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For fleeing Jews, Venezuela was a golden land — now in exile, they watch their homeland’s unrest with trepidation
After their overcrowded motorboat ran aground and took on water, the 15 migrants swam up to a Tampa beach. The men they paid back in Havana had promised they’d be in Miami within five hours; instead they were at sea for five days, running out of food and water.
Two of the migrants had to be carried ashore, where they were swiftly detained by the police. Years prior, their entry would have been easy with a pathway to citizenship, but now with an anti-immigrant backlash they were sentenced to a year in jail.
After a week, a sympathetic Cuban-born prison guard smuggled out a letter asking for help. “They hold us,” it read, “as if we were criminals, murderers, in stifling dark rooms. We are given only black coffee in the morning and fed once a day, and very limited at that.”
The letter writer worried that he and his fellow refugees might spend months in the dark cell without air or light. But what he feared most was being deported.
Amazingly, the letter got them out.
The letter’s author was Mordechai Freilich, a 26-year-old Polish Jew who had run into trouble as a socialist organizer in a shoe factory in Cuba then ruled by General Gerardo Machado. Written in Yiddish, the letter was mailed to Freilich’s uncle in New York who was instructed to share it with this newspaper, the Forward, which published it on May 14, 1931 under the headline: “Jewish immigrants rescued from sinking boat and arrested when they try to smuggle themselves into America.”
Mordechai, known as Máximo, had written articles for the Forward before he’d left Poland two years earlier. At the time, it was the most widely read ethnic publication in the United States. The newspaper’s general manager, the influential New York politician Baruch Charney Vladeck, persuaded the future governor of New York Herbert H. Lehman to intervene. Freilich and the others were released on condition they find a country to accept them within two weeks.
“The United States was the goldene medine; it was the salvation, but it was closed,” Máximo’s daughter Alicia Freilich told me by phone from her home in Delray Beach, Florida, “Venezuela became our goldene medine.”
Alicia was born in Caracas in 1939, and for the past 57 years, she has been a columnist for El Nacional, the leading Venezuelan newspaper, which itself has become an exile. In 2018, the government seized its headquarters. Today, the web-only publication is blocked by the nation’s internet providers, limiting its readership to the Venezuelan diaspora and those within the country determined enough to digitally bypass the censorship.
In 2012, Freilich suspected her phone was tapped by the government and fled to Florida. If it wasn’t for her advanced age, she’s sure she would have been jailed for her criticism of then-President Hugo Chavez.
“I became an immigrant at the age of 73,” Alicia told me in Spanish the week after President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were arrested by American forces. “I never thought I’d leave.”
Since 2012, a quarter of Venezuela’s population, nearly 8 million people, have left, fleeing food insecurity, political oppression and spiraling gang violence. Though Venezuela was once home to a community of 25,000 Jews, its Jewish population has fallen to 5,000. Alicia Freilich remembers full synagogues, and generous charities that allowed for even the poor to attend Jewish day schools and take advantage of the busy community center, and Jewish retirement home. Now the first thing visitors to the website of the nation’s leading Sephardic organization see is detailed information on how to apply for Spanish citizenship,
While there was a small Sephardic Jewish community in Venezuela in the 19th century, the country’s Sephardic families came mainly from Morocco during the country’s post-war oil boom. Most Venezuelan Jews, however, are Ashkenazi, the children or grandchildren of Eastern European Jews who left Europe before the Holocaust, like Alicia’s parents Máximo and Rifka, or survivors who came after the war, like Alicia’s ex-husband Jaime Segal.
In 1938, Máximo made a return trip back to Poland. “I begged them [my extended family] to leave, that there was going to be a war,” Máximo told Alicia in an interview published in her 1976 book Interviewees in the Flesh, “but they laughed at me.” After the war, his in-laws, Alicia’s aunt and uncle Gutka and Abraham, who survived Auschwitz, joined the family in Caracas.
Officially, Venezuela had restrictive immigrant policies, but made exceptions. In 1939, the government of Eleazar López Contreras gave refuge to 250 German Jews onboard the Caribia and Köningstein ships which had been denied entry at all other ports. Máximo Freilich was one of the representatives of the Jewish community who welcomed the new arrivals at the port in La Guaira.
“Venezuelans are magnificent, generous,” Alicia told me, “like my father used to say, ‘the people are so generous that even a beggar would offer some of his coffee.’”
Máximo, like most Jewish immigrants at the time, was a “claper,” the Yiddish term for an itinerant salesmen. After years of “claping” on doors, peddling rags, he graduated to a Caracas storefront. Among Jews, the self-educated Máximo was a respected figure, a contributor to Yiddish newspapers like the Forward, a settler of disputes, a man consulted over beet soup and gefilte fish. But he never mastered Spanish, and to Venezuelans he remained a “musiu,” slang for a foreigner.
In 1987, Alicia wrote her first novel, Cláper, adapting Máximo’s Yiddish diary from his early years in America, which she intertwines with her own story. Máximo’s journey is from his shtetl, fictionalized as “Lendov,” Alicia’s is from her sheltered Jewish day school childhood into the wider Venezuelan society, attending college and starting her career. She mixes in literary circles, rubs shoulders with leading intellectuals and leftwing dissidents, yet she’s never fully at ease, discovering she is not so different from the “Polish peasant” parents she wished to escape.
“Half a century ago, a bunch of musiús began arriving. They knocked on doors in order to sell rags. They knocked: clap, clap, clap,” she writes reflecting on her success in journalism. “So daughter of a cláper, I too am a caller. When I knock and knock from the pressroom, what I wish to sell for free is what we might call ethical anxiety.”
Alicia’s part of the narrative comes in the form of a monologue to her psychoanalyst, like in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint, which she references in her book. But Caracas is not Newark. Beyond the middle class of the cities is vast poverty. Venezuelan Jews helped build the democracy that emerged in 1958 after the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, and for four decades Venezuela was considered one of Latin America’s most stable and affluent countries. But oil wealth bred corruption, inequality fueled unrest and by the 1990s the system was fracturing.
In 1999, the socialist Hugo Chavez, who had led a failed coup attempt seven years earlier, was elected president. Initially popular for promising to redistribute oil wealth to the poor, Chavez chipped away at democratic norms leading many professionals to exit the country in the early 2000s.
“They never directly target the [Jewish] community,” said Alicia, but Chavista anti-Israel rhetoric created a hostile atmosphere. In 2009, armed men overran the nation’s largest synagogue Tiféret Israel in Caracas, desecrated the sanctuary, stole objects and spray painted antisemitic and anti-zionist messages demanding the government expel Jews. That’s when she first thought about leaving.
Soon, she said, her younger sister Miriam Freilich, a culture writer for El Nacional and host of a radio program, decided it was impossible to be an independent female journalist in Caracas. She moved to Colombia before joining her daughter in Israel, and passed away in Spain last year. Alicia’s two sons had left years earlier. They did post-graduate studies abroad in the 1990s and decided not to return.
Ernesto Segal is a physician in Florida and Ariel Segal, who has lived in both the U.S. and Israel, is a communications professor in Lima. “’I prefer Venezuela as a people, as a climate, as the landscape,’ Ariel, 61, told me over Zoom from Lima. “I haven’t returned because of the Chavismo.”
“‘We lived in paradise, but we didn’t realize it,’ Ariel said. He particularly remembers Club Hebraica, the Jewish community center in Caracas, not just a sports center but a hub for youth groups, singles mixers, and holiday celebrations. It’s where he went to school. “After Chavez, we realized, ’wow, that was wonderful. We had freedom. We could change the president every five years. Politicians never threatened each other.’”
For years after he’d left, Ariel returned for weeks at a time each year to lecture at Venezuelan universities on authoritarianism and the Middle East. Then, in 2016, he was accused by name on a government television program of being an agent of the Mossad. He hasn’t been back since.
It was after Chavez’s death in 2013 that most Venezuelans migrants left. With a fall in oil prices and Nicolas Maduro in power came inflation, shortages and increased corruption. Increases in U.S. sanctions further strained the economy making it difficult for the average person to access food and medicine. Early waves of middle-class immigrants left the country on planes with visas. Jewish Venezuelans headed to Florida, Spain, Panama, and Israel.
More recent migrants are poorer without passports or visas. Many fled initially to countries within the region with over 2 million residing in Colombia, but others were forced to head north to the United States. Their treacherous and unauthorized immigration was not so different from Máximo’s journey in 1931.
At the end of his first term, President Trump deferred deportation for Venezuelans. More recently, he has turned hostile claiming “hundreds of thousands” of Venezuelan migrants are members of what he calls “savage” and “bloodthirsty gangs” like the Tren de Aragua, which he says President Maduro sent to “terrorize Americans.” Last year, he stripped the protective immigration status of more than half of the nation’s 1.2 million Venezuelan immigrants, targeting them for deportation. Now, his administration has suggested that with Maduro in prison, Venezuelans can return home.
“They took the clown out of the circus, but they left the rest of the troupe,” Alicia told me. Maduro’s arrest has been celebrated by Venezuelan exiles, but she doesn’t feel it’s enough. The current acting president Delcy Rodriguez and her brother, Jorge, the National Assembly president, long allies of Maduro, are extremely dangerous, she says.
She’s hopeful that slowly things will improve, but she says that Trump’s unpredictable personality and disregard for the rule of law worry her, as both a Venezuelan and as a Jew living in the United States. While he has been friendly to Jews, she says she fears he could easily turn on them, and, she added, his focus with Venezuela is oil, not human rights. “They are not acting with solid democratic principles in the country,” she said, “but the United States [democracy] itself is also at risk.”
Even if Venezuela gets on the path to democracy, it will take time. Alicia doesn’t believe exiles will return home anytime soon. She herself doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. At 86, her energy goes into her weekly column for El Nacional. On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, she wrote about her survivor aunt and uncle. Mostly, though, she focuses on current Venezuelan politics.
Her father had written from Caracas for Yiddish speakers thousands of miles away. Now, Alicia speaks to a Venezuelan diaspora.
In a recent column, she stressed the only people with the legitimate authority to run Venezuela and restore freedom to the masses are those who were fairly elected in 2024 “There is no other correct way to rescue the imperfect and perfectible democracy,” she concluded.
Florida, Alicia Freilich told me, is not her home; her community, her focus, her heart remain in Caracas. It reminds me of something she quoted her father as saying: “I stayed back in Lendov, just my feet left.”
The post For fleeing Jews, Venezuela was a golden land — now in exile, they watch their homeland’s unrest with trepidation appeared first on The Forward.
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Amid blazing heat and rising tides, artists find beauty and desperation in these biblical times
Daniel Rothbart’s floating aluminum and glass forms are at once playful and lyrical, biomorphic and other-worldly; prehistoric and futuristic. They are set in a pond and two small pools in Staten Island’s Snug Harbor, a hidden pastoral gem that once served as a safe haven for sailors.
Overflowing with colorful flowers and plants and shrubbery, the scene is idyllic, short of the oppressive, steamy heat that has settled over the landscape. But then that’s part of it too. Rothbart’s Serpentine Sibyls: A Floating Sculptural Installation, animated by winds and currents, are site-specific and immersive. He is keenly in tune with its ecology.
“No, my work has not always addressed political issues, but water is a fraught medium,” he told me over the phone. “You can’t work with water without addressing its importance to life on this planet and climate change and stewardship. Water has always fascinated me.”
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest the ocean was a constant alluring presence. And as a Jew, the water’s historical, cultural and religious traditional significance is defining, he said.
“There’s the purification ritual of the mikveh, the parting of the Red Sea, the washing of hands and feet before entering the temple in Biblical times and the casting off of sins, Tashlich on Rosh Hashanah. Water diplomacy and technology has always been central in Israel. Making the desert bloom.”
Rothbart, a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited across the globe, is the author of Jewish Metaphysics as Generative Principle in American Art, which examines how Jewish mystical traditions, especially Kabbalah, informed abstract American art in the post-World War II years.
Erudite and heady, Rothbart said that his work can be viewed through the lens of tikkun olam, the Jewish imperative to help repair a fractured world, but it also borrows from Japanese culture, outer space imagery, Marcel Duchamp’s dadaism and Greek mythology.
The title of his exhibit references Sibyls, the Greek female prophets who were consulted in catastrophic times, not unlike our current era cursed by floods and wildfires and heat waves.
Rothbart started thinking about floating sculptures in 2007 for a piece he was conceiving for the Venice Biennial. A city surrounded by water cried out for it. Japanese glass fishing floats came to mind.
“The Japanese fishing floats would wash up on shore in Oregon where I grew up,” he recalled. “I loved the fragile recycled pieces of glass that came from the orient and that I could de-contextualize a common object and in so doing create something new.”
To anchor the sculptures, Rothbart and his assistant kayaked to the middle of the pond. There, once he established where he wanted each sculpture, he dropped each form, now attached to two to five-pound iron weights.
“The sculptures are sensitive to any existing life in the water,” he said. “The pond here has turtles and fish. I’ve found that the animals adjust to the new forms. I love the relationship between life in the pond and the foreign objects.”
Three artists, one flood
The Interchurch Center in upper Manhattan is currently hosting Noah, A Future of Hope, 3 Faiths/ 3 Artists/ 1 Story. A traveling exhibit, it employs the story of Noah and the flood to gently remind viewers to save, protect and celebrate the environment. The topic is explored respectively through a Christian, Muslim and Jewish vision. The artists — Yona Verwer, a Dutch-born Jew, Brian Whelan, a British-born Christian of Irish heritage and Hady Boraey, an Egyptian Muslim — each merge their religious identity with personal aesthetics and the need to advocate for the environment.
“Each artist was invited to create eight paintings that visually inspire our imaginations to heal our world by honoring our intricate connection to the earth as our sustainer, and by maintaining a sacred balance with all her life forms,” said curator Paul G. Chandler in his introductory remarks at the exhibit’s opening night reception. “In this way, the story of the ark, its animals, and the flood, take on contemporary relevance as we face today’s climate crisis.”
Seven is a significant number in each religion, so Chandler selected seven core lessons, each reflecting some part of the Noah story, for the artists to address. The eighth painting from each artist served as a kind of synopsis of the work that was to follow.
Water is a common image throughout the exhibit; indeed, water plays a major role, not only in Judaism, but in Christian and Islamic rituals as well, from Christian baptism to the washing of feet and hands before prayer in a Mosque.
When I asked Chandler if he could guess the religion of each artist on the basis of their paintings he said he could for the Jew and Christian, but wouldn’t have had a clue that Boraey emerges from an Islamic tradition.
“His paintings have an individual aesthetic and a more universal feeling. Still, you never see the face of Noah in his work. In Islamic tradition you can only view him from the back. To see his face is idolatry. Jews have the same tradition, but may not adhere to it as rigidly.”
Some of Verwer’s work incorporates Hebraic texts and characters. In “Care for the Species,” a figure is blowing a shofar. Similarly, Chandler said, he’d know that Whelan’s paintings were made by a Christian. They are literal illustrations of key moments in the Noah story.
His depiction of Noah evokes a figure right out of vaudeville, grinning broadly, sporting a little hat and in more than one instance looking slightly confused.
“Christians turn catastrophe into a kind of children’s bedtime story,” Chandler said. “It’s very Christian to sanitize the story. Jews don’t do that.”
“My being Jewish — a religious Jew—has had a bearing on how I look at everything,” said Verwer who says that water and its preservation is deeply important to her not least because for more than 2,000 years Judaism has had many rules to safeguard water. As a Holland native, she, like Rothbart, grew up near water and so it was always part of her universe.
Verwer’s work is also exhibited in an accompanying solo show, Fluid Futures-Living Waters, which features eight paintings that explore ocean pollution through a comic sensibility. One piece, bal tashchit (prohibition against needless destruction) depicts an octopus, submerged in deep ocean waters, clutching a soda can in its mouth.
“I don’t feel a painting is finished if I haven’t laughed at least once,” Brian Whelan said. “But it also needs a message.”
His major challenge was Chandler’s insistence that the paintings embrace a note of optimism.
“I don’t see any hope in what’s happening to this planet,” said Whelan. “My work mostly follows in the tradition of East Anglican medieval narrative paintings found in churches dating back to the 14th-to-16th centuries.”
For me his strongest piece is “Humans Outside the Ark Perished,” which appears in his linked, one-man show, 40 Days and 40 Nights. Here we see desperate hands reaching towards Noah for safety. A mouse sits alongside Noah, a poignant image. It’s safe and sound compared to the desperate humans.
Of the three painters, Boraey said his work was the least likely to be connected to any one particular religion. Unable to obtain a visa to the States he spoke to me on the phone from the Northern coast of Egypt.
He said his piece “The Great Collapse” spoke most vividly to both the Noah story and the ecological precipice we’re now facing as a result of climate change.
In the foreground, we view Noah from the back gazing out across a body of water at masses of people crushed together and almost immobilized as they hopelessly struggle to move forward. In the background hangs a giant and cratered blue moon sinking below the horizon and into the ground. It is at once foreboding and exquisite.
Having participated in exhibitions in the Middle East and Europe, Boraey said he was most influenced by the surrealist art movement in Cairo in the late 30s. The marriage between folkloric and political motifs is its hallmark.
The Noah tale for him is “both pessimistic and optimistic because hope is always there and they survived at the end of the story,” he said. “Noah saved humanity. He reminds us that we have to be very careful with the earth.”
In harmony with nature
Back at Snug Harbor, the late afternoon heat dome has made the airless, sun-baked space even more relentless than it was earlier in the afternoon. Rothbart’s visitors are slowly straggling out of the park, some wiping away sweat with bits of tissue, others fanning themselves; still others pouring water from their bottles onto reddened necks and arms and legs indifferent to the water splashing on to their clothes.
“Talk about global warming and climate change,” he told me. “This weather only drives home the point of just how serious this is and how we have to learn to live in harmony with nature and our environment.”
Serpentine Sibyls will run through Sept. 28.
Noah: A Future of Hope will run at the Interfaith Center through Aug. 26 and then continues its global tour.
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Fire at Postville, Iowa, kosher meat processing plant shuts down production ahead of the High Holidays
(JTA) — A major fire at one of the largest kosher meat processing plants in the United States is poised to increase the price of kosher meat ahead of the High Holidays, in addition to devastating the plant’s local community.
Investigators in Postville, Iowa, said on Wednesday that the fire that devastated AgriStar Processing started accidentally in the facility’s laundry room. The fire, which began on Tuesday, destroyed at least 75% of the plant and has put more than 600 people out of work, Fire Chief Jeff Bohr told the local TV network KCRG.
The fire has also interrupted a linchpin of kosher meat production, according to OU Kosher, the oversight agency run by the Orthodox Union.
“The damaged facility means a significant portion of kosher beef and chicken slaughtered and sold in the US will not enter the kosher supply chain,” Rabbi Moshe Elefant, the organization’s CEO, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Kosher consumers will feel the impact of the tightening supply with reduction of availability.”
Elefant said OU Kosher was working to “find solutions for ramping up production at other plants” while warning that the crisis could fuel bad actors.
“Unfortunately, when supply is limited, it creates opportunity for unscrupulous individuals who seek to make money by preying on the well-meaning Kosher observant public,” he wrote.
Jarad Bernstein, the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines, said the fire represented “a terrible situation” in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“The impact on the local community and the business will be large,” he said.
The fire is not the first time that a crisis at AgriStar has sent the community into a tailspin. In 2008, a federal immigration raid at the plant, then known as Agriprocessors, netted the arrest of hundreds of workers and led to the arrest and conviction of the company’s longtime CEO Sholom Rubashkin on 86 counts of bank fraud, mail fraud and money laundering. It also led most of Postville’s Jewish residents to leave the town, which had developed as an unusual stronghold of Orthodox life in eastern Iowa.
Saying that “many people” believed Rubashkin’s 27-year prison sentence had been excessive, President Donald Trump commuted Rubashkin’s sentence in 2017. Rubashkin’s conviction stands.
Canadian Jewish billionaire Hershy Friedman purchased Agriprocessors and reopened it as Agri-Star. He told JTA in 2016 that he had done so after being urged by Jewish leaders to ensure competition in the kosher meat processing industry.
“It wasn’t done for financial purposes; it was done to really cater to the Jewish community,” he said about the purchase. “During the time Rubashkin was closed, the price of beef roughly doubled. After we acquired it, it came right back down.”
Friedman also said he had shored up the company’s employment practices, which had run afoul of the law, and made improvements to the slaughter process that had made Agriprocessors a target of animal rights activists.
Agri-Star said in a statement on Wednesday that it appreciated the first responders who “worked tirelessly and selflessly to protect lives and contain the fire” and the employees who had shown “inspiring” care for each other. It also indicated that it did not yet know the future of the plant.
“We understand there are many questions about what comes next,” Agri-Star wrote on social media. “While we are still gathering information and evaluating our short-term plans, we are committed to sharing verified updates as soon as they become available. We appreciate your patience as we work through this process thoughtfully and responsibly.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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California law on antisemitism in schools will be enforced after free speech challenge is defeated
(JTA) — A California law to prevent antisemitism in schools will be enforced after a federal judge dismissed a challenge from teachers and students who said it violated free speech.
U.S. District Judge Noël Wise on Tuesday ruled against a lawsuit opposing Assembly Bill 715, which went into effect in January. The new law introduces measures to curb the “widespread surge in antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and bullying” faced by “Jewish and Israeli American pupils across California.”
As part of the law, California is establishing an Office of Civil Rights with a new statewide antisemitism prevention coordinator for public schools, who has not yet been appointed. The law mandates teachers to provide “factually accurate” instruction rather than “advocacy, personal opinion, bias, or partisanship.” It requires local educational agencies to take action if they find that instruction or school-sponsored materials are discriminatory.
A group of teachers, students and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed a challenge in November. They said the law was unconstitutionally vague, chilled speech in the classroom about Palestinians and discriminated against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and perspectives.
Wise said it was too soon to consider these claims, given the uncertainties still surrounding the new Office of Civil Rights, its leadership and how it will define and respond to antisemitism. She also said that teachers and students did not provide sufficient evidence of infringements on free speech, and teachers could not claim speech rights on the job.
“Teacher Plaintiffs are not acting as private citizens and therefore do not have First Amendment rights while teaching,” Wise said in her ruling.
She also dismissed the claim that the law would discriminate against non-Jewish students. “The existence of an Antisemitism Coordinator does not change the Office’s overarching purpose to stop discrimination generally; it merely reflects the State’s decision to accord specific funds to a specific problem,” she said.
Malak Afaneh, a staff attorney at ADC, said the group was reviewing the court’s decision and considering its options.
“AB 715 has already caused educators to alter the way they teach out of fear that classroom discussions or activities could trigger complaints or investigations,” Afaneh said in a statement. “When teachers feel compelled to abandon cultural identity projects or avoid discussions about Palestine, it is students who are denied the opportunity to engage with diverse ideas and perspectives.”
The Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco celebrated Wise’s decision as “great news.”
“This ruling, and the fact that the case has been dismissed with prejudice, affirms that AB 715 is a strong, legitimate approach to protecting Jewish students — and all students — against harassment and discrimination,” the group said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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