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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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How seriously should we take San Francisco’s anti-Zionist hecklers?
The videos of local activists in San Francisco accosting Scott Wiener, the state senator running to replace Nancy Pelosi in the U.S. House, are hard to watch.
“Say ‘Free Palestine’ for the camera, dog,” Jesus Coba, who runs a popular Instagram account, tells Wiener as he’s trying to watch the World Cup at a bar. “Say ‘Free Palestine’!”
Coba is holding the camera close to Wiener’s face as the politician stares at him in silence.
A few days later Wiener was surrounded and screamed at as he made his way through Dolores Park, where he had come to participate in a Shabbat service as part of the Trans March.
“F— you and your Zionist handlers,” one person shouted at Wiener, who is both Jewish and gay, and has championed legislation protecting trans rights. “F— you and your Israeli masters.”
What happened to Wiener can be seen as part of a national trend. Jack Schlossberg, a Jewish heir to the Kennedy dynasty, face-planted in his attempt to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler in the U.S. House. He ran a poor campaign, but it wasn’t helped by the fact that he tried to trade on his status as a Millennial social media influencer while refusing to embrace the TikTok generation’s skepticism of Israel.
“Can you say ‘F— Israel,’ Jack?” an erratic fellow influencer who goes by the name Crackhead Barney asked visibly stressed Schlossberg during a street interview.
“No way, dude, I’m Jewish,” Schlossberg responds.
And other Democrats have spoken about the extent to which a candidate’s willingness to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza has become a litmus test in primary contests.
But, at the same time, the people hounding Wiener in public are part of a radical but fringe minority — one with deep roots in San Francisco — that has struggled to gain political power even as its members excel at generating viral clips.
***
San Francisco is home to loud and often obnoxious activism fueled by the very real sense of alienation that comes when a region known for its radical politics is subjected to repeated rounds of displacement by the tech industry. I grew up in the city during the first dot-com boom, when the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project plastered the neighborhood with calls to vandalize luxury cars and sushi restaurants. The man behind the group was eventually arrested and police found instructions in his apartment for how to build acid bombs.
Gay Shame, an anonymous protest collective, carried on this style of activism with a promise to “instigate, irritate, and agitate” and graffiti insisting that “Queers Hate Techies,” while locals blockaded the private buses that ferried tech workers to their jobs south of the city.
When Google Glass — an early precursor to Meta Ray-Bans that embed a livestreaming camera in your glasses — became a symbol of gentrification, a woman was punched in the face for wearing the device into a local dive bar.
It’s not shocking that Jews have not always fared well among this set, for whom strident opposition to symbols of power reigns supreme. A disturbing precursor to the protests against Wiener came in 2018 when activists began weekly protests outside Manny’s, a cafe and “civic event space” in the Mission.
The business replaced a sushi restaurant, but it still somehow became the target of neighborhood activists who demanded a host of concessions from Manny Yekutiel, the cafe’s Jewish owner. Yekutiel agreed to many of the asks: bilingual signage and staff, affordable drip coffee and free event bookings for community groups.
But Yekutiel still found himself facing weekly protests, including by Gay Shame, accusing him of promoting a “pro-elite, pro-Zionist and pro-gentrification agenda.” Someone spray-painted a Star of David and “F— Zionism” on the exterior, and a window was smashed.
His sole crime was apparently a Facebook post from a few years before he opened the business asking for recommendations on “some good Zionist organizations in the Bay.”
The people who thought protesting Yekutiel was a good use of their Wednesday nights for several years are the same folks — sometimes literally — who are now harassing Wiener.
Coba, who was kicked out of the bar for yelling at Wiener, and whom Wiener said had previously accosted him at the airport and accused him of having a “tainted bloodline,” recently posted footage of someone chasing Yekutiel through a street fair.
Yekutiel is now running for the Board of Supervisors, which is San Francisco’s city council, and the man quizzing him was mad that Manny’s had once hosted pro-Israel activist Hen Mazzig. Coba claimed Mazzig was an Israeli commando, which I could find no evidence for, and Yekutiel said all he knew was that Mazzig had served in the Israeli military as most Israeli Jews are required to do.
“Well maybe having Israelis at the cafe isn’t a good idea,” the man, who does not identify himself, tells Yekutiel.
***
It could be difficult to summon much sympathy for tech workers whose commute was delayed by nudists trying to board their buses as a form of protest. But it’s much easier to see how corrosive the “Zionist” litmus tests being applied to Jews in San Francisco and elsewhere are.
As a longtime politician, Wiener’s record of support for Israel is deeper than Yekutiel’s. But not by much. He joined a solidarity trip to Israel in 2024, but had also called for a ceasefire in Gaza in November 2023, opposes U.S. military aid to Israel at least until a new government is in place, and — after an awkward delay — he joined the other candidates in the race for Pelosi’s seat in accusing Israel of genocide.
Wiener is a relative moderate in a city where progressives sometimes treat that as akin to being MAGA, and both Coba and the people yelling at Wiener during Pride make allusions to disagreement with his preferred housing policy. Mayor Daniel Lurie, another moderate, was chased out of the Trans March last year, though without as much vitriol.
But it seems clear that the obsession with Wiener supposedly supporting genocide is tied to the fact that he’s Jewish.
His opponent, Connie Chan, is backed by labor unions and has staked out a position to Wiener’s left on Israel, though she has faced no backlash for being endorsed by Pelosi, who embodies moderate San Francisco politics and has been a stalwart supporter of Israel.
At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that the people leading the charge against Wiener have failed time and again to move the political needle.
They didn’t stop gentrification or slow the mass arrival of tech workers to the city and luxury buses still ferry them to work. Google Glass flopped, but now every other influencer on TikTok is wearing Meta Ray-Bans to film content. Manny’s continues to thrive with support from prominent progressives in the city, and Yekutiel appears to be leading in his race to join the city council.
Wiener rose from the Board of Supervisors to the State Senate, and despite his extremely vocal detractors he remains the favorite to win in November. Local media has not framed Israel as a key issue.
(Schlossberg, for his part, ultimately lost to another pro-Israel Jewish candidate who was to his right on Gaza.)
When Joe Eskenazi, one of the most astute journalists covering local politics in the city, wrote about the Manny’s protests years ago he aptly described the demonstrators as “a diminutive group of attention-seekers.”
That certainly seemed to be the case at the time. Whether the rising tide of animosity toward Israel will afford these hecklers a veto over Jewish politicians ascending the political ladder is now an open question.
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As the Bible and the news from the Strait of Hormuz tells us, our world is in dire straits
The most important traffic reports these days usually come from the Strait of Hormuz.
“Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz dropped significantly over the weekend, The New York Times reported, “as a four-day exchange of attacks between Iran and the United States left some shipowners deciding it was too risky to transit.”
What’s going on with the Strait of Hormuz affects gas prices, stock prices, Americans’ moods — and the world economy.
But what does “strait” mean, anyway?
The word has been with us for a long time, and intriguingly, it appears in many famous translations of the Torah. It also pops up in translations of the New Testament.
“Strait” comes from the Latin for “strict.” It first appeared in English in the 14th century, when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it referred to clothing — “a garment, etc.: Tight-fitting, narrow.”
Over time, the meaning changed a bit, but it always had something to do with narrowness. From 1561 to 1725, it meant: “Of bonds, a knot: Tightly drawn.”
As the centuries passed, it attracted the attention of poets.
”It matters not how strait the gate,” wrote William Ernest Henley in his poem “Invictus.” “How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”
It turns out that Henley was kind of into the subject of what words meant.
“The poet, who was one of the leading slang lexicographers of his day, saw the gates of heaven as strait — tight, narrow, difficult to get through,” the late great language columnist William Safire observed in 1984, when he wrote a column on “strait” and “straits.”
Maybe Henley had the New Testament in mind, too.
Matthew 7:13 in The King James Bible advises: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.”
Today, according to Merriam-Webster, “strait” means “a comparatively narrow passageway connecting two large bodies of water — often used in plural but singular in construction.”
Henley, the poet, was using an archaic meaning — a narrow passage, without water.
In contemporary English, “strait” also has a secondary meaning — “a situation of perplexity or distress — often used in plural,” according to Merriam-Webster, but also according to anyone who has used the phrase “dire straits,” including, one would presume, the band Dire Straits.
Both physical and emotional space
“Strait” describes both a physical space — for example, a body of water — and an emotional space, like “dire straits.”
Perhaps that dual meaning is why the word “strait” appears in translations of the Torah. In the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, the Hebrew word tzar, or “narrow,” is translated as “strait.”
Consider 1 Samuel, 13:6, in the JPS translation from 1917:
“When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait — for the people were distressed — then the people did hide themselves in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in holds, and in pits.”
Tzar has both a literal descriptive meaning and a figurative emotional meaning. Sure, as an adjective, it means narrow, such as in the famous song about the entire world being “a narrow bridge” — gesher tzar me’od.
But as ki tzar lo in Samuel 1 6:13 demonstrates, it can also refer to a tough circumstance, a strait. Similarly, perhaps, in contemporary Hebrew, someone might say, tzar li, or “I am saddened.”
These multiple meanings might lead a person to the hazardous question of whether one should say the “Strait of Hormuz” in the singular, or “Straits of Hormuz” in the plural.
That was what fascinated Safire in 1984. Today, his take feels like a postcard from another time — but it’s also soothing in this moment of, well, dire straits:
“My advice,”Safire wrote. “Go with the familiar; follow your ear. If you’re happy with the Straits of Gibraltar or Magellan, use the final s; if the place name is new to you, let the gazetteer crowd have its way.”
“Hormuz is unfamiliar to most Americans, and the Strait of Hormuz is therefore the name I would use, going along with Gary Hart and the stylebooks,” Safire continued. “But retain the singular sense: ‘The Straits of Gibraltar’ is a passage.’ ‘’The Strait of Hormuz’ is the next Quemoy and Matsu.”
I liked being distracted for a moment from Iran and Trump with the mention of “Gary Hart.”
That nostalgia reminded me that today’s Strait of Hormuz news cycle, about a traffic jam for the fuel and food we need to live, is about both a location and a feeling.
Sure, the waterway may be physically open, or, at least of this writing, effectively closed because of fear, but its status has other meanings too — like whether the Iranian regime actually won this war, and whether that narrow space is also a symbol of future peril.
And in those multiple meanings, strait echoes the Biblical tzar —narrow, yes, but also dangerous.
In Hebrew and in English, narrowness, perilousness and sadness frequently go together, indicating a world or a situation that must be navigated carefully. Perhaps a word like strait — a little bit singular, a little bit plural — captures it all.
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Mamdani says ‘I can’t tell you I support’ Israel as a Jewish state
(JTA) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he could not endorse states that privilege one religion over another, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, during a one-on-one interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday.
“Democratic Socialists of America now says they no longer favor a two-state solution. “Is that the way you see it as well? Karl asked in the interview, which came days after Mamdani’s endorsed Democratic socialist candidates for Congress swept their New York Democratic primaries.
Among them, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier campaigned on platforms that included opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel and support for Palestinian rights.
Mamdani replied to Karl: “The way I see it is equal rights for all people. And I think that that’s the truth for Israel. It’s the truth for any country in the world.”
When pressed by Karl that Israel is in fact a Jewish state and “that’s in the charter, that’s the way it is now,” Mamdani said he has consistently stated he supports “the state of Israel as a state with equal rights.”
However, he added, “I believe that any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.”
The backlash to Mamdani’s comments was quick. In a statement Sunday, Ambassador Ofir Akunis, Consul General of Israel in New York, said, “Mamdani, we do not need your recognition of the Jewish state. If you knew a little history, instead of spending all day inciting and spreading hatred, you would know that Israel’s Declaration of Independence guaranteed full equality for all its citizens. That has been the reality since the day our state was established.”
Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, posted on X, “Mamdani is either willfully ignorant or maliciously mendacious,” adding that “Israel has no official state religion.”
He also stated that there are multiple countries for which Islam is the state religion, with additional Muslim-majority countries declaring Islam as the state religion in their constitutions.
Karl also asked Mamdani about his broader views on Israel, which became a prominent issue during the New York Democratic primaries, particularly among candidates who support Israel and continued U.S. military aid.
Mamdani said voters made it clear that “they were tired of tens of billions of dollars being spent in our taxpayer dollars to violate international law to kill thousands of civilians.”
He added that currently “Palestine is described as if there is a ceasefire,” but more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed during it. He said New Yorkers want to “follow international law, to believe in the humanity for all.”
Karl also pressed the mayor on the Poetica coffee shop incident in Brooklyn last week, where staff refused to take New York Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman’s money for a coffee purchase, calling him a “genocide enabler” because he supports Israel.
Mamdani said while he has “political disagreements” with Goldman (who lost his seat to Mamdani-backed Brad Lander), “I do believe that that’s a response that goes beyond that.”
And when asked about rising antisemitism in New York City, the mayor said that while Jews are a minority of the city’s population, they constitute a majority of victims of the hate crimes committed in the city. ”That’s something that’s unacceptable,” he said.
Akunis said, however, that “The surge in antisemitism across the United States, and particularly in New York, is the result of ignorance and a lack of knowledge, combined with a fundamental hatred of the Jewish people.”
He added, “I once again warn that Mamdani’s inflammatory rhetoric will end in very serious and violent acts against Jewish and Israeli communities throughout the city.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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