Dagestan future doubts after rabbi’s murder
The final surviving German to be honoured as Righteous Among the Nations has died just short of her 98th birthday. Gertrud Steinl was an official in the Polish city of Stryj during the Second World War when a worker, Sarah Shlomi, confided in her that she was Jewish. Ms Steinl, who sent the worker to live with her parents and ensured she was not deported to a concentration camp, was honoured in 1979. Her death on Sunday was confirmed by the head of the Jewish community in Nuremberg.
A Russian Jewish community leader and rabbi was murdered in a tragedy that could prove fatal for the vanishing community in Dagestan, an autonomous republic in the northern Caucasus. Izgiyagu Pashayev, 66, from the Buynaksk Jewish community, was attacked and murdered by the brother of a woman to whom he had offered shelter after she became homeless, Russian media said. A man has been arrested and will be charged under the Russian Criminal Code. There are believed to be only seven Jewish families left in Buynaksk, down from some 50,000 in the mid-1970s.
JACOB JUDAH
IT WAS a mild early summer evening and Venice’s ghetto quarter was pleasantly busy, rather than packed to the gills like the more touristy sites. It was early Friday afternoon and the ghetto was winding down when a bearded man honed in on me and my companion and said: “My friends, would you like to celebrate Shabbat with us at Chabad House?”
I thought of that unexpected invitation — from a stranger to two strangers — a couple of days ago when a friend sent me a video of a Venice I struggled to recognise: its narrow lanes usually teeming with tourists and the odd local eerily empty, shops and restaurants shut, visitors gone, all life sucked out. So empty it felt dead; a splendid museum rather than a living city.
The ghetto quarter and its museum are closed like the rest of Venice — but then, the whole of Italy, Jewish and not, had been slowly shutting down for weeks. My inbox has kept pinging with cancellation notices: it started back in February when the Milan-based CDEC (Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center) indefinitely postponed the official presentation of its 2019 Antisemitism in Italy report.
Then the Meis, the National Museum of Italian Judaism and Shoah, which like all Italian institutions shut its doors, although for Purim it sent out a defiant message highlighting the festivity’s message of resilience, with hope and optimism overcoming trauma and danger.