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Aruba’s new rabbi comes out of retirement to lead a congregation in ‘paradise’
ORANJESTAD, Aruba (JTA) — One of Alberto Zeilicovich’s first duties as a Conservative rabbi was to officiate the funeral of a 20-year-old congregant, murdered by a drug cartel while enjoying a night out with his friends at a disco.
It was the late 1980s in Medellin, Colombia, and Zeilicovich had entered the pulpit at the height of the Colombian drug wars and the reign of notorious kingpin Pablo Escobar. Two years later, he would bury another member of the congregation murdered by the cartel.
“We felt fear,” Zeilicovich, who goes by Baruch, said about his six years in Medellin. “The president of the congregation told me you cannot walk on Shabbos to the synagogue. ‘You should come with a car.’ I asked, ‘Are you afraid someone is going to kidnap me?’ He said, ‘No, I am afraid somebody will kill you.’”
To give him a break, a congregant sent Zeilicovich on a trip to Aruba and Curacao, islands where, he recalled, he could “unplug a little bit from a situation that was very dangerous.”
That 1990 trip would ultimately result in the other bookend of his career: Zeilicovich recently came out of retirement to begin a three-year contract as the rabbi of Beth Israel Synagogue, a small synagogue on the Dutch island of Aruba in the southern Caribbean Sea. He had visited the island at least once a year for the past 32 years.
Temple Beth Israel, a Conservative-style synagogue in Oranjestad, Aruba, was consecrated in 1962. (Dan Fellner)
“First, the people are very friendly,” he says of Aruba, which has a population of about 100,000 and is officially called a “constituent country” of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. “Second, it’s a very safe place. And third, the island is a paradise. Everything is so beautiful.”
The synagogue, located in the island’s capital city of Oranjestad, is not affiliated with any movement of Judaism but operates in the style of the egalitarian Conservative movement. It is just a block from one of Aruba’s signature white-sand beaches and a five-minute drive to Eagle Beach, perhaps its most famous.
While Zeilicovich no longer needs armed security guards to accompany him to synagogue as he did in Medellin, he still brings to the pulpit the difficult life lessons he learned during those tumultuous years in Colombia.
“Being in Medellin made me realize how a rabbi should teach the congregation about what are the most important things in life,” he says. “That shaped me in understanding what the role of a rabbi should be — a facilitator for everybody to be a better Jew, a better person.”
Zeilicovich, who speaks five languages, was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he experienced antisemitism and life under an oppressive military regime. He studied at a rabbinical seminary in Buenos Aires before completing his ordination at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem.
Following his six years in Medellin, Zeilicovich moved to a synagogue in Bogota, the capital city of Colombia, before rabbinical stints in Puerto Rico, Texas and most recently New Jersey, where he announced his retirement from Temple Beth Sholom in Fair Lawn in late 2020.
Zeilicovich and his wife Graciela had moved to Israel when he got a phone call from Daniel Kripper, a friend and fellow Argentine who was retiring as the rabbi of Aruba’s Beth Israel.
“He called me and said, ‘Baruch, what are you doing in Israel?’ I said I’m going to the beach. He said, ‘Why don’t you come to the beach in Aruba where you can have a congregation again?’ And I said, ‘Why not?’”
According to Richenella Wever, a member of the Beth Israel board, Zeilicovich has been a good fit with the synagogue’s diverse congregation. “His way of thinking, teaching and his ability to connect the Torah with daily life is amazing,” she said.
Jewish life in Aruba dates back to the 16th century, when immigrants arrived from the Netherlands and Portugal. In 1754, Moses Solomon Levie Maduro, who came from a prominent Portuguese Jewish family in Curacao, settled in Aruba, where he founded the Aruba branch of the Dutch West Indies Company. Maduro paved the way for more immigrants but the island’s Jewish population has always remained small. It’s now about 100.
In 1956, the Dutch Kingdom officially recognized the Jewish community of Aruba; Beth Israel was consecrated six years later. The synagogue calls itself a “Conservative egalitarian temple keeping Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions.” In addition to Beth Israel, there is a Chabad chapter on the island that opened in 2013.
With a membership of just 50 local families and a few dozen overseas residents, Beth Israel has limited resources. A Dutch law stipulating that the salaries of clergy in Holland’s overseas territories be paid by the government helps the synagogue remain solvent.
“This is really unique,” says Zeilicovich. “You can be a minister of an evangelical church, a Roman Catholic priest, an imam from a mosque or a rabbi from a synagogue — the government pays the salary.
“When I want to brag about myself, I say I am an employee of the Crown of Holland,” he added with a laugh.
Zeilicovich says the Aruban government has been highly supportive of the Jewish community, even erecting a life-sized bronze statue in 2010 of Anne Frank in Queen Wilhelmina Park in downtown Oranjestad.
A bronze statue of Anne Frank stands in the Queen Wilhelmina Park in downtown Oranjestad, Aruba, at left; at right, a T-shirt for sale in the Beth Israel gift shop in Aruba reads “Bon Bini,” meaning “welcome” in Papiamento, the local language. (Dan Fellner)
“That means they have respect for the Jewish community,” he says. “And they are very sympathetic with us about the Holocaust.”
Zeilicovich says a typical Friday night Shabbat service attracts about 20 people, about one-third of whom are tourists. Some arrive on the many cruise ships that dock just a mile away from the synagogue; others stay at condos or at one of Aruba’s posh resorts.
If there aren’t enough worshippers for a prayer quorum of 10 on Saturday mornings, a Torah study group meets instead. The synagogue’s small sanctuary can hold 60 worshippers, and is normally full for the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur each fall.
“We are a friendly, welcoming congregation,” Zeilicovich says. “We are family — mishpocha. When you come here, we try to make you feel that way.”
Indeed, a popular item in the synagogue’s small gift shop is a T-shirt imprinted with the words “Bon Bini Shalom.” Bon Bini means “welcome” in Papiamento, the Portuguese-based Creole language spoken in the Dutch Caribbean.
Zeilicovich says one of his priorities as the new rabbi is to improve the synagogue’s marketing efforts and revamp its website. He adds that Aruba’s Jewish community often is overshadowed by Curacao, its Dutch neighbor to the east that is home to the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Americas.
“We are behind in marketing,” he said. “And we understand we are missing a huge opportunity.”
For now, Zeilicovich is enjoying his time in Aruba and can’t help but marvel at how his life has changed since his days as a rabbi in Medellin when just getting from his home to the synagogue was a dangerous ordeal.
“I think about that and look to heaven and say, ‘God, thank you.’”
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VIDEO: ‘Shtisel’ bubbe Lea Koenig in a Yiddish music video
Lea Koenig, who played Shulem Shtisel’s mother Malka in the popular Israeli TV series Shtisel, sings a Yiddish song in a new music video posted on YouTube. The lyrics are accompanied by English subtitles.
As Koenig sings the song, “Kum zhe mame” (Come, Mommy), we see her leafing through old photo albums, gazing at images of her mother, presumably long gone. The poignant scene reminds us that even a woman in her 80s could occasionally feel like a little girl again, longing for her “mommy.”
“Kum zhe mame” was originally a Russian song called “There’s Little Light From the Window” written in 1964, with lyrics by Constantin Vanshkin and music by Eduard Kolmanovsky. In 1968 it was translated into Hebrew by Leah Noar. Now Israeli actor Yaniv Goldberg has written a Yiddish version.
This isn’t the first Yiddish translation of “There’s Little Light From the Window,” though. The late songwriter Moshe Sachar, who wrote the songs for the Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof in the 1960s, translated the Russian song into Yiddish, which the popular Israeli singer David Eshet sang on his 1972 record album Farbotene lider (Forbidden Songs).
But there’s a major difference between the two Yiddish translations. Sachar’s song is political, describing a mother in the former Soviet Union trying to protect her son, while Goldberg’s is more personal and sentimental.
Lea Koenig was born in 1929 in Łódź, Poland. Her parents were the Yiddish actors Dina and Józef Kamień. When the Nazis occupied Poland her family escaped to Tashkent, in Soviet Uzbekistan. Her father was murdered in the Holocaust. In the end of the 1940s, Lea Koenig emigrated with her mother to Romania, where she studied at the National University of Arts in Bucharest and began acting in local Jewish theater productions. In 1961, she emigrated to Israel.
Primarily acting in Hebrew, Koenig performs in Israel and all over the world, as well as in the Tel Aviv Yiddish theater, Yidishpiel. She speaks English, Hebrew, German, Polish, Romanian, Russian and Yiddish.
The post VIDEO: ‘Shtisel’ bubbe Lea Koenig in a Yiddish music video appeared first on The Forward.
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If You Oppose Terrorism in the West But Not in Israel, You Don’t Oppose Terrorism
An Israeli soldier stands during a two-minute siren marking the annual Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, at an installation at the site of the Nova festival where party goers were killed and kidnapped during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, in Reim, southern Israel, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Soon after the unfortunately named Jihad Al-Shamie’s terror attack on a Manchester synagogue, his father, Faraj Al-Shamie, issued a statement on behalf of the family. The statement distanced the family from Jihad’s jihadi actions, saying that they strongly condemn the “heinous act, which targeted peaceful, innocent civilians.”
That is as it should be. However, it was soon revealed that while Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel was still in progress, Faraj al-Shamie, a trauma surgeon, had praised those undertaking the attack. He had described them as “God’s men on earth.”
That calls into question the sincerity of his attempt to distance his family from his son’s terrorist attack. After all, the vast majority of those killed on October 7 were also “peaceful, innocent civilians.”
Why would somebody condemn his own son’s terror in England, while praising the larger scale terror inflicted by Hamas and other militants in Israel? There are two broad possible explanations.
One explanation is that while he is not actually opposed to acts of terror in the United Kingdom, he has a personal interest in suggesting otherwise.
Being seen to endorse domestic terror, especially if one is an immigrant and a minority in one’s country of adoption, can invite unwanted opprobrium. There are self-interested reasons to avoid this.
The other explanation is that he is opposed to heinous acts against peaceful, innocent civilians only when those civilians are not in Israel. Being in Israel, however, does not make civilians less peaceful or innocent. Nor will it help to suggest that civilians in “settler colonial states” cease to be innocent civilians. First, Jews are indigenous to Israel. Second, under the “settler, colonial” framework, all residents of the US — other than those descended from native Americans — would have no claim against violent terrorism by the indigenous peoples.
Thus, anybody willing to justify the indiscriminate terror against civilians in Israel demonstrates that they are not actually opposed to terrorism.
In this way, somebody’s opinion about terrorism in Israel is the litmus test of how genuine their opposition to terrorism is. If you are not opposed to killing Jews in a synagogue in Jerusalem (or a music festival in the Negev desert, or kibbutzim adjacent to Gaza), then you have no principled reason to oppose killing Jews in a synagogue in Manchester, or office workers in the World Trade Center, or passengers in a flight over Lockerbie.
We should employ this litmus test more often. We should ask anybody purporting to oppose anti-Jewish and other terrorism in Western countries whether they are similarly opposed to terror in Israel. If they are not willing to state such opposition, they will thereby demonstrate just how phony their opposition to domestic terrorism is.
It is quite possible, of course, that many of those justifying terrorism in Israel would be willing to justify it in other Western countries too. Many of them, even in the US, for example, are happy to call for “death to America.”
Nevertheless, it would be helpful to encourage them, as individuals, to acknowledge this explicitly — rather than hide behind slogans like “globalize the intifada,” which other people, including those seeking public office, attempt to sanitize by introducing ambiguities that are not actually there.
This approach asks us not to restrict their speech (beyond cases of incitement to imminent violence), but rather to encourage them to speak their minds more fully. This is how we can make it clearer to a broader swath of the population exactly what values many of those “social justice” activists actually hold.
Now, it might be said that just as opponents of terror in the West must also oppose terror in Israel, so those who oppose terror both in the West and in Israel should oppose the violence used by Israel and Israelis.
There certainly are cases where this is true. Those opposed to the violent targeting of Palestinians in America, as we all should be, ought also to be opposed to Baruch Goldstein’s murderous rampage, or the terror that a fringe group of the Israeli right visits upon Palestinians in the West Bank. However, that is compatible with recognizing that there is a moral difference between Hamas’ October 7 attack and Israel’s response to it, which sought to prevent another such attack from ever happening again.
British police responded forcefully to Jihad Al-Shamie’s attack, by shooting him, which is exactly what they should have done under the circumstances. That is true even if it turns out that the police should have taken more care not to harm those Jews within the synagogue, two of whom the police accidentally shot. Whether there was any police culpability is a matter for detailed forensic investigation.
Similarly, albeit at a larger scale, one could find fault with some of the ways that Israel has undertaken its response, without drawing a moral equivalence with the Hamas attack. The October 7 attack is manifestly wicked. That Israel responded militarily is the opposite. It had both a right and a duty to protect its citizens from further such attacks. Criticism of the details of that response is a matter for close forensic investigation. However, such an investigation cannot be replaced by memetic metastasizing of the “genocide” accusation.
David Benatar is Emeritus Professor Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. His most recent book is Very Practical Ethics (Oxford, 2024)
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The Netherlands’ Moral Mirror Is Cracking
A view shows the Peace Palace, which houses the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in The Hague, Netherlands, April 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
For decades, Israel viewed the Netherlands as one of its most reliable European friends, a nation whose moral compass — forged in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust — pointed firmly against antisemitism and toward Israel’s right to exist in peace.
Dutch diplomacy was measured, its civil society was open, and its historical consciousness ran deep.
But that image of the Netherlands has begun to fracture. Since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war, the Netherlands has witnessed a surge of anti-Israel rhetoric, antisemitic incidents, and violent protests that have shaken Jewish communities and confounded Israelis who long saw the Dutch as allies in both memory and morality.
The numbers tell a sobering story
The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) has reported an 818% increase in antisemitic incidents compared to the pre-October 7 average.
In 2024 alone, 421 incidents were recorded, the highest since the watchdog began systematic monitoring.
These are not abstract statistics; they represent Jewish families harassed, synagogues threatened, and Israelis attacked on Dutch streets.
One shocking example was the “Jew-hunt” in Amsterdam after the Ajax vs. Maccabi Tel Aviv match in November 2024.
What should have been a sporting event spiraled into open violence: Israeli fans chased through the streets, attacked by mobs on scooters, assaulted simply for being visibly Jewish or Israeli. The term “Jew-hunt” was not invented by the press; it came from officials describing what they saw. For many Israelis, this was not a local disturbance, it was a moral alarm bell ringing from a country they once saw as safe ground.
From moral clarity to moral confusion
How did this happen? Why would a nation that still teaches Anne Frank’s story with pride see antisemitism return so visibly to its streets?
Part of the answer lies in the Dutch self-image. The Netherlands prides itself on tolerance, free speech, and moral independence. In recent years, however, those same virtues have created fertile ground for extremism to hide behind “activism.” The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, long a subject of heated debate, has become a proxy battlefield for identity politics, post-colonial guilt, and populist anger.
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, murdering 1,200 people and abducting hundreds, the global narrative quickly shifted, especially online. In Dutch cities, massive protests filled the streets, some peaceful, many not. Chants of “From the river to the sea” echoed in public squares. At first glance, these may appear as calls for Palestinian statehood. But in practice, they too often turned into calls for Israel’s elimination, and sometimes, for violence against Jews.
The Dutch demographic landscape also plays a role. The country’s growing communities with roots in Muslim-majority countries often bring with them deep identification with the Palestinian cause. That, combined with a small and highly visible Jewish population (less than 1% nationwide), has produced an imbalance in public discourse.
In many cities, Jewish students now report hiding their identity, removing Stars of David, or avoiding public events for fear of harassment.
The power of media and the failure of nuance
Dutch media coverage has also shifted. Complex Israeli security dilemmas are often flattened into emotional images of Gaza’s suffering, stripped of the context of Hamas’ terror infrastructure or its strategy of human shields. Social media compounds the problem, turning outrage into performance, and moral judgment into tribal belonging.
When the moral conversation becomes binary, oppressor versus oppressed, nuance dies first, and Jewish safety follows. This is not about silencing criticism of Israeli policies; it is about recognizing the line between critique and hate, a line that in the Netherlands, like across Europe, has grown dangerously blurred.
A legacy betrayed
There is something deeply tragic about this Dutch transformation. The Netherlands, more than most European nations, has wrestled publicly with its wartime past, with its collaboration, its resistance, and its guilt. Out of that reckoning grew an ethos of “never again,” not just for Jews, but for all peoples. Yet today, that moral inheritance is being hollowed out by selective empathy.
It is one thing to criticize a government; it is another to chase Jews through the streets of Amsterdam. It is one thing to advocate for Palestinian rights; it is another to vandalize offices of Christian organizations that support Israel, accusing them of “backing genocide.” Such behavior is not protest; it is persecution reborn under new slogans.
The test for Dutch democracy
The Netherlands now faces a test not unlike the one that Europe faced in darker times: Will it confront antisemitism wherever it appears, even when it wears the fashionable mask of “anti-Zionism”?
If yes, that means stronger political leadership, consistent law enforcement, and educational courage — and teaching students to distinguish between political dissent and ethnic hatred. It also means insisting that free speech does not include the freedom to terrorize Jewish citizens.
If the Netherlands wants to remain the moral compass it once claimed to be, it must first look in the mirror and admit that the image reflected there is no longer as clear as it once was.
Because the question Israelis now quietly ask is not whether the Netherlands still supports Israel’s right to exist. It’s whether Dutch society still remembers why that right matters.