‘Bachelorette’ contestant is great-great-grandson of Kovno’s last chief rabbi

When Jeremy Simon, a New York City real estate investor, headed out on a recent date, he was thinking of a rabbi who died during the Holocaust.

Simon, 29, is one of four remaining competitors on “The Bachelorette” this season, its 21st. The show features a single woman choosing among 25 men vying for her love. (“The Bachelor” flips the sexes.)

In an episode that aired last week, 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.”

As he later told Hey Alma, he was referring to Avraham Dov-Ber Kahana Shapiro, the last chief rabbi of Kovno, now Kaunas, Lithuania.

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 Europe’s first modern yeshiva, and one of its most highly regarded. Considered an “ilui,” or Talmud prodigy, Shapiro 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 69.

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.”

Jewish Telegraphic Agency