opinion
How Fostering Jewish Life Would
Safeguard Malmö’s Jews
Daniel Radomski | JNS
B 16
DECEMBER 29, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
The Stortorget, a large plaza in the center of Malmö.

Current Malmö Mayor Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh
has worked closely with the local Jewish commu-
nity to combat antisemitism, including appointing
a special coordinator. She also has entered into an
agreement with the Jewish community to jointly
strengthen public knowledge about Jewish life and
history, as a manner of countering antisemitism
and reducing the community’s vulnerability. She
embodies the need for government and Jewish
communal offi cials to collaborate, and I hope to
see these initiatives fl ourish under her leadership.

Also under Stjernfeldt Jammeh’s stewardship,
the city’s coordinator against antisemitism, Mirjam
Katzin, last month published a second report about
the Malmö Jewish community and its perception of
local challenges. While the qualitative report con-
cluded that Jewish residents of Malmö face hatred
against Jews, particularly in times of growing
tensions in the Middle East, several Jewish Malmö
residents also shared that they had an “optimistic
view of the situation.”
In other words, the Jewish community wants to
counter antisemitism, but does not view it as the
defi ning factor of Jewish life and identity in the
city of Malmö.

Positively featuring Jewish life and culture in the
public square would strengthen the connection
between the city and its Jewish citizens, accord-
ing to the respondents. Just as essential, it would
help to educate the community at large about the
need for Jews to enjoy a proud and public Jewish
identity, critical in curtailing growth of the world’s
oldest hatred.

In other words, the Jewish community of Malmö
is sophisticated in its interests and nuanced in
its complexity and needs to work alongside the
Malmö government in jointly developing a deep-
ened and accessible sense of Jewish pride. Already,
the city has partnered with the Jewish community
to open a Jewish Knowledge Center in the city’s
synagogue, to improve awareness of the Jewish
national minority in schools, and to develop mean-
ingful interfaith eff orts, among other outcomes.

At the same time, Swedish leaders must be clear
and consistent in their immediate and forceful con-
demnation of threats against their Jewish citizens,
whatever the source or motivation.

Finally, Jewish life anywhere, especially in a
city as rich in Jewish history as Malmö, must
not be reduced to a chronicle of persecution,
as in the case of my own family’s experiences
before their arrival in Sweden. Instead, coordi-
nated actions against antisemitism, combined with
eff orts to strengthen Jewish identity and the com-
munity’s understanding of the Jewish people, will
serve as a model for other locales and safeguard
Jews not only in Malmö, but elsewhere around
the globe. JE
Daniel Radomski is the head of strategy and programs for
the World Jewish Congress and executive director of its
Jewish Diplomatic Corps. He grew up in Malmö, Sweden.

Christian Beiwinkel via Wikimedia Commons
igotry anywhere is a grave injustice, yet it
becomes all the more real to me when I hear
about antisemitism in Sweden.

This nation, which was a respite for thousands
of Jewish refugees shortly after World War II,
eventually became a symbol of humanism and
hospitality. Among those saved were my paternal
grandparents, who arrived in Malmö aided by
Count Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish diplomat who
co-chaired the Red Cross. As was often the case
with Holocaust survivors, my grandparents soon
began to rebuild their shattered lives after their
arrival, and in 1946, they welcomed Chaim, my
father, into the world.

In 1969, Sweden was again a safe haven for my
family. My mother, Dora, a 19-year-old Polish student
of chemistry at the University of Wrocław, immigrated
to escape a further wave of antisemitism.

And today, my extended family still lives in
Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, and sees it as
their home.

While I now reside in the United States, I
will always feel indebted to Sweden. However, I
fi nd myself heartbroken because Malmö, whose
Jewish community dates back to the 17th century,
has become associated not with tolerance, but
with antisemitism, specifi cally motivated by hatred
toward Israel.

Unfortunately, numerous physical and verbal
attacks against Jews have occurred, in addition to
several pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have
featured overt antisemitism. In December 2017, for
example, several hundred people marched through
Malmö shouting, “We have announced the intifada
from Malmö. We want our freedom back, and we
will shoot the Jews.”
Ilmar Reepalu, who served as the city’s mayor
from 1994 to 2013, essentially accused the Jewish
community of generating hatred, arguing that it did
not distance itself clearly enough from Israel. Can
you imagine a politician blaming any other group
for the hatred they experience?
I, for one, cannot.

Fortunately, Malmö’s current leadership strikes a
diff erent tone. In 2021, the city hosted the Malmö
Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating
Antisemitism, which I proudly attended in my pro-
fessional role for the World Jewish Congress. At
that time, the international community made spe-
cifi c commitments to counter Holocaust distortion
and denial and fi ght antisemitism.




feature
Wild pitch
How an Israeli kibbutznik became
a coach for the Cincinnati Reds
Elli Wohlgelernter | JTA
Alon Leichman, hired as a pitching coach for the Cincinnati Reds,
plays for Team Israel during the eighth inning of the Tokyo Olympic
Games baseball opening round against the United States in
Yokohama, Japan, on July 30, 2021.

archaeological site that gives Gezer its name.

And that’s where Leichman grew up, fi rst brought
to the fi eld by his father for the 1989 Maccabiah
Games, fi ve weeks after Alon was born on May 29.

“I never related to that fi eld as the place my dad
built,” said Leichman. “It was a fi eld that was on the
kibbutz. Growing up, everyone around me played
— my older brother played, and all my friends, a
little older than me, played.

“I remember — I was 4, in gan [pre-kindergarten],
and I would walk to the baseball fi eld and practice.

I vividly remember being in the gan and going to
practice. But baseball on the kibbutz is just some-
thing that I grew into. Everyone did it; I was not
special, just another kid who played. I happened
to love it a lot.”
‘We’re good people’
So he played and played and got better and better.

By age 10, he was on the team representing Israel
at a tournament in the Netherlands. But baseball
in Israel back then was in its infancy, and there was
not enough money to pay for the team to travel.

So Leichman had to work extra hours to get the
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 17
P Kazuhiro Fujihara/AFP via Getty Images
KIBBUTZ GEZER, Israel — Bill James, the infl uen-
tial baseball writer, historian and statistician, once
described the great Yankees fi rst baseman Don
Mattingly in only four words: “100% ballplayer,
0% bulls***.”
The same can be said of Alon Leichman, the
fi rst athlete born in Israel to make it to the major
leagues, having just been named assistant pitching
coach of the Cincinnati Reds.

Under manager David Bell, Leichman will help
instruct the team’s pitchers, including Chase
Anderson, Luis Cessa, Fernando Cruz, Alexis Díaz
and Hunter Greene, on mechanics, pitch selection,
preparation, concentration and execution.

His journey has been unlikely, verging on prepos-
terous: How could someone from Israel, where
baseball is barely an afterthought, step out of the
wheat fi elds of a kibbutz to the highest level of
baseball in the world?
The 33-year-old is the product of Kibbutz Gezer
(the “Carrot Kibbutz”), the youngest child born to
two idealists who grew up in Zionist youth groups
and helped found this kibbutz in central Israel in
the 1970s together with other Anglo — that is,
English-speaking — Zionists.

But David, Leichman’s father, couldn’t leave it all
behind in Queens, N.Y. He was a baseball fan, a big
baseball fan — “I always knew that if, God forbid,
there’s a fi re in my house, I know where my base-
ball glove is.” One day, he and his fellow kibbutz
residents had an idea: Why don’t we cut off a slice
of the wheat crop and construct a regulation-sized
fi eld in the southwest corner of the kibbutz, where
we can all go play when we get off work?
That was 1983, and there wasn’t a single base-
ball or softball fi eld in all of Israel. So David, who
was in charge of construction on the kibbutz
(Leichman’s mother, Miri, is the kibbutz rabbi),
built his fi eld of dreams, just 450 yards from his
front door and in the shadow of the 4,000-year-old