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(JTA) — All 12 months lengthy, the Jewish Telegraphic Company stories concerning the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our group. To shut out the 12 months, we needed to show our consideration to individuals who might not have been such family names however whose tales need to be remembered.
Right here, with the assistance of readers who shared the names of individuals they’re remembering, we recall 18 Jews who formed their native communities and made a distinction within the lives of these near them. They embody rabbis whose impression prolonged for many years, lecturers who impressed generations of scholars and activists who have been working to construct a greater world. Could their recollections be a blessing.
Harriet Bograd
A champion of rising Jewish communities in far-flung locations.
Harriet Bograd, middle, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a go to to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish group in Ghana in an undated photograph. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)
Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported rising Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and different locations far past the standard facilities of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart on the West Finish Synagogue, she was impressed by a go to in 2004 to a distant village in Ghana, the place about two dozen households thought-about themselves Jewish. Within the years to come back, she and Kulanu would supply help to rising Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and extra. She as soon as mentioned of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the concept [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities which have their very own richness and selection.”
Henry Berg-Brousseau
Transgender activist from Kentucky
Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Marketing campaign)
Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied historical past, political science and Jewish research at George Washington College, the place he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had just lately gotten a significant promotion on the Human Rights Marketing campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, dwelling, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to increase grace, compassion and understanding to everybody however particularly to the susceptible and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not at all times returned to him,” his mom, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in an announcement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was vital to him to make the world a extra accepting place. At 24 years previous. he had lastly discovered a group however that might not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Orthodox advocate for girls’s rights
Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)
Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a number one determine of Trendy Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for girls’s rights inside Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included making a rabbinical court docket to help “agunot” — girls whose husbands refused to divorce them — steadily earned him scorn from traditionalists inside Orthodoxy. However many others noticed him as a “light large” who wielded his years of examine and expertise to struggle for girls’s rights in Jewish legislation. Krauss was born in Romania and got here to america in 1948. Coming from an extended line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Trendy Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Younger Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. Throughout his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva College and commenced to get extra concerned in points associated to the function of ladies in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 got here again to New York to discovered the Worldwide Beit Din, or non secular court docket, to work on agunot instances. “Some say it’s a trendy revolution,” he informed the Jerusalem Submit. “I say that’s the way in which it is best to do it.”
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni
A survivor and scholar who teased out the numerous voices of the Talmud
Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was related to Columbia College for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia College professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for a few years on the Conservative motion’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, till leaving the establishment in 1983 over its determination to ordain girls rabbis. He later turned dean of the rabbinical faculty of the Union for Conventional Judaism, a motion created by rabbis and students who equally broke with the Conservative motion. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud examine by treating Jewish textual content as a dwelling, mutable dialog throughout generations, versus a static doc. Halivni’s method to studying was the “corollary to loving the textual content a lot that you simply simply needed to perceive it to its fullest, no matter instruments would allow you to take action,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.
Moris Albahari
A remnant of a Ladino-speaking previous
Moris Albahari, proven in a documentary about his story known as “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish group. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)
Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator drive, got here to deport him and his massive household to Jasenovac, the nation’s equal of Auschwitz. A former trainer working as an Ustaša guard within the city of Drvar, the place the practice stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their vacation spot, and David was in a position to assist his son escape from the practice. As a result of Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that’s combination of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and different languages, he was in a position to communicate with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him a number of extra instances earlier than the tip of the battle, however afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews useless or ceaselessly dispersed, he spoke the language largely at dwelling. At one level the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a pacesetter inside Bosnia’s Jewish group. “It’s a horrible loss, particularly for Sarajevok,” mentioned Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not talking simply by way of distinguished members of the group, we’re talking by way of members of the family.”
Rachel Brodie
A “grasp Jewish educator” whose affect was huge
Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish Information of Northern California)
Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble but by way of her work as an educator had an unlimited affect on the Jewish group within the Bay Space of California, the place she lived, and past. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an academic useful resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She additionally served as “chief Jewish officer” on the Jewish group Middle of San Francisco, a place created only for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender coronary heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Undertaking in Berkeley, the place she had been a senior educator. “To study together with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and reworked.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her dwelling in Berkeley.
Rabbi Steven Sager
“Chief, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and past
Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)
When Rabbi Steven Sager died Could 15 at 71 after an prolonged battle with pancreatic most cancers, he was mourned not solely by his household and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, however by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry group spanning the globe. “Steve was an attractive and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I typically don’t imagine in translation, particularly translation of poetry. It appears to me that each language has an internal secret that can’t be transposed into one other vessel. But, when Steve translated my poems I had a unique feeling — I felt he entered an internal layer, one which lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”
Nate Geller
Dedicated to constructing stronger Jewish communities
Nate Geller, at his dwelling in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” signal, which he took dwelling and held on his mantel. (Courtesy)
Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a wrestle with leukemia that he confronted with attribute humility, religion and optimism. His demise was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s father or mother firm); to his synagogue group in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had devoted his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis College in 1983. Within the hours after his demise, chat rooms and electronic mail bins stuffed up with loving tributes to Nate, outstanding for his or her consistency: Pals and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his ardour for Jewish studying, his dedication to Israel, his willingness not simply to listen to however to hear when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his household: his spouse Lyn Gentle Geller, herself a mild and passionate drive amongst “Jewish professionals,” his grown kids Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s spouse Talia, and their youngsters, Annaelle and Judah. Mentioned one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is a gigantic Nate-shaped void on this planet now.”
Hedi Fried
A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden
Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s tradition minister and handball participant Linnea Claeson throughout a counterprotest towards a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP through Getty Photographs)
Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, the place she turned a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke extensively about her experiences through the Holocaust, gathering among the most typical exchanges in “Questions I Am Requested Concerning the Holocaust,” revealed in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no query too tough to reply. You have been courageous, beneficiant, devoted and intensely smart,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent however not your message. It lives on in everybody who met you, in your texts, books, movies and your perception that man remains to be good — and that it’s attainable to construct a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our complete existence.” Fried, who had three kids, died in November at 98.
Rabbi Sy Dresner
The “most arrested rabbi in America”
Rabbi Martin Freedman, proper, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,middle, are taken to the Tallahassee metropolis constructing the place they have been charged with illegal meeting after they and 10 different “Freedom Riders” have been arrested making an attempt to eat on the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Pictures)
Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was typically known as the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider within the Sixties, Dresner constructed a profession as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was lively within the struggle towards the Vietnam Battle and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Financial institution. Dresner was born on the Decrease East Aspect in 1929 to an Orthodox household and grew up in Brooklyn, the place his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a toddler however went on to turn into a Reform rabbi after serving within the Korean Battle and dealing on a kibbutz in Israel. “We got here as Jews who keep in mind the hundreds of thousands of faceless individuals who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he mentioned after an arrest in 1964 exterior a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We got here as a result of we all know that, second solely to silence, the best hazard to man is lack of religion in man’s capability to behave.”
Eli Evans
‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’
Eli Evans, seen right here in an image from a visit to Israel within the Seventies, was “equally at dwelling in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)
Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, the place his father would turn into the primary Jewish mayor and his mom the founding father of Hadassah’s first chapter within the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native dwelling regardless of spending his grownup life in New York Metropolis, the place he was a distinguished grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Road” in each america and Israel. He wrote a number of memoirs about Southern Jews and likewise included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at a number of foundations in accordance with an activist philosophy that helped launch the Youngsters’s Protection Fund, seeded the South with Black legal professionals who turned native civil rights leaders and constructed ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their nations made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish institution and strengthened American Jewish life, with out dropping his Southern Jewish soul,” mentioned Brandeis College professor of American Jewish historical past Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have identified him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of issues of COVID-19, after a interval of declining well being.
Sheryl Grossman
A lifelong advocate for folks with disabilities
Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish incapacity activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Collection at Towson College)
Sheryl Grossman stood small, at simply 4’3″ and 48 kilos, however on this planet of Jewish incapacity advocacy she loomed massive, as each the founding father of a Fb group for folks dwelling with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Incapacity Empowerment Middle. She died March 28 at age 46, the results of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked most cancers. “I don’t assume anybody will ever know simply how a lot work Sheryl did through the pandemic to assist Jewish communities help their most susceptible neighbors who have been within the hospital or remoted at dwelling with COVID,” mentioned Shoshana Finkel, a legislation scholar who met Grossman when she was an intern on the American Affiliation of Individuals with Disabilities. “She didn’t really feel the necessity to share her accomplishments; that was by no means what the work was about for her.”
Dara Goldman
A professor of Spanish and Jewish research in her prime
Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish research on the College of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)
Dara Goldman was making ready for commencement on the College of Illinois, the place she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Tradition and Society, and for the American Jewish Historic Society convention, when she died Could 13 of a coronary heart assault. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so numerous that she was affiliated with eight models inside the College of Illinois; most just lately, she was researching Jewish cultural manufacturing in Cuba, the place she introduced assets for the Jewish group throughout her analysis journeys, and co-edited a quantity on Twenty first-century Jewish writing. “Together with her attribute wit, she would usually joke that she was a Jewish lady who took a fallacious flip at diaspora,” mentioned a remembrance revealed by the college. “However jokes apart, she might be on the identical time a Jewish lady from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and liked very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate inside our halls for a very long time.”
Yaakov Shalev
A beloved household man whose story was Israel’s
Yaakov Shalev, seated third from proper, helped manage Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Elia-Shalev)
“After I arrived for a go to with household in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged almost everybody at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my youthful cousins badgered me to take away it. It took my aged grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everybody down and declare that I’m his identical beloved grandson, with or with out the piercing.
“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we known as him, handed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, along with his 5 kids at his aspect. He spent his previous few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants akin to Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Farid al-Atrash.
“Saba Yaakov helped manage the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 after which enlisted within the Israeli army as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself methods to construct homes and have become a profitable contractor within the Sixties. However he quickly determined the stress was an excessive amount of and opened a store in south Tel Aviv the place he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their work. He saved the store operating for greater than 40 years, going to work every single day till he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter
Trude Feldman
A journalist who specialised in Yom Kippur interviews
Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter within the White Home in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)
The daughter of a rabbinical household, Trude Feldman launched her profession masking the 1961 trial of Nazi mass assassin Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, the place she put her coaching as a Hebrew trainer to make use of by instructing the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She additionally taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) However it was in her protection of American presidents that Feldman really made her mark, turning into well-known for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as a chance for redemption. That’s what bought her the primary interview with Invoice Clinton after he copped in 1998 to sure, having intercourse with that lady. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Evening Reside” as soon as did so in a sketch — however these near her understood their worth. “The joke, nevertheless, was on everybody else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired together with her signature persistence, her fashion extra usually elicited not puff however profundity, extra sincerity than sugar. The distinctive entry she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable outcomes.”
Harlene Winnick Appelman
A revolutionary chief in Jewish training
Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photograph supplied by the Covenant Basis.
Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s profession in Jewish training took off in 1982 when she turned the director of household life training at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish studying, bringing kids out of dry frontal settings right into a extra tactile expertise of Judaism. After becoming a member of the board of the Covenant Basis, which funds and promotes Jewish training, in 1994, she turned its director in 2005 and held that function till 2021, permitting her to affect a era of Jewish educators. A lot of them mourned her demise at 75 on Aug. 18; the trigger was most cancers. “I’m one in all a complete congregation of Jewish academic leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made really feel particular,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in a web based remembrance. “I hope that in her reminiscence, I’ll discover ever new methods to assist extra Jewish rabbis and educators really feel seen, heard, succesful, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Basis initiated a brand new prize, in Jewish household training, in Appelman’s honor.
Tom Tugend
An indefatigable journalist
Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles dwelling, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)
Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his household left their dwelling in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, the place he had lived for many of his life. Within the intervening many years, he fought within the U.S. Military and the Israel Protection Forces; coated Jewish information for a wide selection of publications, together with JTA; and loved 66 years of marriage throughout which he and his spouse raised three daughters. “His authenticity got here by way of to anybody who knew him,” mentioned one in all them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many individuals.”
Judah Samet
A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror
Judah Samet stands subsequent to his portrait, a part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Neglect” undertaking on the College of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photograph by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Middle of Pittsburgh)
Judah Samet turned a nationwide face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue capturing as a result of he survived: He had been operating late that day, so was not contained in the constructing when 11 of his fellow congregants have been murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s visitor to the State of the Union tackle. The expertise was each very totally different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, the place he was born in February 1938, and in some methods comparable. As a younger baby, Samet was compelled by the Nazis from his dwelling and shipped along with his household first to a labor camp in Austria after which to the Bergen-Belsen focus camp. After a cease in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh within the Fifties, finally becoming a member of his father-in-law’s jewellery enterprise there and remaining a dedicated group member till his demise at 84 on Sept. 27.
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