To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. In his 1790 letter of reply to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, George Washington echoed the words of first generation Jewish-American Moses Seixas who had penned them as part of a congratulations and query to the newly inaugurated first U.S. president with the aim of ensuring that American Jews would be afforded the fundamental rights spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. The letter, which has been described as the most important document in American Jewish history, represents two key springboard concepts highlighted...
Six years ago, a group of neo-Nazis and white supremacists orchestrated a violent attack on an anti-racism protest in Charlottesville, Va. held as a counter to their own rally. They planned for weeks, down to what to wear and even what to bring to lunch and how they would claim self-defense when one of them […]
A specialist on how people learn about Holocaust history and prejudice will speak in Milwaukee. That speaker, Danny M. Cohen, is an associate professor of instruction in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. He teaches courses on Children and the Holocaust, The Holocaust and Education and Holocaust Memory, Memorials and Museums. […]
MADISON – The state legislature passed a bill requiring K-12 public schools to include Asian American and Hmong American history and contributions within curricula across the state. As of late March, the legislation was headed to the desk of Gov. Tony Evers, who was expected to sign the bill into law. The bill received […]
“The Chosen,” the story of a pair of Jewish boys growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s, began life as a novel by Chaim Potok, first published in 1967. It was adapted into a movie in 1981 and then, in 1999, Aaron Posner worked with Potok to turn it into a stage play. That play […]
MADISON – Advocates testified last month in support of a bill to provide state funding for the Holocaust education center. The state Legislature is considering the bill to provide funding to Wisconsin’s Holocaust education center, after 2021 legislation requiring Holocaust and genocide education in schools led to increased demand for educator training and resources. Advocates […]
The Dec. 3 Torah scroll dedication at Chabad of Glendale, sponsored by Lubavitch of Wisconsin with participation from the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, was a profoundly emotional experience. I flew in from Florida with family. Hundreds of Wisconsin Jews, spanning religious, secular, atheists and agnostics, were present at Chabad, symbolizing how the Torah transcends denominational differences. […]
In 1942, in Vilna in what is now Lithuania, a group of Jews worked to hide books, art, and other cultural artifacts from the Nazis. Led by poets Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginskithe group was known as the Paper Brigade of Vilna, and it took and hid the items that had been part of the […]
Death was everywhere. That’s how Khaya Matusevich, now a Milwaukee resident, remembers the scenes she witnessed during the Second World War. Matusevich grew up in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. She was 12 –years old when, in 1941, she and her family encountered bombing in the country. Along with her grandmother, Matusevich had been away […]
As the world wrapped its hate around Jews world–wide, I saw an email from the Milwaukee Jewish Federation offering a flight to D.C to attend the March for Israel on Tuesday, Nov. 14. Without any hesitation, the decision was made. In my lifetime, Jews have not been called up on a national level to stand […]
WASHINGTON, D.C. – They came to represent. The politically active and the inactive, the observant and the non-observant, the men and the women, the different generations, all here. Milwaukee Jewish Federation chartered a plane and flew about 180 people on it to Washington, D.C., then flew it back that same day, to stand up for […]
The round tables were draped with linen. A cantor sang Hebrew melodies at the dais. It was all just a bit of something, a gesture. No amount of honor could possibly be enough. Interviewing at her round dinner table, Faina Balterova remembered when she was a girl in Ukraine, shocked to have just learned that […]
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