Oct. 9, 2024: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Crying Staffers of CBS

White House "frustrated" with Netanyahu; Biden undercuts Harris on hurricane response; The gay science

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The Big Story

In what feels like a reawakening of the spirit of 2020, triggered staffers at CBS News have demanded confession and contrition for what they saw as an unfair, unbalanced interview with a Black author who criticized Israel. 

Last Monday, Ta-Nehisi Coates, darling of the left and the racial thermostat-setter for post-Obama America, appeared on CBS Mornings to talk about his new book, The Message. Co-anchor Tony Dokoupil ventured a handful of mildly confrontational questions, asking Coates what “offends” him about “the existence of a Jewish state” and remarking that his book, which portrays Israel as a sort of Jewish Confederacy transplanted to the Middle East, would not be out of place in the “backpack of an extremist.” 

The story might have ended there, were it not for the reaction inside CBS. This Monday, network executives lambasted Dokoupil in an internal meeting, according to leaked audio released by The Free Press, for failing to lay aside his “personal bias” in questioning Coates’ declaration that Israel is a pariah apartheid state. “There were tears. [People were] very upset,” a participant reported. Dokoupil, a convert to Judaism whose ex-wife and children are Israeli, evidently violated cherished standards of objectivity by asking Coates—in a five-minute interview—to explain his book’s lack of analysis or context regarding one of the world’s most fraught conflicts. He was taken to task by the CBS News Race and Culture Unit, which “focused on Mr. Dokoupil’s tone of voice, phrasing and body language during his interview with Mr. Coates,” according to The New York Times. Dokoupil apologized to the staff for causing them discomfort, though he appears not to have gone so far as to disavow his interview or its framing.

Coates became famous—first in pieces for The Atlantic and then in his 2015 bestseller, Between the World and Me—for drawing the broadest possible conclusions about race in America from the narrowest specificity of his own experiences. In The Message, Coates applies the same wide-eyed hermeneutic to explaining Israel-Palestine. His fact-finding mission consisted of a 10-day trip to Israel and the West Bank, where he was guided by local Palestinian informants from the Palestine Festival of Literature and leftist IDF veterans, followed by reading some unspecified books—we can guess which ones—about the conflict.

This kerfuffle has already inspired a lot of commentary about how weird it is that Dokoupil is being attacked for asking basic journalistic questions of an author on a national book tour who is making self-consciously tendentious and controversial claims, almost as though questioning Coates is an act of bad faith or even insolence. But in this new book, Coates made nonsensical claims that deserve challenge. He routinely confuses—on purpose?—Israel and its millions of Arab citizens with the occupied West Bank, insisting that both are governed by a regime of racial differentiation that infects every aspect of daily life. He contends, without evidence, that Arab Israelis in Haifa are treated as second-class citizens in a regime that closely resembles Jim Crow. Et cetera. 

This is a favorite angle of the anti-Zionist left, though it is always hard to pin them down on it. Adalah, an Arab-Israeli nonprofit that cooperates closely with the Adalah Justice Project, a Rockefeller-funded fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Foundation, maintains a database of the “more than 65” laws that target Arab citizens of Israel. But if you are looking for the Nuremberg Laws part II, which is how Al Jazeera describes them, you will search in vain. The list of discriminatory laws includes a recent directive that gives hospital administrators the discretion to ban hametz—leavened bread products—from their facilities during Passover. While this rule may rankle secular sensibilities or annoy the families of Arab patients visiting their sick relatives, it is no more evidence of “apartheid” than are Utah’s laws capping the legal alcohol content of beer. Nor are laws that strip public funding from groups that oppose the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

But America’s holy fool is not concerned with the specifics of anything except his own perspective and the feelings that arise from it. In an interview yesterday with Amy Goodman and Juan González for Democracy Now!, Coates discussed his visit to Senegal, which comprises one of three sections of The Message. He went to Gorée, an island that served as a major port in the slave trade, and described how he refused to have a tour guide, preferring to wander about and absorb the vibes. As a result, he has nothing useful to say. “It was my deep sorrow. It was my deep, deep, deep sorrow. … I would look out, and I would have these moments, and I would say, ‘My god!’ You know what I mean?”

Well, not really. The problem with being a solipsist with no register of common associations is that your ineffable sentiments don’t translate. “History is always complicated,” Coates told NPR in reference to Israel/Palestine. “Stories are always complicated. What I saw over there was not especially complicated. It was not any more complicated than American history.” Everything is complicated, except for the things he has made up his mind about, which are simple. How about that.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Armin Rosen visits Auschwitz with 90-year-old survivor Rav Nissen and 97 of his closest family members

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The Rest

→White House officials remain “frustrated” at Israel’s refusal to divulge its plans to retaliate against Iran for its ballistic missile attack on Israel last week, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The Israelis’ reluctance, of course, is likely due to their fears that anything they share with Team Biden will be duly leaked to the American press—or directly to the Iranians. As we reported last week, “U.S. officials” leaked the news of Israel’s ground operation in Lebanon to The Washington Post prior to the Israelis announcing it themselves, provoking a great deal of grumbling in Jerusalem. Given a Tuesday night report from Israel’s Channel 12 that the United States and its Arab allies have launched “covert talks with Iran” for a “comprehensive cease-fire aimed at calming all war fronts at once,” it’s hard to blame the Israelis for concluding that Washington is unenthusiastic about punishing the ayatollahs.

—PM

→New York officials are in a lather over news that Donald Trump plans to hold one of his famous rallies in Manhattan. The once-and-maybe-future president announced that he is bringing his traveling show to Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27. His haters are falling all over each other to demonstrate their deep historical knowledge and draw direct parallels to a pro-Nazi rally held at the Garden (in a different location) by the German American Bund … 85 years ago. Local State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal posted on X that the event “will endanger the public safety of New Yorkers and has the potential to incite widespread violence.” The association of Madison Square Garden with American Nazism sounds piquant but a trifle forced—it certainly didn’t dissuade the Democrats from holding their 1992 convention there.

→Hurricane Milton is expected to make landfall late tonight, but the major storm is already lashing West Central Florida with flood water and heavy rain. The hurricane is predicted to bring a 15-foot flood surge to the 120-mile stretch between Fort Myers and Tampa. Seven million people are under mandatory evacuation orders and FEMA is standing by. Milton has already caused waves in the electoral season, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis refused a phone call from Vice President Kamala Harris, which both sides cast as political opportunism by the other. But then President Biden told the press that he has been in close contact with DeSantis. “The governor of Florida has been cooperative,” said the president. “He said he’s gotten all that he needs. I talked to him again yesterday, and I said—no—you’re doing a great job, it’s all being done well, and we thank you for it.” Some suggest that Biden was not-so-subtly undermining the Harris message by painting her outside the lines of emergency command and making her accusations against DeSantis sound petty. It does seem like there is little love lost between Biden and Harris, as he appears reluctant to do much on behalf of her candidacy.

→DEI and its infiltration into hiring and promotion across business and the academy is supposedly being rolled back as society returns to common sense. But it’s clear that the ideology of class-based preferment and resource distribution is sticky. The Free Press reports that the National Science Foundation has proffered billions of dollars of grant money on the basis of non-science-related attributes. The University of Georgia, for instance, received $644,642 to “identify systemic racism in mathematics teacher education,” and a researcher at Northwestern University got over a million dollars to look into “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM.” Well, everyone loves some good storywork.

→Radio shock-jock Howard Stern became famous 40 years ago for his irreverent, crude broadcast style, which turned the airwaves into a weird chamber for his eructations and bizarre, perverse stunts. Hardly political, Stern was a free-speech libertarian who, in a parody of political endorsement, promised to back the first candidate in the 1993 New Jersey gubernatorial race who would vow to name a highway rest stop after him. Christine Todd Whitman called in, promised to do so, and won Stern’s backing and the election. Decades later, Howard Stern has apologized for the misogyny and vulgarity that were always his stock in trade and has thrown his support behind Kamala Harris in a manner that bleeds earnestness. “Do you take naps?” he asked her in a recent interview, tossing the softest of softballs. Stern even harrumphed that Saturday Night Live ought not to permit Maya Rudolph to perform her gentle impression of Madame Vice President. “I hate it,” he announced. “I don’t want you being made fun of. There’s too much at stake.” C’mon, man. Get a hold of yourself!

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TODAY IN TABLET:

Israel vs. Iran on the Judo Mat, by Raz Greenberg

A new film about rival female judokas, one from Israel and one from Iran, by an Israeli director

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Giving Thanks to God at Auschwitz

97 Mangels accompany their family patriarch on a journey to the gates of the hell from which they were miraculously born

By Armin Rosen

There is knowledge of the survivors’ hearts that belongs to Hashem alone. And for the time being the survivors themselves can transmit their experiences across the generations, in hopes that the firsthand immediacy and reality of the Holocaust and its possible meanings will outlive them. “You know what we got for rations, for food?” Rabbi Nissen Mangel brandished the knots of his clenched hand: “This size of bread, and three quarters all moldy!”—such was Mangel’s daily sustenance at Auschwitz, 79 years earlier. “But we ate the mold also. You realize, this was also a nes? You know what the mold is? Organic antibiotic. What you make penicillin from? From mold. This saved so many Yiddin. Can you imagine? Nissim nissim nissim nissim!”

Miracles, miracles, miracles, miracles! Rav Nissen lost his father, his grandfather, his home, and his childhood in the Holocaust. Within this infinite cruelty he lived out events impossible enough to affirm God’s presence and power. There was the miracle of Josef Mengele twice deciding not to order the execution of young Nissen Mangel, and the miracle of the SS officer who made sure Mangel survived the forced march from Auschwitz to Gunskirchen, the Austrian camp near Mauthausen from which he was liberated in May of 1945. There was the miracle of being alive each morning when the march resumed. “When the SS got tired at night, 1 or 2 o’clock, we lay down. Where did we lay down? A field of snow. Subfreezing temperature in snow, without a blanket. How come we didn’t freeze to death? Ask how such a thing is possible. Nissim!”

It is churlish to dispute the miraculousness of Mangel’s survival. He is one of the last of the living who was there. The Germans tattooed a number on his arm. Mangel’s sister lost several toes to frostbite in the frigid weeks before the Red Army’s arrival on Jan. 27, 1945. She too survived the war, and lived well into the 21st century.

Mangel’s translation of the entire Rosh Hashana machzor in three months on instruction from the Lubavitcher rebbe seems a milder assertion of cosmic unlikelihood than the fact of either sibling surviving the tortures the Nazis inflicted on them. “Aaron, you ask me: Where was God?” Rav Nissen said, in response to the usual theological queries about the genocide of Europe’s Jews. “I say, ‘how could a person not believe in God?’ All the nissim until now. Nissim, nissim, nissim! I told you the tip of the iceberg. But even the tip, you say: ‘How did it happen?’”

When I visited Rav Nissen’s Crown Heights home on a Sunday afternoon in the winter of 2023, the earth-colored holy books spilled out of every crawl space, just as one of his grandsons promised me they would. “My cousin Laize came to this realization a few years ago that any book he’s opened in my grandfather’s house has notes tucked in it,” Ari Herson, the Chabad Hasidic movement’s young emissary in Mendham and Chester, New Jersey, had told me in Poland, three weeks earlier. “Every nook and cranny in that house has sforim. You open the closet upstairs and on top of the clothing there’s a pile of sforim.” Volumes towered to the ceiling in the solarium enclosing Rav Nissen’s porch, overlooking Empire Boulevard. More books filled the top shelf of the closet where his black jackets hung. At 90 years old, Rav Nissen would teach a shiur later that night on the Ein Yaakov, the narratives of the Talmud, with the ruach and the acuity of someone decades younger.

Rav Nissen does not look like an old man. Below his unwrinkled face is a sturdy white beard which angles aerodynamically away from his chest, out into the world and the universe. There is no fatigue in his eyes, which radiate the same metaphysical seriousness as the rest of his compact body, which is not the least bit frail. He has a sense of humor, but it's possible it's been many decades since a frivolous thought crossed his mind. As an 10-year-old in Auschwitz, Rav Nissen pulled a heavy cart from barrack to barrack, a job that allowed him to search for his lost mother and sister. He remains a strong and determined carrier of heavy obligations.

Rav Nissen speaks with the dignified timbres of the murdered world, Germanic gravity in throaty counterpoint to the cheder and schmatta peddlers and wandering Hasidim and other idylls of Jewish nostalgia—and in counterpoint to all the much heavier realities of 20th-century European Jewish life and death that this nostalgia is meant to protect us from. The final period before the Nazis murdered nearly everyone who spoke with the polyglot Yiddish accent of Kosice, Slovakia, was an era of overwhelming danger and possibility for Europe’s Jews, one where New York, Vienna, Warsaw, Moscow, Berlin, Vilna, and Jerusalem all offered competing visions of the future. Emigration, secularism, assimilation, extermination, or perhaps even redemption, whether through communism or Zionism or Yiddishkeit, loomed beyond the close horizon. The accent’s near-extinction in the present day doesn’t make Mangel a curiosity displaced from a foreign past as much as it elevates him to near-mystical isolation: He comes from a place and a time free of narishkeit, a world whose vast potential ushered millions of Jews into killings pits and gas chambers.

The accent is close to extinct—but Jews are not. In Krakow three weeks earlier, the day before his 90th birthday on the Hebrew calendar, some 95 of Rav Nissen’s living descendants and in-laws gathered with him and his wife, Raizel, in the Remah Synagogue, the medieval shul of Rabbi Moses Isserles, the great interpreter of the Shulchan Aruch. Five surviving children—Malkie, Gittel, Nachum, Menachem, and Yisroel—dozens of grandchildren, and at least 25 great-grandchildren packed into the wooden pews. Their universes existed because of the survival of this one man and the nissim that made it possible. Among them were rabbis and electronics wholesalers and importer-exporters and medical professionals and custom kippah-makers and a young backpacker who had flown in from Brazil, mid gap year. There were IDF veterans, one of them on leave from the newly erupted war against the exterminationists in Hamas, along with a U.S. Air Force chaplain. There were offspring who had drifted away from observance and others who had dedicated their lives to Judaism. There were Borsalinos and baseball caps, beards narrow and wide and wild and tamed and nonexistent, sheitels alongside free-flowing natural hair. A young boy in a white- and blue-striped sweater had tzitzit he hadn’t grown into hanging a little below his knees. A slightly older cousin had a powder blue Instax instant camera dangling around his neck. Newborns still many years away from their first conscious memory dotted the crowd, ensconced in BabyBjörns and bear cub onesies and an armada of strollers. There were at least a half-dozen pregnant women.

“For us to be here, l’havdil, it’s for physicists to be in the laboratory of Einstein,” announced the family’s tour guide. The Remah Synagogue, the shul of Rabbi Moshe Isserles, was the last stop on a twilight walking tour of Kazmierz, for centuries the downtown of Jewish Krakow until Nazis and communists cleared the way for the neighborhood’s current existence as an international hipster hangout. It is a sturdy and unornamented building, too solid and humble to ever be destroyed, with walls thick and ancient enough to keep out the surrounding world.

This crowd already knew that Isserles, known by his Hebrew initials as the Remah, was the genius who had further elucidated the Shulchan Aruch, Rabbi Joseph Karo’s still-authoritative 16th-century code of Jewish law, becoming in effect the work’s co-author. The guide posed a question to the numerous Torah scholars on hand: How did Rabbi Isserles end his contribution to the Shulchan Aruch? One of the bolder adult grandkids spoke up. But he knew his role in this particular Mangel family give-and-take was to prime the person such questions were really meant for, so the grandson hesitated a split second long enough for Rav Nissen to roar: “V’tov lev mishta tamid!” A good heart is always feasting. His tie was tucked inside his sweater, sleeves drooping softly at the ends of his arms. “And how does he start!” Rav Nissen then declared: “Shvisi Hashem l’negdi tamid!” I place God before me always.

Here in Krakow, future epicenter of tragedy, joy and Hashem were the Remah’s two tamids, the interconnected constants of Jewish existence. Rav Nissen made neat divisions in space with the rabbinically expounding slice of his left hand, knees bent in a quarter-bow, eyes circuiting the crowded frontier of his descendants, who were impressed though hardly surprised at this feat of Judaic recall. The sharpness of Rav Nissen’s mind, like the existence of his vast family, and maybe also the endurance of the Jewish people 80 years after the Holocaust, transcends such concepts as “surprise” and bores right into those hidden substrates of reality where God might plausibly dwell.

***

Rav Nissen Mangel’s 90th birthday on the Hebrew calendar, the 11th of Cheshvan 5784, fell on Oct. 26, 2023. For over 20 years his children and grandchildren had discussed the possibility of a family trip to Auschwitz. The idea was for everyone to gather at the site of the miraculous survival to which they all owed their existence, and to thank Hashem for the life of their tatty, their zaide—or, as time went on, their alter-zaide. Rav Nissen’s vitality into his 70s and then his 80s was no guarantee that it would ever be possible to get 50 and then 60 and then eventually nearly 100 people to Poland at the same time. There is an element of randomness to any elderly person’s physical health. “He’s got a 20-year plan, but he’s 90,” Mendel “Mendy” Herson, the associate dean of the Chabad rabbinical college in Morristown—the movement’s key training ground—and the son-in-law of Rav Nissen, told me in Krakow.

After the COVID pandemic, Rav Nissen's children and a few of the more enterprising grandchildren and in-laws, the women in particular, took on the steep logistical challenge of making the trip a reality. The trip was so important and difficult an undertaking that it was never in any serious danger of getting canceled after the Oct. 7 attack. Three weeks after the onslaught the 97 Mangels were staying at a glassy new hotel across the Vistula River from the spires of old Krakow and a block away from the Plac Bohaterow Getta, the square that was once the entrance of the Nazis’ urban prison camp. The walk from Eastern Europe’s best-preserved medieval cityscape to the plaza of metal chairs coldly memorializing the recent-enough extermination of Krakow’s Jews takes about 15 minutes. The square invites ghastly feats of imagination that the rest of the confectionery, tourist-jammed city seems to actively discourage, as if the idea of this place—and perhaps of European civilization—were to make you forget that the murders actually happened centuries after the painting of da Vinci’s "Lady with an Ermine," which hangs in Krakow’s Czartoryski Museum. Auschwitz is an hour down the road, far enough that a visitor can forget that it’s even there.

This was my first trip to Poland since reading the great literary memorial of the Holocaust, Chava Rosenfarb’s The Tree of Life, a 1,000-page recreation of the Lodz Ghetto in narrative. In Lodz I learned that literature preserves the past far better than physical reality can. In century-old row houses within the former ghetto the weight of Jews awaiting death had indented the stairs—and so had the weight of people who hadn’t known those people, or who knew and didn't care, or who had once cared but grew used to not thinking about them. Fire Brigade Square, where Chaim Rumkowski, Lodz’s "King of the Jews," begged the inmates to surrender their children for transport to Auschwitz in a vain attempt at saving themselves, is now the tranquil backyard of a day care.

For those of us who are totally severed from pre-American Jewish life—the ones who do not know who in their family lived or died in the Holocaust, and who have received no intergenerational memory of what their lives or deaths were like—literature is perhaps the only thing that can bridge our alienation from the Old World and our distance from its destruction. The Mangels have available to them the only means of memory superior to literature: They have Rav Nissen, and they have each other. Family creates the human architecture through which stories endure as something real. As one of the only non-Mangels on hand in Poland, I could experience their Auschwitz reunion as one of the only effective revolts against forgetting.

“Hodu Hashem ki tov / ki l’olam chasdo,” “Give thanks to God because He is good / Because His loving-kindness endures forever,” was the family reunion’s motto. The Hallel service’s climactic cries of hope and gratitude, recited on Pesach and Sukkot and other holidays, couldn't be put on the trip’s official sweaters, since the presence of such holy words would mean that, as with a tallis, Jewish law would prohibit the garments from ever being taken into a bathroom. The eventual sweaters showed a block-letter mem within an outline of the modern-day country of Poland. “Happy birthday Zaide!” read the inside of the official kippot, bearing the same logo. The trip would include a day in and around Krakow; a visit to the tomb of the Hasidic master Rav Elimelech of Lizhensk, a distant Mangel relative; and a day at Auschwitz, followed by Shabbat in Warsaw.

Large gatherings of Mangels weren’t so unusual—there was always another simcha on the way, another wedding or holiday that could get several dozen of them in the same place at once, in family strongholds like Pittsburgh or Cincinnati or Cherry Grove or Crown Heights. Everyone understood the importance of a Mangel journey to Auschwitz; Rav Nissen himself had returned there several times since the five months he spent there as a boy in 1944. But there were anxieties churning beneath the years and then decades of delay. The trip would be a mass transmission of the family’s story across four generations and beyond, with everything this implied about the looming, inevitable loss of a living connection to Jewish Europe, the Holocaust, the Lubavitcher rebbe, and everything else contained within Rav Nissen’s remarkable and ever-telescoping life.

Other concerns were less existential: No one could know what it would really, actually be like for everyone to travel to Auschwitz with Rav Nissen, who had followed the rebbe’s advice to share stories of his survival with the public but did not often volunteer them around his family. Rav Nissen told me he did not discuss his Holocaust experiences with the rebbe: “Our relationship was on more of a spiritual level, a Toyrah level,” he said.

“We heard the stories growing up, somewhat,” Malkie Herson told me late one night in Krakow. The Chabad rebbetzin of greater Somerset County, younger daughter of Rav Nissen, had never been to Auschwitz before. She sat across from her husband, Mendy, and next to her brother Nachum, an Ohio-based Chabad rabbi with the same intent face and wispy beard as his father. The details came out gradually, over the course of many years, though never all at once. Though Rav Nissen had recorded his story after his children were adults, I got the sense the grandchildren were almost unanimous in not listening to the series, in part because their parents discouraged it, though also out of a cross-generational fear that the public version of Rav Nissen’s story would contaminate their own private relationship to him. At home, Nachum explained, his father “was never bitter, never angry. He never had nightmares. His whole approach to the Holocaust and his survival was so positive: God saved my life, what am I supposed to do with it?”

We were in the ground-floor dining room of the hotel, boxes of fruit and kosher snacks piled nearby. A neighboring room offered a bounty of Frisbees, bouncy balls, off-brand Duplos and Magic Markers, though a bedtime-dodging pair of great-grandkids preferred to burn off their late-night energy by chasing each other down the hallway.

“He specifically did not take reparations from Germany,” Malkie continued. “He didn't want to give credence to the idea he’s carrying around psychological trauma with him, though obviously he is.” His children were left guessing at what exactly this trauma might consist of, given how little of it trickled into observable life. “We didn't grow up with Holocaust stories,” she said.

It would take the reverberations of a later tragedy for Rav Nissen’s family to glimpse his highly attuned mind and soul left naked before something beyond explanation. In 1988, Lazar Mangel, Raizel and Rav Nissen’s oldest son, a young Chabad shliach, was killed by a drunk driver on his way back from an evening minyan in central New Jersey. His wife was pregnant with a daughter. At this granddaughter’s engagement party, a little over 20 years later, Rav Nissen spoke with tears streaming down his cheek, something even close relatives had never seen before and would never see again.

“At this moment I want to thank Hashem for the blessings and goodness he’s given me my entire life,” Mendy Herson recalled him saying. “He said: ‘There are things I don’t understand, but I will not let them get in the way of seeing the blessings I have in my life.” The crying Rav Nissen hinted at his inner torments by saying, “I have a lot of questions for Hashem.” He did not need to spell out what those questions might be: Why did the Nazis murder my father and grandfather, people who were even stronger Jews than himself? Why did I lose my first son so senselessly, in the midst of a holy act? What sort of God would test His children like this?

For a rabbi tested as profoundly as Rav Nissen, there is meaning and order concealed within the failure to fully understand Hashem. Through the distorting apertures of despair, the fact of the world’s horrors and miracles dwelling so closely together, of the blessings and curses emerging from the same wellspring of holy mystery, can begin to look like perversity—or worse, like the outcome of sheer cosmic randomness. But Rav Nissen and his family share a theology that prohibits Jews from living lives of despair. However horrible things are, however little we understand them, however much we may doubt, we do not have the right to see it all as meaningless. We cannot approach God as if He is mindlessly unfeeling or depraved. “I live in the Hasidic world,” Mendy Herson told me. “I live in a world of believers. Rav Nissen more than believes he has been blessed with goodness.”

***

On the charter bus to Auschwitz I was seated next to Laizer Mangel, a bearded redhead, a Crown Heights rabbi in his mid-20s and the grandson of Rav Nissen’s who had launched the custom kippah business. With the help of various overseas vendors Mangel could orchestrate the mass production of nearly any conceivable kippah with any logo, pattern, and inner lining—for a simcha or a Chabad house or a fraternity or a business—and he could do it in two weeks. Diverse sources of 21st-century Jewish demand were equal to Mangel’s ability to control a very specific global workflow. “A kippah can be made of either four triangular panels or six triangular panels. Six used to be more common but now, thankfully, four is more common. But the market demands that if someone makes a custom kippah, they should have the ability that each of their panels can be a different color.” We drove past the Krakow airport, where a mothballed Ukrainian government jet awaited the end of the nearby war. An armored tank-tread ambulance, painted white with the red cross, rumbled by on the back of a flatbed truck. “Do they want the clip with multiple prongs?” Mangel continued. “Do they want the standard clip that’s less expensive? Then I need to match the thread of the logo to whatever color accent border or whatever color accent material—and that’s the kippah market now.” (Ten months after the trip Mangel made the kippot for my recent wedding, and did a tremendous job.)

The scenery flashing by outside was a prelude to a site of horrors that exactly one person onboard could comprehend. We wound through rolling green hills, through villages with a single roundabout, past apartment blocks and grocery stores and strip malls, and also an indoor water park— “the Auschwitz water park!,” one of the older grandkids exclaimed. It was all too normal. The bus grew uneasy at how normal it was.

Ari Herson, seated behind me, had been to Auschwitz with his grandfather nearly 20 years earlier. He had heard stories of his zaide’s childhood in Kosice more recently than that, when Rav Nissen came to live with the Mangels’ New Jersey branch as the COVID pandemic swept through New York City. Ari heard about the real china Rav Nissen’s family reserved for Shabbos use, about the zmiros they sang and the ornate legs of their carved Shabbos table. He heard from Rav Nissen about singing in the synagogue choir, about his family’s reserved bench in the city park on Saturday afternoons after shul.

Like his kippah-making great-grandson, Rav Nissen’s father, Eliezer, had been in the garment trade. He had done well enough to become a generous funder of schools and charitable institutions in Kosice—he also had the cash to buy a villa in Bratislava for his family to flee to when the deportations accelerated. Before the war the family had a country house in a village outside Kosice, a place Ari visited with his grandfather during that earlier trip to Europe.

“There’s two rows of homes and in the middle is this little creek, barely even a stream,” Ari recalled as the bus passed another sign for the ominously approaching town of Oswiecim. “My grandfather walks up and he says: There used to be a creek here. And as he starts saying this you can see that in his head he’s less present, like he’s being transported back to his childhood. Then he’s talking about how him and his cousins would go into the creek and run after the little kechkelach—the little ducks. And the ducklings would run in a row and they'd run after them and they’d throw bread to them.” Ari watched in amazement as this trickling stream froze his grandfather in a moment of prewar innocence, returning him across the span of nearly his entire lifetime to a world at the cusp of unknown terrors and miracles.

Back in Crown Heights, I asked Rav Nissen about what Jewish Kosice had been like. The Jews of Slovakia were less assimilated and more religious than their neighbors in Czech lands, he explained. Kosice became part of Hungary, which meant the Nazis did not begin deporting Jews until they directly occupied and governed Hungary relatively late in the war. His memories are of a place too pure for our world and too wondrous to possibly survive.

“The rebbe of the cheder had a big, big big garden and had a lot of trees,” Rav Nissen recalled. “He put on the branches cherries, and when we learned well he took us out from the cheder, and he held our little little legs—you know when you pick up the sefer Torah, yes? That’s what he did to us! And we climbed, we took the cherries. Hashem sends us the cherries! Can you imagine this? For us, Hashem sends us cherries, good ripe, sweet cherries. And it was beautiful.” Memories of the destruction began shortly after that. “As a child, 8 years old—this still rings in my ear—” Rav Nissen told me moments later, “my mother said, if Papa is going to Auschwitz I want to go with him, together.”

Read the rest here.