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A Manhattan synagogue explores the rich, surprising history of Jews and chocolate
(New York Jewish Week) — In 2006, Rabbi Deborah Prinz was on a trip to Europe with her husband, Rabbi Mark Hurvitz, when they wandered into a chocolate shop in Paris. While meandering about the store, Prinz picked up a brochure and read a line that, given her rudimentary French, she was sure she misunderstood: It claimed that Jews had brought the art of chocolate-making to France.
Prinz, who at the time was the congregational rabbi at Temple Adat Shalom in Poway, California, was stunned. That little morsel of information stayed with her throughout her 10-week sabbatical — and ended up being a defining moment of her life: For the next several years, Prinz followed the zigzagging trail of chocolate, from the rainforests of the New World to the cities of the Old World and, from there, to the American colonies, hoping to clarify the role that Jews played in the making, marketing and trading of chocolate.
Prinz, who now lives in New York, was fascinated by the connection between Jews and chocolate, and the overlap between the dispersion of the Jews and the expansion of the chocolate market across the globe. Her research culminated in a book, “On the Chocolate Trail: A Delicious Adventure Connecting Jews, Religions, History, Travel, Rituals and Recipes to the Magic of Cacao,” which she published a decade ago.
A second edition came out in 2018, with a new chapter about the controversies over chocolate likenesses of deities, as well as updated information about chocolate museums and factory tours around the world.
Now, an exhibit detailing the rich history of Jews and chocolate in this country, “Sweet Treat: Chocolate and the Making of American Jews,” is on view at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, where Prinz began her career as the Reform congregation’s first female rabbi. The exhibit is a pared-down, American-specific version of an exhibit Prinz co-created in 2017 with the Bernard Museum at Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side, ““Semi[te] Sweet: On Jews and Chocolate.”
Chocolate, and humankind’s love affair with it, dates to pre-Columbian peoples in Mesoamerica who used chocolate in their religious rituals. Jewish involvement in chocolate parallels the movement of the Jewish people, beginning with Sephardic Jews of Iberian descent in the 16th and 17th centuries, Prinz said by email. Sephardic Jews, she said, probably engaged with chocolate soon after the first European contact with it, which is said to have occurred during Columbus’ fourth voyage (1502-1504).
“Jews jumped onto the chocolate trail in the early phases of European interaction with the New World and they introduced the drink [of hot chocolate] in diasporic places such as New Spain (now Mexico), Oxford (England), Martinique, Amsterdam, Bayonne (France), Brabant (Belgium), New York and Newport (Rhode Island),” Prinz told the New York Jewish Week by email, adding that their action “created a path of business interests and appetites that continues in our time. These included chocolate entrepreneurs who fostered, perpetuated, and fed an appetite for the drinking chocolate of the day.”
Based upon Prinz’s years of research, the exhibit sheds light on some of the key Jewish players in the Colonial-era chocolate trade, including Aaron Lopez, a Sephardi immigrant, merchant and slave trader who became one of the wealthiest men in Newport, Rhode Island. Lopez, an observant Jew, gave chocolate as part of his tzedakah food packages to poor members of the Jewish community. He also helped build the historic Touro Synagogue, which today is owned and overseen by New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, also known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue.
The chocolate exhibit is a “micro history,” according to Rabbi Sarah Berman, Central Synagogue’s director of adult education. By examining the surprising role the Jews played in the chocolate trade in this country, the exhibit, which is on display at the Sanctuary Building, across the street from the synagogue, is “one way of understanding how Jews and Jewish culture came together in this country and began to define itself from the colonial period forward.”
As for the decision to mount an exhibit about chocolate at the Midtown synagogue, Prinz wrote in an email that Jews’ involvement with chocolate is “a sweet, yet little-known aspect of the Jewish experience. Also, a number of the stories are New York based. And finally, it offers up important themes of sustenance, resilience, opportunity and hope.”
On display is a facsimile of a map of 15th-17th century dispersions of Sephardi Jews and their relationship to historic chocolate centers. (Courtesy Rabbi Mark Hurvitz)
Among the items on display in the small exhibit is a map of the dispersions of Sephardi Jews in the 15th to 17th centuries, which shows how the areas where Jews settled correspond with early centers of the chocolate trade, as well as an image of Albert Einstein’s personal hot chocolate cup, which he brought with him when he left Germany for the United States in1933.
“In Jewish life and tradition, we often look to rabbinic texts to understand who we are and how we move through the world over time. Texts are wonderful, but they preserve the reality, the lived experience and the scholarship of a certain class of men in certain times and places,” Berman said, adding, “Objects in art tell a different story, maybe a fuller story about who we are.”
Also featured in the exhibit are Lopez’s cousins, the Gomez family, who were leaders of New York’s Jewish community and major donors to Congregation Shearith Israel. They, too, were involved in the chocolate trade: Rebecca Gomez, widow of Mordecay Gomez, may have been the only Jewish woman in the chocolate business in the late 1700s. On display is a facsimile of an ad for her chocolate business at 57 Nassau St. in Lower Manhattan that ran in The Royal American Gazette, a New York newspaper, on Dec. 3, 1782.
The exhibit also touches on more recent Jewish chocolate entrepreneurs in this country, including Stephen Klein, who launched Barton’s Bonbonniere in New York in 1940. Just before the outbreak of World War II, Klein, whose family members were candymakers in Austria, fled to this country and soon thereafter began selling chocolates door-to-door. From there, he eventually expanded to 3,000 shops across the country, creating iconic candies such as almond kisses and the chocolate lollipops known as lollycones. For many Jewish families in the 1950s and 1960s, Barton’s candy was the hostess gift for the Jewish holidays.
What’s more, as an Orthodox Jew, Klein used his candy business to further educate Jews and non-Jews alike about Judaism. Klein, said Prinz, was an “immigrant who helped other immigrants come over. He ran full page ads [in newspapers] with information about Judaism, holidays and Israel. Barton’s candy boxes included inserts about Judaism and Jewish holidays. Like the Maxwell House coffee company, Barton’s designed a Passover haggadah, too.”
Jewish chocolate products also influenced the most American of all beverages: fountain drinks. The story of the egg cream, which most people believe was created at the start of the 20th century by a Jewish immigrant, is detailed in the third part of the exhibit, “Ooey, Gooey, Chocolatey Treats.” The exhibit details how a Jewish family also created Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup which many consider essential to a proper egg cream. In the 1920s and ‘30s, Louis Auster, who is credited with creating this poor man’s soda drink, reportedly sold 3,000 egg creams a day 3 cents a glass — and up to 12,000 on sweltering summer days, according to Barry Joseph, author of “Seltzertopia.”
As a whole, the exhibit, which is on view until Feb. 9, 2024 and is open to the public on Wednesdays from 12:30-2 p.m. and Fridays after Shabbat services, presents a comprehensive look at the long history of both Jews and chocolate in this country. “Integration [of Jews] into wider society, the acculturation, the influence going back and forth from Jewish to American and back to Jewish cultures can all be traced through those early days,” said Berman, “and chocolate is an example.”
According to Prinz, looking at American Jewish life through the lens of chocolate helps us “understand the resiliency of Jews exiled from Spain and then immigrants from the Holocaust as they sought freedom, acclimated to new settings, and found new business ventures in America,” she wrote in an email to the New York Jewish Week. “Our ancestors overcame persecution and oppression, in part through chocolate. Their chocolate endeavors in America from its earliest days reminds us that Jews were part of the founding of our country.”
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The post A Manhattan synagogue explores the rich, surprising history of Jews and chocolate appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iran’s Top Diplomat Meets With Russian Officials, Supreme Leader Sends Letter to Putin Ahead of Talks With US
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, March 21, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran’s so-called “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, briefing Moscow on the ongoing nuclear negotiations between Tehran and the United States.
Khamenei also sent his top diplomat, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, to Moscow, where on Thursday he met with Putin and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, to deliver Khamenei’s letter. During their meetings, they discussed Iran’s nuclear program, last week’s US-Iran negotiations in Oman, and efforts to expand bilateral cooperation and address regional developments.
Thursday’s high-level meeting came just days before a second round of talks between Tehran and Washington, scheduled to take place in Rome this weekend.
Since taking office in January, US President Donald Trump has reinstated his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran aimed at cutting the country’s crude exports to zero and preventing it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
However, Tehran has refused to halt its uranium enrichment program, insisting that the country’s right to enrich uranium is non-negotiable.
Last month, Trump threatened to bomb Iran and impose secondary tariffs if the country does not reach an agreement with Washington to curb its nuclear program.
Russia has said that any military strike against Iran would be “illegal and unacceptable.” As an increasingly close ally of Tehran, Moscow plays a crucial role in Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the West, leveraging its position as a veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council and a signatory to a now-defunct 2015 nuclear deal that imposed limits on the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia will continue to assist in resolving the conflict between the two adversaries.
“The Russian Federation remains ready to do everything within our capabilities to contribute to the settlement of the situation by political and diplomatic means,” Peskov said in a statement.
During his first term, Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 nuclear deal — known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — between Iran and several world powers, which had imposed temporary limits on Tehran’s nuclear activities in exchange for lifting harsh, long-standing economic penalties on the Islamist regime in Tehran.
“Regarding the nuclear issue, we always had close consultations with our friends China and Russia. Now it is a good opportunity to do so with Russian officials,” Araghchi told Iranian state media before his meeting in Moscow.
On Tuesday, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said that any deal with Iran must require the complete dismantling of its “nuclear enrichment and weaponization program — reversing his earlier comments, in which he indicated that the White House would allow Iran to enrich uranium to a 3.67 percent threshold for a “civil nuclear program.”
Although Iran has denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has raised concerns over Tehran’s rapid acceleration of uranium enrichment.
The IAEA warned that Iran is enriching uranium up to 60 percent purity, close to the roughly 90 percent weapons-grade level and enough to build six nuclear bombs.
Despite Tehran’s claims that its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes rather than weapon development, Western states have said there is no “credible civilian justification” for the country’s recent nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”
Russia’s diplomatic role in the US-Iran nuclear talks could be crucial, as Moscow has recently solidified its growing partnership with the Iranian regime.
On Wednesday, Russia’s upper house of parliament ratified a 20-year strategic partnership agreement with Iran, strengthening military ties between the two countries.
Signed by Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in January, the Strategic Cooperation Treaty will boost collaboration between the two countries in areas such as security services, military drills, warship port visits, and joint officer training.
Iran’s Ambassador to Russia, Kazem Jalali, said this agreement “stands as one of the most significant achievements in Tehran-Moscow relations.”
“One of the most important commonalities between the two countries is the deep wounds inflicted by the West’s unrestrained unilateralism, which underscores the necessity for broader cooperation in the future,” Jalali told Iranian state media this week.
Under the agreement, neither country will permit its territory to be used for actions that pose a threat to the other, nor will they provide assistance to any aggressor targeting either nation. However, this pact does not include a mutual defense clause of the kind included in a treaty between Russia and North Korea.
The agreement also includes cooperation in arms control, counterterrorism, peaceful nuclear energy, and security coordination at both regional and global levels.
Iran’s growing ties with Moscow come at a time when Tehran is facing increasing sanctions by the US, particularly on its oil industry.
Last year, Iran obtained observer membership in the Eurasian Economic Union. The free trade agreement between Tehran and the union’s member states, set to take effect next month, will eliminate customs tariffs on over 80 percent of traded goods between Iran and Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.
The post Iran’s Top Diplomat Meets With Russian Officials, Supreme Leader Sends Letter to Putin Ahead of Talks With US first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Hamas Rejects Israeli Interim Truce Offer, Says Will Only Release Remaining Hostages for End to Gaza War
Protesters, mainly Houthi supporters, stand near a screen displaying senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya during a rally to show support to Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in Sanaa, Yemen, Oct. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Hamas wants a comprehensive deal to end the war in Gaza and swap all Israeli hostages for Palestinians jailed in Israel, a senior official from the Palestinian terrorist group said, rejecting Israel‘s offer of an interim truce.
In a televised speech, Khalil Al-Hayya, the group’s Gaza chief who leads its negotiating team, said the Iran-backed Islamist group would no longer agree to interim deals, adopting a position that Israel is unlikely to accept and potentially further delaying an end to the conflict.
Instead, Hayya said Hamas was ready to immediately engage in “comprehensive package negotiations” to release all remaining hostages in its custody in return for an end to the Gaza war, the release of Palestinians jailed by Israel, and the reconstruction of Gaza.
“Netanyahu and his government use partial agreements as a cover for their political agenda, which is based on continuing the war of extermination and starvation, even if the price is sacrificing all his prisoners [hostages],” said Hayya, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“We will not be part of passing this policy.”
Egyptian mediators have been working to revive the January ceasefire agreement that halted fighting in Gaza before it broke down last month, but there has been little sign of progress with both Israel and Hamas blaming each other.
“Hamas’s comments demonstrate they are not interested in peace but perpetual violence. The terms made by the Trump administration have not changed: release the hostages or face hell,” said US National Security Council spokesperson James Hewitt.
The latest round of talks on Monday in Cairo to restore the ceasefire and free Israeli hostages ended with no apparent breakthrough, Palestinian and Egyptian sources said.
Israel had proposed a 45-day truce in Gaza to allow hostage releases and potentially begin indirect talks to end the war. Hamas has already rejected one of its conditions – that it lay down its arms. In his speech, Hayya accused Israel of offering a counterproposal with “impossible conditions.”
Hamas released 38 hostages under a ceasefire that began on Jan. 19. In March, Israel‘s military resumed its ground and aerial offensive in Gaza, after Hamas rejected proposals to extend the truce without ending the war.
Israeli officials say that the offensive will continue until the remaining 59 hostages are freed and Gaza is demilitarized. Hamas insists it will free hostages only as part of a deal to end the war and has rejected demands to lay down its arms.
The war was triggered by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage to Gaza.
The post Hamas Rejects Israeli Interim Truce Offer, Says Will Only Release Remaining Hostages for End to Gaza War first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Says Chinese Satellite Firm Supporting Houthi Attacks on American Interests
A Houthi fighter mans a machine gun mounted on a truck during a parade for people who attended Houthi military training as part of a mobilization campaign, in Sanaa, Yemen, Dec. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
The US State Department on Thursday accused a Chinese firm, Chang Guang Satellite Technology, of directly supporting attacks on US interests by Iran-backed Houthi fighters and called this “unacceptable.”
Earlier, the Financial Times cited US officials as saying that the satellite company, linked to China’s military, was supplying Houthi rebels with imagery to target US warships and international vessels in the Red Sea.
“We can confirm the reporting that Chang Guang Satellite Technology Company Limited is directly supporting Iran-backed Houthi terrorist attacks on US interests,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told a regular news briefing.
“China consistently attempts … to frame itself as a global peacemaker … however, it is clear that Beijing and China-based companies provide key economic and technical support to regimes like Russia, North Korea and Iran and its proxies,” she said.
Bruce said the assistance by the firm to the Houthis, a US-designated terrorist group, had continued even though the United States had engaged with Beijing on the issue.
“The fact that they continue to do this is unacceptable,” she said.
The spokesperson for China’s Washington embassy, Liu Pengyu, said he was not familiar with the situation, so had no comment. The firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
China is Washington’s main strategic rival, and the latest charge comes as the two economic and military superpowers are in a major standoff over trade in which US President Donald Trump has dramatically ramped up tariffs on Chinese goods.
The post US Says Chinese Satellite Firm Supporting Houthi Attacks on American Interests first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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