Are Jewish Heritage Tours of NYC in Our Future?

“This is where the Jews used to live,” I’ve told numerous Jewish heritage travel groups over the years. This type of tourism that combines education, remembrance, and genealogical discovery has been a significant part of my career as an educator.

Cities that once bustled with Jewish life in Europe regularly leave behind architectural clues, the most common being indentations on doorposts where mezuzot once hung or Stars of David still etched into former synagogues that are now libraries or community centers. Over the past 20 years, “Stolpersteine” (stumbling stones) have been installed in cities, towns, and villages across Europe to mark the last known residences of Jews and other persecuted groups forced to leave during the Holocaust. It’s disheartening to hear about instances when current residents have resisted having these humble, individually engraved markers placed outside their homes, not wanting to be reminded of this lachrymose aspect of their local history.

I know firsthand about Jewish heritage travel. In 2019, I visited Lithuania as part of a Park Avenue Synagogue trip to Eastern Europe. Realizing that my ancestral village, Giedraičiai in Lithuanian and Gedrevich in Yiddish, was only 27 miles from Vilnius, I arranged a side trip to see the shtetl my family came from. Miraculously, my grandmother’s house was still standing.

While imagining a quick visit to take a photo, I quickly discovered standing on my Bubbe’s doorstep that this wooden shack had many lessons to offer that could only be learned in context. Cultural, religious, and economic divides not only reinforced my grandmother’s feelings that she was seen as Jewish and not Lithuanian, but also compelled her to leave for the United States in the late 1920s.

My Bubbe’s unequivocal view of Jewish persecution in Lithuania was confirmed by her own experiences and by the fate of those who stayed behind. The last members of our family were murdered in August 1941 by the Nazis and their collaborators in what Father Patrick Desbois calls “the Holocaust by bullets.” As much as I wanted to see where my family lived, the visit felt more like a pilgrimage to a memorial.

This experience reinforced that “Fiddler on the Roof,” which premiered 60 years ago, is more than nostalgic storytelling. It’s a poignant portrayal of yet another painful stop in the Jewish travelogue.

Since October 7, seventeen synagogues have been set aflame in Tunisia, Germany, Canada, Armenia, Russia, France, Ukraine, Australia, and, yes, the United States. Each time I read about these arson attacks, Mordechai Gebirtig’s 1936 song “Es Brent”, Yiddish for “It’s burning”, starts ringing in my ears.

The ADL’s data makes one thing clear: Antisemitism isn’t coming from one group, political party, or ideology. To make matters worse, 25% of Americans believe that these attacks are “understandable”?!

Since the beginning of this academic year, I’ve experienced three antisemitic incidents along the East Coast. In each case, no one around me said a word of support for me or condemnation of those spewing hate.

In this full-blown pandemic of hate, do we, as Jews, still have a future in the country where our first president declared: “To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance”?

Tensions in the American Jewish community are understandably high. The recent murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim at the Capital Jewish Museum, the anti-Zionist encampments and unrest on college campuses, and the rising tide of antisemitism, even before October 7, raise unsettling questions about Jewish safety in the United States. The results of the NYC Democratic mayoral primary have only complicated an already uncomfortable situation.

After visiting the Touro Synagogue, the oldest standing synagogue in the United States, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned a haunting reflection in his 1852 poem “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport”:

They slumber here, beside an alien shore;

Their temple has no voice, their law no hand;

Yet still their faith endures;

and evermore Their monuments bear witness in the land.

Channeling Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews, Longfellow laments the disappearance of this once-vibrant Jewish community as he simultaneously marvels at Judaism’s enduring faith and legacy. Looking at this poem anew, we can wonder whether this poet is talking to his generation or ours?

Es brent? Is America Jewry as we know it withering? Only time will tell.

With the Jewish people currently within “The Three Weeks” marking the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, what keeps me up at night is the fear that, someday, Jewish heritage tours will include Crown Heights, Teaneck, and the Upper West Side. Neither my Bubbe nor Longfellow would be surprised.

And yet, I don’t believe the American chapter of Jewish history is over. I, for one, hope that Americans of all races, faiths, and creeds will look back many years from now and admire how our generation found the strength to build bridges and create a civic society far greater than our founders and ancestors ever imagined.