Breaking Bread, Re-making Community

February 4, 2016 7:56 AM

"The rich Jewish traditions in the city of Uzhhorod were all but wiped out by Nazi death camps and decades of Soviet rule. Now one born-and-bred New Yorker aims to bring them back, one perfectly browned challah at a time." "Bringing a Bite of Old Brooklyn to Ukraine," by János Chialá, Tali Mayer, and Ilya Ginzburg.
posted by MonkeyToes (24 comments total)

My girlfriend makes the best challah! She'll love this article. Thanks!
posted by Fister Roboto at 8:18 AM on February 4, 2016

I got excited for the movie part of six seasons and a movie. I guess challah is good too.
posted by Talez at 8:21 AM on February 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

Interesting piece, thanks.
posted by Miko at 8:23 AM on February 4, 2016

I'm usually a little ambivalent about Chabad -- they're one of the few Jewish groups that proselytize, and they explicitly proselytize to other Jews. They have a tendency to reject anything but Chabad as an authentic expression of Judaism, and so they end up running roughshod over existing Jewish traditions.

But Chabad rose from the Pale of Settlement and, in some ways, retained the culture and practices of the place. I don't want to overstate this -- Hasidic Judaism is not trapped in amber, it has continued to develop and evolve in America, and so isn't a window into the past so much as a parallel development with the present.

But it's as close as we have to a tradition that was once indigenous in places like Uzhhorod, and so I can't complain about its return. Of course, Hadisism wasn't the only indigenous form of Judaism in Uzhhorod -- it was the home to a famous rabbi and author of works on Jewish law, Shlomo Ganzfried, who was from the Orthodox tradition, and Ukraine was also home to a breathtaking variety of Jewish practices, including Frankism, a weird failed Messianic movement that is probably best left in the past.

From what I understand, there are an estimated 400,000 Jews in Ukraine now, so there probably is opportunity for a wide range of Jewish practices, and, ultimately, that's the best reflection of the history of Ukrainian Judaism. But, still, in underserved communities, I can't complain when a Chabad Jew bring Hasidism with him to Ukraine.
posted by maxsparber at 8:26 AM on February 4, 2016 [17 favorites]

I wonder if Chabad gave him a small business loan. That seems like something they should do.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:26 AM on February 4, 2016

Mixed dancing? Not the Hasidism of Brooklyn.
posted by Sophie1 at 8:30 AM on February 4, 2016

they're one of the few Jewish groups that proselytize, and they explicitly proselytize to other Jews.

When they're working the street in midtown NYC where I work, they never fail to pick me out of the crowd. Those guys have the most sensitive Jew-dar I've ever seen. Hell, they can probably tell the last time you ate at Mendys.
posted by dr_dank at 8:34 AM on February 4, 2016 [4 favorites]

For other folks whose brains are just waking up, this is not about a crossover of the TV shows Breaking Bad and Community.
posted by idiopath at 8:36 AM on February 4, 2016 [5 favorites]

Those guys have the most sensitive Jew-dar I've ever seen.

They always leave me alone, despite the fact that I went to a Jewish high school, studied for an undergraduate degree in Jewish studies, am directly descended from Reb Wolf Kitzes (one of the founders of Hasdism), and speak a fair amount of Yiddish.

It's probably because I'm an Irish-American adopted by Jews. They just don't seem to have completely gotten their head around the fact that the average American Jew nowadays tends to look like Alyson Hannigan more often than Seth Rogan.
posted by maxsparber at 8:37 AM on February 4, 2016 [12 favorites]

And thank goodness. I don't need them to teach me how to wear tefillin. I know how to daven. I don't because I am an atheist, and that's a perfectly respectable thing for a Jew to be.
posted by maxsparber at 8:39 AM on February 4, 2016 [6 favorites]

the average American Jew nowadays tends to look like Alyson Hannigan more often than Seth Rogan.

Wow, we're doing better than I thought
posted by clockzero at 8:41 AM on February 4, 2016 [7 favorites]

When they're working the street in midtown NYC where I work, they never fail to pick me out of the crowd. Those guys have the most sensitive Jew-dar I've ever seen. Hell, they can probably tell the last time you ate at Mendys.

No, it's that you've got an easy tell. Lubavitchers are like cats. They see you avoiding eye contact and go, "Aha!"

...and then you find yourself shaking the lulav and the etrog in the middle of the street.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:43 AM on February 4, 2016 [9 favorites]

When they're working the street in midtown NYC where I work, they never fail to pick me out of the crowd.

I'm descended from Jews as far back as we can trace and they never ping on me. Reddish brown hair, blue eyes, whitest white girl in white town, Austro-Hungarian. My younger sister, on the other hand, has a massive Jew-fro and is targeted immediately.
posted by Sophie1 at 8:47 AM on February 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

"Yisroel said, “we call it ‘racial profiling.’ Who looks Jewish?” (When asked to clarify later, Yisroel said it’s not about the nose — a “broad, clear forehead with no creases” indicates a non-Jew, while Jews’ foreheads are sometimes lined.) Next is detecting a subtle vibe of recognition, a process that Levi calls “bageling.” Third is playing the statistics game. One out of every five people in New York City is Jewish, Yisroel said. If you exclude African Americans and Asians, your odds are closer to one in three. (But it’s not a rule, the brothers conceded. There was the time that Yisroel ”did etrog” with a “homeless black guy” who said he was Jewish.)"
posted by leotrotsky at 8:47 AM on February 4, 2016 [4 favorites]

Now I'm curious to know how I scan. (Raised Catholic but some ancestors from the Pale.) I might have to make a trip to midtown next time I visit the city.

Then again I have RBF so they'll probably leave me alone.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 8:58 AM on February 4, 2016

RBF in an epidemic in the Hasidic community. I mean, JUST LOOK AT SCHNEERSON.
posted by maxsparber at 9:01 AM on February 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Yisroel said, “we call it ‘racial profiling.’ Who looks Jewish?” (When asked to clarify later, Yisroel said it’s not about the nose — a “broad, clear forehead with no creases” indicates a non-Jew, while Jews’ foreheads are sometimes lined.) Next is detecting a subtle vibe of recognition, a process that Levi calls “bageling.”

Ugh

ugh ugh ugh

We didn't wander in the desert for 40 years for this, bruh
posted by clockzero at 9:04 AM on February 4, 2016 [6 favorites]

The Lubavitchers always ping me, but just about the only way I could look more stereotypically Jewish would be if I had inherited my grandfather's nose. There was a man with a schnoz.

I don't daven, though. God and I have an understanding.
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:07 AM on February 4, 2016

> János Chialá

Huhn, I've never seen it spelled that way before.
posted by benito.strauss at 9:22 AM on February 4, 2016

I've only been picked out once. I'm ethnically a half-jew (ashkenazi), and, problematically, on my dad's side, though my mother did the entire conversion thing before she married my father and I was raised a full-jew. I look neither stereotypically jewish nor overtly stereotypically non-jewish: I am fair of skin, medium of eye and hair, and pointy of feature. The lubavicher who picked me out asked, as they ask, "are you jewish?"

and I said "I am, but I bet you think I'm not"

and he asked me to explain, and I did. He wanted to know if, when my mother converted, it was to Orthodox Judaism.

"Reform," I said.

He let me go. I was unwanted.

___

Nowadays I get kind of offended when they don't pick me. But I acknowledge that I'd also be offended if they did pick me. Maybe I'm just offended by jew-dar, or half-jew-dar.
posted by millipede at 10:20 AM on February 4, 2016 [6 favorites]

Now if we could only get a kosher bakery on the Upper West Side. Sigh.

(Granddaughter of survivors, married to a rabbi, never gets pinged.)
posted by Mchelly at 10:36 AM on February 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

When they're working the street in midtown NYC where I work, they never fail to pick me out of the crowd

So that's who those guys are. I wondered why those young men on the corner of 7th and 49th were asking me whether I was Jewish. I thought they were selling something (which I guess they were, in a way) so they got my standard answer of "not today, thanks", which understandably seemed to confuse them a little.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 11:01 AM on February 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

Nowadays I get kind of offended when they don't pick me. But I acknowledge that I'd also be offended if they did pick me. Maybe I'm just offended by jew-dar, or half-jew-dar.

I feel like how good at getting offended you are should be a key aspect of Jew-dar, no?

Anyway, I found this piece really fascinating. It reminded me of a great book I read about the Holocaust in Hungary as a kid - IIRC the protagonist spent time in both Hungary and Ukraine before being sent to Bergen-Belsen. I just looked up the author (it's semi-autobiographical) and she is from this area of Ukraine. The book is Upon the Head of the Goat.

I spent a lot of my childhood reading these kinds of books, but one thing that was often missing from the narratives is what happened after the war. So this is great.
posted by lunasol at 11:02 AM on February 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

> When they're working the street in midtown NYC where I work, they never fail to pick me out of the crowd. Those guys have the most sensitive Jew-dar I've ever seen.

I dunno, they never failed to pick me out of the crowd either, and I'm not Jewish (though I do speak a little Yiddish). Must be the hat, beard, and creased forehead.

Great post!
posted by languagehat at 2:24 PM on February 4, 2016 [3 favorites]