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New Yorkers are buzzing about local honey this Rosh Hashanah
(New York Jewish Week) — Five years ago, Gadi Peleg, the owner and founder of Breads Bakery — an Israeli-style bakery with roots in Tel Aviv and stores around Manhattan — began to sell New York City-harvested honey in his stores in the weeks before Rosh Hashanah. It was an instant hit.
All the products at Breads (other than soft drinks) are prepared in-house, and it made sense to Peleg that the honey be proprietary, too. So Peleg turned to Andrew Coté, a fourth-generation beekeeper and owner of Andrew’s Honey, who has more than 100 hives around the city.
“Honey from the city is cleaner than honey from the countryside,” Coté, who is Jewish, told the New York Jewish Week. “Very few to no pesticides are sprayed in Manhattan.”
Beekeeping became legal in New York City in 2010, at which time 42 bee owners were registered. According to the New York City Health Department, there are currently 121 beekeepers registered with the city. Tom Wilk, New York City director of the Empire State Honey Producers Associations, estimates that there are probably twice that amount. “People are afraid of letting the government know what they are doing,” he said.
Interest in beekeeping continues to grow, and there are classes on beekeeping throughout the city. Brooklyn Grange, a leading rooftop farming business, holds a Beekeeping 101 class at its Brooklyn Navy Yard location. In Astoria, Queens, Nick and Ashley Hoefly, will soon open the city’s only dedicated honey shop, The Honey House at Astor Apiaries where you can try honey, take classes in beekeeping, gardening and cooking.
September is a busy month for New York City’s beekeepers. Rosh Hashanah, and its custom to put honey on the holiday table, jacks up demand — and demand in a city with 1.6 million Jews is steep. What’s more, September is a big harvesting month and, for the last 13 years, the Queens Beekeepers Guild has hosted a honey festival on the second Saturday in September on the boardwalk in Rockaway Beach.
Coté, founder of the New York City Beekeepers Association and the author of a book about urban beekeeping, is perhaps the best known of the beekeepers spread across the five boroughs. He and Peleg first became acquainted at the Union Square Greenmarket, where Coté sells his wares. The four-day-a-week market is just down the block from Breads’ original Manhattan location on West 16th Street. It was a win-win situation for the two businessmen: The beekeeper gained an additional revenue stream while the baker acquired an exclusive source of honey from a producer who’s landed on “best” lists.
Of Coté’s dozens of hives, four of them are earmarked for Breads. They are located on the roof of a building at 19th Street and Broadway.
“When people hear the honey comes from hives a few blocks away, they react with disbelief,” said Samantha Mele, logistics manager at Breads Bakery. She is referred to as its “Queen Bee” — both because of her focus on details and her involvement in the honey project. “Longtime customers will pre-order since they know we sell out.”
“We first prioritize jarring the honey,” Peleg said. “People really enjoy it obviously with apples and on our challah bread.” He added that Breads sells “ many, many hundreds of jars” of the stuff each fall.
Breads also uses honey — local, if available after jarring, as well as honey sourced elsewhere — in a variety of Rosh Hashanah baked goods, including honey cake, medovik (a caramelized biscuit layer cake made with buckwheat honey), honey rugelach and safta cake (a honey, cinnamon and apple cake).
The amount of honey harvested from Breads’ four hives changes year to year, and the flavor — which depends on where the bees collected their pollen, and when the honey was harvested from the hives — varies, too.
“Generally the earlier honey [of the season] is lighter and the later honey is darker,” Coté said. “That’s because of what is in bloom at different times of the year. The early harvest [in New York] is full of pollen from linden trees.” Pollen from these European lindens, according to the Central Park Conservancy, makes a delicately flavored honey.
Beekeeping is a full-time job for some New Yorkers, like Coté, who grew up keeping bees in Quebec with a Catholic and Native American father and a Jewish mother. “My mother’s family was thrilled to have beekeepers in the family, since it meant a relatively endless supply of fresh pure honey, for all occasions, but most especially for Rosh Hashanah,” he said.
For other urban beekeepers, it’s “a hobby that pays its own way,” according to part-time beekeeper Menachem Husarsky of Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.
Husarsky began raising honey bees three years ago, at his wife’s request. She, along with their daughter, suffers from seasonal allergies, and many believe that ingesting locally sourced honey helps people build immunity to their pollen. (Alas, the medical community is divided on this.)
“Menachem took the idea and ran with it,” said Malka Husarsky, Menachem’s wife, who recalled her own mother eating local honey to help with her allergies.
Within a year, the family’s COVID-era hobby grew into a small business. In 2021, they began to sell their honey, The Birds and the Bees Brooklyn. Most of the sales are via Facebook, to the local communities of Ditmas Park and Kensington, but they also sell to their fellow Orthodox neighbors at their upstate home at Vacation Village in Monticello, New York.
So far, this year, the Husarskys have harvested 170 pounds of honey from four hives located in the modest side yard of their Brooklyn home. This season’s flavors are rare: “We have apple, cherry and peach trees on our property,” Husarsky said. “We have Meyer lemon and clementine trees in pots. A lot of our neighbors in the area grow mint and someone was growing hot peppers.”
By the end of this season, they expect to extract a total of 375 pounds of honey, which they sell for between $2 to $3 an ounce (the peach honey, which has a more limited supply, goes for $3 an ounce).
Sales, said Husarsky, “kick up in September around Rosh Hashanah,” and they usually sell out.
And at the Husarsky family’s celebration of Rosh Hashanah, “We intend, of course, to dip our apples in our honey,” said Menachem Husarsky. “We have apple trees on both our properties with apples ready for Rosh Hashanah.”
“We’re excited and blessed to spend the holiday with family,” Malka Husarsky added. “ It will be really special to have our family around the table, filled with items from Hashem and our urban farm.”
And there may be Jewish lessons to be learned from beekeeping, too. According to Rabbi Eitan Webb, director of the Chabad House at Princeton University: “Honey bees all work together in unity. They know that time is short and there is so much to do, and they run around as fast as they can, so they can create something good.”
“Bees make honey, but they also sting when they are threatened,” he added. The late Chabad rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, “suggests that, like bees, our primary role is to do mitzvahs, bringing sweetness to the world. Though we have the power to sting, we should reserve it for sparing use and only in defense of our treasure: Judaism.”
At Breads, the crew there has been preparing for Rosh Hashanah — which begins on the evening of Friday, Sept. 15 — since March. “We realize what a huge responsibility it is to ensure that people can celebrate the holiday,” Peleg said. “We take that responsibility very, very seriously.”
As for Coté, he and his family celebrate Rosh Hashanah by having — you guessed it — a honey-based feast. First, there is honey cake. “Our honey cake is always made with buckwheat honey for a much richer and more satisfying (in my opinion) honey cake,” Cote wrote to the New York Jewish Week.
Then, there is the honey and apple tasting. “Since I work at a farmers’ market, I always command a wide spread of different apples,” he said. “These are sliced and sorted and dipped in an almost equally diverse selection of honey.”
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The post New Yorkers are buzzing about local honey this Rosh Hashanah appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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ADL Research: 24% of Americans Believe Recent Violence Against Jews Is ‘Understandable’
Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim who were shot and killed as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum, pose for a picture at an unknown location, in this handout image released by Embassy of Israel to the US on May 22, 2025. Photo: Embassy of Israel to the USA via X/Handout via REUTERS
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a report on Friday revealing American attitudes about antisemitic violence following the targeted attacks earlier this year against Jews in Boulder, Colo., Harrisburg, Pa., and Washington, D.C. The watchdog group found a sizable minority (24 percent) found the attacks “understandable” while 13 percent regarded them as “justified.”
The ADL surveyed a representative sample of 1000 Americans on Thursday, ensuring the group matched accurate proportions of the country’s demography. The findings showed disparate views across age groups and partisan affiliations while also a clear, majority consensus on many questions.
The survey showed that 87 percent of respondents believed the three recent antisemitic attacks to be unjustifiable while 85 percent called them morally wrong and 77 percent assessed them as antisemitic. Eighty-six percent regarded the violence against Jews as hate crimes. However, nearly a quarter of respondents said the attacks were “understandable.”
More Republicans (15 percent) than Democrats (11 percent) regarded the attacks as justified, while more Republicans (79 percent) than Democrats (77 percent) saw the attacks as antisemitic. Partisan differences also manifested in support for increased government action against antisemitism with 74 percent of Republicans in favor compared to 81 percent of Democrats.
In presenting their research findings, the ADL emphasized the broad agreement in American opposition to antisemitic violence and conspiracist tropes before noting the presence of a distinct minority of “millions of people who excuse or endorse violence against Jews—an alarming sign of how anti-Jewish narratives are spreading.” For example, 67 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans agree that antisemitism is a serious problem.
Smaller numbers among the Democrats (25 percent) and Republicans (23 percent) will acknowledge antisemitism as a concern in their own party. The ADL poll suggests the legitimacy of such suspicions, finding that “28 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats agreed with tropes such as Jews have too much influence in politics and media.”
Partisan affiliations correlated with where respondents saw the most significant antisemitic threats. Republicans expressed a 3.6 times greater likelihood of worries about left-wing antisemitism compared to Democrats who were 4.4 times as likely to focus on right-wing antisemitism.
The pollsters found that attitudes toward the severity of the antisemitic threat differed according to age.
While 80 percent of silent generation respondents saw antisemitism as a serious problem, that number fell to 65 percent for baby boomers and members of Generation X. The rates dropped again for millennials (52 percent) and Gen-Zers (55 percent).
Perceptions of antisemitism in local communities also differed by generation. While 19 percent of Americans overall report having witnessed antisemitism in their communities, that figure jumps to 33 percent for Gen-Zers and 20 percent for millennials. Among the boomers it drops to 10 percent and for Silent Generation respondents it reaches 17 percent.
Large numbers saw the threat of popular protest slogans “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” with 68 percent seeing the phrases as potentially fueling violence, a view held even among 54 percent of those who favor protests against Israel.
Researchers also observed a correlation between Israel support and perceiving the seriousness of antisemitism in America. While 74 percent of those favorable to Israel saw domestic antisemitism as significant, only 57 percent of those with negative views of the Jewish state agreed.
Nearly a quarter of those polled—24 percent—expressed the conspiratorial view that some group had staged the attacks to provoke sympathy for Israel. A second report also released by the ADL on Friday showed the rise in discussions of “false flag” attacks on the Reddit website in response to the antisemitic violence.
The ADL warned that “these beliefs are especially dangerous because they justify holding Jewish Americans responsible for the actions of the State of Israel, effectively viewing them as collectively responsible for international politics—making them greater targets.”
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Sen. Bernie Sanders Calls on Democrats to Stop Accepting Money From AIPAC
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to the media following a meeting with US President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, US, July 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), took to X/Twitter on Monday to call on all Democrats to stop accepting political donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the influential pro‑Israel lobbying entity.
In his tweet, Sanders wrote that AIPAC has aided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in waging an “illegal and immoral war being waged against the Palestinian people.” Sanders continued, claiming that “NO Democrat should accept money from AIPAC” while asserting that the organization helped “deliver the presidency to Donald Trump.”
Sanders’s post came in response to comments by former Obama administration foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes, in which Rhodes urged Democrats to reject all future donations from AIPAC. Rhodes argued that AIPAC has influenced Democrats to take immoral stances on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“AIPAC is part of the constellation of forces that has delivered this country into the hands of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, and you cannot give them a carve out,” Rhodes said on an episode of the podcast Pod Save the World. “We need to have this fight as a party, because these are the wrong people to have under your tent.”
Tommy Vietor, another former Obama administration official and podcast co-host, agreed, accusing AIPAC of “funneling money to front organizations that primary progressive Democrats.”
AIPAC, the foremost pro-Israel lobbying firm in the US, has historically backed pro-Israel candidates from both parties. The organization does not specifically lobby against progressive candidates. AIPAC has aided the campaigns of pro-Israel progressives such as Ritchie Torres.
Sanders has long held an acrimonious relationship with AIPAC. In November 2023, he repudiated the group for supposedly having”supported dozens of GOP extremists who are undermining our democracy,” and urged his fellow Democrats to stand together in the fight for a world of peace, economic and social justice and climate sanity.”
Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser under President Obama, has emerged as a vocal critic of Israeli policy, particularly under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His skepticism is rooted in years of diplomatic frustration during the Obama administration, especially surrounding failed peace negotiations and Israel’s settlement expansions in the West Bank. Rhodes has often framed Israel’s hardline stance as a major obstacle to a two-state solution, and he has been critical of what he sees as unconditional U.S. support that enables right-wing Israeli policies. His stance reflects a broader shift among some American progressives who advocate for a more balanced U.S. approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Sanders has long been a staunch critic of the Jewish state. Sanders has repeatedly accused Israel of committing “collective punishment” and “apartheid” against the Palestinian people. Although the senator initially condemned the Oct. 7 slaughters of roughly 1200 people throughout southern Israel by Hamas, he subsequently pushed for a “ceasefire” between the Jewish state and the terrorist group. Sanders also spearheaded an unsuccessful campaign to implement a partial arms embargo on Israel in 2024.
In the 20 months following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, relations between the Democratic party and the Jewish state have deteriorated. Democratic lawmakers have grown more vocally critical of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza, sometimes arguing that the Jewish state has recklessly endangered lives of Palestinian civilians. Moreover, polls indicate that Democratic voters have largely turned against Israel, intensifying pressure on liberal lawmakers to shift their tone regarding the war in Gaza.
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Iranian National Charged in Plot to Subvert US Sanctions Against Islamic Republic
Iranians participating in a memorial ceremony for IRGC commanders and nuclear scientists in downtown Tehran, Iran, on July 2, 2025. Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl via Reuters Connect.
Federal law enforcement officials have arrested an Iranian national after uncovering his alleged conspiracy to export US technology to Tehran in violation of a slew of economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic, the US Department of Justice announced on Friday.
For May 2018 to July 2025, Bahram Mohammad Ostovari, 66, allegedly amassed “railway signaling and telecommunications systems” for transport to the Iranian government by using “two front companies” located in the United Arab Emirates. After filing fake orders for them with US vendors at Ostovari’s direction, the companies shipped the materials — which included “sophisticated computer processors” — to Tehran, having duped the US businesses into believing that they “were the end users.”
The Justice Department continued, “After he became a lawful permanent resident of the United States in May 2020, Ostovari continued to export, sell, and supply electronics and electrical components to [his company] in Iran,” noting that the technology became components of infrastructure projects commissioned by the Islamic Republic.
Ostovari has been charged with four criminal counts for allegedly violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (ITSR), under which conducting business with Iran is proscribed due to the country’s human rights abuses, material support for terrorism, and efforts to build a larger-scale nuclear program in violation of international non-proliferation obligations. Each count carries a 20-year maximum sentence in federal prison.
Ostovari is one of several Iranian nationals to become the subject of criminal proceedings involving crimes against the US this year.
In April, a resident of Great Falls, Virginia — Abouzar Rahmati, 42 — pleaded guilty to collecting intelligence on US infrastructure and providing it to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“From at least December 2017 through June 2024, Rahmati worked with Iranian government officials and intelligence operatives to act on their behalf in the United States, including by meeting with Iranian intelligence officers and government officials using a cover story to hide his conduct,” the Justice Department said at the time, noting that Rahmati even infiltrated a contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that possesses “sensitive non-public information about the US aviation sector.”
Throughout the duration of his cover, Rahmati amassed “open-source and non-public materials about the US solar energy industry,” which he delivered to “Iranian intelligence officers.”
The government found that the operation began in August 2017, after Rahmati “offered his services” to a high-ranking Iranian government official who had once been employed by the country’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, according to the Justice Department. Months later, he traveled to Iran, where Iranian agents assigned to him the espionage activity to which he pleaded guilty to perpetrating.
“Rahmati sent additional material relating to solar energy, solar panels, the FAA, US airports, and US air traffic control towers to his brother, who lived in Iran, so that he would provide those files to Iranian intelligence on Rahmati’s behalf,” the Justice Department continued. Rahmati also, it said, delivered 172 gigabytes worth of information related to the National Aerospace System (NAS) — which monitors US airspace, ensuring its safety for aircraft — and NAS Airport Surveillance to Iran during a trip he took there.
Rahmati faces up to 10 years in prison. He will be sentenced in August.
In November, three Iranian intelligence assets were charged with contriving a conspiracy to assassinate critics of the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as then US President-elect Donald Trump.
According to the Justice Department, Farhad Shakeri, 51; Carlisle Rivera, 49; and Jonathan Loadholt, 36, acted at the direction of and with help from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an internationally designated terrorist organization, to plot to murder a US citizen of Iranian origin in New York. Shakeri, who remains at large and is believed to reside in Iran, was allegedly the principal agent who managed the two other men, both residents of New York City who appeared in court.
Their broader purpose, prosecutors said, was to target nationals of the United States and its allies for attacks, including “assaults, kidnapping, and murder, both to repress and silence critical dissidents” and to exact revenge for the 2020 killing of then-IRGC Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Iraq. Trump was president of the US at the time of the operation.
All three men are now charged with murder-for-hire, conspiracy, and money laundering. Shakeri faces additional charges, including violating sanctions against Iran, providing support to a terrorist organization, and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Powers Act, offenses for which he could serve up to six decades in federal prison.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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