Julian Ungar-Sargon, at The Blogs

Julian Ungar-Sargon

Aug 21, 2026, 7:45 PM

Sometimes the dead do not wait for us beneath the earth. They wait within the letters that still bear their names. I remember almost nothing of the walk through the abandoned cemetery. Only the shock. One tall granite stone. Standing. Alone. Every other monument had yielded to weather, neglect, and time. Broken. Fallen. Swallowed by grass and silence. Yet...

Aug 15, 2026, 9:23 AM

The City My Father Lost — Part III

“The dead ask very little. Only that the ground be permitted to receive them.” The Zentralfriedhof is enormous, and the Jewish sections are at the far gates, and the taxi driver had to be given the gate number twice. Marcus and...

Aug 7, 2026, 7:05 PM

The City My Father Lost — Part II

“A synagogue is not a building. It is a room in which a community agrees, weekly, to be addressed.” On the third morning I walked from Marchettigasse to Stumpergasse, which takes about eight minutes, and which my grandfather did on...

Aug 2, 2026, 9:14 AM

The City My Father Lost — Part I

Some journeys are measured in miles. This one was measured in sentences — my father’s, which I had been carrying, unread, for sixty years. The Austrian Airlines flight came down over the Marchfeld in the late afternoon and I understood,...

About Me

Julian Ungar-Sargon is a rabbi, a scholar, and a neurologist. Trained at the Royal London Hospital and Columbia Presbyterian, he also holds a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD in Ancient Near Eastern Languages from Brandeis. He writes daily on the Talmud, and on healing, poetry, and the spiritual life of medicine.