Jackie Hajdenberg | Jewish News

America’s Black-Jewish story gets an update on new PBS series featuring Henry Louis Gates, Michael Twitty and more

Jackie Hajdenberg — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:05:29 +0000

(JTA) — Passover may still be months away, but PBS is seating a diverse set of Jews down for a seder this month — casting the communal storytelling meal as an ideal entry point for exploring the complicated history of Black-Jewish relations in the United States.

The meal can be seen in Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, which airs on Tuesday evenings, and it features a diverse set of Jews — including many who are Black — discussing the role that the Exodus story plays in both Black and Jewish traditions.

The conversation does not avoid difficult topics that challenge the conventional wisdom that having gained freedom from slavery represents a clear parallel for Jews and Black Americans.

“Something that I often think about during Passover is every year we commemorate our freedom as Jews,” says Nate Looney, director of community safety and belonging at the Jewish Federations of North America, in a clip shared exclusively with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But as Black Americans, we’re often told to ‘get over slavery,’ and ‘forget about it.’”

The four-episode docuseries explores the historical rifts and alliances between Jewish and Black Americans and is hosted by Harvard University historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. It comes during Black History Month — and as questions have simmered about whether the last several years have irreparably harmed the historic kinship between Jewish and Black Americans.

It argues that the relationship between Black and Jewish Americans wasn’t set in stone during the civil rights movement when Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched in Selma with Martin Luther King Jr., but was shaped by centuries of history, and continues to be shaped by oppression and white supremacy.

Among those at the table with Looney are Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, senior rabbi of New York’s Central Synagogue; cookbook author and culinary historian Michael Twitty; writer Jamaica Kincaid; David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker; and Rabbi Shais Rishon, also known as MaNishtana.

The series explores key moments in the histories of Black and Jewish Americans, and how those moments ran parallel and crossed paths over the past five centuries. It covers the transatlantic slave trade, the overlaps between the Great Migration and Jewish immigration from Europe, the lynching of Leo Frank, the civil rights movement, the Crown Heights riots, the 2017 Unite the Right rally, and post-Oct. 7 activism.

“A lot of previous conversations about [Black and Jewish relations] really just look at that golden era or just look at the divisions that have come in the last decades, but we’re trying to take a holistic view about how race and caste [were] established in America,” Sara Wolitzky, co-executive producer and director of the docuseries told eJewishPhilanthropy.

Black and Jewish America features a variety of academics, activists, writers, and celebrities, including Rev. Al Sharpton, Jewish studies professor Susannah Heschel (the rabbi’s daughter), actor Billy Crystal, activist and professor Cornel West, and playwright Tony Kushner.

The episodes run every Tuesday at 9 pm, ET until Feb. 24.

Helena Weinrauch, Holocaust survivor and ‘dancing angel’

Jackie Hajdenberg — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 16:07:42 +0000

(New York Jewish Week) — New Yorker Helena Weinstock Weinrauch, a Holocaust survivor known for taking up ballroom dancing in her late 80s, died at her home on the Upper West Side on Sunday, May 25. She was just one week shy of her 101st birthday.

The cause was likely congestive heart failure, her niece Judy Paskind said.

“She loved being made up and dressed up,” Paskind, a retired accountant, recalled. “And a lot of people [at the funeral] yesterday were saying how elegant she was, and she was! She always looked put together. Until she got sick in the last year, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her without makeup.”

Weinrauch’s incredible story of survival — and how she discovered, at 88, the joy of ballroom dancing — was the subject of a 2015 documentary, Fascination: Helena’s Story.

Weinrauch was also known for wearing the same hand-knit blue sweater during the first Passover seder every year for more than 75 years. The sweater — with fluffy angora sleeves, a metallic blue bodice and a scalloped V-neck — had been made by Weinrauch’s friend Ann Rothman, who stayed alive during the Holocaust by knitting for the wives of Nazi officials while a prisoner in the Łód Ghetto.

“She became known in the ghetto,” Weinrauch told the New York Jewish Week in 2022. “She was so good at knitting that she knitted coats for the wife of the German people and it became known that Ann can knit skirts, a blouse — anything you want, she can knit it.”

Weinrauch was born in Dusseldorf in 1924 to a family of German-speaking Jews. Her mother, Gisela, was a concert pianist; her father, Maximilian, was a Viennese engineer who owned oil wells. She had a sister, Erna, who was six years older. The family soon moved to Drohobycz, Poland (today’s Ukraine) for her father’s work, and Weinrauch was 9 years old when the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933.

In 1939, following a brief Nazi occupation and later, the Russians, the family’s house and oil wells were seized. Weinrauch’s parents and sister were forced into hiding under the Soviets, but due to her age, young Helena was able to attend school while also working part-time in an office.

At her job, Weinrauch was given a false identity by her boss, which allowed her to continue living somewhat in the open. A year later, the family was reunited, but only briefly: The Nazis returned and, as conditions worsened for Jews, Helena’s parents and sister were rounded up. She never saw any of them again.

Weinrauch’s identity was eventually discovered when she was reported to the Gestapo by a former classmate who recognized her. Weinrauch was deported to Plaszow and then Auschwitz, where she survived a 500-mile death march to Bergen-Belsen and was liberated by the British Army on April 15, 1945.

Helena recuperated in Sweden, where she met Rothman, also an Auschwitz survivor, in the hospital.

Two years later, Weinrauch immigrated to New York, where she learned English by listening to the radio and reading the dictionary. To make ends meet, she worked as a dental assistant, a receptionist, a baby nurse and, for 30 years, as a medical paper writer to a professor of cardiology and nephrology in Manhattan. In 1951, she married Joseph Weinrauch, who was employed in the fur business. Their daughter, Arlene, was born in 1953.

Arlene, whom Weinrauch called “a very bright, intelligent, gifted girl” in her book, died from breast cancer in the 1990s.

“I have to say, of all the horrific things that happened to me — losing my parents and sister, being interned in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, spending a year in a hospital and rehab facility — nothing can compare to losing a child,” Weinrauch told Lilith Magazine in 2016.

In 2006, after 55 years of marriage, Joe Weinrauch died.

“After my uncle died, she started a whole new life with the ballroom dancing and creating a whole new group of friends through that and people in her building,” Paskind said.

Weinrauch would dance at the Manhattan Ballroom Society on the Upper East Side, where dance leader Steve Dane called Weinrauch the group’s “dancing angel.” She became very close with her dance partner, Slavi Baylov, who is more than 50 years her junior and was at her bedside when she died.

“When I dance, I forget what happened to me and it makes me feel for a few minutes or hours that I am happy,” she told The New York Times in 2018.

In 2023, one-woman play, A Will to Live, based on Weinrauch’s unpublished memoir, premiered at New York’s Chain Theater. “My story is not fiction,” Weinrauch wrote in a statement at the time. “Unfortunately, this is my true story.”

It was also later in life that Weinrauch became comfortable speaking publicly about her harrowing experiences during the Holocaust, which she began doing through the Meta and John Spiegler Holocaust Education Fund, an endowment for Holocaust education aimed at middle school children in Corning, New York, established by Judy Paskind’s parents. (Paskind’s mother was Joe Weinrauch’s sister.)

“The kids wrote her thank you notes,” Paskind said. “She got notes like, ‘we’ll adopt you.’ She was very touched by that. She kept that in an album and looked at it often.”

Weinrauch was also a well-known Upper West Side fixture, recognized by the staff at Barney Greengrass and Zabar’s, where she was practically treated like a celebrity — something she loved, Paskind said.

“I would FaceTime with her every week,” Paskind said. “And this morning, I was getting dressed and thinking, ‘I’ve got to call Helen.’”
She added: “She was a larger-than-life person.”

Lily Ebert, Holocaust survivor who became a TikTok sensation

Jackie Hajdenberg — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 15:29:46 +0000

(JTA) — Lily Ebert, the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who educated millions on TikTok and cultivated a late-in-life friendship with King Charles III, died Wednesday, Oct. 9 at her home in London. She was 100.

Ebert’s death was announced by her great-grandson Dov Forman, who helped make her into a social media phenomenon in her final years.

“In the face of unimaginable loss, Safta made a promise to herself,” Forman shared in a letter on behalf of the family, using the Hebrew word for grandmother. “If she survived that hell on earth, she would tell her story-not with anger, but with strength, dignity, and the determination to honor those who did not. Never has a promise been so profoundly fulfilled as hers.”

Ebert was 20 when she was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where she was separated from her mother Nina, her younger sister Berta, and her younger brother Bela, who were all sent to the gas chambers. Lily and her two other sisters were transferred to a munitions factory in Leipzig and liberated in 1945. After the war, they headed to Switzerland and then to Israel shortly before independence.

Lily was reunited with her older brother, also a Holocaust survivor, in 1953, and eventually made a life in Britain, moving there in 1967. She gave testimony at museums and universities and co-wrote a book about her experience with Forman, one of 38 great-grandchildren among her descendants.

In addition to the great-grandchildren, Ebert is predeceased by one daughter and survived by a daughter, a son, 10 grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.

One of those great-grandchildren is Forman, with whom she co-created a TikTok account to educate social media users on the Holocaust and the prevalence of antisemitism. Forman was 16 at the time they created the account in 2021; it now has 2 million followers.

Over the years, the account featured Ebert showing off Jewish foods including challah and rugelach, celebrating various Jewish holidays and, crucially, telling and retelling her Holocaust story, often in the form of trends popular on the platform.

The account also documented as Ebert grew progressively weak, including over the course of several hospitalizations. After each, Forman would triumphantly report her return to health.

On her 100th birthday last Dec. 29, the account quoted Ebert as saying, “I never thought I would survive Auschwitz. Now I celebrate 100 surrounded by my large and loving family. The Nazis did not win!”

Ebert’s followers included members of the British royalty. Just after her 99th birthday in late 2022, she was honored by King Charles III as a Member of the British Empire for her work in Holocaust education. The following year, when she turned 100, the king sent flowers for her birthday.

“It was with the greatest sadness that I heard this morning the news of Lily Ebert’s death,” the king, who wrote the foreword to her book, shared in a statement. “As a survivor of the unmentionable horrors of the Holocaust, I am so proud that she later found a home in Britain where she continued to tell the world of the horrendous atrocities she had witnessed, as a permanent reminder for our generation — and, indeed, for future generations — of the depths of depravity and evil to which humankind can fall, when reason, compassion and truth are abandoned.”

He added, “Alongside other Holocaust survivors she became an integral part of the fabric of our nation; her extraordinary resilience and courage an example to us all, which will never be forgotten.”

As Ebert’s presence on TikTok with Forman increased, the pair also faced antisemitism online. (The app’s critics say it is rife with unchecked antisemitism.) In May 2021, Ebert posted a message wishing her followers a “Shabbat shalom,” to which many users responded with antisemitic spam.

Acknowledgements of her death resulted in critical comments, too. A condolence note posted to Twitter by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the moderate Labour leader who worked to rid his party of antisemitism following a scandal, was inundated with replies accusing the prime minister — who is married to a Jewish woman — of holding a double standard given his administration’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas.

“You are complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. There will be survivors too,” one commenter wrote. “I hope they haunt you.”

Another commenter excoriated Starmer from an opposing perspective. “Yet you allow people who call for the death of Jews to have hate marches every weekend,” the commenter wrote, ostensibly referring to pro-Palestinian marches that take place in England. “She would have been disgusted with you.”

It was the kind of vitriolic discord that Forman and Ebert advocated against in their social media posts.

“Over the years, Safta’s story touched hundreds of millions worldwide, reminding us of the resilience of the human spirit and the dangers of unchecked hatred,” the family’s statement said. “She taught us the power of tolerance and faith, the importance of speaking out, and the need to stand against prejudice.”