Barbara Finkelstein
By Barbara Finkelstein
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Yiddish World Grassroots Influences the Mainstream In Fight Against Child Sex Abuse
This article originally [appeared](http://yiddish.forward.com/articles/203732/ray-of-hope-for-sex-abuse-victims-in-the-orthodox/? “appeared”) in the Forverts. When a notable anti-domestic violence activist asked her father, the founder of a Baltimore yeshiva, how rabbis had dealt with child sexual abuse in prewar Europe, he told her, “We closed the shutters.” Up until a few years ago, this selective blindness was the de facto rabbinic…
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Yiddish World The ‘Turncoats’ Of Wojslawice — And What They Say About Us
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The Jews of Uchanie, my father’s shtetl in Lublin province, used to say about the Jews of Wojslawice just down the road, that they were meshumodim. Turncoats. What worse epithet could you hurl at a fellow Jew? Slawek Nowodworski, the translator/genealogist my son and I hired in…
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Culture The Holocaust Memoir I Didn’t Help Write — And Wish I Had
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Nolan Gurfinkiel belonged to the dwindling tribe of Holocaust survivors who used to eat at my parents’ Shabbos table. He was a Schindler Jew, one of about 1,200 Krakow Jews who survived through the good offices of Oskar Schindler, Europe’s most famous Righteous Gentile. Nolan wore dark…
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Culture In Poland, Artistic Excavations Reveal a Lost World of Jews
This article, which originally appeared in the Forverts, is one of a four-part series by Barbara Finkelstein about her recent trip to Poland. The Grodzka Gate Centre in the city of Lublin came into being in the early 1990s, when Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, a physics student, set out to establish an independent theater in the Grodzka…
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Culture How I Reunited My Holocaust Survivor Father With His Long Lost Neighbor
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Jerzy “Jurek” Skarżyński had been up half the night. The next day he was going to meet the daughter and grandson of a Jewish man who once lived in Uchanie, his home village, and his mind would not slow down. Jurek, a Polish Christian, had not spoken…
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