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How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
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The post How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel’s Ethiopian asylum seekers fight deportation efforts
(JTA) — This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
TEL AVIV – When Endalkew Yemani Tesma fled Ethiopia in 2005, he did not know what awaited him on the way to Israel, nor that once he arrived, he would spend nearly two decades without permanent status.
He passed through Sudan, then Libya, then Sudan again, and reached Israel in 2008 by way of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. There, Yemani Tesma said, he was held captive and abused by Bedouin traffickers, treatment that refugee rights organizations in Israel have documented extensively among those who crossed the same route.
After claiming asylum due to civil unrest in his home country, Yemani Tesma was given a 2(a)5 visa, the renewable permit that lets asylum seekers stay while their claims are pending. He settled in Jerusalem, married a fellow Ethiopian asylum seeker and started a family. His children have grown up in Israeli schools and, by every measure that matters to them, as Israelis. Although they are not Jewish, their first language is Hebrew, and they learned Israeli history alongside Jewish traditions and holidays.
Yemani Tesma works at a hummus restaurant in Jerusalem, the kind of job he described as paying the bills and supporting his six children, but nothing beyond that. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ate there once, Yemani Tesma recounted, “And he didn’t even try to deport me.”
But Yemani Tesma and his family are still in danger. A High Court decision last December allowed their group protection to be revoked. After years of feeling that they had found an oasis of safety, the family now faces the possibility of deportation. To prevent that from happening, a Jewish organization originally founded to help Jews fleeing Eastern European pogroms is taking the Israeli government to court.
Few given refugee status
Israel’s asylum approval rate is roughly 0.1%, or about five people a year, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
It’s so low that Sigal Rozen, the public policy coordinator at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli NGO she helped found in 1998, can name those whose applications have been approved by first and last name. In the European Union, by comparison, 39% of asylum decisions in 2025 were approvals.
She claimed that the bureaucracy, and the deferral of decisions on some files for years, is deliberate. “They want to make life as difficult as possible, so that people give up and leave,” she asserted.
According to Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority, 1,334 asylum applications from Ethiopian citizens are currently pending. And Ethiopians are just a sliver of the asylum-seeking population. Roughly 30,000 asylum seekers live in Israel, a country of just over 10 million people. Most of those asylum seekers are Eritrean and Sudanese who crossed the Sinai before Israel completed its border fence with Egypt in 2013.
Eritreans still hold group protection that shields them from deportation, because Israel accepts that conditions in the country are too dangerous for them to return, and most Sudanese have obtained status through the courts, as Israel does not have official diplomatic relations with Khartoum and cannot deport them there. Ethiopians have no such shield.
Israel had granted group protection to Ethiopian nationals in light of the civil war between the Ethiopian armed forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front back in November of 2021. In January 2024, Israel’s then-Interior Minister Moshe Arbel withdrew it, citing advice that the security situation in Ethiopia was sufficiently stable for nationals to return. Arbel declined to be interviewed for this story.
In December 2025, the High Court upheld that decision, rejecting an appeal by the Hotline, HIAS Israel and the Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Israel. The three-judge panel gave them four months to prepare to leave.
The Population and Immigration Authority has since begun pulling individual case files — some untouched for years — to the front of the queue in order to reject them, telling asylum seekers to leave the country or risk deportation.
Ethiopians whose claims have been rejected can now be detained if they come to a government office for any reason, Shahar Mandil, policy advocate at the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations in Israel, said. Some do not know they have been rejected, as notices were sent to email addresses they no longer use or to lawyers who no longer represent them.
“A decision on an asylum application is delivered through the contact channels provided by the asylum seeker,” the Population and Immigration Authority told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It is the asylum seeker’s responsibility to keep those contact details updated,” adding that every asylum seeker whose application is rejected is asked to leave the country.
The Population and Immigration Authority’s position is that conditions in Ethiopia no longer justify group protection, and that asylum seekers can return to the country’s capital of Addis Ababa even if other areas remain unstable.
Under international refugee law, a state can reject a claim of asylum by arguing that the applicant could move somewhere safer within their own country (known as an internal flight alternative). But that argument carries a requirement, said Nimrod Avigal, director of legal aid at HIAS Israel: “You need to show that this specific person can actually move within the country.”
Yordanos, who declined to give her last name for fear of deportation, said it was not possible to go elsewhere in Ethiopia. “We can’t move from one place to another,” she explained. “Any police checkpoint can stop you, depending on who you are and where you’re from.” When it comes to Addis Ababa, she continued, “Even if it were safe, it’s not possible. You can’t bring 130 million people to live in Addis,” referring to the entire population of Ethiopia.
Yordanos reached Israel in 2022 after securing a visa for a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, another route that many Ethiopian asylum seekers described taking to JTA. She and her husband hold advanced degrees and once ran a business that took them to more than 11 countries. In Israel, she cleans houses.
Israel historically backed refugee rights
On Sept. 22, the district court in Tel Aviv will hear a case seeking a new way to prevent the deportation of non-Jewish Ethiopians currently in Israel. A petition from HIAS Israel argues that the government has never created a mechanism for asylum seekers to claim protection from deportation under the principle of non-refoulement, which bars states from returning people to countries where they face danger.
HIAS was founded in 1881 as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to help Jews fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire. It spent the following century assisting Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust. As Jewish migration slowed in the 2000s, the organization expanded its work to non-Jewish refugees, including Syrians, Afghans, Ukrainians and Somalis, dropping “Hebrew” from its name in 2014. Its Israel branch now represents non-Jewish asylum seekers, with the government of the Jewish state as the defendant.
Israel was among the first countries to ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention, and Israeli jurists helped write it, including Jacob Robinson, a Lithuanian-born legal adviser to Israel’s UN delegation who was a central figure in its drafting. The treaty’s cardinal principle is non-refoulement, that no state may return a person to a country where they face serious danger. Israeli courts operate on what Anat Ben-Dor, a clinical instructor at Tel Aviv University’s Refugee Rights Clinic who is currently handling several Ethiopian cases, called an interpretive presumption: “Unless there is clear contradictory legislation, the government should be assumed to abide by international law.”
James Loeffler, the Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, who studies the Jewish role in building the postwar human rights system, said the people who wrote those rules would not recognize what Israel is doing now. Robinson and his contemporaries “were committed to non-refoulement. They would have seen that as the cardinal principle above all and would be gravely disappointed by a situation in which Israel is sending thousands of people back to a country where they still face serious peril,” Loeffler said.
Not everyone sees the low asylum recognition rate as a failure, however. Yonatan Jakubowicz, founder and executive director of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, which advocates for tighter immigration controls, argues that Israel has struck a deliberate balance between “maximum compliance with the principle of non-refoulement” and restricting long-term settlement and the “pull factor” it creates for mass migration.
Israel, he notes, is the only developed country with a land and sea border with Africa, apart from the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, into which roughly 70,000 people crossed from Morocco in a matter of days last month, prompting an emergency EU meeting.
Israel’s granting permanent residence to Ethiopians, Eritreans and Sudanese “could collapse its immigration policies, triggering a massive influx of illegal and mixed migration” over the Egyptian fence or by sea, “followed by a wave of family reunification requests.”
The route he described has been effectively closed for more than a decade; crossings from the Sinai all but stopped after the border fence went up. Most Ethiopians reached Israel by other means – on tourist or work visas or, like Yordanos, on visas for religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem – and applied for asylum after arriving.
Jakubowicz’s arguments are echoed elsewhere in the Western world. Earlier this month, a U.S. district judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopians, after the Department of Homeland Security announced in December that conditions in Ethiopia “no longer pose a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Ethiopian nationals.” The language is nearly identical to the advice Israel’s former interior minister, Arbel, cited in Jerusalem two years earlier.
Mola, who asked to be identified by his first name only as he still has family in Ethiopia and also fears deportation, worries that Israel will follow the U.S. lead and step up deportations of Ethiopian asylum seekers ahead of the national elections scheduled for Oct. 27 as a campaign victory for the right-wing coalition now in power.
“Every time there’s an election, asylum seekers suddenly become a target,” said Mandil of the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations. “Because there are many groups, in many parts of the Israeli public, and it’s both the coalition and the opposition that make promises, trying to convince people to vote for them if only they can take care of this situation.”
In addition to repeating common tropes in the developed world tying migrants to theft and violence, Israelis who support cracking down on immigration often invoke another argument: demography. They worry that letting asylum seekers stay permanently in Israel would erode the Jewish majority of the Jewish state.
“The logic is, if we allow groups of non-Jewish people to stay here, they could, God forbid, marry Israelis, and that threatens Jewishness, the Jewish majority,” Mandil said. Loeffler traces the same anxiety to Israel’s unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. Non-Palestinian refugees, he said, have “absolutely gotten caught up in that struggle,” because Israeli leaders resist any move they fear “might open up more opportunities for Palestinians to make legal claims.”
Sivan Carmel, country director of HIAS Israel, calls the numbers argument a non-starter. “Israel has a population of about 10 million, this is 50,000, 60,000 people. It doesn’t make a dent in the demography of the country,” she said.
A clock that keeps ticking
The children of asylum seekers have long been a focus of civil society organizations working on their behalf. They argue that the state should treat them as cases separate from their parents and that even if Israel tries to deport the parents, the children are a different question. Mandil has spent years making that case in the Knesset.
“How can they be asylum seekers when 94% of them were born in Israel?” she said. Asked whether they speak Hebrew, she answered: “Completely. Better than I do.” Yet they are classified, she noted, not as asylum seekers but as infiltrators. “How can you be an infiltrator when you were born in Israel?”
Ethiopian asylum-seeking parents who spoke with JTA described a particular kind of parenting, shielding their children from what their lack of status would eventually cost them, while preparing them for the moment they turned 18 and found out.
Yemani Tesma likened it to a “a clock that keeps ticking. I know the alarm will ring, and I have to decide what to do by the time it does.”
Eventually, the time came.
When his son turned 16, his classmates began preparing for the military draft. His son, however, was left out. No call-up notice, no aptitude test, none of the photographs with families at the recruitment office. So he asked his father why.
“It is because you are not Israeli, and cannot become Israeli,” his father told him. His son shut his bedroom door, Yemani Tesma said, and did not open it for a day.
Israel, like most countries outside the Americas, does not grant citizenship on the basis of birth alone. A child’s status is derivative of a parent’s, said Ben-Dor of the Refugee Rights Clinic. Courts will occasionally make exceptions – for a child with a disability, or one whose integration into Israeli society is exceptional, say – but the government, she said, is wary of any principle suggesting that being born in Israel could confer legal status.
Ben-Dor is representing two Tigrayan mothers of children with special needs whose humanitarian applications cannot be considered at all because the Interior Ministry demands Ethiopian passports the women do not have in order to process their claims.
In early 2012, then-interior minister Eli Yishai lifted collective protection for South Sudanese nationals, clearing the way to deport 1,500 people. The first flight left Tel Aviv for Juba on June 17 of that year, in an operation the government called “Returning Home.” Civil war broke out the following year.
“Children who had studied in Israeli schools found themselves drawing water from wells in South Sudan,” HIAS Israel’s Avigal said. “These are Hebrew-speaking children.”
Why did we come here?
Most asylum seekers in Israel hold a 2(a)5 visa. “It’s a specific visa whose only function is to say you can’t be deported,” said Mandil. The visa is stamped “This permit is not a work permit.” Asylum seekers are able to work, however, because the state promised the High Court it would not fine their employers.
“Every right, every basic right, every social service, we have to fight for,” Mandil said. “They aren’t eligible for anything, not a driver’s license, not the ability to leave the country and come back, not health insurance, not higher education. Certain professions are closed to them because they have no status.”
That has left many Ethiopian asylum seekers in a cycle of poverty in the country where they sought refuge. Now, with a deportation deadline already behind them, 18 years after Yemani Tesma arrived and raised a family here, some are asking why they came at all.
Mola is a community leader and translator and spends his unpaid hours helping asylum seekers file petitions with the Interior Ministry.
“When I am not doing my backbreaking work,” he told JTA, “I do all I can to help asylum seekers fill out paperwork.” He once worked as a project coordinator and Amharic translator at the Canadian Embassy in Israel.
“Anyone who has had the option or ability to leave Israel for a third country has done so. Everyone who is left here has nowhere else to go,” he said.
In the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, it seemed there might be an opening for the Ethiopian asylum seekers to cement their place in Israel.
As Israel’s largely foreign agricultural workforce was evacuated and Palestinian work permits were suspended, some of the people the Interior Ministry is now preparing to deport went to farms along the Gaza border to pick fruit.
Members of the Ethiopian asylum-seeking community bought supplies at supermarkets and delivered them to Israeli soldiers, Mola said.
Multiple busloads of asylum seekers traveled to farms in the envelope to harvest crops that would otherwise have rotted. None of them were paid. “After Oct. 7, we saw asylum seekers volunteering to assist people in the south, distributing food, volunteering in agriculture. I’ve seen it with my clients, and I’ve seen it with groups of asylum seekers,” Avigal, of HIAS, said.
Three months later, the Interior Ministry revoked their protection from deportation.
Asked whether any of this had left him bitter toward Israel, one Ethiopian asylum seeker, who asked not to be named for fear of deportation, rejected the premise. “I don’t hate,” he said. “Bless Israel.”
Told that someone else in his position might feel differently, he answered, “No. What we hate is the decision.”
Avigal added, “What we say at HIAS is, we used to help people because they’re Jewish, and now we’re helping people because we’re Jewish.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel’s Ethiopian asylum seekers fight deportation efforts appeared first on The Forward.
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Milo Yiannopoulos, right-wing troll with links to popular antisemitic figures, detained by ICE
(JTA) — Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, a close associate of Ye, Candace Owens and other past and present promoters of antisemitic conspiracy theories, has been detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers, federal officials announced Friday.
Yiannopoulos, a British citizen who himself has cheered on the Trump administration’s mass deportations, was arrested in New Orleans on Thursday.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Yiannopoulos had entered the U.S. legally in 2019 but “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.” Yiannopoulos missed an immigration hearing and was issued a final order of removal in July, according to DHS, and will remain in ICE custody “pending removal.”
Jewish MAGA firebrand Laura Loomer, an influential figure in the Trump administration, took credit for the arrest on social media.
In a series of posts on X, Loomer blasted Yiannopoulos for his past internship with former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and his appearances on right-wing commentator Candace Owens’ podcast. Both Greene and Owens are anti-Israel figures who have become critics of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
“Milo is going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace,” Loomer wrote. “Today is a great day for America.” Late Friday, Loomer claimed he was “on an airplane back to the UK.”
Yiannopoulos, a former editor at Breitbart News and onetime beacon of the burgeoning alt-right movement, has a long history of inflammatory comments, and has flirted with Holocaust denial while claiming Jewish ancestry. The Anti-Defamation League labeled him as an “alt right apologist” and a “misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, transphobic troll who is extremely good at getting people to pay attention to him.”
His ascension through the conservative movement was abruptly halted in 2017 after appearing to endorse pedophilia in a video. But the commentator bounced back after developing a relationship with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. After Ye began to gain notoriety in 2022 for promoting extreme antisemitic rhetoric, Yiannopoulos joined his long-shot 2024 presidential campaign as chief of staff.
Yiannopoulos also took credit for organizing a dinner in 2022 between Donald Trump, Ye and white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, which was widely condemned by both parties. At the time, Yiannopoulos said that he organized it “to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end.”
More recently, when Ye took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year to apologize for his antisemitism, Yiannopoulos shared the ad on X — a day after he had posted, “The problem with these kamikaze Jews is they aren’t remotely as likable, human or frightening as Japs.”
Yiannopoulos has said that he is Jewish through his maternal grandmother, though he is a practicing Roman Catholic, and refutes claims of being racist or antisemitic.
In 2019, Yiannopoulos told the Los Angeles Jewish Journal that he is a “paid-up Zionist” who would advocate for a Jewish “super-state” in the Middle East. That interview took place in Berlin, the day after an event where Yiannopoulos spoke to members of the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland party.
Two years earlier, Yiannopoulos had rallied against the City University of New York for hosting Linda Sarsour, a promoter of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement against Israel, as a commencement speaker.
In an April 2026 interview with Owens, who herself has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, Yiannopoulos compared the Israeli government to Nazi Germany, and said that “Netanyahu’s Israel will have eclipsed Hitler’s Germany by many, many counts, morally speaking, probably by the numbers, too.”
He said that the Netanyahu administration “has gone so far that they’re now willing to sacrifice their own citizens in order to increase their borders.”
“Where do I remember that from? Uh, could it be the word ‘Lebensraum’?” he said, referring to the key tenet of Nazi ideology that meant conquering more land for the Aryan race to settle. “Could it be a country that did exactly that?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Milo Yiannopoulos, right-wing troll with links to popular antisemitic figures, detained by ICE appeared first on The Forward.
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These Jews are looking for a ‘runner’s chai’
Ezra Feig begins each Friday the same way: corralling 100 Jews to go on a run in Central Park.
He stands up on a park bench, towering above the crowd. They’re schmoozing and stretching, with impressive energy considering the hour. Around half wear blue shirts and shorts emblazoned with a white Star of David, interlaced with an outline of a runner.
Feig spreads his arms wide and says “Welcome to Nice Jewish Runners.”
A 35-year-old health care entrepreneur, Feig launched Nice Jewish Runners in the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Three years later, the running group has kept up its pace. Jews from multiple generations, but mostly in their 20s and 30s, continue to feel the group’s pull. For those raised in less observant backgrounds but called to engage more with their Judaism after Oct. 7, the weekly jogs give them a way to do so outside a synagogue.
The group has expanded to at least 19 cities in five countries around the world. And — despite, perhaps even in spite of rising antisemitism — the Nice Jewish Runners still don their Star of David T-shirts, hats, and jewelry.
“It’s pretty simple,” said Zach Woodin, who leads an Atlanta chapter. “You lace up, you pin on a Star of David, you run with other Jews — and for a few miles, the world feels a little less scary.”
Melissa Tucker, who now runs the club’s Chicago chapter, found something in the running club that she hadn’t experienced at other events for young Jews. She liked the group’s ethos and emphasis on building community instead of “you have to do this religious thing.”
Nice Jewish Runners is a passion-project for Feig. He originally intended to have one run, in New York, once a week. It would be a “pre-Shabbat celebration,” as he described it, with coffee and babka afterward.
The group got more traction, partially through its boisterous social media presence, with short-form videos of runners each other with confetti during races or quick on-camera interviews at morning runs. People outside New York City started to notice, and asked if Nice Jewish Runners could come to their city. Chapters sprouted up in cities around the world.
Most chapters draw mostly people in their 20s and 30s, but in Westchester, a suburban county outside of New York City, runners show up pushing their babies in strollers. Others bring their grandchildren.
“One thing I really love about our community is, it’s not another singles club,” Feig told the Forward.
Though the group is also not not a singles club. “I don’t think people are opposed to meeting people romantically in the run club,” chuckled Woodin of Atlanta.
In fact, the New York chapter just had big news on that front. One recent Friday morning, a couple who met during a morning run announced they had gotten engaged, making them the first Nice Jewish Runners to do so.
After the announcement, the runners split up into pace groups, and headed off to circumnavigate the three miles around the park, in their blue Magen David t-shirts.
At a time when being visibly Jewish has become more dangerous, Feig thinks this is more important than ever.
“If we show that we’re afraid, then other Jews around us are also going to be afraid,” he said. “But if we show that, you know, we’re gonna proudly wear our Star of David and be visibly Jewish, it’s gonna inspire other Jews to do the same and not be afraid.”
Tucker of Chicago says that her mother worried about her running along the shore of Lake Michigan with a big Star of David on her chest. But so far, “It hasn’t been a concern,” Tucker said. “Like, Baruch Hashem, nothing has happened. On the lakefront, people have only smiled and giggled at us rather than hate on us.”
The group also hosts special events for the holidays, with some chapters doing monthly Shabbat dinners and annual Hanukkah parties.
Though their shirts typically only get positive responses, there have been some concerns. At major runs, some club members who have draped themselves in Israeli flags have gotten heckled from the sidelines. In one incident, the heckling came from another runner and led to their suspension from New York Road Runners.
Since the 2025 Boulder attack, where a man firebombed a walk in support of Israeli hostages, killing one person and injuring a dozen others, the group has been vigilant about security.
They don’t publicize the location of their meetups on social media. In order to find the locations, would-be participants have to join Heylo, an event management platform, where chapter leaders only accept them once they have approved their identity.
When each run finishes, the Nice Jewish Runners head in a pack toward Breads Bakery. Waiting for them is a jug of iced coffee and freshly-baked babka — a sort of Oneg Shabbat after the weekly running ritual. The newly-engaged couple sponsored the oneg after a recent run. After a few celebratory words and photos, everyone dug in.
“At the end of the day, it’s not just a run,” Feig said. “It’s Jews showing up for each other, wearing a Star of David in public, and starting Shabbat with coffee, babka and zero apologies.”
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