“Is This Heaven Or Is It New Jersey?”

By Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman

(A baseball story excerpted from The Forward)

We had wanted to go to the shore — 70 miles to the south — to watch the waves and the seagulls. Instead, my wife Ruchama and I drifted toward Brookdale Park, a leafy paradise in Montclair, NJ, just a few miles from the concrete and cobblestone of our gritty homebase of Jewish Passaic.

Here the ballfields and tracks are manicured and vivid. The foul lines and base paths are brightly painted and the ball skips around in the golden hue of the late summer afternoon.

At the park, Ruchama and I settled behind the backstop of a baseball field. Two young men in their 20s were playing pitcher and catcher. You could hear the satisfying snap of the hardball into the catcher’s mitt, the catcher calling out balls and strikes as though it were a real game. I watched with the loneliness of a 10-year-old wanting to be included.

Even though I was many decades older than they were, and I was wearing the uniform of an Orthodox Jewish male from Passaic — white shirt, dress pants, black yarmulke — I nevertheless asked, “Could I join you?”

“Sure,” they answered. “Grab a glove, and we’ll hit some out.”

Jake, the pitcher, picked up a bat and corked the ball to the outfield. I didn’t realize a ball could get up so high. I got under it and waited for it to obey the laws of gravity and fall plop into my glove. I threw it back in.

He hit the next one to his friend Brad. This one went ever farther and higher. Brad galloped like a gazelle, chased it down, relayed it to me, and I passed it back home. Jake drew from a bag full of hardballs, spilling out near the backstop. He was a human fountain of pop-ups, hitting them faster than we could shag them.

I am well past the age of playing baseball. I’m almost a pensioner, and I was never good at the game anyway. I should have kept strolling in the park with my wife, both hands clasped behind my back. What keeps calling me to the game, even now in the late innings of life?

I grew up as a backbencher in the bais medrash in Yeshiva Chaim Berlin. In the yeshiva’s bucolic Camp Morris in the Catskills, on Friday afternoons in summer, the big men of the bais medrash would lumber over to the ball fields — and they would hit the tar out of the ball. Too young to play with them, I would “announce” the game from behind the backstop with my friend Mayer Weinberger. Afterwards, we would play high-pops for hours.

Perhaps these Montclair men saw something in me. Could they have known how happy baseball makes me? Did they sense a bond between us, a bridge across the decades? Our parks in Passaic are not as fancy. We have good food, good friends, and a wonderful life. Why stray into the manicured gardens of Montclair? No one from Passaic does.

As the sun drifted down, another friend of theirs joined us. “Now let’s do fast-pitching practice,” Jake said.

I wore a batting helmet, but I knew nothing of Jake’s control. An errant fastball could do me in. I had played fast-pitch softball, got beaned once and escaped with a swollen arm. But this was hardball, and a lot more dangerous. I stood there, shaky bat in hand, swung and missed, but then poked one up the third base line, a bonafide hit. I braced for the impact of Jake’s two-seamers, but I stood fast and hit some more.

After the last ball, we parted in different directions. I saw them climbing the small hill in right field in the dying light of the day, while I headed for the parking lot on the north side. We waved to each other with all the good will upon which this country was built.

Later that night, in my Passaic bed, I fell into a young man’s sleep and stumbled into a dream: Jake had hit the ball high above the treetops. Then he hit another and another. They rose in arcs. I settled under one, waiting for it, twisting, turning, my gloved hand held out.

When Luigi Maria Calio, a classical archaeology professor, first brought students from the University of Catania to excavate an area of Ostia Antica, the ancient commercial port of call outside Rome, he wasn’t sure what he might find, the New York Times said. The dig site had not been explored in modern times, in spite of its central location next to a square that was once the city’s headquarters for shippers and traders and is today renowned for its mosaics.

“We thought we’d find some warehouses or a fluvial port,” he said. Instead, the archaeologists last summer uncovered what may be the oldest existing example in the ancient Roman world of a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath. They have tentatively dated the structure to the late fourth or early fifth century.

“Such an antique mikvah has never been found outside Israel, “so it’s a very relevant find,” said Riccardo Di Segni, Rome’s chief rabbi. He added that the discovery has contributed to illuminating the rich history of Jews in Rome land Ostia Antica.

• At the Academy Awards telecast, the Israeli-Palestinian documentary, “No Other Land,” won an Oscar for Best Documentary, but has no U.S. distribution.

• Mikey Madison, who is Jewish, won best actress for “Anora,” which is set in Brighton Beach.

• Linda McMahon, the billionaire wrestling executive was confirmed as Education Secretary. She supports Trump’s effort to dismantle parts of the agency she now runs, even as it serves as the main federal body investigating allegations of antisemitism on campus. To date, about half of the 4,100-person workforce has been slashed

In what may seem a contradictory move, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has issued letters to 60 colleges and universities it says are under investigation for alleged violations “relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination.” The list of schools included elite Ivy League schools, state schools and smaller institutions. The letters warned of possible consequences, including cuts in federal funding, if they don’t take adequate steps to protect Jewish students. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have erupted periodically on college campuses and have led to the arrest of hundreds of demonstrators.

• President Trump wants to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist. The American Jewish Committee said it was “appalled” by Khalil’s views, but did not praise his arrest. Judge Jesse Furman, a Jewish federal judge, who blocked Trump’s deportation order of Khalil, faced a wave of online attacks from far-right figures — including against his wife, a prominent Jewish educator.

• The man charged with killing seven and injuring dozens more at the 2022 July 4 parade in the heavily Jewish city of Highland Park, Ill, changed his plea to guilty as his trial was about to begin.

• Brad Lander, one of two Jewish candidates in a crowded mayoral race in New York City, the largest Jewish community outside Israel, unveiled a public safety plan that includes measures to curb the rise in antisemitism.

• Every Jewish U.S. House Democrat urged Google CEO Sundar Pichai to reinstate International Holocaust Remembrance Day and Jewish American Heritage Month as default listings on Google Calendar.

• Steve Bannon accepted a “Warrior for Israel” award from Orthodox pro-MAGA activists, using the stage to dismiss accusations of antisemitism and calling himself “one of the most pro-Israel people out there,” a week after he made a straight-armed gesture many saw as a Nazi salute.

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he invoked emergency powers to bypass Congress and expedite $4 billion in military aid to Israel.

• A federal task force on antisemitism will visit 10 U.S. college campuses to address rising antisemitic incidents, including Columbia, Harvard and UCLA.

• Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden administration’s antisemitism envoy and a longtime Holocaust scholar at Emory University, said she was considering a visiting professor job next year at Columbia. “But I’m now convinced that to do so would be folly — to serve as a prop or a fig leaf,” she wrote of her decision to turn down the offer.

• Nicole Shanahan, the billionaire and former vice presidential running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during the 2024 election, said she is now a member of Jews for Jesus.

• Jeremy Strong did not win an Oscar for his role as Jewish attorney Roy Cohn in a biopic about Donald Trump, will star in Netflix’s “The Boys From Brazil,” a series about the 1978 Nazi cloning thriller.

• Photographer Gillian Laub has been documenting the stories of the remaining estimated 245,000 Holocaust survivors, capturing more than 300 portraits so far.

• Mark Carney, the newly elected leader of Canada’s Liberal Party and the incoming prime minister, has vowed to protect Canadian Jews amid rising antisemitism.

• Conservative radio host Anthony Cumia, who was fired a decade ago by SiriusXM for sexual content and hate speech and who has since shared antisemitic and racist content on social media, is back on the air with a new show, “The Anthony Cumia Show,” on WABC, according to a press release from the station’s parent company, Red Apple Audio Networks. John Catsimatidis, the company’s owner, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “WABC will not allow him to say anything antisemitic.”

Twitter suspended Cumia’s account in 2017, and permanently banned him from the platform in 2021. He was allowed to return after the website was purchased by Elon Musk, the following year.

• Antisemitism in Switzerland has surged to an “unprecedented level” across the country, according to the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG) in collaboration with the Foundation Against Racism and Antisemitism ((GRA). The war in the Middle East has fueled incidents, the report said. In 2024, 103 incidents were reported, compared to 38 the previous year, and 6 in 2022. Incidents are climbing this year.

“Whereas attacks such as verbal abuse, spitting, physical assault, and even brutal attacks on life had been distant occurrences happening abroad, they are now a reality here,” the SIG and GRA said.

• A terrorist rammed his car into a bus stop in Israel, then opened fire, killing an elderly man and critically injuring a soldier before being killed by police.

• Thew chief rabbi of Orléans, France, was assaulted in the city on March 29 — an attack French President Emmanuel Macron condemned as a reminder of the “poison” of antisemitism.

A light-filled atrium is featured in the new Tree of Life museum, education center and synagogue building, to be erected in Pittsburgh at the site of the Oct. 27, 2018 shooting that killed 11 worshippers, one of the “deadliest antisemitic attacks in American history,” said Michael Bernstein, the synagogue’s chairman of the board of directors. An exhibit at the University of Pittsburgh introduces information about the shooting, items gifted to Pittsburgh’s Jewish community in its aftermath, and an overview of the history of antisemitism in America.

The building will include an education center and museum on the grounds, and will continue to be the spiritual home of the synagogue’s congregation. Lead architect is the renowned Daniel Libeskind, who has designed Holocaust memorials and also the master plan for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site after 9/11. Libeskind has described the design theme as bringing light into darkness, tailored to the programmatic needs of the community. An outdoor memorial is being designed by a committee representing the nine families who lost loved ones in the synagogue shooting.

The white cars moved slowly, their cargo of coffins unbearably heavy, their silence loud. Inside, the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her two small sons, Ariel and Kfir; also Oded Lifshitz, a retired journalist — all hostages stolen from their homes on Oct. 7, returned in death.

The convoy drove past Nir Oz, the kibbutz from which they had been taken. Crowds lined the road as the cars passed — somber, standing with Israeli flags and some whispering the national anthem.

Jews grieved together on social media, where an orange square and orange hearts — referencing the redheaded Bibas family — quickly spread as symbols of heartbreak. At Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, mournful music played as large monitors showed video clips of the four hostages in happier times. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it “a wrenching day, a day of grief.”  [The body returned could not be confirmed as Shiri Bibas.]

Reported by Forward, Times of Israel, CNN, Getty Images

Leo Geyer, a British musician and Oxford University doctoral candidate, has spent eight years studying the music written and played at Auschwitz. The orchestras, made up of inmates, were ordered to play marching tunes at camp events. Geyer’s discoveries comprise 210 fragments, some complete scores.

Geyer came upon the forgotten manuscripts by chance in 2015 when he first visited Auschwitz while working on a commemorative piece of music to honor the late Sir Martin Gilbert, the author of a history of the Holocaust. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, an archivist mentioned some fragments of musical scores that had been left there. Since then, Geyer has visited many times to put the fragments together. Pictured, trumpeter Jakub Imielski plays one of the pieces at the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp on Jan. 27 in Oswiecim, Poland.                                      Windfall Films photo