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In ‘Mapping Jewish San Francisco,’ a treasure trove of Bay Area Jewish history goes on display
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — The year was 1968. Young people from around the country were descending on San Francisco looking for ways to express themselves, making efforts — sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic — to free themselves from the bonds of American society.
At the same time, a group of Jews came together in the city to create something new.
“After painfully realizing that the Jewish leaders and especially, in San Francisco, are only interested in lectures on the terrible lost generation, but have no wish of giving them a helping hand, we opened, on our own, a house of love and prayer in San Francisco.”
Those words, by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, are on a handmade brochure from 1968. It’s only one artifact in a treasure trove of documents and photos displayed in a new, online exhibit out of the University of San Francisco called “Mapping Jewish San Francisco.” Much of the historical material is being seen publicly for the first time.
“We really want people to get a sense of the unique elements of Bay Area Jewish life,” said Oren Kroll-Zeldin, lead curator of the project and assistant director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the university.
The first part of a brochure advertising the House of Love and Prayer, 1968. (Mapping Jewish San Francisco)
The San Francisco project was inspired by “Mapping Jewish Los Angeles,” a UCLA endeavor that for more than a decade has been bringing multimedia stories of L.A.’s diverse Jewish neighborhoods to life.
“I thought, oh my goodness, we need to do this about San Francisco!” Kroll-Zeldin said.
He brought the idea to Aaron Hahn Tapper, director of USF’s Swig Jewish studies program.
“He was immediately excited and supportive of it,” Kroll-Zeldin said.
They got to work, but executing the projects was a bit more daunting than expected, including making sure the multimedia elements of the website worked perfectly.
But now the site has launched with two inaugural exhibits: Kroll-Zeldin’s deep dive into Carlebach’s synagogue and religious commune known as the House of Love and Prayer, and a comprehensive look at the Karaite Jewish community in the Bay Area and beyond.
“Through ‘Mapping Jewish San Francisco,’ we aim for people to better understand how today’s Bay Area Jewish community came to be and the role that Jews have played in the creation of this major American city,” Hahn Tapper said in an email.
Kroll-Zeldin said a key factor in the effort was the access he had to personal papers, stories, photos and anecdotes, provided to him by the people who were there. He calls it “one-of-a-kind archival material.”
“This is only possible based on the willingness of these people to tell these stories,” he said.
There are also videos, including a series of oral histories with locals who experienced communal living, and archival audio recordings of Carlebach’s teachings and music. The exhibit covers the reach of the rabbi’s impact, but also touches on the controversies around Carlebach, who was accused of sexual assault by many women.
The second exhibition, led by Hahn Tapper, highlights the history of the Karaite Jews, a small but distinct and vibrant community of Jews who are the inheritors of a little-known branch of Judaism.
It is a custom among Karaite Jews to pray kneeling on the ground, as seen here in the sanctuary of Congregation B’nai Israel in Daly City. (Courtesy Kararite Jews of America)
They split from the mainstream, theologically, somewhere between the eighth and 10th centuries. While they follow Torah, they do not follow the rabbinic interpretations in the Mishnah and Talmud. Karaite Jews have many customs and prayers that set their religious practice apart.
The largest group of Karaites lived in Egypt until the 1950s, when tensions, violence and war drove many of them out. Some moved to Israel and others to the Bay Area, where they built a tight-knit and active community.
Only 50,000 or so Karaites are left in the world today, with an estimated 1,000 in the Bay Area, site of the only Karaite synagogue in the Western Hemisphere.
“They are a very important subcommunity of Jews,” Hahn Tapper said. “In addition, as a religious studies scholar who focuses on contemporary social identities, the ways this Jewish community has re-established itself here in the Bay Area is astounding.”
Hahn Tapper said he went through mounds of documents and hundreds of hours of video interview footage to put together the online exhibition, called “Out of Egypt.” He said the videos are invaluable because so many of the Karaites who immigrated to the United States have died in recent years.
“Through this exhibit we have documented their lives, lives of Jews in Egypt that no longer exist,” he said. “These interviewees paint a picture of what it was like to celebrate Jewish holidays in Cairo, some of whom did so with their Muslim neighbors.”
Kroll-Zeldin said each exhibit takes up to two years to prepare, in collaboration with academics, students and community leaders; scholars first collect and digitize the material, then do the research, writing and bibliography work.
The next project is being led by Rabbi Camille Angel, USF’s rabbi in residence, who is working with her students to collect stories of Jewish LGBTQ life in San Francisco. Their research and findings will help tell that chapter of Bay Area Jewish history, a form of storytelling that will continue to be central to the project as it unfolds.
“People like stories,” Kroll-Zeldin said. “Stories connect people. And there are so many interesting stories to tell.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
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From Texas to Tel Aviv, invitations go out to Jews fleeing ‘Mamdani’s New York’
(JTA) — Just hours after New York City’s mayor election was called for Zohran Mamdani, a top Israeli official issued an invitation.
“New York will never be the same again, especially not for its Jewish community,” Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli tweeted. “I invite the Jews of New York to seriously consider making their new home in the Land of Israel.”
Chikli’s call dovetailed with another appeal to Jewish New Yorkers made by a spokesman for the Jewish settlement in Hebron, Yishai Fleisher.
“Indeed, it was a great run, and you were a blessing to NYC. But Jews will feel less and less comfortable in the Big Apple,” tweeted Fleisher. “So do yourself a favor, buy real estate in the Land of Israel.”
The outreach from Israel sought to reach the majority of New York Jews who voted against Mamdani, many of whom saw his criticism of Israel as a warning sign for the safety of the city’s Jewish communities under his leadership.
While Mamdani has frequently reiterated a commitment to protecting Jewish New Yorkers, the impulse to flee the city following his win loomed large over Jews attending Andrew Cuomo’s event on election night, when the former governor came in second.
“One-hundred percent people are going to be leaving New York City under this mayorship,” said Joshua Friedman, a 32-year-old Orthodox Jew from the Upper East Side, in an interview. “There’s no reason to stay. Someone that hates you in your own backyard, why would you want to be here?”
After the election was called, Victoria Zurkiev, an Orthodox Queens resident and social media influencer at the event, said she predicted that “people who are successful will leave New York because they wouldn’t want to put their life in danger.”
“I believe that there is no life with Jewish people in New York going forward,” Zurkiev said. “I’m a New Yorker, this is my town, and to now sit there and think, where are we going next? It’s pretty sad.”
Vowing to move after a disappointing election result is almost a cliche, and not just for Jews in New York — exit talk is high among the wealthy in the city, whom Mamdani hopes to tax at a higher rate.
But actually leaving — and uprooting homes, careers and family life in the process — is much rarer. Still, while it remains unclear how many Jewish New Yorkers will finalize plans to leave the city, some communities have begun pitching themselves as destinations.
In Annapolis, Maryland, which currently has a Jewish candidate leading its mayoral race, plans for a new Jewish federation to serve the state’s capital and Chesapeake region were quickly shored up to coincide with New York City’s election outcome, according to Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, a co-founder of the new federation.
“We do expect that we’ll be making an appeal to new Jewish New Yorkers,” Laszlo Mizrahi, who is active in Democratic politics, said in an interview. “We feel that we are uniquely well positioned for people who want to have a warm and wonderful Jewish life that is without drama.”
Rabbi Marc Schneier, a prominent rabbi of the Hampton Synagogue and friend of Cuomo, announced that he was planning to build the first Jewish day school in the Hamptons.
“This is in anticipation of the thousands of Jewish families that will flock to the Hamptons and greater Suffolk County to escape the antisemitic climate of Mamdani’s New York City,” Schneier wrote in a post on Facebook.
Les Schachter, the board president of Congregation Nishmat Am, a Conservative synagogue in Plano, Texas, issued an “open invitation” to New York’s Jews to settle in North Texas.
“With the recent changes in New York City’s political leadership, I’ve heard from many Jewish families and business owners who are weighing their options,” said Schachter in an email. “If you’re considering a new start, I invite you to look closely at Plano and the greater North Texas region — where Jewish life is thriving, community is strong, and you’ll be genuinely, unmistakably welcome.”
Michael Benmeleh, a real estate agent in Miami, a city with a sizable, and growing, Jewish population, also emailed an appeal to Jewish New Yorkers on Thursday, writing “Tired of traffic, taxes, and Mamdani? Stop kvetching, start packing.”
Perhaps the most intense response has come from Israel, a country built in large part by Jews who left places that had gone from hospitable to hostile. While Chikli and Fleisher are right-wing figures, the assumption that New York Jews would want to leave was so widespread that it was the subject of a skit on the satirical show “Eretz Nehederet.”
In the skit, a New Yorker and an Israeli fleeing their home countries cross paths at Ben Gurion Airport. The New Yorker making aliyah says, “Trust me, it’s just not safe for Jews,” to which the Israeli, on his way to New York, replies, “You literally came to the most dangerous place for Jews on the planet.”
A poll of 501 Israelis published Thursday found that nearly half said they would avoid traveling to New York while Mamdani is mayor. The Jerusalem Post dedicated its front page on Thursday to an image of a disintegrating Statue of Liberty under the headline “Jews at risk in New York City.” And a satirical image shouting out Mamdani as the employee of the month at Nefesh B’Nefesh, an agency that supports Jews in claiming Israeli citizenship, went viral on social media.
Widespread social media comments suggest that some New York Jews at least thinking about moving to Israel, or making aliyah, in response to Mamdani’s election can be found widely.
“We need to take all our money, all our business, and ourselves and go back home to Israel,” one Jewish New Yorker who said she had already “updated my Aliyah paperwork” wrote in a Facebook comment. “Not because we are afraid ( even though many of us are) but because we need to SHOW the world why it looks like when we take away all we give and bring it to the only place we are safe- Israel.”
But even among those who see Mamdani’s win as a potent portent of antisemitic trouble, the idea of a Jewish exit from the biggest Jewish city in the world doesn’t always hold attraction.
“Don’t allow anyone to push you out,” Mayor Eric Adams told the Israeli journalist Neria Kraus in July, months before he dropped out of the election Mamdani won. “If I’m a Jewish person I’m not plotting out my plan to flee. You’re not going to run around the country every time someone does something antisemitic.”
Rabbi Tali Adler, a faculty member at Yeshivat Hadar who lives in New York City, wrote in a Facebook post the morning after the election that she understood why Jews in the city were scared about its result. But, she reminded them, thinking about or planning to flee was not the only traditional Jewish path ahead of them.
“We are the descendants of ancestors who not only knew when to leave, but so much more often, how to stay,” Adler wrote.
The post From Texas to Tel Aviv, invitations go out to Jews fleeing ‘Mamdani’s New York’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Iranian-American sentenced to prison in Iran for visiting Israel 13 years ago
(JTA) — A Jewish Iranian-American man has been sentenced to prison in Iran for traveling to Israel 13 years ago for his son’s bar mitzvah, his family members have disclosed.
Kamran Hekmati, 70, of Great Neck, Long Island, which is home to a large Persian Jewish population, traveled to Iran in May for what was supposed to be a brief visit.
But in July, he was detained and sent to Evin prison in Tehran, his relatives told the New York Times, which reported Hekmati’s imprisonment for the first time on Thursday.
The notorious prison was heavily damaged during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran in June. Directly following the war, Iran arrested 35 members of the Jewish communities in Tehran and Shiraz on charges of having contact with Israel.
It was not clear whether Hekmati was included in that total. But Iranian authorities had realized that he both held an Iranian passport, despite having moved to the United States as a child, and had violated a law barring Iranians from traveling to Israel. (Iran does not recognize dual citizenship.)
In August, he was sentenced to four years in prison by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court. His sentence was reduced to two years in September, and a lawyer for his family has filed an appeal seeking his release on humanitarian grounds because he has cancer, according to the newspaper.
Kamran Hekmati, a 70 yo Jewish Iranian American from New York has been arrested by the Islamic Regime for the crime of traveling to Israel 13 yrs ago for his son’s bar mitzvah.
He was arrested in May while visiting Iran, and is sentenced to 4 years in Evin Prison. pic.twitter.com/Il3tYaciNo
— The Persian Jewess (@persianjewess) November 7, 2025
“Kamran was the person who glued the family together. He was always there for everyone, his wife, his kids, all his relatives, anyone he met in Iran,” Hekmati’s cousin, Shohreh Nowfar, told the New York Times. “It’s so ironic that the country he loved so much and tried to help has now imprisoned him.”
Hekmati’s family came to the United States several years before the Iranian Revolution in 1979 caused tens of thousands of Iranian Jews to flee to the United States and Israel. Today, Iran has an estimated 8,000 Jews who are permitted to practice their religion but barred from any contact with Israel or display of support from it.
Hekmati is currently one of four U.S. citizens held in Iranian prison, but appears to be the first case of the country arresting an American Jew in recent years. The Human Rights Activists News Agency in Iran, an affiliate of the Human Rights in Iran NGO, reported in July that a second Jewish American had also been imprisoned and released on bail.
“The Iranian regime has a long history of unjustly and wrongfully detaining other countries’ citizens,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement to the Times. “Iran should release these individuals immediately.”
The post Jewish Iranian-American sentenced to prison in Iran for visiting Israel 13 years ago appeared first on The Forward.
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Rep. Elise Stefanik, self-styled protector of Jews on the right, announces run for New York Governor
New York Rep. Elise Stefanik announced a run for governor Friday, as the Republican seeks to leverage her elevated profile as a vocal supporter of the Jewish community to a role in higher office.
She aims to challenge the Democratic incumbent Kathy Hochul, who angered many Jews in New York with her endorsement of New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, despite his track record of Israel criticism.
In an announcement video for Stefanik’s gubernatorial run, a narrator notes that she “fought woke insanity in our schools,” as a headline referring to her campus antisemitism hearings fills the screen.
Stefanik, who is not Jewish, has been one of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill condemning antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and war in Gaza. Her relentless questioning of university presidents about the campus climate for Jews was credited with leading to the resignations of the top posts at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and others.
Many invitations to address Jewish groups followed, including the Anti-Defamation League and Yeshiva University (which awarded her the Modern Orthodox school’s highest honor over the objections of many faculty). Her newfound allyships came despite Stefanik’s past platforming of the antisemitic “Great Replacement” theory, and other troublesome aspects of her history that confounded liberal Jews.
Stefanik, who seeks to become the first Republican since George Pataki to move into the governor’s mansion in Albany, seems likely to make antisemitism a main flank of her campaign. Her video attacks Hochul for the governor’s Mamdani endorsement, saying Hochul “cozied up to a defund-the-police, tax hiking, antisemitic Communist.” Hochul is facing a primary challenge from her top lieutenant, who had endorsed Mamdani much earlier in the election cycle and who is married to a Jewish filmmaker.
Among the Republican endorsements of Stefanik’s campaign the candidate retweeted Friday morning were Leo Terrell, who heads an antisemitism task force within the Trump administration, and New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, who is Jewish and vocally pro-Israel.
“Elise Stefanik will clean up our college campuses from the rot they have become and will confront antisemitism head on!” Vernikov wrote.
A staunch ally of President Donald Trump, Stefanik had been in line to become his ambassador to the United Nations, where she had promised to be a vocal defender of Israel. Her nomination was withdrawn in order to keep her in the House to help protect the chamber’s slim GOP majority, but Stefanik has been eyeing a bigger platform ever since.
Her announcement comes as the GOP is facing an internal civil war over right-wing antisemitism, with pundit Tucker Carlson, the head of the Heritage Foundation, and Vice President J.D. Vance among the figures taking criticism for embracing or failing to condemn antisemitic viewpoints. Stefanik was absent from this year’s Republican Jewish Coalition summit, where various speakers denounced antisemitism on the right.
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