system that nurtures the best and the brightest. This bill does the opposite: it harms our educational system and chills discussion in the classroom.

Because of the overwhelming opposition, Sen. Cirino promised to make some amendments to the bill, but his changes have not addressed citizens’ concerns. Undeterred by the opposition, however, he vowed to press forward, saying, “I don’t get bullied very easily.”

Respectfully, senator, this isn’t students, higher institutions, professors, and citizens trying to bully you; we are trying to use our right to speak out against a damaging bill. I just hope you listen to us.

Attorney Addison Caruso of Oakwood is a fellow at Case Western University in its Environmental Law Clinic.

So, what do you think?

PAGE 20

By Rafael Medoff the railways because the GerIt’s not easy for a politimans sometimes could repair cian to criticize a popular railway lines fairly quickly. ex-president from his own That Monday-morningparty. That’s why it is signifiquarterback excuse ignores two crucial facts: the bridges cant that President Joe Biden along the railway routes were strongly criticized the refusal much more difficult to repair; of President Franklin D. Rooand even though railroad sevelt to bomb the railways tracks were sometimes repairleading to Auschwitz in 1944.

Biden has spoken of his adable, that did not stop the miration for FDR’s leadership Allies from making railways during the Depression and prime targets in their air war World War II; but it’s imporagainst the Germans.

No less than 32 percent of tant to be equally frank about the bomb tonnage utilized a president’s failures. in the Allies’ entire strategic President Biden spoke on air campaign in Europe was May 16 at a White House event celebrating Jewish Pres. Joe Biden at the White House Jewish American devoted to attacking railAmerican Heritage Month. He Heritage Month Celebration, May 16. way routes. The impact was said he first learned about the significant. The Nazis were Holocaust when his father, a World War II veteran, compelled to divert tens of thousands of laborers spoke at the dinner table “about how outraged he was from military construction in order to repair damabout why we didn’t bomb the railroad tracks into the aged railroads. Trains carrying military supplies were concentration camps, why we didn’t let the ship in stranded, and war materials remained in warehouses with Jewish (refugees), and he talked about the need because there was no way to get them to the front. to make sure every generation understood.”

Hitler’s Ardennes offensive (better known as the As a result, Biden later took his own children to vis- Battle of the Bulge) was repeatedly postponed because the damage inflicted on transportation routes preventit the former site of the Dachau concentration camp.

“I want(ed) them to see how no one could pretend ed resupplying German troops there. The bombing of they didn’t know,” the president explained. “I wanted rail marshaling yards destroyed freight cars, locomothem to bear witness to the perils of indifference.” tives, and military goods awaiting shipment.

Biden is not the first president to publicly acknowlThe Allies’ destruction of rail centers, bridges, and edge FDR’s abandonment of the Jews. railroad cars in Germany’s key coal-producing region, At the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial the Ruhr, drastically reduced coal production and Museum, on April 22, 1993, President Bill Clinton said stockpiles, which in turn crippled other industries. that even after America’s “awareThe U.S. government’s Strategic Bombing Survey found the destrucness of (Nazi) crimes grew into indisputable facts, far too little was tion of the transportation routes done” to help the Jews. “Before the “was the most important single war even started,” Clinton emphacause of Germany’s ultimate ecosized, “doors to liberty were shut nomic collapse.” and even after the United States The fact that American bombers and the Allies attacked Germany, were already attacking railways rail lines in the camps within miles throughout Europe makes it clear of militarily significant targets were why President Biden’s father was left undisturbed.” so “outraged” over the question of “why we didn’t President George W. Bush, viewing an aerial recon- bomb the railroad tracks into the concentration camps.” naissance photo of Auschwitz at Yad Vashem on Jan. The heart of the problem was that the Roosevelt 11, 2008, remarked, “We should have bombed it.” And administration was committed to the principle that President Barack Obama said on April 23, 2012, that military resources should never be used to assist the Nazis were able to carry out the Holocaust in part Jewish refugees. President Biden, by contrast, ap“because so many others stood silent.”

In the spring of 1944, American Jewish organizapears to embrace the principle that the U.S. should tions received definitive information about Auschwitz use its military power to save lives when it can: recall and repeatedly urged Roosevelt administration ofthat the Obama-Biden administration bombed Libya when Muammar Gaddafi was preparing to massacre ficials to bomb the railway tracks and bridges over civilians in 2011, and sent U.S. planes to break the ISIS which hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews siege of the Yazidi refugees in the mountains of Iraq in were being deported to the gas chambers.

2014.

U.S. officials responded that bombing the railways With his remarks, President Biden in effect reafwould require “diverting” planes from elsewhere in Europe. Even when Jewish leaders pointed out that firmed that he is determined not to repeat Roosevelt’s the same railways over which Jews were deported mistakes. were also being used for German military purposes, they still received the same answer: No. Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Recently, some apologists for FDR’s Holocaust reInstitute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. cord have argued that there was no point in bombing

Biden is not the first president to publicly acknowledge FDR's abandonment of the Jews.

Views expressed by columnists, in readers’ letters, and in opinion Send letters (350 words max.) to The Dayton Jewish Observer, pieces do not necessarily reflect the opinion of staff or layleaders of 525 Versailles Dr., Dayton, OH 45459 • MWeiss@jfgd.net The Dayton Jewish Observer or the Jewish Federation of Greater Dayton.

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

PRESIDENTS

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

DINNER 2023

PAGE 21

By Vered Guttman, The Nosher My grandmother Rachel was a gifted cook. After moving as a young mother from Baghdad to Tel Aviv in 1943, she kept cooking the same dishes she grew up with in Iraq. From her small kitchen, out came fried eggplant slices, ground chicken and parsley meatballs, rice with vermicelli that she cooked in freshly made chicken broth, and chopped spicy vegetable salad with tons of black pepper.

But the highlight was her assortment of stuffed foods that Iraqi and wider Middle Eastern cuisine is famous for: sambousek pastries with Iraqi cuisine, dating to 13thchickpea filling; kubbeh (facentury Baghdad. The Book of rina dumplings) stuffed with Dishes by Al Baghdadi includes meat in okra, pumpkin or a recipe for madfuna, which beet sauce depending on the means buried, and is also the season; stuffed chicken with root of the name of North rice (t’beet) for Shabbat; cookAfrican Shabbat overnight stew ies stuffed with dates (baba known as tfina or adafina. b’tamar); and sweet sambousek Al Baghdadi describes how with sugar and nuts. to pound cooked meat, mix My favorites were the with chickpeas and then stuff stuffed vegetables, particularly eggplants with the mixture. stuffed onions and tomatoes, He spices the dish with safand especially when they got fron, coriander and cinnamon, a little burnt at the bottom, releasing their sugars that caramelized their skin.

My grandmother’s stuffing was made of rice and a little ground beef, and had a slight lemony taste, which, with the natural sweetness of the onions and tomatoes, made the dish sublime.

Stuffed vegetables are a cornerstone of Stuffed onions and tomatoes

Stuffed vegetables The ultimate comfort food

PAGE 22

sprinkles with rose water and cooks on a “gentle fire.”

Stuffed food, whether it’s a stuffed dumpling or pastry, leaf or vegetable, requires a lot of practice, patience, and time — things my grandmother never questioned when she’d lovingly roll kubbeh, stuff sambousek or separated onion layers to fill and roll.

She started her day early in the morning, cooking her own chicken broth that she later used in the stuffed vegetable and the kubbeh sauce.

To make the stuffed onions, she first cooked then separated the onions into layers so she could fill each layer separately.

From time to time she sat at a chair near the large window, letting her feet rest, looking outside, feeding Tel Avivian cats

with some scraps, before she went back to roll kubbeh and stuff onions.

And she’s not the only one.

Grandmothers from around the Jewish world have been stuffing vegetables for generations.

More specifically, at least since the Ottomans started spreading the technique of making dolma, a general name for stuffed vegetables and leaves, throughout the empire, making it a popular practice that’s open to creative interpretation.

“There’s seven different ways to cook an eggplant…

The second one to make it is the wife of the Shammash she hollows it and fills it with herbs, and lots of rice they call this meal: a dish of dolma.”

– Seven Ways To Cook An Eggplant, a Ladino folk song.

Over the years, inspired by friends and colleagues in Israel,

I’ve added to the vegetablestuffing techniques and recipes my grandmother taught me.

Driven by a desire to keep her beautiful culinary traditions alive, I prepare stuffed vegetables regularly. I find the slow and repetitive labor of stuffing relaxing, and delight that the final flavor is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

Whenever I walk through a farmers' market or supermarket vegetable aisle, I find myself drawn to veggies that I can stuff in various ways: Eggplants stuffed Sephardistyle, with a mixture of ground meat, rice, and herbs, or rainbow chard for a colorful pot of mashi — the Arabic term for stuffed vegetables used by Jews from the Middle East.

While these dishes invite creativity when it comes to flavors, there are some rules when it comes to the cooking method. Here are six of my best veggie-stuffing tips: 1. Choose firm vegetables of about the same size. If you’re mixing a variety of vegetables, try to keep them all of the same firmness.

For example, potatoes and beets need more time to cook than zucchini and tomatoes.

Onion layers are adjustable in that sense, and can be cooked for a longer or shorter time.

2. Melon ballers, serrated grapefruit spoons, and apple corers are all helpful in emptying veggies, especially zucchini and root vegetables.

3. Soak the rice in cold water for at least one hour before mixing the stuffing, to make sure it is moist enough and will not dry during the cooking process.

4. Ground beef, chicken or lamb add good flavor to the stuffing, but that’s all you need meat for: a bit of flavor. There’s no need to add too much of it.

A quarter pound of ground beef mixed with two cups of rice is more than enough.

Vegan meat substitutes work very well, too.

5. Have patience and cook your stuffed vegetables slowly over 90 minutes to two hours.

After that, especially if the filling includes rice, let the dish stand covered for at least another 30 minutes before serving.

The rice will absorb all the steam and will have the best texture this way. This is true for any cooked rice dish.

6. Never overstuff vegetables and leaves with rice. The rice expands as it cooks and will rip the vegetables if they’re filled too much.

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

The Class of 2023

Bring in this ad and receive $10 off your next in-store purchase of $60 or more*

Celebrating our high school graduates

Expires 10.31.2023. *Some exclusions apply. Not valid on wine, candy, or delivery.

1306 Troy Street • Dayton, Ohio 45404 937-223-1213 • furstflorist.com

Graham Henry Glovka

Parents: Todd and Mindy Glovka Grandparents: Linda and the late Michael Novak, Robert and Mary Glovka School: Kettering Fairmont Activities: Tennis, French Club President, Academic Team, Latin Club, Dulcimer Club Volunteering: Tutoring, Rachel & Friends, Firebird Camp, Kettering Rec Center Honors: National Honor Society, Psi Alpha Congregation: Temple Beth Or After Graduation: Brandeis University, majoring in Linguistics and English

Yetta Krummel-Adkins

Parents: Miriamne Krummel and Matt Adkins Grandparents: Bill and the late Rifka Krummel, Marguerite and the late Greg Adkins School: Oakwood Activities: Varsity Girls Tennis, Symphony Orchestra, National Honor Society Treasurer, Ohio Model U.N., Dayton Performing Youth Strings Volunteering: Dayton Metro Library, Wright Memorial Public Library, Humane Society of Greater Dayton Honors: Honors Diploma, French Honors Society Congregation: Beth Abraham After Graduation: New York University, Liberal Studies Core

Alayna Poch

Parents: Eric Poch, Sheri Poch Grandparents: Phyllis Froug (Leet), Ronald Froug, the late Gloria Kobrin, Honore and the late Richard Poch Great-grandparents: The late Jack and Freida Leet, the late David and Bess Froug School: Weiss High School, Pflugerville, Texas Activities: Varsity Choir Officer, Health Occupations Students of America Officer, National Honor Society Volunteering: Rotary Interact Club Honors: Salutatorian, Honor Roll, AP Scholar Biomedical Science Award After Graduation: University of Texas at Austin, Astronomy Major in the College of Natural Sciences

MAZEL TOV! The Better Business Bureau of Dayton and Miami Valley honored Ohlmann Group with its Legacy Award at BBB's Torch Awards for Ethics Awards Dinner, May 9. Ohlmann Group marketing and advertising agency is owned by Linda Kahn and Lori Ohlmann. Every year, Ohlmann Group donates hundreds of hours of creative time to small businesses, and encourages its employees to become involved in causes they care about. Each month, the agency schedules a half-day volunteer outing for its team to give back together.

bus, Ohio Holocaust Remembrance, held at Columbus City Hall, April 21.

Valley School Legacy Award.

Beth Abraham Synagogue congregant Alan Chesen was honored as the Federation of Jewish Men's Club's KIO Region Man of the Year at its annual meeting in Cleveland, May 21.

Benjamin Guadalupe is graduating from the University of Rhode Island with majors in psychology and biology, and a minor in French. He's now applying to graduate programs in psychology. Benjamin is the son of Melissa and Harold Guadalupe.

Mary Rita and Norm Weissman received the 2023 Miami

Send your Mazel Tov announcements to mweiss@jfgd.net.

Steven M. Carne

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Primary grade Judaics teacher Sandy Sloane-Brenner is retiring from Hillel Academy after 50 years of service to the Dayton area's Jewish day school.

Word has it that she'll continue helping in the classroom and teaching prayers to the youngest students part time. Sandy easily holds the record as Hillel's longest-serving teacher.

Holocaust survivor Ira Segalewitz of Kettering was the speaker for this year's Colum-

For your Class of 2023 graduates

Mon-Thu: 10:30 am-10 pm Fri-Sat: 10:30 am-10:30 pm Sun: 11:30 a.m-10 pm

Clara Hochstein, wife of late Holocaust survivor David Hochstein, looks at the tallit katan (little prayer shawl) from his teenage years, now preserved and part of the permanent collection at the Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center at Union Terminal in Cincinnati.

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

MSG

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PAGE 23

RELIGION

CONGREGATIONS

Lessons from Mount Sinai

Moreover, the metaphor of the desert extends to spiritual Conservative barrenness and emptiness.

Rabbi Aubrey L. Glazer requires a balance between

By Rabbi Levi Simon When we feel spiritually without an owner, emphasizing Cantor/Dir. of Ed. & Programming humility and self-esteem.

Chabad of Greater Dayton depleted, we must remember that the Torah is not the sole Andrea Raizen Humility allows us to conOn Shavuot, this year on May that the Torah was given in the possession of a select few.

Fridays, 5 p.m. nect with God, recognizing our 25-27, Jews around the world desert, and even in our present It is accessible to every Jew, Saturdays, 9:30 a.m. smallness in comcommemorate the monumental circumstances, God grants us regardless of back305 Sugar Camp Circle, parison to the Divine, event of the Giving of the Torah the opportunity to connect with ground or status or Oakwood. 937-293-9520. while self-esteem on Mount Sinai.

Him through His precious gift. intellectual capabethabrahamdayton.org empowers us to overHowever, the significance of We must share this gift with bilities. Our ancestors this event reaches far beyond come obstacles and others, reaching out to even the demonstrated this Beth Jacob Congregation fulfill God's will. seemingly barren souls among commitment when Traditional This delicate comus, and through the power of they unequivocally Rabbi Leibel Agar bination of humilTorah, help them flourish and Saturdays, 9:30 a.m. Evening accepted the Torah the past; it is an experience that ity and pride was minyans upon request. grow. before fully compre7020 N. Main St., Dayton. is relived every year and, to a exemplified by Moses As we celebrate Shavuot, hending its com937-274-2149. bethjacobcong.org lesser extent, every day. himself. As the leader let us reflect on the profound mandments.

We can discover valuable of the Jewish people, teachings of our sages and the The barrenness of Temple Anshe Emeth insights on how to approach the he had unparalleled Rabbi Levi Simon the desert also teaches symbolic lessons of Mount Reform Torah and its acquisition in our spiritual achieveSinai. us a valuable lesson.

320 Caldwell St., Piqua. lives from the teachings of our ments, yet he remained "more May we embrace the balance Just as our ancestors relied on Fri., June 2, 7:30 p.m. led by Jese sages and the significance of the humble than all the men on the God for sustenance and trusted of humility and self-esteem, Shell. Contact Steve Shuchat, physical setting. face of the earth." transcending our personal in His providence, we too 937-726-2116, ansheemeth@ The choice of Mount Sinai His humility stemmed from should prioritize our dedication limitations to connect with God gmail.com. ansheemeth.org as the site for the Giving of the the understanding that his gifts to the study and observance of through the study and obserTorah holds symbolic meaning. were bestowed upon him by vance of His Torah. the Torah over material conTemple Beth Or Despite being the smallest of God, and his self-esteem arose May the lessons of unity, cerns.

Reform all mountains, it was precisely from his unwavering dedication humility, and dedication to Even in times of hardship Rabbi Judy Chessin this mountain that God chose to fulfilling God's will. and uncertainty, we must have God's will guide us toward a Asst. Rabbi/Educator Ben Azriel for this transformative event.

The setting of Mount Sinai in faith that God will provide for meaningful and transformaFridays, 6:30 p.m.

The emphasis on humility the desert holds further lessons. tive Shavuot experience. Chag our needs as He did for our 5275 Marshall Rd., Wash. Twp. The desert represents a place Sameach! ancestors.

937-435-3400. templebethor.com becomes apparent, as Torah

Beth Abraham Synagogue

Perspectives

Temple Beth Sholom

Reform Rabbi Haviva Horvitz 610 Gladys Dr., Middletown.

513-422-8313. templebethsholom.net

June

Sivan/Tammuz

Spiritual leaders honored

Marshall Weiss

Temple Israel

Reform Senior Rabbi Karen BodneyHalasz. Rabbi/Educator Tina Sobo Fri., June 2, 6 p.m.

Fridays, June 9, 16, 23, 30, 6:30 p.m. Sat., June 24, 10:30 a.m.

130 Riverside Dr., Dayton.

937-496-0050. tidayton.org

Temple Sholom

Reform Rabbi Cary Kozberg 2424 N. Limestone St., Springfield. 937-399-1231. templesholomoh.com

Shabbat Candle Lightings June 2: 8:41 p.m.

June 9: 8:46 p.m.

June 16: 8:49 p.m.

June 23: 8:50 p.m.

June 30: 8:51 p.m.

ADDITIONAL SERVICES Chabad of Greater Dayton

Rabbi Nochum Mangel Associate Rabbi Shmuel Klatzkin Youth & Prog. Dir. Rabbi Levi Simon. Beginner educational service Saturdays, 9:30 a.m. 2001 Far Hills Ave. 937-643-0770. chabaddayton.com

Yellow Springs Havurah

Independent Antioch College Rockford Chapel.

Contact Len Kramer, 937-5724840 or len2654@gmail.com.

PAGE 24

Torah Portions June 3: Naso (Num. 4:21-7:89) June 10: Behalotecha (Num. 8:1-12:16) June 17: Shelach (Num. 13:1-15:41) June 24: Korach (Num. 16:1-18:32)

At this year's Women of Valor luncheon, held May 10, Beth Abraham Synagogue Sisterhood honored women who provide spiritual leadership to local Jewish congregations (L to R): Temple Beth Or's Rabbi Judy Chessin, Temple Israel's Rabbi Karen Bodney-Halasz, Temple Israel's Courtney Cummings, Beth Abraham's Cantor Andrea Raizen, and Temple Beth Or's Mary 'Mahira' Rogers. Not pictured is Temple Israel's Rabbi Tina Sobo.

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THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

JEWISH FAMILY EDUCATION

Pig tales

The Power of Stories Series Nearly 2,200 years ago, Antiochus IV seized the throne in the Seleucid Empire, an enormous Greek state that included Judea. To unify his kingdom, he embarked on an aggressive Hellenizing mission specifically targeted toward the Jews, outlawing the Torah, forbidding all Jewish religious practice,

“In other words,” writes food journalist Alix Wall, "pig was no more or less treyf (unkosher) than these other animals during the biblical era.”

This changed during the late Hellenistic and Roman periods, notes Prof. Jordan Rosenbaum, when Judea’s foreign rulers imported swine herding, pork as a food staple, and the pig as an essential pagan sacrificial animal.

Unsurprisingly, the signifiCandace R. cance of the pig became inflated Kwiatek in the Jewish mind, reflected in its “abhorrent status” both in Jewish and rabbinic sources and and forcing the consumption of as a prohibited food. pork and the sacrifice of pigs on Even today, the pig remains the altar of the Holy Temple. the ultimate Jewish symbol of When Antiochus’ troops arloathsomeness, captured in rived at the town of Modiin and colorful Yiddish colloquialisms: demanded that its Jews offer chazer (acting or up a pig to the pagan gods (to eating like a pig, be followed by the obligatory a selfish person); feast), the elderly local priest, chazer shtahl Mattathias, replied, "Though all (pigsty); and the nations that are under the chazerai (junk, king’s dominion obey him…I junk food). and my sons…will not hearken At the same to the king’s words, to go from time, refusal our religion." to adopt these When another Jew stepped pig-centered pagan practices forward to make the sacrifice, became a key marker of Jewish Mattathias killed him, setting in identity and otherness in the motion the world’s first ideominds of the Jews’ adversaries. logical religious war, that of the As a consequence, the pig Maccabees. evolved into an antisemitic Why the widespread Jewtrope, starkly evident in Judenish aversion to pork? How did sau, medieval folk and church swine become symbols of Jewsculptures of Jews in "obscene ish oppression and antisemicontact" with a sow; the epithet tism? And what lessons can we for Inquisition-era secret Jews, learn from the chazer, the lowly Marrano (swine); and modern pig? antisemitic caricatures of Jews First appearing in the Bible and Israel as pigs. alongside the camel and hare, With the continuous negative the pig is one of the specified association between pigs and mammals prohibited as food to food in Jewish text, history, and the Israelites, each lacking one language, it’s inconceivable that of the characteristics of being the infant toe-wiggling rhyme, kosher: cud chewing and cloven "This little piggy went to marhooves. ket" and the fable of the Three

Little Pigs have Jewish origins.

But there are Jewish pig tales with unexpectedly nourishing themes.

Pig's feet. Although the pig doesn’t chew its cud, it does have split hooves. So why is it reviled more than other mammals that display neither cudchewing nor split hooves?

The Midrash explains that when the swine sprawls on its side, it showcases its cloven feet as if to say, “I’m kosher!”

Outwardly kosher, but inwardly not. So too, the Midrash continues, the Roman Empire gives the appearance of holding court and pursuing justice while obscuring its underlying robbery, violence, corruption, and oppression.

Thus pig’s feet, chazer fissel, have become synonymous with hypocrisy and superficial righteousness that doesn’t reflect inner sincerity.

Whole hog. According to Prof. Beth Alpert Nakhai, meat wasn’t a significant part of the diet in the ancient world.

Living animals were much more valuable as ongoing sources of labor, transportation, milk, wool, multi-use dung, and offspring.

Pigs were the one exception, notes the author of Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages, David Kraemer. Providing neither food, nor fabric, nor any practical economic function while alive, pigs were simply exploited for their meat: their lives devoted to wholehog consumption, oppressed like slaves, intended solely for death. Each portrait is an abominable life in Judaism’s worldview.

Impossible Pork. “When the vegan meat manufacturer Impossible Foods requested kosher certification for its new line of Impossible Pork, the OU

balked,” Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz recounts. “Although the actual product is made of kosher ingredients, the OU found that certifying Impossible Pork as kosher was…simply impossible.”

Despite the increasing variety of “faux unkosher” products from fake bacon to imitation crab to dairy-free cheeseburgers, it seems pork carries a weight all its own.

After all, Steinmetz concludes, the pig, with its centuries-long legacy of antagonism and antisemitism, is the metaphor for something absolutely, unequivocally, and unquestionably non-kosher: chazer treyf, as unkosher as a pig.

Pig in the mud. Rabbi Mendy Kaminker tells a Chasidic story of two brothers, one a wealthy magnate and the other a God-fearing pauper. When the poor brother’s daughter was

to be married, he approached his rich sibling for help with the wedding expenses.

Delighted to host his brother, the rich fellow invited him on a tour of his palatial home.

After a while, however, the poor brother tired of viewing the spacious rooms, opulent furnishings, and lavish gardens and asked to cut the tour short.

Puzzled, his bigwig brother responded, “But there’s still more to see!” His poor brother replied, “There is a creature that wallows in the mud all day.

If you ask it what it wants, all it can think of is, ‘More mud!’

You, too, are sunk in the mud of possessions and material pleasures, and all you want is more mud instead of focusing on the truly important things in life.”

Although rare, Jewish pig tales reveal surprising insights about culture, conduct, and character worth pondering.

There are Jewish pig tales with unexpectedly nourishing themes.

Literature to share Professor Buber and His Cats by Susan Tarcov. The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of About to lose his bookstore home in JerusaAuschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan lem, Ketem the cat decides to relocate to the Freedland. The book opens with 19-year-old book-filled home of the famous philosopher Rudolf Vrba and 26-year-old Fred Wetzler and author Martin Buber. Tarcov’s charmpoised to escape from Auschwitz. After ing picture book for young readers explores three days hiding in a pile of discarded Buber’s life and unique worldview from a wooden boards, they would be the first cat’s point of view, expressed in dreamy Jews ever to escape from the death camp. thoughts and feline fantasy. The values of But their journey was just beginning. Freedrespect, relationships, communicating with land seamlessly weaves together memorable God, and the surrounding world permeate characters, detailed experiences, evocative the story. An engaging introduction to a descriptions, and heart-stopping suspense significant Jewish historical figure. into an award-winning page-turner.

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

PAGE 25

Arts&Culture

Keira Knightley heads up cast of animated film on Holocaust artist Charlotte portrays the first graphic novelist's feverish 18-month labor of love to chronicle her life before her murder at Auschwitz

Charlotte catches a last glimpse of her parents from the train window as she departs Berlin for the south of France in January 1939.

Good Deed Entertainment

By Renee Ghert-Zand, Times of Israel Crory in her final role prior to her death in April 2021. later. Salomon’s mother, Franziska Grünwald SaloJust prior to her murder in Auschwitz in October “We’re doing this for Charlotte. She has been overmon, died in 1926, when her daughter was a young 1943, artist Charlotte Salomon completed what many looked and under-appreciated. This film is meant to girl. Salomon was told it was from influenza. consider the world’s first graphic novel. She was 26 bring attention to her,” said Julia Rosenberg, one of the When she was 16, Salomon left school after the years old and six months pregnant when she died. film’s producers.

Nazis came to power in 1933. She applied to the Her unique, avant-garde work, Born in Berlin in 1917, Salomon is primarily known prestigious Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und titled, Leben? oder Theater? Ein for Life? or Theater? which has remained in print. The angewandte Kunst (United State Schools for Pure and Singspiel (Life? or Theater? A seed for Charlotte was originally planted when RosenApplied Arts) in 1936, and managed to be accepted Song-play), seamlessly blends fact berg received a published copy of Life? or Theater? as a despite her lack of prior training and the strict quotas and fiction in its 1,325 expression- bat mitzvah gift four decades ago. on Jews accepted to institutions of higher learning. She ist-style gouache paintings and “I don’t remember who gave it to me, but someone studied there for two years, until she was forced to overlay transparencies. brought it into my life and it struck a chord with me as leave due to increased enforcement of Nazi race laws.

Whittled down to over 800 pag- a young woman,” Rosenberg said.

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Salomon’s es, it is an entire play replete with “It was a classic coming-of-age story she told father was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration characters (fictionalized versions about herself, and I saw myself camp. Upon his release, he and of people in her life), original text, in her story. As a girl, I found Salomon’s stepmother, opliterary references, and musical cues. It speaks of love, resonance in it even if I couldn’t era and classical singer Paula uncertainty, suicide, and possibly even a murder com- articulate my feelings about it at Salomon-Lindberg, decided that mitted by the artist. the time. As an artist, she gave the family must flee Germany.

Entrusted in the care of a non-Jewish family friend me a lot to think and dream They sent Salomon in January ahead of her deportation, since about,” she said.

1939 to join her maternal grandAngela Lewis its recovery, the semi-autobiSalomon’s romantic parents at the villa of a wealthy ographical multi-media work yearnings spoke so strongly American named Ottilie Moore has been subjected to censorto Rosenberg that she in Villefranche-sur-Mer, who was ship, speculation, and scholarly bought a copy of Life? or sheltering refugees. Salomon’s research.

Theater? for every man she parents went to Amsterdam, Its newest incarnation is as an fell in love with — “Like a totem,” she said. planning to meet up later with their daughter and animated film, titled Charlotte, Writer David Bezmozgis was brought in to head together to America. with an all-star cast of voice write the final draft of the film’s script. Having Salomon’s parents didn’t make it out of Holland characters. Dayton's JCC Film written and directed live-action movies, Bezmozin time, and were deported to the Westerbork transit Fest will screen the film June 8 gis ensured that the animation did not paint a camp. They managed to escape, and survived in hidin conjunction with the Amerifalsely rosy picture. ing until the end of the war. cans and the Holocaust exhibit “The film changed at the Dayton Metro Library's tonally when I came in. main library.

It became more serious. I Although the artist’s life and made it more cinematic, work also have been document- Producer Julia Rosenberg which can be done by ed in books, exhibition, and inventing sequences that films, this is the first time anyone has approached the are highly visual, where you narrative using a visual style evocative of the one used let the images do the speakby Salomon herself. ing,” Bezmozgis said.

Charlotte features voice acting by a team of A-listUnlike Rosenberg, Bezers, including Keira Knightley as Charlotte, Brenda mozgis was only vaguely Blethyn, Jim Broadbent, Sam Claflin, Eddie Marsan, familiar with Salomon before Sophie Okonedo, Mark Strong, and the late Helen Mc- joining the project. He delved into Life? or Theater? and a variety of secondary sources In conjunction with the Americans and the Holocaust to learn more about her. exhibit at the Dayton Metro Library's main library, Salomon was the only the JCC Film Fest will screen Charlotte at 7:15 p.m., child of a prosperous German Thursday, June 8 at the Main Library, 215 E. Third St., Jewish family. Her father, AlDayton. With guest speaker Edna Carter Southard. Free. bert Salomon, was a surgeon.

Reservations are requested at daytonmetrolibrary.org.

His study of mastectomies and breast X-rays eventually Charlotte will also be available to view online, June 8 led to the widespread use of beginning at 7 p.m. through June 10 at 7 p.m. The cost is mammography many years Charlotte Salomon and her grandparents before 1940. $12. To view online, go to jewishdayton.org/events.

This is the first time anyone has approached the narrative using a visual style evocative of the one used

by Salomon herself.

PAGE 26

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

In the meantime, Salomon’s grandmother died by suicide in the south of France. It was then that it was revealed to Salomon that her mother had also taken her own life, as had her aunt and a number of other relatives.

Salomon and her grandfather were interned at Gurs, but they were released due to her grandfather’s ill health. Upon returning to Villefranche, Salomon was in extreme emotional distress from learning of her family’s history of suicides and the political situation. She felt her days were numbered as both a Jew in Europe, and as someone genetically predisposed to mental illness.

This was the catalyst for Salomon’s 18 months of feverish work producing Life? or Theater? between 1940 and 1942. The artist expressed enigmatically that it was a work depicting her life and the life of family members — including things that may or may not have happened.

“Charlotte Salomon invites us to think about truth and representation,” Rosenberg said.

Upon the opus’ completion, Salomon dedicated it to David Franco Ottilie Moore and handed it to a family friend named Dr. Moridis for safekeeping.

“C’est toute ma vie” (It’s my whole life), Salomon told the doctor.

In October 1943, Salomon was deported along with her new husband, Austrian-Jewish refugee Alexander Nagler, to Auschwitz. It is believed that Salomon was sent to the gas chambers immediAuthor David Bezmozgis ately, while her husband died a few months later of exhaustion.

According to Bezmozgis, there was a robust discussion within the film’s creative team as to what to put in the script, and what to leave out. It wasn’t easy in some instances, because of the blurring of fact and fiction in Life? or Theater?

It was decided to include a scene in which Salomon kills her grandfather by poisoning an omelette she prepared for him. The official record states that his death was due to a head injury, however a 35-page letter in painted lettering surfaced in 2011 in which Salomon confessed the poisoning to her former lover Alfred Wolfsohn.

It appears that the letter was originally included in Life? or Theater? and removed by her parents, after they retrieved the work after the war from Ottilie Moore,

A work in gouache by Charlotte Salomon, from her principal work, Life? or Theatre? It depicts Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria, Nov. 9-10, 1938.

who had received it from Dr. Moridis.

“There was enough supporting material, including a ‘death mask’ drawing Salomon purportedly made of her grandfather as he was dying in front of her. We could make a strong case that this could have really happened,” Bezmozgis said.

The creators, however, decided to stay away from hints in Salomon’s work that her grandfather was a sexual molester. A 2017 article in The New Yorker makes a case for the sex abuse, even linking it to the suicides of Salomon’s female relatives.

“To include this in our film would be to validate that it (the sexual abuse) happened, and we don’t have enough evidence to do so. I’m OK with crimes of omission, but not of commission, in a biographic film,” Bezmozgis said.

Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg, curator and director of the art department at Yad Vashem, advised against dwelling on the sensational aspects of Salomon’s life, rather than on Salomon’s multi-layered and innovative artistic point of view.

“It’s more important to focus on her amazing artwork. She was a gifted visual artist with a great sense of color and original composition. We see the influence of cinema, photography, and cartoons on her expressive style. She blew categories away and pushed boundaries,” Moreh-Rosenberg said.

While Life? or Theater? was gifted to the Jewish Museum of Amsterdam by Salomon’s parents, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust history authority and memorial, holds 24 of Salomon’s works in its collection.

Eleven are currently on display in a special gallery dedicated to Salomon in Yad Vashem’s art museum.

In addition, Salomon’s story and some reproductions from Life? or Theater? are included in the section of Yad Vashem’s history museum dealing with the rise of Nazism in Germany.

“If Salomon created such a powerful artwork at age 23, who knows what she could have created later,” Moreh-Rosenberg said.

“In a way, she epitomizes the loss brought about by cultural programming the Holocaust forwith the Jews and humanity,” she said.

Celebrate NATIVE

AMERICAN

Heritage Month

at Dayton Metro Library!

Enjoy panel discussions, children’s story hour, Thanksgiving extravaganza, Toddler Time-on-the-Go with Boonshoft Museum of 7 p.m., Monday, June 5 Discovery, and an exhibit from Sunwatch Village.

Dayton Metro Library • Main Library

Daytonians and the Holocaust — The View from Here In conjunction with the exhibit Americans and the Holocaust, Dayton Jewish Observer Editor & Publisher Marshall Weiss will explore Daytonians’ responses, actions, and inactions connected to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Self-Portrait by Charlotte Salomon, 1940

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

Presented by Dayton Metro Library and Miami Valley Jewish Genealogy & History

Marshall Weiss

JG&H JG&H

ASK ME

Miami Miami Valley Jewish MiamiValley ValleyJewish Jewish Genealogy Genealogy History Genealogy&& &History History

9 3 7. 4 6 3 . 2 6 6 5

For event details, visit PAGE 27 DaytonMetroLibrary.org or call the Ask Me Line at 937.463.2665.

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Judd Hirsch plays a Holocaust survivor in iMordecai.

By Stephen Silver, JTA The real Mordecai Samel, at the time in his late 70s, really didn’t want an iPhone in 2015.

The Holocaust survivor who had been living in south Florida since 2004 didn’t see a need. His taped-together flip phone worked fine. But his son Marvin insisted.

One thing that helped convince Mordecai to give in: the ability to listen to the klezmer music of his youth that the iPhone provided.

“One day I got off a plane, and I called my dad, and all I could hear was static,” Marvin Samel said.

Soon Mordecai was going to iPhone lessons at a local store six times a week.

“It’s there that I see my father holding court, telling stories,” Marvin said about the lessons, “and I said, this is it.

This is the vehicle to tell the story as a screenplay.”

Thus sprung an unusual comedy film inspired directly by first-time director Marvin Samel’s life, centered on a Jewish family that is split by a stark generational divide.

In the film — as in the Samels’ real lives — Marvin (Sean Astin) attempts to sell his cigar company while his father’s antics continually get in the way and his mother (Carol Kane), who has Alzheimer’s disease, sometimes wanders off.

JCC Film Fest will screen iMordechai at 10 a.m., Tuesday, June 20 at The Neon, 130 E. Fifth St., Dayton. Sponsored by Hadassah, the screening includes a 9:30 a.m. reception and speaker Tara Feiner, JFS senior director, after the film. Tickets are $12 and may be purchased at jewishdayton.org/events or at the door. The film will also be available to view online.

“I had to tone him down for the movie, because no one would believe me if I actually printed the truth. He’s always getting himself into trouble,” Samel said of the real Mordecai, a retired plumber, played onscreen by Tony and Emmy Award winner Judd Hirsch.

At the same time, Marvin’s wife, who has just given birth to twins, is upset with him about delays in the company sale and the family’s resulting cash crunch. Mordecai agrees to take the iPhone lessons and befriends the instructor (Azia Dinea Hale) whom he calls “Einstein Nina,” someone with a surprising family backstory of her own.

Mordecai tells her stories about his family’s escape from the Nazis when he was a child, showing her family pictures from before the war and noting that he can’t remember his mother’s face.

These stories, Marvin Samel said, were inspired more by the stories told

by Mordecai’s brother, who was older when the family fled, than by his own.

The family left Poland in 1939, when Mordecai was 3 and his older brother was 6. They first went to the Soviet Union and eventually to Brooklyn.

Mordecai’s family was from Janów Podlaski, a small town in Poland at the center of the territory split by Hitler and Stalin in 1939. Some flashback sequences are presented in animation.

Marvin Samel sold his company, Drew Estate Cigars, in 2014. The film was mostly self-financed, in part from the proceeds of the cigar company’s sale, “all the way through distribution.”

He had never before set foot on a movie set prior to the first day of filming of iMordecai.

Samel taught himself filmmaking in Continued on Page 31

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

In this original Holocaust film, a Jewish inmate makes up a language to survive

By Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA For a movie about the Holocaust, the Belarussian film Persian Lessons has some comic potential. Set in a concentration camp somewhere in Western Europe, it involves a Jewish inmate who survives by giving Farsi lessons to a Nazi officer who dreams about opening a restaurant in Tehran.

One problem: The inmate doesn’t speak Farsi. Instead, he comes up with his own language and teaches it to his captor, trying not to raise suspicions.

If that sounds like a comedy of errors, it’s no accident. Persian Lessons is based on a short story by the screenwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase, who specializes in tragicomedies. Der Spiegel describes Kohlhaase as a master of “dialogue jokes.”

But Persian Lessons is a somber thriller about surviving while obtaining justice against the odds. And the film sets itself apart from others in its genre in how it puts a deeply human face not only on the victims, but on the perpetrators as well.

Belarus submitted the movie for Oscar competition because it was filmed there, but it was disqualified from competition because it’s not actually about that country.

Persian Lessons opens Dayton's JCC Film Fest, June 1. The film, which is mostly in German (and fake Farsi), begins in a truck packed with Jewish men being driven to an execution site. One man offers Gilles, a young Belgian Jew, an expensive-looking book in Persian in exchange for Gilles’ sandwich. Shortly after the transaction is made, the men are taken to the place of execution. With nothing to lose, Gilles tells the Nazi soldiers he is in fact Persian, not Jewish, and presents the book as proof.

He can hardly believe his luck when the soldiers decide to keep him alive because their commander is looking for a Farsi speaker.

But Gilles’ troubles are only beginning. Sleep deprived, malnourished, and terrified, he must find a way to consistently teach a nonexistent language to a man who would kill him instantly if he slips up.

Gilles comes up with a code system using the only reliable foreign vocabulary at his disposal: the names of the inmates around him.

To each inmate, he assigns a foreignsounding mashup of their first and last names. To each mashup he assigns a JCC Film Fest will screen Persian Lessons for its opening night, 7:15 p.m., Thursday, June 1 at The Plaza Theatre, 33 S. Main St., Miamisburg. Tickets are $18 and include a 6:30 p.m. reception. Purchase tickets at jewishdayton.org/events.

Cohen Media Group

Nahuel Perez Biscayart portrays a Jewish inmate at a concentration camp in the Belarusian film Persian Lessons.

word that captures something about the personality or appearance of the inmate.

Then he teaches that word to the officer, who ends up unwittingly memorizing his victims’ names.

Much of the critically acclaimed film is devoted to the development of Gilles’ scheme. But as it progresses, the film distinguishes itself from other Holocaust films in its treatment of the daily lives of the Nazi soldiers running the camp: the romance between female and male guards, the rivalry and politics between the officers, and how Nazism divided their own families back home.

This window into the routine of perpetrators was the main motivation for director Vadim Perelman, a Ukraine-born Jew whose family lost many relatives in the Holocaust.

“What I mostly wanted to do is to show the Germans, their humanity. To

tragedy from 2003 about immigration show that they were just like us, that and depression starring Ben Kingsley they’re not any different at all,” he said. and Jennifer Connelly — believes there’s Doing this is a more powerful ina perpetrator in each of us. dictment against the Nazis than their “Myself, as a child, I was playing frequent dehumanization as monsters in with the idea of being a bully. Pushing the film industry, Perelman argued. around the weak, calling them This view, famously argued names. Everybody has that in by philosopher Hannah Arendt them,” he said. in her 1963 book Eichmann in Perelman, 59, was an only Jerusalem: A Report on the Banalchild in Kyiv. His father died ity of Evil, has gained popularin a car accident when he was ity but remains disputed by 9 years old, and he and his historians and jurists, including mother immigrated to Italy in Justice Gabriel Bach, who pros1977. They lived in extreme ecuted Adolf Eichmann. poverty in Rome — Perelman They argue that Arendt’s was once treated by a veterianalysis ignores both the Vadim Perelman narian because a doctor was remarkable ideological fervor too expensive, he told the Jewish Journal of Nazi antisemitism and its deep roots of Los Angeles in 2003. predating the Reformation.

Perelman (who now lives in CaliPerelman — whose best-known film is House of Sand and Fog, an award-winning fornia) and his mother later moved to Cohen Media Group Canada, where he got in trouble with the law for burglary. He eventually completed his high school diploma and became a director specializing in commercials.

His personal history may have informed his perspective on morality, he said.

In Persian Lessons, the Nazi officer, portrayed by Lars Eidinger, reflects on some of the choices that led him to run part of a concentration camp that is under threat of being captured by enemy troops. In one of the film’s most dramatic moments, the officer confides to Gilles that his plan to move to Tehran is born from the desire to reconnect with his older brother, who fled Germany because of Nazism.

“Evil isn’t something you’re born into,” Perelman said. “It grows out of a Lars Eidinger plays a Nazi officer at a concentration camp during the filming in Belarus of set of choices, some pretty small at first.”

Persian Lessons.

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

PAGE 29

Docudrama revisits Asher Naim's work with Ethiopian Jews

By Joanne Palmer, The Jewish Standard When we’re children, we are taught — and naturally tend to believe — that good things happen smoothly, that goodness always is straightforward. We don’t learn about complications and doubts, much less about working through them, until much later.

We are taught and believe that Ethiopian Jews were flown to Israel "on the wings of eagles." If we’re lucky, we learn that goodness is strengthened through complications and doubts.

We learn that there were politics involved in getting Beta Israel to Israel; at times, it was ugly. There was racism. There was White-saviorism. There was cultural condescension. There was cultural confusion. And there was no happy-ever-aftering for the group, although many of its individual members have thrived. The community still faces poverty, racism, stereotyping, and bigotry, even at home in the Promised Land.

But Operation Solomon did get 14,325 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 36 hours in 1991. It was a heroic undertaking, and it was led by an Israeli diplomat named Asher Naim.

OpenDor Media is a punnily named nonprofit organization (door as in a door that opens, and dor as in generation, specifically the younger generation that’s the intended audience for much of the company’s work) that makes video content about Jews and Israel for young people.

It has made a film about Asher Naim, a docudrama called Exodus 91. It will be screened June 15 as part of Dayton's JCC Film Fest.

Naim’s two sons live in the United States: Gideon is in Manhattan, Ari is in Tenafly, N.J. Their sister, Ronit, lives in Israel.

Recently, I interviewed Ari Naim about his father.

“The history behind the movie is that my father was a career diplomat,” he said. But Asher Naim’s childhood didn’t make such a career seem likely. Or even, for that matter, possible.

“My father was born in Tripoli, Libya, in 1929,” Ari Naim said. “The family goes all the way back to the expulsion from Spain; they had lived in Libya for hundreds of years. Everything was fine — and then Mussolini came in, and then there was World War II, and things changed.

“So the whole family decided to leave. There were seven brothers and sisters; they and their parents all got on a truck and drove to Israel. As the story goes, it was my father who really pushed them to immigrate.”

That was in 1946, so the Naims found themselves in Palestine. “The children dispersed around the country.

The parents got an apartment in Yaffo (Jaffa), and they had their eighth child, the only one born in Israel. My father went to some kibbutz, and then fought in the JCC Film Fest will screen Exodus 91 at 7:15 p.m., Thursday, June 15 at The Neon, 130 E. Fifth St., Dayton. With guest speaker Michal Avera Samuel. Tickets are $12 and may be purchased at jewishdayton.org/events or at the door.

PAGE 30

A scene from Exodus 91

Avishag Shaar-Yashuv

sador, and he opened the Israeli embassies in South 1948 war.”

Korea and Finland,” Naim said.

The family was very poor, Naim said; so was the “So time passes, and they finished serving in Fincountry, as it struggled to survive in those first few land — it was 1990, and they move back to Jerusalem. years as an independent Jewish state. But his father And then Israeli’s foreign minister said, ‘We have a knew what he wanted. problem in Ethiopia. We have 14,000 Jews, there are “He decided that he was going to get educated. He rebels taking over the government, and we need somedidn’t even know what a university was.” one to go over there and figure out what to do to solve After the War of Independence ended, the governthe problem.’” ment “gave the soldiers pieces of land to build houses The problem was serious. The country was poor on,” Naim said. “He went up to the Hebrew Univerand violent; the Jews had gathered in Addis Ababa, sity in Jerusalem, and talked to a professor there. My the nation’s capital city, living in crowded, unsanitary father said, ‘I want to learn.’" conditions, standing on interminable lines as they He would become a lawyer. He also had to work. waited to get Sisyphean amounts of paperwork done, “He worked as a laborer and sent money home to his so they could go on to the next pile of paperwork. The family so they could eat,” Ari Naim said. “He worked Israelis already had airlifted about 7,000 Jews to Israel in construction as a plasterer. He was a very dynamic in 1984 in Operation Moses and had managed to get person, and he knew people. Someone in the foreign a few hundred out after that. But ministry,” where Asher Naim was Avishag Shaar-Yashuv political corruption and violence in working in construction, “told my Ethiopia, and the reluctance of many father that when he gets his degree, Israeli rabbis to accept the Beta Israel he also should apply for a job in the as Jews, mixed in with some pure foreign ministry.” So he did. “And racism, kept the Ethiopian Jews stuck they said OK and gave him a job as a in Addis Ababa, unwilling to give up low-level diplomat.” and go home but unable to get out.

He had married during that time.

“This problem comes up. And beHis wife, Hilda Glick Naim, was cause my father was at the end of his born in Boston. “She won a scholarcareer by then, he’d been doing this ship when she was 18, took a boat to work for a very long time and was Israel, studied at the Hebrew Univera very savvy diplomat, and because sity, and got a teaching degree,” her he was also from that region, and he son said. Hilda and Asher met at the was an immigrant himself, those were university, and soon they married. some of the reasons they sent him Asher Naim’s first posting was in there.”

Japan. He and his wife, Hilda Glick A child plays an Ethiopian immigrant And there was an opening at the Naim, went together. to Israel in Exodus 91.

Israeli embassy because someone had “Golda Meir was my father’s boss tried to kill Meir Joffe, the ambassador Asher Naim at one point, when she was the foreign minister, and was replacing. she liked to say that with Naim, they got two for the The movie shows the way that Operation Solomon price of one,” Ari Naim said. “My mom was the ultieventually happened; the often bad-faith negotiations mate diplomat.” and determination and desperation that led to the Ronit Naim was born in Tokyo, and Ari Naim was escape. born in Nairobi, Kenya. “When they were in Kenya, “When my parents got back to Israel, they realized Golda Meir came to visit them,” Naim said. “They that bringing 14,000 Ethiopians into this high-tech were at their house, having dinner, and my mom said environment was not simple,” Naim continued. “They to Golda, ‘I have two kids, but I don’t have a sabra (native-born Israeli).’ Golda said, ‘You’re right,’ so they devoted the rest of their lives to raising funds for scholarships for the kids. They gave out hundreds of sent them back to Israel, and my brother was born scholarships.” Asher Naim died in 2016, “but my mom there.” is a Hebrew teacher, and she’s still teaching at 91. She’s But that didn’t stop the Naims. They represented in the same house in Jerusalem that they lived in ever their country — Asher officially, Hilda unofficially but since they went back. She teaches Ethiopian kids. My effectively — at the Israeli embassy in Washington, at parents both believed that education was the way out, the consulate in Philadelphia, and later at the United just as it was for my father. That’s how he got out.”

Nations. “Eventually my father became an ambas-

THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

Got out of poverty, got out of hopelessness, got out of despair.

“After our father died, Gideon and I thought that we should do something to continue their mission, of getting Ethiopian Jews a proper education, so we created this movie. We are co-executive producers.

“We started with the idea of a 10- or 15-minute movie, but the director, Micah Smith, had a really good vision about it. He wanted to expand it; to make it not just a legacy film, but to encompass the issues the story brings up. It just evolved, and to Micah’s credit, one of things he did was incorporate the perspectives of the Ethiopians.”

The film mixes scenes done by actors with talking-head shots of the people those actors portray, and at times it pulls back from the actors to show the set they’re on as an artifice as it reveals the people around them, who normally are not on camera.

Some of the staged scenes are quite stagy; others, with children, are less so. Often it’s not clear whether something is real or staged. It does make clear that diplomats are actors, as it tells us at the very beginning, and it impresses on viewers how hard it can be to retain moral clarity when the path to that clarity can be obscured by competing demands, shoving themselves in the way.

“It wasn’t like the Entebbe mission, when the Israelis came, they conquered, they left,” Naim said. Operation Solomon was far messier than that, and “when it was over, there were real people, 14,000 of them, in a small country.”

In 1975, the United Nations passed a resolution determining that Zionism is a form of racism.

In 1991, Asher Naim gave an impassioned speech to the body in which he served, talking about the way Israel had gotten Black Jews out of Ethiopia and now was trying to assimilate them.

“One of the things that my father did that I am the proudest of is that shortly after he was sent to the U.N., based on his speech, the U.N. repealed that resolution,” Naim said.

“His speech was asking how we could be racist, when we are doing what we are doing? Here I stand? Who am I? An immigrant! A North African Jew!” The story of the Naims is a story of real belief in goodness as it is battered by reality. It’s about understanding that there are competing realities; at times they’re equally true. It’s about realpolitik and compromise and dashed dreams and misunderstandings and the need to keep trying.

iMordecai

Continued from Page 28 part by taking online courses through MasterClass from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, and Jodie Foster, and he also had a chance meeting at a dinner with retired basketball star Ray Allen, who had made a novice acting appearance in Spike Lee’s He Got Game when he was in his early 20s.

Allen’s advice was to spend some time on movie sets to get a feel for things, but not much was filming in south Florida at the time. iMordecai was shot in 23 days in late 2019, meaning that Samel filmed a movie that starred Hirsch as a heavily-accented, old-world Jewish immigrant inspired by a relative of the filmmaker at least a year before Steven Spielberg did the same for The Fabelmans.

Hirsch was nominated for an Oscar for his role in that movie, his first Academy Award nomination since Ordinary People more than 40 years earlier.

Samel’s film, which features the city of Miami extensively, has been a hit in Florida. It had its world premiere in January 2022 at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, where it won the audience award for best narrative film.

“I think that this film has the capacity to possibly impact and resonate with people of all ages,” said Igor Shteyrenberg, executive director of the festival.

Perhaps the success with the older Florida crowd has to do with the universality of the film’s subject matter. Even Warren Buffett, the famed investor, turned in his flip phone for an iPhone back in 2020, when he was nearly 90, even though he had bought many billions of dollars in Apple stock by that point.

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THE DAYTON JEWISH OBSERVER • JUNE 2023

OBITUARIES Marcie E. Mazer, age 70 of Dayton, passed away April 28 in Columbus. Marcie was a devoted mother and grandmother, a passionate supporter of the State of Israel, a dog-lover, an avid gardener, and a member of Beth Jacob Congregation. She was preceded in death by her parents, Marshall and Shirley Mazer, and son, Edward Buren.

Marcie is survived by her sons and daughters-in-law Elliott and Sara Buren of Orlando, Jeffery and Meagan Buren of Columbus, and Marc and Luxuan Buren of San Francisco; sisters and brother-in-law Andrea and William Franklin of Israel, Bonnie Mashiach of Florida; brother and sister-in-law, Dr. David and Cherie Mazer of Florida; nine grandchildren, numerous nieces, nephews, and many other relatives and friends. Interment was at Beth Jacob Cemetery.

Memorial contributions may be made to Friends of the IDF in Marcie's memory.

Robert Douglass Stomel, 59, of Springboro, passed away on April 25. Bob is survived by his wife, Susan (nee Lustig) of almost 20 years, and their two sons, Matthew and Ethan.

He is also survived by his mother, Arlene (nee Korsin).

He was preceded in death by his father, Murray Allen Stomel. Bob is also survived by his brother, Marshall Stomel, and his wife, Pam (nee Bank), their children, nephew Mitchell and niece Peyton; brother-in-law Steven Lustig and his wife, Nora, and their son, nephew Daniel; brother-in-law David Lustig and his wife, Dottie (nee Mountel), and their children, niece Chloe, nephews Adam, Sam, and Caleb. Bob was in the bicycle business his entire life, working the last 25 years at Huffy Bicycles. He was a staunch advocate of bicycle

safety and was an integral part of the creation of bike lanes and many biking events in Springboro. Bob was also an avid fan of Frank Sinatra, gathering a collection of memorabilia that would impress Sinatra himself.

Although Bob moved away from his hometown of Philadelphia, his love for the Eagles and cheesesteaks never wavered, and he beamed with pride whenever anything came up relating to Philly. Interment was at Riverview Cemetery. Contributions in Bob’s memory may be made to Middletown Hospice, ACS, or Springboro Safety/ Planning Committee.

Tunisia

pilgrims to the synagogue. Avi Chana, who has gone on the pilgrimage, told the Times of Israel, Continued from Page 11 “I think it’s a death blow, at least sing, feast, light candles and for the foreseeable future, to a write their wishes on hardbeautiful tradition and pilgrimboiled eggs. age, and it is causing palpable In the 1990s, the pilgrimage pain. This is dealing the pilgrimOur Family attracted some 10,000 people, Serving age a mortal blow.” according to a report in The Your Family Tunisian President Kais Saied, Conversation, and attracts thouFor More Than 90 Years who has been accused of gutting sands today. Since 2011, IsraeTunisia’s democracy, met with lis have been able to enter the country for the pilgrimage even the country’s chief rabbi May 17 though Israel and Tunisia do not and pledged to protect Tunisian Funeral Homes, Inc. Jews and their houses of wormaintain diplomatic relations.

The pilgrimage was canceled in ship. Saied had also drawn scruPre-need Arrangements Pre-paid Funeral Trusts 2011 following the Arab Spring, tiny over comments he made Cremation Services • Transfers which began in Tunisia, and at- May 14, in which he pointed to North Main Chapel tendance dipped in subsequent Israeli violence against Palestin1706 N. Main Street ians and claimed his grandfather years. The pilgrimage was also Huber Heights Chapel canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to saved Jews during World War 5844 Old Troy Pike II. Critics said he was trying to the Covid pandemic.

For Both Locations downplay the issue of antisemiCall 937-275-7434 tism in Tunisia.

Has the synagogue been attacked before?

Yes. In 2002, al-Qaeda set off a truck bomb near the synagogue that killed 20 people, most of them German tourists, about six weeks before the pilgrimage. TuFrom Generation To Generation. nisia’s government denounced the attack and paid to restore the damage.

LICKLER And in 2018, five men were arrested in connection with a UNERAL firebomb attack at the synagogue. A suspicious fire also OME broke out at the synagogue in & 1979.

REMATION

L’dor V’dor.

How will this attack affect the pilgrimage?

The May 10 attack, and the fact that it was perpetrated by a security official, have led to despair among current and former

G F H C SERVICE

Larry S. Glickler, Director Dayton’s ONLY Jewish Funeral Director 1849 Salem Avenue, Dayton, Ohio 45406-4927 (937) 278-4287 lgfuneralhome@gmail.com

PAGE 31

Sunday, June 11 • 11:00am to 7:00pm • free Temple Israel, 130 Riverside Drive, 45405 • www.tidayton.org/festival

Outside Entertainment

Inside Speakers & Tours

12:00PM 11:30AM, 12:00PM, Mary “Mahira” Rogers 1:30PM, 3:00PM, with Steve Wyke 4:30PM, 6:00PM and Marc Gilbert Guided Building Tours Jewish & Yiddish favorites 1:15PM Dayton Metro Barbershop Chorus Barbershop Classics

12:30PM Bonnie Beaman Rice and Jayne Klose Combatting Stereotypes & Antisemitism

2:30PM The Shimmy Cats Israeli folk & Middle-Eastern dancing

2:00PM Meredith Moss Levinson (moderator) Diversity of Jewish Culture and Tradition

3:45PM The Flying Klezmerians Eastern European & Klezmer favorites

3:30PM Tom Bainbridge, Jese Shell, Vicki Kemmerer Jews Can Be Farmers Too

5:00PM Miami Valley Symphony Orchestra Jewish Orchestral Settings & Movie Soundtrack Classics

5:00PM Rabbi Karen Bodney-Halasz Diversity of Jewish Practice in America

Food & Drink Vendors

Fun All Day Raffle Prizes

Take a chance to win one of 5 prize packages.

Tickets available online.

Outdoor Market Judaica, jewelry, accessories, gifts, clothing, and more

Children’s Area

Family story time, games, crafts, and a petting zoo

Mitzvah Alley

Learn about Sidewalk Soldiers, Montgomery County Prevention Coalition, Brunner Literacy Center, and the Soroptimists

Learn more, become a sponsor, pre-order baked goods, and buy raffle tickets online: www.tidayton.org/festival Thank you to our lead sponsors:

Jewish Federation

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