An Accidental Hero

JEWISH LIFE

North Macedonia’s first Jewish lawmaker gets hit with antisemitism

BY CNAAN LIPHSHIZ

RASHELA MIZRAHI SPEAKS TO A COLLEAGUE DURING A CABINET MEETING IN SKOPJE, NORTH MACEDONIA, JAN. 14, 2020.

(COURTESY OF THE PARLIAMENT OF NORTH MACEDONIA)

(JTA) – Politics was supposed to be a very brief interlude in Rashela Mizrahi’s career as a scientist.

A 39-year-old Jewish fertility researcher from North Macedonia, she was appointed last year to serve for 100 days as the temporary minister of labor in her Balkan country, situated north of Greece. She was deemed a good nonpartisan pick to serve as a placeholder ahead of elections.

“I had zero interest in politics,” Mizrahi told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But I thought it’d send a good message for women. Plus, like any Jewish daughter, I wanted to make my parents proud.”

But what began as a token stint resulted in multiple diplomatic spats and the country’s worst-ever wave of public antisemitic rhetoric.

Along the way, Mizrahi became an unlikely hero for many of her country’s conservatives and a fighter for preserving the memory of a Jewish community that the Nazis and their allies almost rendered extinct.

It all started in February, she said, during a routine press conference that she gave at the labor ministry in the capital Skopje weeks after she became its temporary boss.

“I talked unemployment, stimulus plans, welfare. The usual stuff,” she recalled. But in media reports, Mizrahi’s message was upstaged by the backdrop: A large wooden sign that read “the Republic of Macedonia.”

This was an issue, because the previous year Macedonia had changed its name to North Macedonia due to pressure from its richer and larger neighbor, Greece. That country has long argued that its northern neighbor’s former name implied territorial claims to Greek’s northern province, which is also called Macedonia.

The sign landed Mizrahi at the center of a polarizing debate between Macedonian hawks who see the 2020 name change as surrender to a foreign power, and doves who defended the change as a pragmatic gesture that opened the door for Macedonia to join NATO and in the future also the European Union.

Mizrahi was not a member of any political party back then and said that she had no intention of making a political point at the press conference. She didn’t even make the sign, which Mizrahi says was “just part of the furniture.”

“The sign was just there. I didn’t have it put up there,” she said.

But as a business and science-oriented straight talker with little interest in diplomatic niceties, Mizrahi did not hide her disdain for the controversial name change.

“You can thank my predecessor, who didn’t commission any new signs. Maybe she recognizes that this is the Republic of Macedonia and that we’re Macedonians,” Mizrahi said to reporters about Mila Carovska, a member of the left-leaning SDSM party that led the name change.

Greece’s ambassador protested the remark and then Nikola Dimitrov, North Macedonia’s foreign at the time, warned that Mizrahi was putting “Euro-Atlantic aspirations in danger.” She was fired just five weeks into her three-month stint.

But what might have ended as the axing of a novice politician snowballed into the country’s first-ever wave of antisemitic rhetoric – with Mizrahi as its target.

Branko Trickovski, a well-known journalist and a supporter of the leftwing SDSM party, ridiculed Mizrahi on Facebook, describing her as a zealot for Macedonian and Jewish nationalism, who gets her strength from “eating hummus made of dead Jews.”

Mersiha Smailovic, a former official from the ministry that Mizrahi had headed, on Facebook wrote that Mizrahi was planning to place an Israeli flag at her office. Another SDSM activist called her a “Jew who worked for the Nazi occupation in World War Two.”

It triggered “a stream of hundreds of antisemitic messages. Death threats. Even against my daughter,” Mizrahi said of her two-year-old, her younger child she had with her husband, a 43-year-old welder who comes from a Christian Eastern Orthodox family.

“I’m still afraid. Not so much for me but for my daughter. I never thought this could happen in this country, where antisemitism never used to be a part of life,” Mizrahi said. “It has changed how I see my country.”

It has also caused her to change her career plans.

“I decided I can’t walk away, I needed to stay and fight,” she said.

Parking her career as a consultant and researcher for an international pharmaceutical company, Mizrahi joined the VMRO right-wing opposition party and became a lawmaker in parliament. She’s North Macedonia’s first-ever Jewish parliament lawmaker since it broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991.

According to a report titled “Antisemitic Discourse in the Western Balkans” published this year by the International Republican Institute, a nonprofit whose mission statement is promoting democracy, the Mizrahi affair showed that “antisemitic narratives exist [in North Macedonia] and are utilized for political gain. Antisemitism is used to sow divisions within the country, which subsequently increases its vulnerability to manipulation.”

The rhetoric on Mizrahi also shocked other members of the Jewish community, a tiny minority of about 200 people, which hasn’t grown since the Holocaust, when the Nazis and collaborators murdered about 98% of Macedonian Jewry.

“We had lived here without antisemitic statements before,” said Maja Susha, an educator and Holocaust researcher who is a member of North Macedonia’s Jewish community. “But after what happened with Rashela we saw the real reality.”

The antisemitism has since subsided and life is safe for Jews, said Susha, who like almost all of North Macedonia’s Jews lives in Skopje. It’s a placid capital where about a quarter of North Macedonia’s 2 million citizens live, mostly in crumbling Sovietera buildings that are juxtaposed with a staggering wealth of statues and classical style monuments.

The antisemitism came as less of a surprise to Mizrahi’s father, Viktor, who for many years had led the Jewish community. The Holocaust shaped much of the way that Rashela Mizrahi and her brother Rahamim were raised by their parents Viktor and Liljana, a convert to Judaism who observes the religion more devoutly than her husband.

“I was encouraged to be a doctor. Rahamim to become a lawyer. Why? Because these are professions so vital that the recipients of your services don’t care if you’re Jewish,” Rashela Mizrahi said. Her parents “were terrified when I stepped into politics,” Mizrahi said. “But they were also very proud.”

In parliament, Mizrahi focuses on initiatives that will help young people gain an education in North Macedonia – which she still refuses to call by its new name – and on projects to mitigate the country’s brain drain problem. But it’s Mizrahi’s foreign policy actions that grab headlines in the Balkans.

In addition to vocally opposing concessions to Greece, Mizrahi is a prominent critic of what she considers the left-wing government’s appeasement of neighboring Bulgaria – another powerful neighbor whose actions have had a devastating effect on Mizrahi’s own family.

On Dec. 30, Mizrahi delivered a speech in parliament about Bulgaria’s role in the Holocaust, when Bulgarian forces occupied what is today North Macedonia and helped round up 98% of the area’s 7,000-plus Jews and deport them to be murdered by German troops.

Standing against the giant Christmas tree that decorates parliament in Skopje during the holiday season, Mizrahi held up pictures of her dead relatives and asked Prime Minister Zoran Zaev: “Who killed them?”

The video, that went viral on local social networks, was a protest over Zaev’s decision last year to remove from government property any memorial plaques for World War II victims that called their killers as belonging to the “Bulgarian fascist occupation,” because “Bulgaria was not a fascist occupier of Macedonia but an administrator,” as he put it.

“My family was not murdered by an administrator’s pen, Mr. Zaev,” Mizrahi said in parliament.

Her protest echoed the position of the Jewish Community of the Republic of North Macedonia, a nonprofit that represents Macedonian Jewry’s interests. Last year, it accused Bulgaria of “deliberately whitewashing its dark history and thus distorting the truth about the Holocaust.”

But Mizrhai’s speech was the first time that this accusation was discussed in such a way in North Macedonia’s parliament, according to Sasha Uzunov, an Australia-based journalist and an expert on Macedonian politics. And it has made Mizrahi “a very visible politician,” he said.

Both that speech and her push against the name change have turned Mizrahi “in a way into a hero” for many people in North Macedonia, Susha added. She is also speaking for many Bulgarian Jews, said Lyna Degen, a Bulgaria-born Dutch-Jewish psychologist who has written extensively about the Holocaust in her native country.

“The danger in Macedonia, as I see it, is that the leader of the country is willing to revise the history of the Holocaust in order to please Bulgaria, whose support they need in order to become a member of the EU,” Degen said.

“It is very unusual that a Jewish politician raises awareness for the atrocities perpetrated by Bulgarian troops,” Degen added. “I don’t know of any other politician doing this” besides Mizrahi.

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this high office, which is vital to the wellbeing and standing of Israel in the global community,” said AJC CEO David Harris.

“He brings enormous assets to the position, including an unusually deep understanding of world Jewry, including the American Jewish community. It is vitally important that Jews – whether in Israel or elsewhere – feel connected to, and welcomed by, the office of Israel’s president. In that spirit, as we have with each president since the state’s rebirth in 1948, we look forward to working closely with Mr. Herzog after he takes office on July 9.”

Similarly, the Israeli-American Council said that it hopes Herzog “will build on his experience working with Diaspora Jewry and the Israeli-American community to strengthen their bonds with the State of Israel, and deepen the connection between the American and Israeli people.”

Hoping the new president can advance the cause of peace

The Orthodox Union also welcomed Herzog’s election, noting the key role that the Israeli president plays in relations between Israel and American and other Diaspora communities.

“Throughout his many years of service in the Knesset, to Israel and in the Jewish Agency, Mr. Herzog has become known for his respectful, soft-spoken manner and for eschewing partisan rancor and feuding,” said Orthodox Union president Moishe Bane.

“He will undoubtedly represent the best of Israel, both within and beyond its borders, and we look forward to working with him during what is sure to be a successful tenure,” said Dianne Lob, Chair, William Daroff, CEO, and Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

The Combat Antisemitism Movement praised Herzog’s commitment to fighting anti-Semitism.

“Not only is he a long-standing friend and adviser to CAM, but for many years he has been one of the strongest and most powerful advocates for the Jewish people and against anti-Semitism globally,” said its director, Sacha Roytman-Dratwa. “No doubt, he will continue to proudly advocate for Jewish rights and wider tolerance as president. He will no doubt represent Israel and the Jewish people as a whole with great distinction.”

The progressive group Americans for Peace Now urged Herzog to use his position to advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace.

“We know how committed he is to Israeli democracy, and to strengthening the social and moral fabric of the state, as well as strengthening its relations with Diaspora Jewry and the international community,” said APN’s president and CEO Hadar Susskind. “We also know how committed Herzog is to the vision of peace between the State of Israel and a future viable Palestinian state. We hope he will use his position as Israel’s next president to advance the cause of peace and strongly urge him to do so.”

Similarly, J Street said it hopes that Herzog will help “strengthen Israeli democracy, reinforce the relationship between Jews globally and the State of Israel, and promote a vision of peace and equality.”

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MAZEL TOV, GRADUATES!

“Scholars enhance peace in the world” – Talmud, Berakhot

As this difficult year comes to a close, we applaud our remarkable graduates for their resilience, their optimism, their solidarity, and their endless kindness and concern for others.You are our heroes.

MIDDLE SCHOOL GRADUATES

Leah Raich Danielle Hadge Leo Koganov Mickey Stepanskiy Roni Rosovsky Muhlenberg College Northeastern University School of Visual Arts (8th Grade) Richard Baer Jenna Beder Evan Bilenker Renata Bomash Selia Sitzer Gidon Teitel Sabrina Weisel Maddie Winarsky UPPER SCHOOL Sydney Hoffman Binghamton University Avichai Jeiger Western Connecticut State University Dalia Levin Yeshiva University Ben Marcus Brown University Gavin Rakitt Logan Terr University of Connecticut Joshua Terr University of Connecticut Dovid Trencher Where each student matters and every moment counts. Racheli Chavkin GRADUATES Jaye Kaplan University of Maryland Yeshiva University Gavin Daniel Noah Divon Austin Eisenstein Max Ferits Gidon Genger Lilah Gordon William Agababaev University of Connecticut Donny DeFala Berklee College of Music Savannah College of Art and Design Alex Kramer University of Massachusetts Zane Roshe Rhode Island School of Design Joshua Schulman University of Connecticut David Waknine Stonybrook University Bryan Weisz Yeshiva University Come see for yourself. Open House Sunday, November 4. Early Childhood 10:00am-12noon 2186 High Ridge Road, Stamford, CT Solomon Green Please RSVP to Denise RafailovJed Devillers Aron Hedberg Yale University 203-329-2186, ext 1310 or drafailov@bcds.org Olivia Herman Benjamin Herman Yael Hochman Rebecca Kaplan Etan Doft New Jersey Institute of Technology High School 1:30-4:00pm 1937 W. Main Street, Stamford, CT A pre-K – grade 12 school Yisrael Kohl Please RSVP to Sarah Rich Ally Hadge Kayla Lindenbaum Yeshiva University203-357-0850 or srich@jhsct.orgJake Lipkin Nathaniel Morgulis 2186 High Ridge Road, Stamford, CT 06903 • (203) 329-2186

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5

Iceland.

Like previous Discovery to Cure recipients, Yehudit and Josh have their sights set on careers in medicine.

“I applied for this internship because it’s really an amazing opportunity to hear from medical professionals from physicians to researchers, and surgeons, and I just think it will be really beneficial in my future because I’m interested in pursuing a career in medicine,” explains Josh. “I’m not sure yet what specific field I want to go into, but from this conference, I’m hoping to learn more about specifically what some of these people do and learn more about specific professions.”

Yehudit has a similar goal in mind.

“I’m really interested in cancer research, and I thought the Yale program would be super interesting to be a part of a lab, and really get my hands in it…to be a part of learning about cancer and possibly even a cure for it. And so I thought this would be a really interesting way to get involved with the professionals,” says Yehudit. “I want to be a doctor. I’m not sure exactly what type of doctor – there are so many different types of doctors that I don’t even know about. I thought it would be a good and interesting way to meet new types of doctors.”

As impressive as the Yale program is, says Ms. Fernandez, it becomes even more so when one considers the program’s arduous application process.

“It’s a very involved, long, drawn out process that takes about six months to prepare,” she says. “We put a lot of effort into working with the student. Of course, credit goes to our students who put in the tremendous effort to complete the exhaustive application process.”

According to Ms. Fernandez, the process begins the previous summer when students usually read two science-related books of their choice that they are then required to summarize in an essay – one of several essays they are required to write.

In fact, it was one of these required books that inspired Yehudit to pursue the Discovery to Cure program in earnest.

“One of the books that I chose to read was The Emperor of All Maladies:The Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee,” notes Yehudit. “As soon as I read that book, I became even more interested in the subject because it talks about the history of cancer: when cancer was first discovered and while they were discovering it, how they cured it. So many people died in the process. Now, modern medicine is changing so fast. I really was inspired by that book.”

As part of the application process, students also must take several required science courses in their junior year, including AP Biology. Ms. Hernandez, who teaches AP Biology at BCHA, serves as an adviser to students applying for the Yale program each step of the way.

Having Mrs. Fenandez as a mentor, say the two students, was tremendously helpful.

“The application was really long. Ms. Fernandez helped me so much. It took like a week to put it all together, and it was all really thanks to her,” says Yehudit.

Says Josh: “I made a lot revisions to the essays – a lot of going back and checking over. In total, the essays had around five drafts before I finally submitted them. Ms. Fernandez read over all my essays after I finished them – and then again after I revised them and was finally ready to submit them. So she was extremely helpful.”

The hard work is worth it because the Discovery to Cure program has innumerable benefits, says Ms. Hernandez.

“These kids put a lot of effort into it because it is such a prestigious project. They get valuable experience that they probably would not have had the opportunity to get. This is something to put on your resume to get your first lab job at college so you can start working with someone earlier than everybody else. It’s a great experience. Plus, it looks amazing on a college application.”

For now, Yehudit and Josh can’t wait to get started.

Says Josh: “I’m just really excited to take part in this conference and I think it’s just going to be an amazing experience for me, learning more about medical professions, particularly, and having the opportunity to meet other high school kids who have the same interests as me.”

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