A ‘Bachelorette’ contestant this season is the great-great-grandson of the last chief rabbi of Kovno
‘Bachelorette’ Jenn Tran gives a rose to Jewish contestant Jeremy Simon. (Disney/John Fleenor)
(JTA) — Jeremy Simon, a New York City real estate investor, was thinking of a rabbi who died during the Holocaust as he headed out on a recent date.
Simon, 29, is one of four men who remain in competition in the current season of the matchmaking show The Bachelorette, which began in June. The show, now in its 21st season, features a single woman choosing among 25 men vying for her love. (The Bachelor flips the sexes.)
In the episode that aired Monday night, Simon and Bachelorette Jenn Tran went on a nighttime date at the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum in Seattle, where they spoke about their cultural and religious differences. Tran, who is Buddhist, said she grew up with her family going to temple for big holidays and is looking for someone with the same outlook on “life, culture, tradition, family and love.”
Simon, in turn, spoke about the importance of his Jewish heritage in his vision for his future. He cited his mother as one reason for his values. His great-great-grandfather, who he said was “a very famous rabbi in Lithuania,” was another.
“Being Jewish culturally is very important to me,” Simon said. “I don’t expect you to convert. I don’t need you to convert. But eventually I do want kids.”
He told Tran he hoped she would meet his grandmother — and then said that her grandfather, the “very famous rabbi,” had “died in the country because he wouldn’t leave during World War II.”
He was referring to Avraham Dov-Ber Kahana Shapiro, the last chief rabbi of Kovno, now Kaunas, Lithuania. He shared the rabbi’s name with Hey Alma, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s partner site.
Shapiro was born in 1873 in modern-day Belarus and was the great-great-great-grandson of Rabbi Chaim Volozhin, who established the Volozhin Yeshiva, widely considered to be the first modern yeshiva as well as one of the most highly-regarded in Europe. Considered an “ilui,” or Talmud prodigy, he became the chief rabbi of Kovno in 1923.
War broke out while Shapiro was in Switzerland receiving medical treatment. Shapiro’s son, then living in New York, asked his parents to travel to the United States, where they might find safety. But Shapiro famously rebuffed the invitation.
“The captain is the last to abandon his sinking ship, not the first,” he wrote in a letter to his son. “At this time of danger, my place is with the people of my city. I am going to Kovno.”
Shapiro died of illness in the Kovno Ghetto on Feb. 27, 1943, at the age of 69.
Despite an active resistance effort, only about 10% of the 30,000 Jews imprisoned in the ghetto were alive when the Soviets liberated Kovno in the fall of 1944.
Shapiro’s son, an attorney named Yerucham Yehuda Leib Shapiro, later published a collection of his father’s religious opinions, known as responsa, called “Devar Avraham.” (A separate set of responsa from the Kovno Ghetto, about questions related to Jewish law under Nazi rule, survived after their author, Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, buried his writing before the ghetto’s liquidation and destruction. Oshry was Shapiro’s student.)
In addition to holding his family’s history close, Jeremy Simon was a member of the Jewish fraternity AEPi at the University of Connecticut, which he discussed in a previous episode of The Bachelorette, and is affiliated with AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, according to his LinkedIn profile.
On the most recent episode, Tran told Simon she would be open to a multicultural family. She said she has many Jewish friends in Miami, where she lives. “We break some bread,” she said, adding that it “would be totally cool to have our kids grow up as Jewish.”
Simon told her, “Honestly the idea of Jewish-Buddhist kids sounds fun. I feel like it would be fun with you.”
And Tran told him, using the Hebrew word for family, “I’m so excited to meet your mishpocha.”
The Bachelor franchise has received criticism for its lack of racial and religious diversity over its many iterations, and relatively few Jews have appeared on the show since the original version began airing in 2002. In recent seasons, Christian bachelors have asked contestants to pray with them.
In 2009, single father Jason Mesnick became the show’s first Jewish Bachelor, marrying the runner-up of the show, Molly Malaney, in a ceremony filmed for an ABC special. The couple remains married today.
Attorney Andi Dorfman was the first female Jewish contestant to join the franchise in 2014, and so far remains the only Jewish Bachelorette.
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