Everyone has a story
Humans of Judaism’s Nikki Schreiber talks about her work
There probably are as many ways to deal with intense grief as there are people, but those ways tend to fall into groups.
Some people sit quietly with the intensity of their grief. Some cry; some gracefully, others in great wails and explosions of tears. Some push it away with drink or drugs. Some talk; some keep silent.
When her father, Bayrish, died, in 2013, Nikki Schreiber “decided that I wanted to do something,” she said.
“So I decided to try my hand at starting a Jewish page.” On Instagram, that is.
Ms. Schreiber set the context. “There was a lot less out there on social media in the landscape of Jewish content,” she said; remember that time in social media is measured more in dog than people years. Eleven years was a long time ago for social media.
In June of 2014, just a few months after she started “Humans of Judaism,” Hamas members kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaer, and Naftali Fraenkel, in the West Bank, and Israel began Operation Protective Edge in Gaza. It was, to understate, a fraught time — nothing compared to now, of course, but still on edge. It was a dangerous time.
“So I was like, ‘Let’s do something,’” Ms. Schreiber said. “I wanted to distract myself, to honor my father, and to put some positive Jewish content and education out on the internet, and see what sticks.”
A lot stuck.
“Humans of Judaism,” on Instagram and on Ms. Schreiber’s identically named website, starts with the understanding that everybody has a story. Ms. Schreiber’s posts, and now her book, tell some of those stories; it tells one a day, generally six days a week, although she allows herself occasional vacations, and in either the voice of the subject of the story or Ms. Schreiber’s own.
All those stories are in her father’s memory, and in honor of her mother, Batsheva.
And not only is the project international, it’s also local. Ms. Schreiber recently moved to Teaneck; she grew up in Highland Park, but her father and his family were deeply rooted in Newark.
Ms. Schreiber will talk about the book at the JCC U at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly on Thursday, October 31. (See below.)
The book tells all sorts of stories — Holocaust survivors, including people like Hedda Kleinfeld, who made her name expertly selling wedding dresses, and the needs-no-further-introduction Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and also such Jewish athletes as Tamir Goodman and Aly Raisman, and entrepreneurs including Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins. (I didn’t know they were Jewish either.) And that’s just from the book’s first few pages.
Ms. Schreiber opens the book with her own family’s story. Her mother was born on the Lower East Side but her mother’s mother was the seventh generation of the family born in Jerusalem; she was a link in a long chain of Orthodox rabbis and their families. Her father’s father, also born in Newark, was from a long line of cantors; he was so precocious that he supported his family, as a cantor, when he was 13 years old.
In that first piece, Ms. Schreiber writes about her great grandfather’s grocery story, at 443 Avon Avenue in Newark. Shmuel, her great grandfather, had a customer named Isadore who lived across town but made a point of shopping in Shmuel’s store, at first simply because another Jew owned it. Over time, the two men talked, discovered a shared love of Torah learning, and eventually Shmuel would close the store when Isadore — whose Hebrew name was Avraham Yaakov — visited, and the two would learn together.
That was the family story; that was all they knew, and it was enough.
And then, at some time in the 1980s — decades and decades later — “my paternal grandmother, Lillian, was telling my mother about a wonderful Jewish market that her father went to in Newark,” Ms. Schreiber wrote. And yes, it turns out that “it was my mother’s grandfather and my father’s grandfather who used to learn Torah together,” she continued. So their grandchildren got married and had four children, two sons and two daughters. One of those daughters is Nikki, and the other is her sister Miriam. And the brothers? Shmuel and Avraham Yaakov.
Although Ms. Schreiber posts frequently, working on “Humans of Judaism” is not her day job; it is, instead, a labor of love. She works in the healthcare field. But as disparate as those two things seem to be, they’re not entirely unconnected, she said. “It has given me some added tools. It helps me to communicate in a more considerate way.” And it has given her the opportunity to see many people struggle with grief, and that helped her deal with her own; in a way, it guided her toward “Humans of Judaism.”
When Ms. Schreiber started posting, her Instagram just took off. “People started connecting with the page,” she said. “Before marking my father’s first yahrzeit, I had reached 10,000 followers on Instagram. I don’t know how that happened. It’s been really authentic and organic. I have tried to maintain a format and tried to evolve and learn. I work at keeping it a healthy space.
“I do attribute the quick growth to there being fewer spaces like it at the time.
As people were trying to understand what was going on in Israel, they found the page and connected with some of the feel-good content and identity there.”
Her posts made readers feel good, and they were real. The stories were both authentic and mostly upbeat.
At the beginning, she wasn’t sure what she’d do with the page, “but once the yahrzeit came, spoiler alert!, I kept going. And it has been quite a ride for the last couple of years.”
She began to work with Artisan, a New York-based publisher that’s a division of Hatchette Livre, before October 7, right around the project’s 10th anniversary. To understate, that was a challenge. “I am a one-woman show, and I am simultaneously trying to do feel-good content while managing this new chapter in Jewish history.
“I want to stay focused on what I’m doing, which is celebrating Judaism, our friends, our supporters, our history.
Not all of her readers are Jewish, she added. “We can’t tell the stories of the Jewish community without also telling the stories of our non-Jewish neighbors,” she said. “And we also have supporters, and people who want to learn about our traditions and our stories. Who want to learn new things.
She comes from an Orthodox family, but her posts, both online and in the book, “are inclusive,” she said. “It’s also apolitical. The only politicians I include are the ones who are no longer alive. I want to stay on task. And that’s true not only of the posts, but of the entire community. Of the environment. These are real people whose stories we’re telling. After October 7, I worked really hard to keep it as a space of Jewish content, that acknowledged and addressed what was going on without sharing any of the more difficult or gory details that people could find in other places.
“I felt that we needed a Jewish space where we could decompress.”
There are many Holocaust stories in “Humans of Judaism,” “which after October 7 we read differently,” Ms. Schreiber said. “We listen to Elie Wiesel’s words differently.
“I find those stories to be important because in most cases they really illustrate the survival, the resilience, the growth, the continuation of Jewish life. There also are the stories that you also have to recognize as very much part of the Jewish experience, about children who didn’t survive.”
Many of the stories are about immigrants or their descendants, and even those immigrants who did not come to the United States as a result of World War II or the Holocaust generally left home for the new world because of pogroms, or poverty, of the draft, or other severe hardships, either ongoing or threatened. “That experience shaped a lot of American Jewish creativity, and it is good to be able to tell those stories,” Ms. Schreiber said.
How does she find all those stories? “Organically,” she said. “Now, it’s become a bit more intentional. Often people find me. Some of them send stories to me. Some of them are on the internet; I follow headlines.” Sometimes she reposts stories — always with permission.
“One of my favorite things is hearing the ping in my email box that means that there’s a story there,” she said. “Many of the stories are right from people’s mouths. I love my inbox so much sometimes I wish I could kiss it. It’s how I can connect with people.
“Now that I’ve been doing it for so long, I have developed relationships. I’ve connected with public figures, with photographers, with people with unique points of view.”
Although many people send in stories that Ms. Schreiber can publish more or less unedited, sometimes she has to edit a bit more, and sometimes she’s asked to write a story. Even if she does edit, “I always want to preserve the person’s voice.”
It’s a community effort, she said.
Ms. Schreiber is very happy finally to live in Teaneck. Much of her family is there, she said, and one of her brothers, A.J. Schreiber, is one of the cantors at Congregation Bnai Yeshurun over the High Holidays, so getting to hear him is a particular thrill. And the first talk on her newly launched book tour will be at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades, which has become her own JCC. “I feel like I’m coming home,” she said.
She welcomes stories; she hasn’t outgrown the tingle that comes from a new one hitting her inbox. Email them to nikki@humansofjudaism.com.
Who: Nikki Schreiber
What: Will talk about her new book, “Humans of Judaism”
Where: At the JCC U at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly
When: On Thursday, October 31, at 12:45
What else: It will follow a discussion on the Supreme Court in Crisis: What Can Be Done, a look at the court’s recent scandals and the public concurrent loss of confidence in it, given by Jess Velona.
What’s the schedule: The morning starts with coffee and conversation at 10:30; Mr. Velona’s talk is at 10:45; participants scatter for lunch, on their own, at noon, and reconvene at 12:45. The program ends at 2.
How much: JCC members pay $38; it’s $45 for everyone else
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