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Climate Change Emergency Demands a Jewish Response
BY JAKIR MANELA AND NIGEL SAVAGE
“Who shall live and who
shall die … who by water and
who by fire … who by earth-
quake and who by plague ...”
TWENTY YEARS AGO,
people cried when they said
these words on Rosh Hashanah,
six days after the attacks of Sept.

11. The ancient words suddenly
held intense contemporary force.

Twenty years later we are
being bombarded by climate-re-
lated disasters, one after another
— each year worse than the
last — and again our ancient
machzor, the High Holidays
prayerbook — carries fresh,
urgent force for all of us.

Who by water? On the
16th anniversary of Hurricane
Katrina’s horrific impact in
New Orleans, another monster
hurricane tested the rebuilt
levees, cut off power and left
catastrophic damage. Then the
storm traveled up the East Coast
causing widespread tornado-like
conditions and massive floods,
killing at least 24. All this just
months after hundreds died in
Germany due to unprecedented
flooding. Who by fire? Raging wildfires
everywhere: in California,
Oregon and Canada; in Greece,
Italy, Turkey and Russia.

Californians confronting
dangerous air quality for
months at a time, year after year.

Eerie red-orange skies, smoke
cascading across the continent,
impacting cities as far away as
the East Coast.

Who by plague? COVID
reveals just how fragile we are —
as individuals and as a society
— and how it is always those
most vulnerable who lose the
most amid crisis.

Hundreds of thousands of
American Jews entered these
High Holidays having been
deeply moved and inspired by
Jewish environmental educa-
tion, action and advocacy over
the past 20 years and more.

Our rising tide movement faces
this historic inflection point in
a deeply Jewish and universal
posture. The IPCC Report,
published just last month, makes
clear that things are going to get
worse before — if — they get
better. Confronting this crisis seems
monumental — because it is. So
much so that individuals might
believe there is nothing they can
do in the face of forces that have
transformed life on the planet so
quickly and negatively.

This crisis is so enormous,
so global, so existential, many
of us wonder how much our
individual, institutional and/or
communal actions can help turn
the tide against such a tidal wave
of climate disasters.

We hear you. And we cannot
promise you what the future
will bring. But we can promise
you that by investing in a deep,
universal cultural change across
the Jewish world, we will be part
of the solution — in the same
way that victory gardens were
part of the World War II effort
70 years ago and tzedakah boxes
helped launch and defend Israel
throughout the 20th century.

Of course we must fight
for aggressive political and
economic responses as well
— both of which become
more achievable as we build
a passionate, committed
Jewish climate movement that
transcends ages, denominations
and geographies.

During these Days of Awe,
we must face this crisis while we
face our own norah, our fear that
it may be too late.

In the spirit of the holy days,
with a commitment to repen-
tance, prayer and justice, we ask
you to join us in doing three key
things, which together make up
the Brit Hazon, a commitment
to change:
Change your behavior. Drive
less. Ride your bike more. Eat less
meat. Use less energy at home,
in your vehicle, in everything
you do. Rosh Hashanah calls
us to return to our best selves
through teshuvah, repentance.

It challenges us to own our
mistakes and pushes us to do
better in the year ahead.

Give. Time, money, advice,
in-kind services and/or other
support. So many inspiring
leaders and powerful organiza-
tions are working around the
world to respond to the climate
crisis. When you consider
giving tzedakah this season,
please consider donating to
any Jewish environmental or
general climate organization
on your radar. Give wherever
you feel called, but please give.

This is a global emergency of
epic proportions. We need your
support now more than ever.

Support systemic change. It is
time for Jewish communities and
institutions across the country
— synagogues, day schools,
camps, federations, JCCs, Hillels
and countless others — to
summon the will and leadership
to join the hundreds of Jewish
institutions that have blazed this
trail for many years by priori-
tizing sustainability and caring
for creation as a fundamental
Jewish value. When institutional
leaders commit to the Hazon
Seal of Sustainability, we embark
upon a multi-year journey
together as partners, integrating
Jewish environmental education,
action, advocacy and adapta-
tion into your community/
organization. In every age group,
demographic and organi-
zational structure — from
b’nai mitzvah experiences to
capital campaigns to interfaith
partnerships and everything
in between — we must rise
up to confront this challenge
with the full might of our
institutions, our culture, our
communities and the power
of Jewish wisdom, ethics and
spirit. This Rosh Hashanah also
marked the beginning of the
shmita year, quite literally a
supersized, yearlong Shabbat —
an end and a beginning, a time
to look back over the last period
and forward to the next.

So may this Rosh Hashanah
inaugurate a year of Jewish
communal reflection, facing the
full threat of this crisis and our
unique responsibility to take
action for everyone alive today,
and for our children, grandchil-
dren and many generations to
come — in America, in Israel
and worldwide. These actions are
inspired by a great love, a deep joy,
hope and faith — and powerful
communities that together will
spark a Jewish cultural renais-
sance interconnected with a
global transformation toward a
brighter future for our people
and all people everywhere.

The Jewish people have a long
history. Our ancestors endured
unspeakable suffering and
calamity, then rose to meet the
next challenge. In this moment
we can do no less. l
Jakir Manela is the CEO of Hazon,
and Nigel Savage is the founder
and former CEO of Hazon.

Feel the Presence, Absence of 9/11 Victims 20 Years Later
BY JESSICA RUSSAK-HOFFMAN
14 SEPTEMBER 16, 2021
Two nights after the Twin
Towers fell on 9/11, we were
instructed to evacuate our
building. There was talk of a
potential attack on the nearby
Empire State Building. My
roommates and I covered
our mouths and noses with
towels to protect against the
still-fetid air and walked east
from our midtown Manhattan
Stern College apartment to
get out of the danger zone.

Every telephone pole was
plastered with hastily printed
“MISSING” signs, each with
a different smiling face and a
phone number to call.

At the corner, right where
the barricades met the Bellevue
Hospital Center, two lines
formed behind folding tables
on the sidewalk.

“What are these lines?” I
JEWISH EXPONENT
asked a state trooper.

“One to give the name of the
missing person and check to see
if they’re in the hospital. The
other to provide DNA,” he said.

Indeed, there were people
in the lines clutching Ziploc
bags of hair brushes and tooth-
brushes. As the days passed,
the line for the hospital names
grew shorter, and the DNA line
grew longer. The missing were
presumed dead.

So when I traveled from
Grand Central Terminal on
Friday to spend Shabbos at the
University of Pennsylvania I was
mortified to hear someone at
Hillel joke: “Some guy trying to
leave his wife is for sure faking
his death right now.”
I said nothing. I was still in
shock from the attacks, but this
tragedy was not mine, either. I
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was a witness, not a victim.

One month later I was
asked to help organize Stern
students to sit shmira at
the New York City Medical
Examiner’s temporary morgue
outside Bellevue every Shabbos
— keeping the Jewish custom
of watching over the dead.

Every Friday night I took the
midnight shift and arrived at
the very spot where the two
lines had formed. Fate brought
me there. A mitzvah brought
me there again and again.

Every single time it felt like I
was walking onto holy ground.

We were a constant flow
of young Jews; the same few
volumes of Psalms passed from
hand to hand for months on end.

What started off as a
catastrophe that I happened
to witness became something
different. During my once-a-
week midnight Shabbos shift,
my job was to offer comfort to
the souls that lingered there in
that makeshift outdoor morgue.

I lived inside that space for nearly
nine months, and when it ended,
it was my turn to recover.

Twenty years later, I can
honestly say that I haven’t. It is
raw. I still think about that Penn
student who joked about the
missing, and perhaps it has made
me stronger in teaching my
own children about empathy
and the right words to say.

Instead I seek closure.

I visit the memorial and see
the waterfalls flowing into the
memorial pools.

In the depths, in their
company, inverted into the
ground below
memorial waterfalls, I go back to one
of the Psalms. To the one I’d
memorized and could recite over
and over when I was too tired at
4 in the morning to read from
the book. Tehillim 130, which
begins: “A song of ascents. Out
of the depths I call You, O Lord.”
Every year around this time
I am brought into the depths.

Out of the depths I continue
to call. l
Jessica Russak-Hoffman is a
Seattle-based author.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM No One Lost Their Jewish Last Name at Ellis Island
BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
SHORTLY BEFORE he died,
my dad gave me a trove of family
documents, some dating to the
19th century. For the first time
I had confirmation of what our
family name was before a great-
uncle changed it to Carroll when
he and his brothers immigrated
to America.

My father’s parents moved
from Russia to Paris before
coming to the United States.

Among the papers is a yellowed
French immigration document
signed by my grandfather on
March 13, 1913; there he spells his
last name Karoltchouk. On my
grandmother’s “Permis de sejour
a un etranger,” issued in Paris in
1914, it’s spelled Karolchouk. A
cursory web search locates Jews
with variations like Korolczuk
and Karolchuk, which I am told
is a common Polish surname.

My father was always ambiv-
alent about his last name. His
uncle was probably right that a
deracinated name like Carroll
made it easier for a family of
Polish Jewish immigrants trying
to gain a foothold in America.

The dilemmas of Jewish
name-changing form a powerful
chapter in novelist Dara Horn’s
new collection of essays. “People
Love Dead Jews” is an examina-
tion — deeply reported, at times
brilliant and often bitter — on
the persistent hatred aimed at
Jews, even in their absence. A
recurring theme of the book is
the way antisemites, philosem-
ites and Jews themselves rewrite
and distort the past, and how
Jewish identity is “defined and
determined by the opinions and
projections of others.”
Our last names are a case
in point. Horn explodes the
old myth that Jews’ names
were changed at Ellis Island by
clerks too lazy or malevolent
to spell them right. In public
lectures and a 2014 essay, Horn
would explain that “nobody at
Ellis Island ever wrote down
immigrants’ names.”
Instead, she’d cite works
like Kirsten Fermaglich’s “A
Rosenberg by Any Other Name,”
a deep dive into the data showing
the “heartbreaking reality” of
Jewish immigrants changing
their own names “because they
cannot find a job, or because
their children are being humil-
iated or discriminated against at
school, or because with their real
names, no one will hire them for
any white-collar position.”
What Horn didn’t count on
was the anger of her audiences,
who insisted that their grand-
parents and great-grandparents
were passive victims of a clerk’s
pen. Horn explains this denial
as a “deep pattern in Jewish
history,” which is “all about
living in places where you are
utterly vulnerable and cannot
admit it.”
Instead of fessing up to that
vulnerability and their culpa-
bility in bowing to it, many
Jews prefer to invent more
benign “origin stories,” either
to exonerate their non-Jewish
neighbors or spare themselves
and their children the “humil-
iation” that the new country is
no more friendly to Jews than
the one they left. If Jews were
to tell the truth about why
Karolchouk became Carroll, or
(in my mother’s case) Greenberg
became Green, they’d be
“confirming two enormous fears:
first, that this country doesn’t
really accept you, and second,
that the best way to survive and
thrive is to dump any outward
sign of your Jewish identity, and
symbolically cut that cord that
goes back to Mount Sinai.”
Horn ends up saluting the
“enormous emotional resources”
JEWISH EXPONENT
displayed by the Jews who cling
to the Ellis Island myth, but I felt
hers is an overly harsh assess-
ment of the survival strategies
employed out of necessity by a
previous generation of Jews. I
can’t prove that my great-uncle
and his brothers weren’t humil-
iated by the name change, but I
am guessing that it went down
easier than Horn imagines. A
new country, a new language,
a new alphabet. So much was
lost in translation. Given the
choice between the misery they
left behind in the Old Country
and the opportunities available
to them even in an intolerant
America, their generation felt
losing the last name was a palat-
able trade-off.

History bears out their choice.

Within a generation or two, the
name-changers’ children were
able to assert their Jewishness in
countless ways. The prosperity
that came with “passing” allowed
them to build public Jewish lives,
worship as they chose and climb
the ladder of success unthwarted
by the twisted imaginations of
antisemites. Having achieved
success, these Jews would build
forward-facing Jewish institu-
tions, proudly attach their names
to dormitories and concert halls,
and send their children to Jewish
day schools without fear that
they would be denied admission
to the top universities.

Horn’s book, by contrast, is
haunted by the killings of Jews
in Pittsburgh, Poway and Jersey
City, but those attacks remain
the exceptions. Despite the
beefed-up security at American
synagogues in the wake of
9/11, and the renewed feelings
of vulnerability they instilled,
those attacks don’t reflect the
lived reality of most American
Jews 100 years removed from
Ellis Island.

Jewish survival and adapta-
tion have often depended on
shape shifting, from first-cen-
tury Yavneh to 20th-century
Tel Aviv, when Jews like David
Grün and Goldie Myerson
traded one kind of Jewish name
for another. Besides, what we
consider “Jewish” last names are
often themselves “un-Jewish”
place names and occupations,
adopted after state legislation in
Yiddish-speaking lands required
hereditary names instead of the
patronymics the Jews had been
using. They certainly didn’t go
back to Sinai.

Name changing wasn’t a
humiliation but a strategy,
and one that, in the American
context, has paid off handsomely.

Like my dad, I sometimes
wish our last name sounded
more Jewish. But to even think
of reclaiming a “Jewish” name is
a privilege that would have been
unimaginable to so many Jews
living in truly hostile lands. And
the notion of what is and isn’t
a “Jewish” name is itself being
complicated — and enriched
— by conversion, interfaith
marriage and all the other factors
that have diversified the Jewish
community in recent years.

Still, as Horn wrote in her
original article about the Ellis
Island myth, the internet has
become a “toxic sea” of antise-
mitic misinformation, and “that
makes it all the more important
to get Jewish history right.” We
should all recognize the Ellis
Island story for the myth that it
is, and embrace the real stories
of courage and adaptation that
brought us to this place and
time. l
Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor-
in-chief of The New York Jewish
Week and senior editor of the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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SEPTEMBER 16, 2021
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