Cedarhurst native plays offense in Braves’ land

Dr. Barry Zisholtz was a urological surgeon, not a politician. But when the Cedarhurst native found himself in a Georgia district whose state representative was silent on Hamas terror and the concurrent wave of antisemitism, he recalled Hillel’s urging in Pirkei Avot, “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.”

That’s how “Dr. Z” finds himself running as a long shot candidate for the Georgia House, a sold-red Orthodox Jewish Republican in the bluest of districts where most people are Black or immigrants. And it’s Atlanta Braves country to boot!

“There hasn’t been a Republican in the state house in DeKalb County in 30 years, so my chances going into this were not good,” Zisholtz told The Jewish Star. His opponent, Imani Barnes, carried the district with nearly 90 percent of the vote two years ago.

For most of the voters he’s encountered, Israel and the Gaza war are not top of mind.

“They’re concerned about the price of a quart of orange juice or milk, or their medicines, and their property taxes going up, and the potholes, and all the people carrying guns, the crime.”

He said that abortion rights — one of the foremost issues dividing Democratic and Republican candidates — rarely comes up, but when it does, he says that “abortion may not be for me, but it’s a big country and each state has its own rules.”

What he’s more often confronted with is his support of former President Donald Trump. He responds that he’s running for a local state House seat, but when pushed will concede that he supports Trump “because my people are at risk.”

“When I see a Democrat and they say, ‘Well, you’re a Republican, you can go home.’ I say, ‘but you’re going to vote for somebody who says Hamas is not a terror and who voted against the antisemitism bill, and they would slam the door and they don’t really care about that.”

Zisholtz spent his formative years in the Five Towns, moving from Flushing when he was about 8 years old and attending the Hillel School on Washington Avenue (now HAFTR). He is still connected — his mother, 91, lives in the same house on Oxford Road where he and his three siblings were raised. One of his brothers still lives in Cedarhurst.

His additional ongoing links to the Five Towns include these:

•When he remarried five years ago, it was to Mindy Rosenman Mitzner, who was from Far Rockaway before moving to Houston. (Zisholtz’s first wife, to whom he was married for 34 years and had four children, died in 2017.)

•Zisholtz recalled that Mindy’s father was a chazen in the Five Towns-Far Rockaway community and also a commercial printer who did his Bar Mitzvah invitations.

•Mindy is a first cousin of Shalom Maidenbaum, a prominent member of the community and founder of the Maidenbaum Property Tax Reduction Group. Her mother was “Morah Marion” who was a teacher and also worked in Shalom’s office.

•Zisholtz met Shalom at Hillel, where they were “best buddies” throughout high school, then they started together at the University of Michigan.

“We had a really nice upbringing” in the Five Towns, he said. “I always went to Beth Shalom; Rabbi Klaperman was my rabbi until I left for college. It was very crowded on Shabbos, but after Shabbos, everyone went to the country club or shopping on Central Avenue. That was the way it was done in the ’70s.”

“We learned that we needed to take care of our community, our family and our friends,” he said. “We frequently went on school buses during the ’70s to protest for the release of the Soviet Jews.”

Zisholtz recently retired after 36 years as a urological surgeon, working mostly in Riverdale and East Point, Georgia.

In an interview with Greg Kelly on Newsmax this week, he said he had no plans to go into politics until discovering that two months after Oct. 7, his state representative “walked out on a resolution calling Hamas a terror organization. And then a month later, she voted against the antisemitism bill. And then she also voted for sanctuary cities. She also voted to allow China, Russia and Iran to do business in Georgia. And she voted to be less tough on crime and criminals. So with all those things, I decided to step up, because she was running unopposed. I knew I had to do something.

“I have 17 grandchildren, and this was really not on the agenda and not on the table,” he told Kelly, “but I thought that this was my opportunity to fight back against many, many things I don’t believe in.”

Because of his medical work in the Black community, including performing indigent surgeries for free, he told The Jewish Star that he’s comfortable campaigning there, and with his team has knocked on 7,500 doors.

“When I walk into a Black barber shop, they first stop cutting hair. It’s like an Eddie Murphy movie. They said, ‘What are you doing here?’ They think I have an emergency. And then I say, ‘I’m Dr Z. I’m coming to earn your vote.’ When I leave the barbershop, they have my sign on the door.”

At a Juneteenth event he co-sponsored with the NAACP in Stonecrest, Ga., Zisholtz quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as saying that “there comes time that silence is betrayal. And I challenged the 150 people there  — I said, we need your help. We were there for you when you were discriminated against. Now we need you. Our kids can’t go to school anymore.”

“As a surgeon, nobody ever asked me whether I was a Democrat or Republican or even my religion,” he told The Jewish Star. “They came with pain or blood in the urine or a kidney stone, and they just asked me to make them well.”

“I grew up being taught to help make the world a better place once person at a time,” Zisholtz says on his campaign website, www.votedrz.com. “That phrase in Hebrew is called Tikun Olam. I have spent my life trying to live by that phrase.”

Once again a thought from Pirkei Avot comes to mind, this one attributed to Rabbi Tarfon: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”

“I know it’s an uphill battle, to unify and educate some of the communities about the Jewish community, and that’s what I’ve been doing,” Zisholtz said.