This piece is part of our Witnessing series, which shares pieces from Israeli authors and authors in Israel, as well as the experiences of Jewish writers around the globe in the aftermath of October 7th.
It is critical to understand history not just through the books that will be written later, but also through the first-hand testimonies and real-time accounting of events as they occur. At Jewish Book Council, we understand the value of these written testimonials and of sharing these individual experiences. It’s more important now than ever to give space to these voices and narratives.
It was a hot and humid day in late July 2018. I was on my hands and knees weeding the driveway to prepare my house in Sag Harbor, NY, for an August renter. Renting out the house was a major source of my income.
My eighty-something-year-old next-door neighbor, Gail, pulled up to the foot of my driveway in her Mercedes convertible and tooted her horn. The top down, she called out to me from the driver’s seat in her gravelly New York accent: “Hey Eric, I’m going to hear my friend give a talk about the Holocaust. She’s ninety. She’s a survivor. You wanna go?” Clearly anticipating reluctance to accept such an invitation, Gail hastened to add, “It’s not heavy; it’s for the kids.”
From my squatting position on the gravel, I wondered how anything about the Holocaust could possibly be ‘not heavy,’ and called out, “When is it?”
“When? Now! That’s why I’m asking you,” Gail answered, her voice rising with the familiar impatience of having to explain things to people who were not thinking as fast as herself. Inhaling deeply, to project my voice from my end of the short driveway, filled my nostrils with the overpowering scent of the OFF! Deep Woods insect repellent that, in an attempt to avoid getting tick-borne Lyme disease while weeding, I had doused my pants and sneakers with.
“Where is it?” I sheepishly inquired.
“Where?!” Gail repeated exasperatedly before answering, “It’s at the synagogue, the good one.”
I imagined showing up at Temple Adas Israel smelling of perspiration and bug spray in an old T‑shirt and khakis, with grass stains at the knee, and stammered, “I’d love to go, but I’m just too… in the middle of all of this right now, and I’m all…”
“That’s OK, the next time there’s a Holocaust, you’ll come!” Gail interjected, saving me from having to elaborate, before she sped off.
As I continued trying to uproot dandelions embedded in the gravel between the treads of wood that formed the walkway from the parking area to the front door, I thought about how Gail, like the older Jewish women in my family, could spontaneously be both melodramatic and outrageously funny. How she reminded me of my quick-witted great-aunt Betty, who had left me the property I was weeding, and of my ingenious grandmother, also named Betty, who had told her sister-in-law to do so.
Another Holocaust? Ludicrous, I had thought. But only three months later on October 27th, 2018, the worst attack on Jews in the history of the United States would take place in Pittsburgh. And now, after October 7th, 2023, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, I revisit this encounter with Gail through a new lens. For the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies intend to perpetrate nothing less than another Holocaust against the Jews, and now, even in what my immigrant great-grandparents called the goldene medina of the United States, antisemitism runs rampant on the right and left of the political spectrum and is becoming mainstream.
When Gail referred to the synagogue that her friend was speaking at as “the good one,” I knew that she meant the local one that my great-aunt and great-uncle had belonged to in Sag Harbor. There was nothing the matter with the other main Hamptons synagogue aside from it being further away, newer, and less haimish.
However, Sag Harbor’s most architecturally significant building and a National Historic Landmark is the First Presbyterian Church, dedicated in 1844. A premier example of the Egyptian Revival movement of the early nineteenth century, this church is meant to evoke King Solomon’s temple in ancient Israel, the destruction of which, at the hands of the Babylonians in 586 BCE, began the first Jewish diaspora. At the time of the church’s construction, the town was an affluent center of the whaling industry. Within ten years, whale oil began to be replaced with petroleum and the industry declined. Towards the end of the nineteenth-century Sag Harbor found a new economic base when it turned to manufacturing. A New Jersey watch company relocated to Sag Harbor and employed immigrant labor including many Jewish engravers, from Eastern Europe and Russia who came to Sag Harbor from the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
In 1898 these immigrant families founded the oldest synagogue on Long Island — Temple Mishcan Israel, meaning Tabernacle of Israel. The structure resembles a white clapboard colonial New England church, with gothic stained-glass windows, albeit one without a steeple. In 1943 the congregation changed its name to the current one — Adas Israel, meaning Community of Israel.
So, in the mid nineteenth century we have the Presbyterians hearkening back to their Old Testament foundations and building a church that looks like an ancient Israelite temple; at the end of the same century the descendants of those Israelites, looking to not draw too much attention to themselves, construct a temple that looks like a church. One hallmark of a Jewish sense of humor is the ability to find the comic in even the sometimes-bitter irony of history.
My great-aunt Betty grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in Brooklyn. She never finished high school because she started working early to help her immigrant parents. In a department store elevator on her way up to the personnel office to apply for a job, a man whispered to her, “If you are Jewish, they won’t hire you.” She filled out the application and left the line for religion blank. The interviewer asked her what religion she was, and she replied, “Presbyterian.” He told her to fill that in on the form. Not wanting to put a lie down in her own handwriting, and by way of offering an explanation for leaving the line blank in the first place, she coyly said, “I’m a terrible speller. Could you write it in for me?”
When Jewish factory workers came to Sag Harbor in the late nineteenth century they were embraced by the town’s multiethnic working class. When my great-uncle, an accountant, and my great-aunt, a secretary, came to build a weekend home in the 1950s they were similarly welcomed. But in Southampton and East Hampton some land deeds were historically restricted from being sold to Jews. When Jews tried to join any of the golf clubs in the area their membership was rejected. So, in 1963 a Jewish dentist named Harry Diner recruited friends and investors and created the Noyac Land Corporation to purchase land for a new golf club. Amongst them was my great-uncle, who served as the treasurer and principal fundraiser for what would become the Noyac Golf Club. Unlike the clubs that had rejected Harry Diner, Noyac was open to anyone who wanted to pay the fees; there was no sponsor necessary, nor letters of support needed. These were the mechanisms which had kept Jews out of the other golf clubs, like East Hampton’s Maidstone, where after being told that he would not be able to join because he was Jewish, Groucho Marx is said to have quipped, “ ‘My son is only half Jewish, can he at least play the front nine?” It did not admit its first Jewish member until the late 1970s.. As ever, when Jews were kept out of institutions, like the hospitals which would not employ them, they raised money from the Jewish community and created their own and made them accessible to all.
As a people, we have long been aware of the need to be prepared for the vicissitudes of life. Having survived, but not yet recovered in number, from the genocide perpetrated against us by Nazi Germany, the one half of our population that lives in Israel is threatened by the Islamic Republic of Iran. We are a people who make backup plans. I’ve always known exactly where my passport is along with some cash I keep handy, just in case. That used to feel unnecessary, something I thought of as perhaps a neurotic symptom of the intergenerational trauma we carry from 2,500 plus years of diaspora, having to flee from country to country at the mercy of the mercurial majority, an epigenetic inheritance; but after living through political turmoil that included white nationalists marching with tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” an attempted coup, and mobs of people demonizing Israel for a war started by Hamas terrorists working on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it seems perhaps… prudent? Is it any wonder that all of my American Jewish friends are more stressed out than they have ever been?
I know that we cannot avoid the maelstrom of history, but I also know that as a resilient people, prioritizing family and community, we will survive it with our intelligence, ingenuity, and our humor.
One of my Israeli American friends, who managed to reclaim his Portuguese citizenship by demonstrating that his family was descended from the Jewish community of Porto (who were expelled in 1496), recently told me he was talking on the phone to a friend of his in Israel who was apprehensive about the country’s future and thought that it would be good to have backup plan.
“Aren’t you Sephardic? Can’t you try to reclaim a Spanish or a Portuguese passport like I did?” he advised. “Or was anyone in your family a Holocaust survivor from Germany or Poland?”
A long silence ensued before she responded, “The only passport I can get… is the Houthi passport because my whole family came to Israel from Yemen!” They burst into laughter.
The views and opinions expressed above are those of the author, based on their observations and experiences.
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Eric Rasmussen is an actor, director, storyteller and devised theater maker. He has appeared in the US premiers of plays by Jean-Claude van Itallie, Hanoch Levin and Yoko Ono. His autobiographical work has been performed at Denniston Hill, The Wilde Project, Second Stage Theater and the 92nd Street Y. His recent scholarship, Queeritage: LGBTQ Family Legacy in American Dramatic Narratives, was awarded the Dean’s Prize for Outstanding A.L.M. Thesis at Harvard Extension School. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is writing a memoir about growing up in an unconventional Jewish family on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.