Roy Altman, a Venezuelan-born, Jewish judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, planned to have a family Passover seder in the Negev desert this year. That was to follow a mission with 25 other federal judges, a seder with Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, and 100 other envoys from around the world, and a baptism ceremony for Catholic family friends in the Sea of Galilee.

The trip wasn’t meant to be.

“In some ways, it’s great, because we get to destroy the Iranian regime, and then we’ll wait a year, and the entire itinerary is already planned,” Altman told JNS. “It’s not like I have to do extra work.”

The judge has brought several groups of American federal judges to Israel to “see and understand the facts on the ground, to have them learn about what the applicable legal regime is and to have them render an opinion about how those legal regimes apply to the facts as they’re adduced on the ground,” he told JNs.

His book “Israel On Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence and the Law” is due out from Advantage Books, part of Simon & Schuster, on April 28.

The judge told JNS that the book’s content comes from his missions to Israel, his speeches around the country about the Jewish state and his conclusion that the “uproar about Israel, which at first was so shocking to me, really is based on six main claims.”

Those claims run the gamut from “genocide” to land theft.

At their core, the claims are all legal, which “requires legal analysis and legal answers and the same legal methodology we use all the time,” he told JNS. “So I thought, why not just apply the same legal methodology that we judges, lawyers and juries apply every single day to legal claims in every courtroom and law office in America, to these six legal claims about Israel and see what happens?”

Each claim gets a chapter, which reads like a legal brief that is written for a lay audience. Each ends with a conclusion, rooted in the law.

“It is written in the way that we talk to jurors,” Altman told JNS.

Americans often struggle to find the truth and analyze facts through the internet, “but when they get together as a jury, an amazing transformation happens,” he said.

That occurs “when they receive this methodology from the judge and the series of tools that they get from the court and from the lawyers to help them analyze, using their reason and common sense, sometimes very complicated issues in the courtroom, and they almost always get to the heart of the issue,” he said. “They get it right.”

Altman hopes to reach what he thinks is about 40% of the country that has no distinct pro-Israel or anti-Israel sentiment but are “people of good faith, who want to know more about the issue,” he told JNS.

Through his book, they “will be armed with the ammunition they need to rebut false claims about Israel,” he said.

‘Uncle Max’s kiddush cup’

The judge has Israel to thank for his first name.

His father’s commanding officer in the Israeli Air Force, named Ro’ee, was wounded in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Altman got his name from that officer, and Ro’ee became Roy. (The Hebrew word means “my shepherd” and is taken from Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd.”)

The judge’s paternal grandfather, Isidoro Altman, was born in Romania and moved to Prague at age 10. After Kristallnacht, Isidoro’s uncle, Max, put him on a boat that he thought was America-bound, but the United States wasn’t taking Jews at that time.

The boat docked in Venezuela, which, Altman told JNS, his grandfather “probably couldn’t spell and didn’t know existed.”

“He certainly didn’t speak the language and knew zero human beings there,” the judge said.

Isidoro’s only possession that he brought with him was his uncle Max’s kiddish cup—the very same cup that the judge uses weekly on Shabbat.

Though uneducated, Isidoro was “brilliant” and went from a bellhop in Caracas to running the entire hotel chain throughout the country, according to Altman. He earned enough to return to Romania to track his family down.

Isidoro found his sister and her husband and their baby, who was born in a Romanian concentration camp.

Traveling through Europe’s ruins, they met a waitress at a French restaurant, Jeanine, who killed a Nazi officer who tried to rape her while investigating her ties to a member of the French Resistance, with whom she had danced at a party.

Jeanine’s family sent her to Normandy, where she hid under a bomb shelter for days. She learned the outcome of the war only when an American soldier opened the bunker door and handed her a stick of Wrigley’s chewing gum. She had heard on the radio that victorious Americans gave out Wrigley’s gum in Italy and North Africa.

Isidoro tried to convince Jeanine to marry him, but she refused. Later, when her work as an Air France flight attendant took her around the world, she came to Venezuela, where she decided to put down roots. She and Isidoro married, and they raised three children, including Altman’s father. The latter moved to Israel at 18 and became an Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer.

In Israel, he married Altman’s mother. Her father, Kalman, fled Poland and ended up in Mexico, only to find that when he had saved enough money to send for his family, that his wife and five children were sent to gas chambers. In Mexico, he remarried and raised four more children, including Altman’s mother.

The judge’s middle name, Kalman, comes from his maternal grandfather.

‘Of the people’

Altman’s parents moved to Venezuela to help Isidoro with the hotel business, but an unsafe environment there led them to move to Miami when Altman was 2 or 3, he told JNS.

He played quarterback and was a pitcher at Columbia University, went to Yale Law School and clerked for a federal judge in Miami. That led to a role as a federal prosecutor. During his first term, U.S. President Donald Trump nominated him to be a federal judge. He was 34.

Altman told JNS that he sees his work through a Jewish prism. “The Bible is replete with references to judging,” he said.

In the Torah portion named for Moses’s father-in-law, the Bible tells of Jethro urging Moses to create a court system of judges overseeing thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens to take pressure off of him. Jethro tells his famous son-in-law to name court officers who, despite their great ideas, aren’t disconnected from society.

“It’s a great lesson for me,” Altman told JNS.

In recent decades, federal judges, who were once “part and parcel of political discourse,” are increasingly seen as confined “in their chambers, all by themselves, totally removed from the people, from schools, from public discourse,” according to Altman.

“That the only way to speak as a federal judge is through your opinions,” he told JNS. “I think that’s not right. That hasn’t been true for the most part in American history.”

Jethro warned against having judges who are separated from politics, according to Altman.

“I think it’s important for judges to be of the people, to understand the community in which they live, their fears, their hopes, their aspirations, and to be able to adjudicate claims fairly and consistently in the context of that lived reality,” he told JNS. “So I do think it informs that part of me every single day.”

Altman said during his Senate confirmation hearing that he believes that the most important quality in a judge is rachmones, Yiddish for mercy.

“I have 250 cases and I’m very busy, but every single case is the most important thing going on in the life of that one person who’s before me,” Altman told JNS. “If you’ve got a case in state court, your life is probably turned upside down.”

“To have a case in federal court, it’s consuming every aspect of your case, and we have to remember that and we have to have rachmones for people in that situation,” he said.

Altman wouldn’t label his Jewish identity. In Venezuela, there wasn’t a distinction between Reform and Conservative, he said. He doesn’t go to synagogue, but the synagogue he doesn’t attend is Orthodox, he said, citing a famous one-liner.

“That was kind of how we were growing up,” he said. “We would have Shabbat dinner every Friday night with lots of friends and family, and we still do every Friday night.”

They also looked forward to Passover seders, Altman said, just as he looks forward to next year’s seder, still set for Mitzpe Ramon, under the desert stars.

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