When employees arrived Sunday morning to open up Miriam, the popular Israeli restaurant in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, they discovered the same two messages sprayed in red graffiti over its windows, front door and along its patio: “GENOCIDE CUISINE” and “ISRAEL STEALS CULTURE.”

They informed the restaurant’s owner, Chef Rafael Hasid. Soon, word got out to the public. Photos of the graffiti quickly spread online as politicians, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams, decried the vandalism. 

“It’s sad,” Hasid told the New York Jewish Week on Sunday, as he spent the day at the restaurant talking with police and greeting the steady stream of customers who came to Miriam to show their support. 

Hasid said they would clean up the graffiti once brunch traffic died down. “I want people to see it,” he said. “We’re not trying to make it like it never happened. I want everybody to see, and then we’ll clean up.”

According to police, officers responded to 911 calls at around 2:59 a.m. and were informed that red paint was “thrown at the window” of the restaurant, along with a “statement made in red spray paint.” No arrests have been made, according to police; the investigation is being handled by the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force.

“People are stupid,” Hasid added. “They have an agenda, not necessarily connected to reality, and they come and vandalize the restaurant and everything.” 

The vandalism sent shock waves reverberating through New York’s Jewish community. By the time brunch service got going on Sunday morning, the restaurant was packed, thanks in part to an outpouring of support from concerned New Yorkers. The response mirrored previous reactions to similar situations, including after antisemitic graffiti was sprayed outside Effy’s Cafe, a kosher restaurant on the Upper West Side, in March 2024. The month before that, hundreds of Jewish and Israeli New Yorkers lined up to dine at Gazala’s, New York’s only Druze restaurant, after it had been hit with anti-Israel vandalism.

By around 1 p.m. on Sunday, the brunch rush had died down, though there were still a few groups waiting for their tables and chatting with Hasid. “That’s terrible,” one passerby muttered as she eyed the graffiti. Inside, customers laughed as they ate their meals, the messages visible on every window. “I’m sorry about the vandalism,” one woman said to her server while she was shown to her table. 

“I don’t live right near here,” said Wendy Sacks, who had decided to make the trip to Miriam after seeing photos of the vandalism online. “You know, I just want to offer them my support.” 

Sacks said she felt the spray-painted messages were a clear act of antisemitism. “It has nothing to do with any killing,” she said. “I mean, you can protest. You can be upset that so many people in Gaza have been killed. And I don’t support Netanyahu, I don’t believe Israel is right in everything — but this is absolutely antisemitic, when you attack a local restaurant that has nothing to do with it.”

That’s a sentiment that New York City Comptroller Brad Lander — who is Jewish and is running for mayor — seems to agree with.  

“Infuriating to see @miriamparkslope — one of my absolute favorites — vandalized (again) overnight with antisemitic graffiti,” Brad Lander, who lives in the neighborhood, wrote in a post on X. “Vandalizing their restaurant because they serve Israeli food and their owner is a Jewish Israeli New Yorker is a clear example of when anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism.”

Lander had previously told the New York Jewish Week that his favorite spot to eat Jewish food is the Upper West Side outpost of Miriam,  which he called the “best brunch in New York City.”

This isn’t the first time that Hasid has dealt with this type of vandalism. In 2022 — prior to the Oct. 7 attack on Israel the next year that launched the Israel-Hamas War — the newly opened Miriam on the Upper West Side was spray-painted with the phrase “F— Jews.” “I don’t want to say I’m used to it, but I’ve seen it before,” Hasid said. “The last one was about Jews, this one is about Israelis. It feels the same.” 

“These kind of vile attacks are continuing *after* the ceasefire agreement,” Manhattan borough president Mark Levine posted on X, referring to the truce that began a week ago in Israel and Gaza. “This restaurant, Miriam, is a beloved Middle Eastern venue whose only offense appears to be that the owner is Jewish. Disgusting.”

Miriam regulars Deb and her niece, Gaia, were also dining at the busy restaurant early Sunday afternoon. “Last week we just walked right in, and this week we had to wait 15, 20 minutes,” Deb said. “It did feel like the neighborhood was coming to support.”

Deb and Gaia, who both declined to share their last names, were unaware of what had happened until they arrived. When she saw the graffiti, Deb said she felt “just rage” and “[wanted] to puke.” 

“I was pretty shocked,” Gaia said, “because it seems like the whole thing is moving backwards in a way. Like, how are you stereotyping and profiling people just bringing cuisine to the neighborhood?” 

“People know that we are not stealing any culture, any food, or [that there’s] any genocide that we’re doing with the food,” Hasid said.

Outside the restaurant, Jewish Community Relations Council CEO Mark Treyger waited for his takeaway falafel order. “Jews are indigenous to Israel — Mizrahi Jews come from so many parts of the Middle East,” Treyger said. “So in addition to holding bad actors accountable, it’s also equally important that we get the truth out there that this is actually very much a part of our culture.”

According to data from the NYPD, there were 345 anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York City in 2024, making up more than half of all reported hate crimes.

In a fraught moment in the film “A Real Pain,” Kieran Culkin, playing the more volatile of a pair of Jewish cousins who go on a roots tour of Poland, berates his fellow travellers for riding in a first-class train car in a country where so many Jews rode cattle cars to their deaths. 

A few scenes later, after breaking away from the tour group, he happily sits in first class, essentially telling his cousin, played by Jesse Eisenberg, “Screw it. We’re owed this.”

“I love that scene,” said Ari Richter, the author and illustrator of “Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz,” a “graphic family memoir” describing Richter’s own visits to the places where his Holocaust survivor grandparents lived and suffered. Richter said that in the train scenes, “A Real Pain” expertly captures the contradictions felt by second and third generation Jewish visitors like him on pilgrimages to a grim Jewish past. 

In his book, Richter describes those emotions on a visit to the Dachau camp memorial. He is both impressed by the efforts made by the German curators to focus on “the nexus of German cruelty and Jewish suffering” (unlike the Polish guides at Auschwitz, where he learns “mostly about the suffering of non-Jewish Poles”) and touched by small gestures, like the “kosher-friendly options” on the menu at the Dachau café. 

And yet …

“In a way, I know they seek my absolution,” Richter ruminates back at the hotel, “and I resent that I offer it by accepting their kindness.”

Richter’s is a multilayered book, published last summer, about his grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ imprisonment in Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz. the lives they made in America (including Tampa, Florida, where Richter grew up); and what Richter calls the safe, “white American identity” he inherited. Richter draws on the survivor memoirs written and recorded by his relatives, collaging actual photographs with his own scratchy but realistic drawings.

But two important episodes in the book feature his roots-slash-research trips – in 2019 and 2021 — that included stops at Auschwitz, Dachau, Jewish cemeteries and his grandparents’ hometowns in present-day Poland and Germany. 

The book describes a process familiar to Jewish visitors to the death camps and the former homes of vanished loved ones: an occasion to face the enormity of the Holocaust, the inheritance of family trauma and what being Jewish means to the pilgrim. In “Never Again…,” between scenes depicting his grandparents’ stories, Richter asks in the present if his relatives’ survival and second chances give him license to put the past aside, and what lessons about Jewish life and survival he’d like to pass on to his children.

Richter’s book arrives at a perhaps not coincidental moment that recently saw the release of two films about such roots trips — “A Real Pain” and Lena Dunham’s 2024 film “Treasure.” They join a genre that already includes Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 novel “Everything Is Illuminated,” Francine Prose’s 1997 novella “Guided Tours of Hell” and screenwriter Jerry Stahl’s 2022 memoir, “Nein, Nein, Nein!” 

So-called “dark tourism” has even spawned its own academic sub-specialty: In her 2014 book “Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places,” anthropologist Erica T. Lehrer describes encounters between Jewish tourists and Polish locals and their halting and occasionally hostile attempts to understand each other. In “Dark Tourism, the Holocaust, and Well-being,” three academics offer an almost comically understated review of the literature: “Dark tourism carried out by Jewish people often has a transformative effect, despite the negative emotional impact it can have on these dark tourists.”  

Comedy is not the first thing that comes to mind when you consider visits to death camps, but if there is one thing the popular treatments of the visits share, it is a mordant sense of humor. Foer’s novel, and its 2005 film adaptation, is about the Jewish author’s journey to Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather’s life during the Nazi liquidation of the family shtetl. Perhaps the best known character in the book is a local handler who speaks a comically broken English. 

Prose’s novella is about an obscure playwright enduring a tour of a concentration camp led by a flamboyant and much more successful writer who himself survived the camp. The tone, like the title, is satiric and pitch black. 

And in “Treasure,” playing a journalist who accompanies her survivor father on a trip through 1990s Poland, Dunham goes for bittersweet comedy before the inevitable visit to Auschwitz and her father’s stolen home.

The humor could be a distinctly Jewish response to tragedy, or a choice to make morbid material more palatable to a wide audience. The very idea of death camps being turned into tourist sites, with gift shops and snack bars, is the sort of “ludicrous” incongruity that everyone from Freud to Schopenhauer to Mel Brooks include in their theories of laughter. Eisenberg told interviewers that “A Real Pain” was inspired by an advertisement promising a “Holocaust tour, with lunch.”

Stahl’s gonzo travelogue gleefully mocks the tourist trappings at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau, but he ultimately concludes that they don’t diminish the impact of his visits. “I don’t care if you can buy a slice after the crematorium and wash it down with Fanta,” he writes. “Nothing, in the end, can diminish the searing gravitas of the physical place on which the martyrs, our ancestors, walked.”

Holocaust tourism has also spawned unrelentingly somber books. In his 2014 novel “In Paradise,” the late writer Peter Matthiessen describes a real-life “Bearing Witness” meditation retreat held at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The tone is as chilly as a Polish winter. And in “The Memory Monster,” a slim, searing 2020 novel by the Israeli writer Yishai Sarid, an Israeli academic who conducts tours of the camps for school groups and tourists has a breakdown under the weight of the memories he is forced to carry and convey.  

What “A Real Pain,” “Treasure” and Richter’s graphic memoir also share is the age of their creators: Richter and Eisenberg are both 41 and Dunham is 39. On Monday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world will mark 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, meaning living Holocaust survivors could only have been youngsters when the war ended. Their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren could only have learned about the Holocaust second-hand in an inheritance that some call “generational trauma” and Richter calls a “generational trust.”

“There’s a certain point where I realized that my parents weren’t going to be the ones telling their parents’ story, so it sort of fell into my lap generationally,” said Richter, a professor of fine arts at The City University of New York (and one of the New York Jewish Week’s “36 to Watch” in 2024).

These third-generation works also share an intense self-consciousness: Eisenberg and Dunham focus less on the history of the Holocaust or the experiences of the victims and survivors than on the interiors of the young protagonists. 

“A Real Pain,” with its tight focus on two millennial Jews facing the loss of their grandmother, has been criticized for being more of a buddy dramedy than a real confrontation with the horrors of the Holocaust. But the film’s scenes set in the Majdanek concentration camp are somber and emotionally draining, as is a montage juxtaposing current sites in Lublin with descriptions of the yeshivas, synagogues and Jewish homes that they replaced. 

And others see the film’s focus on the characters’ individualized pain and personal grieving as its strength: New York Times critic Manohla Dargis writes that the dark history the cousins confront is “inseparable from the existential reality of their grandmother, from the woman and the mother she became, and from the family that she had.” 

Richter’s book, by contrast, digs deep into his relatives’ histories and memories — throwing his own struggle to make sense of the “generational trust” into sharp relief. In the book his sense of complacency as a middle-class Jewish American is shattered by the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 and the resurgence of the far right. He finds solace in the words of his grandfather Karl: “I am ultimately an optimist — I have to be. Because the haters have won if they succeed in hardening your heart.”

Late in his book, after the birth of a daughter, Richter begins to consider the next generation. “I want her to feel completely free in the world,” he writes, “unencumbered by the pressures of Jewish continuity and undoing Hitler’s work.” At the same time, he finds it sad to think about a cultural heritage “erased through assimilation into generic American whiteness.”

“I want them to be well aware of their history. I made this book for them,” he told me, in what could be a mission statement for Holocaust tourism. “It’s a starting point for them to do their own research, go down their own rabbit holes and to learn more about that history. It’s a starting place for them to explore their family history and their Jewish history.”

Days after stoking controversy by delivering what some believed to be a Nazi salute and making Holocaust jokes, Elon Musk appeared at a campaign rally for a far-right German political party to tell supporters to be proud of their heritage.

Musk’s appearance Saturday at the rally for Alternative for Germany, known as AfD, was unadvertised and came by video. It was the second time in as many weeks that the world’s richest man and close ally of new U.S. President Donald Trump has appeared alongside Alice Weidel, the party’s candidate for chancellor in Germany’s Feb. 23 election.

During his speech, Musk told a cheering crowd of 4,500 that he believed the AfD was “the best hope for Germany.” He also alluded to Germany’s history.

“There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said.

He added that he believed the party could “preserve” and “protect” German culture, which he implied was facing a threat.

“It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Musk said.

The rally is set to be AfD’s largest before next month’s elections, in which the party is polling in second place. The rally took place in Halle, the eastern German city where a far-right extremist attacked a synagogue on Yom Kippur in 2019.

Musk’s appearance at the rally comes days after he twice made a straight-armed gesture at a Trump inauguration event that ignited comparisons to the Nazi “Sieg Heil” salute. After some arbiters of antisemitism said they would give him the benefit of the doubt, Musk posted a series of Holocaust jokes on X, the social network that he owns.

The entire saga followed Musk’s recent endorsement of AfD, which has found increasing traction in Germany with its anti-immigrant, pro-Russia and anti-European Union platform. Some of its politicians have also downplayed the Holocaust, and German courts have fined one of its regional leaders, Björn Höcke, multiple times for using the Nazi-era phrase “Alles für Deutschland,” or Everything for Germany.

Musk hosted Weidel for a livestream on X earlier this month. During the call, Weidel falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler was a communist in a bid to distance AfD’s politics from the Nazis’.

Musk’s appearance at the AfD rally caused at least some Jews who said they had previously given Musk the benefit of the doubt to condemn him.

“There I was. Joining the chorus calling the left ridiculous because of a poorly orchestrated arm gesture. And then this happens, coupled with a few Holocaust zingers on Twitter in terrible taste, and now, I’m not so sure who is ridiculous, or if in fact we are all being played,” Blake Flayton, a pro-Israel influencer, posted on Instagram.

President Donald Trump says he has asked Jordan to accept Palestinians from Gaza and plans to press Egypt to do the same.

Trump said he spoke to Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Saturday, five days after being inaugurated for his second term and six days into a ceasefire that he pressed for in the Israel-Hamas war.

“I said to him I’d love you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess. I’d like him to take people,” Trump told reporters Saturday night aboard Air Force One following a rally in Las Vegas. Calling Gaza “literally a demolition site right now,” he added, “I’d like Egypt to take people.”

While millions of Palestinian refugees have lived in Jordan since Israel’s founding in 1948, Arab states have since been resistant to accepting Palestinian refugees out of concern that doing so would aid ethnic cleansing and undercut pressure for Palestinian statehood.

Some on Israel’s far right would like to see Jewish resettlement in Gaza after the war and have called on Israel to encourage Palestinians to emigrate from the enclave. David Friedman, Trump’s’ ambassador to Israel during his first term, said this week that Trump could support encouraging emigration.

Asked whether he envisioned such a move as temporary, Trump said, “It could be temporary, could be permanent.”

Trump did not say how Jordan’s Abdullah responded. Just days after the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel by Hamas that launched the war, the king said, “No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt.”

Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, said the same thing at the time. Trump said he planned to speak to Sisi on Sunday.

Egypt and Jordan both have peace agreements with Israel. During his first term, Trump brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab nations, and he is seen as eager to strike a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“People are dying there,” Trump said about Gaza. “So I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”

Reconstruction of Gaza would begin under the third and final phase of the current ceasefire, which is less than a week into its six-week first phase.

President Donald Trump will allow the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, removing a hold his predecessor, Joe Biden, had placed on the ordnance.

The change comes during a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that Trump played a key role in brokering. In the days since he took office, Trump has sent mixed signals about how active he’ll be in advancing the ceasefire agreement, some of which has yet to be negotiated.

Biden had blocked the delivery of the bombs due to concerns surrounding Israel’s invasion of the city of Rafah in Gaza. While the Biden administration said those were the only bombs it did not give Israel, Biden’s pro-Israel critics — including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — pointed to the holdup as evidence that the administration was not fully supportive of Israel.

Netanyahu also suggested the White House was blocking other weapons shipments, which administration officials denied.

On Saturday, Axios reported that Trump would allow Israel to receive the bombs. Hours later, Trump posted on social media that Israel would obtain weapons it had paid for but had yet to receive.

“A lot of things that were ordered and paid for by Israel, but have not been sent by Biden, are now on their way!” Trump posted on his social network.

The delivery of the bombs marks at least the second time this week Trump has reversed a Biden policy on Israel. In an executive order on Inauguration Day, he also removed the sanctions Biden had placed on extremist Israeli settlers.

Keith Siegel, an American taken hostage on Oct. 7, 2023, will reportedly be released in the coming days as part of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal.

The report on NBC News, citing Israeli sources, is a sign that Siegel is alive. It came hours after four Israeli women soldiers went free in the agreement’s second hostage release on Saturday. In the first stage of the ceasefire, a total of 33 hostages are slated to be released over six weeks in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners.

So far, the seven captives who have been released have all been women. Following additional negotiations over the weekend, two more women will be released on Thursday: Agam Berger, a soldier, and Arbel Yehud, a civilian. A third unidentified hostage is expected to be freed with them.

That third hostage could be Siegel. Hamas is also due to release three more hostages on Saturday, Feb. 1, and he could be in that group.

Yehud’s status has threatened to derail the ceasefire. Israel expected her to be released on Saturday according to the terms of the deal, but she is being held by Islamic Jihad, another Gaza terror group, and was not included in the release.

In response, Israel barred the return of Palestinians to northern Gaza. But following the announcement of Thursday’s release, Israel will now allow Palestinians to enter the area.

Siegel, 65, is one of three living American hostages still being held in Gaza. The others are Sagui Dekel-Chen, who is expected to be released in the first phase of the ceasefire, and Edan Alexander, who is not. Hamas is also holding the bodies of four Americans who were killed on Oct. 7 or afterward: Omer Neutra, Itay Chen, and Gad and Judith Haggai.

Siegel grew up in North Carolina, and was abducted from Kibbutz Kfar Aza during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. His wife Aviva was also taken hostage and released during a weeklong ceasefire in November 2023. His mother died in December.

Emily Damari, a fellow Kfar Aza resident who was taken hostage and released on Jan. 19, had reportedly pleaded for Siegel to be freed in her place, but Hamas denied the request.

Before she was released from Gaza last week, Emily Damari asked her captors for a favor: to let her neighbor Keith Siegel go free instead.

That’s according to a report in Israeli media on Friday, five days after Damari was released and on the eve of a second expected release of Israeli hostages from Gaza.

Siegel, 65, and Damari were both taken captive by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, from Kfar Aza, the kibbutz of roughly 760 people in southern Israel where they lived. Damari, 28, is the same age as one of Siegel’s four children; his wife Aviva was also abducted but released in November 2023 during a temporary ceasefire.

The request was denied, according to the report, which first aired on Israel’s Channel 12. Israel and Hamas agreed on a schedule for the release of 33 hostages, most of them alive, over six weeks as part of a ceasefire deal; the schedule calls for women to be released first, followed by older and sick men, including Siegel.

The report suggests that at least some of the remaining hostages are being kept together and offers new evidence that Siegel is alive inside Gaza. An immigrant from the United States, Siegel appeared in a hostage video released by Hamas last April. His mother died in December in North Carolina, where he grew up.

Since her release, Damari has become a symbol in Israel because she returned with bandages making her injured hand resemble the “rock on” emoji. Among those welcoming her as she was driven back into Israel was Keith Siegel’s daughter Shir, who posted on Instagram later that night, “I am speechless. … My sister is home. I hugged her. It’s real. She came back to us. Thank God.”

This article was originally created as a newsletter. Sign up for the weekly Jewish Sport Report here.

Good afternoon and happy Friday!

This week’s Jewish Sport Report features updates on two major halls of fame, plus a feel-good moment from a New York Knicks game. Let’s dig right in.

Ian Kinsler becomes first Jew to earn Baseball Hall of Fame votes in 12 years, but drops off the ballot

The Baseball Hall of Fame announced the results of its 2025 ballot on Tuesday, and former star player Ian Kinsler received 10 votes, becoming the first Jewish player to earn HOF votes since Shawn Green in 2013. He was the first Jewish player to make it onto the ballot since his fellow Team Israel coach Kevin Youkilis in 2019, who did not receive votes.

Jewish history aside, Kinsler’s 10 votes amounted to only 2.5% of all voters, below the 5% percent threshold required to remain on the ballot in future years. With 394 total voters this year, Kinsler would have needed to receive 20 votes to remain on the ballot, and 296 for induction. Ichiro Suzuki became the first Japanese player ever elected to the Hall of Fame, falling one vote shy of unanimity, and will be joined in this year’s class by pitchers CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner.

While Kinsler will fall off the ballot after only one year, his career remains worthy of celebration. In 14 MLB seasons, he won two Gold Glove awards for his defense at second base, while earning four All-Star selections and winning the 2018 World Series with the Boston Red Sox. Kinsler’s 54.1 career wins above replacement puts him at 20th all-time among second basemen, ahead of multiple hall of famers, including Bobby Doerr and Nellie Fox.

Next year, retired Milwaukee Brewers star Ryan Braun will have his chance at Cooperstown. Braun, who sometimes went by the moniker “Hebrew Hammer” during his playing career, won the 2007 NL Rookie of the Year and the 2011 NL MVP awards. He also received six All-Star selections and five Silver Slugger awards, but his legacy was tarnished when he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs and served a 65-game suspension in 2013. Braun’s 352 home runs are the most all-time among Jewish players. Players known to have used steroids have thus far been shut out of the hall.

(Two-time All-Star second baseman Jason Kipnis also joins the ballot in 2026. Kipnis grew up Jewish but is now a practicing Roman Catholic — though he once celebrated a home run with a “Hava Nagila” dugout dance.)

Halftime report

YOU’RE IN! Speaking of halls of fame, the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Israel unveiled its 2025 class, a group of 14 athletes and media personalities representing sports ranging from swimming and wrestling to judo and basketball. The group includes former NBA star Amar’e Stoudemire, legendary Argentine broadcaster Andrés Cantor (“Gooooooool!”) and Olympians from the United States, Israel, Mexico, Denmark, Germany and France. Meet all the honorees here. (And check out our 2023 feature on why there are so many Jewish sports halls of fame.)

“ONE OF OUR OWN.” Recently released British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari thanked her fellow Tottenham Hotspur fans, who had displayed yellow ribbons at the Premier League club’s London arena and chanted ‘She’s one of our own’ at matches during the war. “She is so touched and we can’t wait to join you again for a match,” Damari’s mother told The Standard. Tottenham has a long history with London’s Jewish community, and the team’s diehard fans are (sometimes controversially) known as the “Yid Army.”

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A THIRD BASEMAN. Spring Training is only weeks away, and star third baseman Alex Bregman is still a free agent. The longtime Houston Astros cornerstone has been linked to the Red Sox and Detroit Tigers this offseason, but recent reporting from The Athletic suggests that the door remains open for a reunion in Houston, where the two-time World Series champ has spent his entire nine-year career.

BEAR-SHERT. The Chicago Bears are one of many teams to hire a new head coach since the NFL regular season ended earlier this month, but possibly the only one to do so in Yiddish. The team’s CEO Kevin Warren used a popular word in the Mamaloshen to describe new Bears coach Ben Johnson, calling the hire “bashert,” which essentially means “soul mate.”

JOIN US! It’s not too late to sign up for JTA’s upcoming four-part virtual class on American Jewish sports history, featuring renowned Yeshiva University Professor Jeffrey Gurock. The course, which will trace the long lineage of Jews who left their mark on the sports world, begins Feb. 6. Learn more and sign up right here.

Jews in sports to watch this weekend (all times ET)

🏈 IN FOOTBALL…

The Kansas City Chiefs host the Buffalo Bills in the AFC Championship Game Sunday at 6:30 p.m. Tight end Anthony Firkser, who appeared in three games for the defending champions this season, remains on the Chiefs’ practice squad, but has not taken the field since a regular season game on Dec. 21.

🏒 IN HOCKEY…

Zach Hyman and the Edmonton Oilers host Jason Zucker and the Buffalo Sabres Saturday at 4 p.m. Sabres prospect Devon Levi has had a stellar season in the AHL, but has struggled during his brief stints in the NHL this season, including during a 6-4 loss on Monday. Quinn Hughes, Max Sasson and Mark Friedman’s Vancouver Canucks host Jakob Chychrun and the Washington Capitals Saturday at 10 p.m. Adam Fox and the New York Rangers host the Colorado Avalanche Sunday at 1 p.m. In the PWHL, Sam Cogan and the Toronto Sceptres host Abbey Levy, Elle Hartje and the New York Sirens Saturday at 2 p.m. Aerin Frankel and the Boston Fleet face Minnesota Saturday at 3 p.m.

🏀 IN BASKETBALL…

Deni Avdija and the Portland Trail Blazers face the Charlotte Hornets tonight at 7 p.m. and host the Oklahoma City Thunder Sunday at 6 p.m. Domantas Sabonis, who is converting to Judaism, and the Sacramento Kings play the New York Knicks Saturday at 7:30 p.m. In the G League, Amari Bailey and the Iowa Wolves host the Valley Suns tonight at 7:30 p.m.

⚽ IN SOCCER…

Matt Turner and his Premier League squad Crystal Palace host Brentford Sunday at 9 a.m.

⛳ IN GOLF…

Max Greyserman, David Lipsky, Ben Silverman and Daniel Berger are all competing in the PGA Tour’s Farmers Insurance Open in San Diego this weekend. Max Homa, who won the tournament in 2023, withdrew from the competition because of an illness.

Eva Szepesi, 92, is traveling this week to the Nazi concentration camp she narrowly survived, where her mother and brother were both murdered.

Szepesi, who grew up in Slovakia and now lives in Frankfurt, Germany, is one of the last survivors of Auschwitz alive today. Just 50 of them are expected to be present on Monday at the camp in Poland for a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation — down from 300 a decade ago and 1,000 a decade before that.

The ceremony comes amid widespread anxiety over whether knowledge about the Holocaust is diminishing as the number of Jews who survived it dwindles. For Szepesi, however, the history has lost none of its power.

“Auschwitz will stay with me until the last day, the last moment,” she said.

For the first time, this year’s milestone ceremony will not feature any speeches by politicians. In addition to the survivors who speak, the only other addresses will come from World Jewish Congress president Ronald S. Lauder, representing major donors to the memorial site, and historian Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Five years ago, Poland’s president Andrzej Duda was the only politician to speak. This year, he is facing criticism over Poland’s pledge not to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant over the Gaza war, in the unlikely event that Netanyahu visits for the ceremony.

“A lot of people are tired of these speeches by officials, functionaries, politicians,” said Yves Kugelmann, the Switzerland-based editor in chief of Aufbau, a magazine started by German-speaking Jewish emigres in 1934. Its newest edition is dedicated to the subject of Auschwitz and memory, and includes contributions by survivors.

“It is important that we have the witnesses talking about what they experienced,” Kugelmann said.

When Soviet troops entered the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, they found 7,000 survivors whom the fleeing SS had left behind.

Twenty years ago, about 1,000 of them attended commemoration ceremonies at the site, in bitter cold. Now, that is the total number of Auschwitz survivors alive worldwide, according to an estimate by the Claims Conference, which negotiates restitution for survivors and recently launched a campaign featuring messages from 80 of them. (The group found last year that there were fewer than 250,000 survivors alive globally.) Most are in their 90s, and relatively few are able to make the trip.

This year’s event is “the last where we will have a visible group of survivors with us,” said Paweł Sawicki, deputy spokesman for the Auschwitz Memorial. “And this is why it is so important to put the entire spotlight on the survivors.”

“They will give the main addresses, and we will not have any politicians giving speeches,” he said, adding, “We do not want to assault this memory by [its] being politically instrumentalized.”

State representatives “will be present, but they will be listening to the voices of survivors,” Sawicki said, noting that it was survivors who in the early postwar years came up with the idea of having a memorial at the site.

Thousands of people are expected to be on hand for the ceremony, which marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day. (A Jewish and Israeli memorial day for the Holocaust, Yom Hashoah, falls in April.) A heated tent has been set up for participants around the infamous gate to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, historians say, of the estimated 1.3 million people deported to the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland from 1940 to 1945, 1.1 million were murdered there; around 1 million of them were Jews.

For decades, their stories have been told by the few survivors. In the videos shared by the Claims Conference, one survivor, Alfred Sobotka, shares a photo from his bar mitzvah, and points to his father and brother, both gassed on arrival at Auschwitz.

Another, Alice Ginsburg, recalls “the heart-wrenching experience of being separated from my family” forever.

In just a few words, each of them paints a universe lost.

Szepesi, who also appears in a video, was the only survivor from her immediate family. She was only 12 when she was deported to Auschwitz in November 1944, several months after her family had sent her alone into hiding with relatives in Slovakia.

Very few children arriving at Auschwitz survived. She was selected for work, cleaning ammunition. She clung to the hope of being reunited with her family. Liberation came; she later returned to Budapest, where she met her husband, a fellow survivor named Andor Szepesi. They married in 1951, started a family and eventually applied for asylum in what was then West Germany, moving there in 1954.

Eva Szepesi first went back to the site for the commemoration in 1995, convinced by her daughters Judith and Anita. After the ceremony she spoke with students for the first time; they sat cross-legged on the floor in her hotel and listened, rapt.

“I just started and it all bubbled up,” she recalled. Since that time, she has spoken with numerous school groups, particularly in Germany.

“I start with my happy childhood, which was very short” but had a lasting impact, she said. “I received a lot of love.”

She tells them “that when they experience injustice, they should stand up and not remain silent; they should get informed, not believe everything straight away. And you have to be careful that something like that never happens again,” she said, adding that listeners “always tell me, we will be the witnesses of the survivors when they are no longer here; we will pass it on.”

In 2016, she finally learned the fates of her parents and brother. Her granddaughter researched at the Auschwitz archive and found Szepesi’s mother, Valeria Diamant, on a list of murdered Jews.

“I was so scared,” recalled Szepesi, who had accompanied her granddaughter to the archive. As if in a dream, “I saw my mother’s name with my own eyes.” She scanned the list and found her brother’s name, Tamás Diamant, as well.

She had waited 70 years, hoping her mother would come for her. It turned out she had been murdered shortly before Eva arrived at the camp.

“It’s always a terrible thought for me, that she saw from above that her little daughter marched in, into Birkenau, Auschwitz-Birkenau,” she said.

All Eva Szepesi has from her childhood, aside from memories, is a handful of photos that a neighbor had hidden and handed to her uncle, wrapped in a newspaper, after the war. Szepesi looks at them every day, and even sometimes speaks with them.

The shattering knowledge about what happened to her family brought some closure. But she still asks herself: “My little brother was four years younger, and he was murdered. Why am I allowed to live, and he had to die? But I don’t get an answer.”

Educators and Jewish organizations have been working to devise strategies for teaching about the Holocaust when the last survivors with memory of the Holocaust can no longer tell their stories — a prospect that grows nearer by the day. Virtual and augmented reality is increasingly playing a role, as are the children and grandchildren of survivors.

On Monday, Szepesi will be a guest of the World Jewish Congress, accompanied by her younger daughter, Anita Schwarz.

The return to Auschwitz is “like going to visit my grandmother. That is where I actually felt her presence for the first time,” Schwarz said.

“There are so many young people today who don’t know what Auschwitz is, who can’t relate to it at all,” Schwarz added. “Only when you really come to terms with history, and actually with your own family history, can you understand what it means and that you really have to do something, so it doesn’t happen again.”

In 1944, the year Judith Frydman turned 1, Nazi troops invaded her hometown of Budapest, Hungary. Her father, who survived, was sent to a forced labor camp while Frydman, her mother and her grandmother were forced to live in the city’s Jewish ghetto, sharing a mattress in the corner of a cramped room.

“Don’t cry, don’t talk loud,” Frydman’s mother would always tell her.

Frydman survived, along with her mother, and she moved first to Argentina and then to Israel. She settled in New York, where she has lived in the same Brighton Beach apartment for 57 years.

Now, Frydman is one of 12 local Holocaust survivors currently featured on a Times Square billboard in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday, which will mark 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. A project of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island — a social services organization and community center in southern Brooklyn that works extensively with Holocaust survivors — the billboard aims to highlight survivors’ experiences and legacies, and to remind New Yorkers that as the number of living survivors dwindles, Frydman and others are still here. 

According to Zehava Birman Wallace, a case management supervisor for Holocaust Survivor Support Services at the Coney Island JCC, when she describes her job the first question many people ask is, “Oh, there are still Holocaust survivors alive?” 

But now, thanks to space donated by the billboard’s owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, a dozen of their faces will be visible in one of the world’s busiest areas.

Raising awareness, according to Birman Wallace, is the first step in raising money to help New York’s population of Holocaust survivors. According to a report last January from the Claims Conference, approximately 14,700 survivors live in New York State — the vast majority of them in Brooklyn — and, as the population ages (the median age last year was 86), the level and cost of the care they need is increasing.

“A significant amount of them are living in low-income situations, and in need, and are in their twilight years, where they need a significant amount of support,” she said. More than half of the survivors in NYC are living at or below the poverty line, according to the Coney Island JCC. 

The campaign first lit up the billboard at the corner of West 43rd Street and Broadway in mid-December, and will run through March 15. The video features a short and powerful 10-second message, playing four times an hour, and features a different Holocaust survivor each week. 

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“Hi, can you see me?” subtitles read as Frydman, whose story will be spotlighted next week, speaks to Times Square’s hundreds of thousands of pedestrians. The video continues: “My name is Judith, I am 82 years old. I am a Holocaust survivor and I am still here.”

Other participants include 87-year-old Marat Rivkin, whose ad played as nearly a million people gathered in Times Square to watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, and Brooklynite Alfred Lock, a 102-year-old from Austria who first escaped to Budapest. Once the Nazis invaded Hungary, Lock managed to get on the controversial Kasztner train, which smuggled Jews to safety in Switzerland — the train was diverted to Bergen-Belsen, however, and Lock survived the next few months there before the camp’s liberation.

In a Zoom interview with the New York Jewish Week, Frydman said she was excited to be part of the billboard project, and emphasized its importance. “We are less and less,” she said about her fellow survivors. “There is so much antisemitism, so much against Jews, against Israel, constantly. So yes, it has to be talked about, or pushed to the conscious[ness] of people.”

Frydman also expressed enthusiasm over her brush with fame. “My family is excited about me, and everyone will want my autograph,” she said, laughing. “Somebody said, ‘Oh, all the guys will be standing outside wanting to be with you.’ And I said ‘No, because on the billboard, all my wrinkles are about three feet long, or 10 feet long, so nobody will want to run after me.’”

“But it’s very exciting,” she added, “and I can’t even imagine being up there.”

Birman Wallace said that the spotlight on Frydman and the 11 other survivors on the billboard is more than deserved. “Those stories deserve to be out there,” she said. “Their faces deserve to be out there in the world, and a billboard in Times Square is really just a step, you know, a piece of that puzzle.”

According to Birman Wallace, the company that owns the billboard reached out with the idea of doing an ad after the Coney Island JCC caught their attention in November with an event providing free hearing aids to Holocaust survivors, in partnership with the Miracle-Ear Foundation and the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation.“They felt really strongly about the work that we do,” Birman Wallace said, adding that the company offered the JCC the space at a “significantly discounted” rate. The remaining cost was covered by a corporate sponsor, Key to Life Homecare. 

The Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island provides extensive services for thousands of Holocaust survivors in Brooklyn — there are approximately 10,000 in the borough — including home care, transportation to programming and medical appointments, financial assistance, home-delivered meals, and a festive monthly party known as Club 2600.

Now, the organization is providing its Holocaust survivor clients with a brand-new experience: a chance to help light up the NYC skyline.

“It’s an incredible place to be,” Frydman said.