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Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world
(JTA) – Israel Mizrahi joined dozens of fellow connoisseurs of rare Jewish books last December to watch the livestream of Genazym, the hottest auction house in the market. A bookdealer by trade, Mizrahi was also on the phone being paid to advise a wealthy client who had signed up to make bids.
But as the auction proceeded, Mizrahi’s advice had little use. His trigger-happy client didn’t seem to care about established valuations: He ended up paying about $50,000 for a book estimated at half that price. “He just pressed the button and kept on bidding until the bidding was over,” Mizrahi said. “There was no convincing him out of it. He spent nearly $600,000 that day and there was no sense to it.”
Behavior that confounds veterans of the rare Jewish book market has become routine at auctions organized by Genazym.
Mizrahi recalled the sale in 2021 of a Passover Haggadah printed in the 1920s in Vienna. With attractive illustrations of a prominent 19th-century rabbi named Moses Sofer and his family, the book makes for a nice addition to a collection. It also happens to be very common.
“I sell copies for $100, and I have probably sold 150 copies in my life,” said Mizrahi, whose shop in Brooklyn is a mecca for Jewish book lovers. “It sold for about $5,500 at Genazym’s auction. I currently have it on sale still for $100.”
At the highest end of sale prices, a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, commanded $620,000 at a Genazym auction last September, while a copy of Noam Elimelech, a classic rabbinic treatise, printed in 1788, fetched $1.4 million four months later — in both cases at least doubling or tripling what experts thought the items were worth based on past sales of the same texts.
“Genazym has come on like a freight train into the world of Jewish auctions. Some of the prices realized are far beyond what this market has seen before,” said David Wachtel, the former Judaica consultant for Sotheby’s auction house.
Since Genazym’s first auction in 2017, it has sold some 1,900 books, manuscripts and other collectible documents for about $26 million plus commission, roughly $12 million above total starting prices, according to an analysis by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of auction records on Genazym’s website. Genazym has increasingly outperformed the longest-standing Judaica auction firms in New York and Jerusalem.
A page from an illustrated Passover haggadah printed in Vienna in the 1920s. (Courtesy of Genazym)
It’s hard to tell exactly what’s driving the boom because the identity of Genazym’s customers is confidential and few flaunt their collections widely. One of the auction house’s owners, in a rare public comment, ventured that Jewish buyers are craving a connection with their heritage. What’s clear is that at a time when traditional libraries are cutting back on buying Jewish texts, Genazym is tapping into an emerging luxury market among Orthodox Jews — and fueling the rise of religious texts as both a status symbol and investment vehicle in some communities.
“I know the sellers, the customers and everybody involved and there is a new wealthy class of Orthodox Jews that have a limited range of things they can splurge on,” Mizrahi said. “They don’t go to Vegas, they don’t do crazy vacations. They keep kosher. So this is a way that they can splurge and show off.”
Rabbi Pini Dunner, who collects rare Jewish books, said investing in Judaica is likely attractive for some in the Hasidic community, whose religious observance is stricter than that of congregants at his Modern Orthodox synagogue in the Los Angeles area.
“There are people I know here in Beverly Hills who’ve got car collections worth tens of millions of dollars,” Dunner said. “In the Hasidic world that has no currency, just as the wow factor of a Picasso has no currency. An original manuscript or first-edition of the Noam Elimelech has a real wow factor, particularly if you can tell people the book sold for more than a million dollars at a Genazym auction.”
The impression that the Hasidic world has grown wealthier over the last decade or two is widespread and based, at least in part, on the proliferation of luxury products and services tailored for the community in places like Lakewood, New Jersey, and Kiryas Joel, New York. Weddings have become increasingly expensive and elaborate, fine dining options are common, and high-end kosher wine and liquor are more readily available.
“It wasn’t that long ago that sit-down dining was looked down upon or not even available. Now there are a plethora of options,” said Chaim Saiman, a law professor at Villanova University who studies the intersection of commerce and Jewish law. “It’s no secret that $200 bottles of Scotch appear at kiddush clubs all the time. $50 used to be a big deal, then $100 was a big deal, now we are at $200.”
Where the new wealth is coming from is not totally clear. Limited survey and U.S. Census data suggests that Orthodox Jews feel crunched by costs associated with practicing religion and that there are large pockets of poverty among them, particularly in Hasidic communities, according to Mark Trencher, the founder of Nishma Research, a nonprofit dedicated to studying the Orthodox Jewish community. The prevalence of large families also means that generational wealth can be harder to accrue for Orthodox Jews.
But there have always been high earners whose philanthropy has buttressed their communities, Trencher noted. “There are a lot of people in that community that are very successful in their businesses and they have large amounts of wealth,” he said. “Those people generally are huge donors to charities. From a financial perspective, those communities are probably doing much better than you would expect them to.”
Many of those high earners make their money through entrepreneurship rather than professional success in the white-collar world. Many nursing home chains — an industry valued at an estimated $171 billion and where growth is expected — have Orthodox owners. Amazon has also created new opportunities for Orthodox businessmen. Orthodox landlords, meanwhile, have benefited from skyrocketing real estate prices in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
A page from a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, which fetched $620,000 at a Genazym auction. (Courtesy of Genazym).
Recent reporting in The New York Times about the Hasidic education system has provided a window into another stream of revenue for private businesses in the community. Entrepreneurs in the community have responded to the increased availability of government funding for special education in New York in recent years by establishing companies to service Hasidic schools, with the government footing the bill. In one example highlighted by the Times, a married Hasidic couple opened such a business in 2014 when they were 21 and 19 years old; in 2022, their company received more than $38 million in government funding.
The owners of another set of companies providing services to Hasidic schools appear to have used their windfall to purchase rare books through Genazym. The owners were indicted in January for allegedly billing the government for more than $1 million in childcare services that they never provided and otherwise defrauding the government out of more than $2.8 million.
Prosecutors are seeking to have the alleged fraudsters forfeit seven books and other documents as listed in a federal indictment. They include manuscripts with a rabbinic signature and rare books of blessing and Jewish law, all of which match items listed on Genazym auctions, where they sold for a total of about $274,000.
Buying Jewish texts at auction can seem like a savvy investment for buyers seeking to safeguard or grow their wealth. Before Genazym launched, a typical Genazym buyer might have invested in U.S. Treasury bills or the stock market, according to Wachtel, the former Sotheby’s consultant.
“I think Genazym has been able to convince people that this is a good vehicle for establishing and growing wealth,” he said. “That also dovetails with your ability to, let’s face it, show off. Somebody comes to your house, you can show them a first-edition Shulchan Aruch. But you’re not going to say, hey, come look at my T-bills.”
The auction house’s tactics appear tailor-made for this growing market. Its motto is “Own your heritage,” and it’s printed on the catalogs the company distributes through popular Orthodox magazines like Ami or Mishpacha or podcasts, places where people with no prior interest in books might encounter the hype. The catalogs also appear in synagogues in heavily Hasidic areas like Brooklyn or Lakewood, but without the prices printed on them so as not to violate a Jewish prohibition against discussing financial matters on Shabbat.
The descriptions in the catalogs emphasize any links that exist between the items for sale and notable rabbis from history, especially figures who established rabbinic dynasties that continue to exist today and who are revered by yeshiva-educated Orthodox Jews. The link might be a signature of a rabbi in a ledger from an old fundraising tour that took place 200 years ago. Or it might be that an important rabbi owned the book in question or even prayed out of it. Like a pair of pants of a prominent Israeli rabbi that drew widespread attention when they briefly went up for auction last month, these texts are seen by some as conferring holiness onto those who possess them. By virtue of their pedigree, these artifacts might even be seen as a segula, or Jewish protective charm.
In its promotional materials and live auctions, Genazym also uses more colloquial and hyperbolic language to describe its items than traditional auction houses, which tend to stick to the kind of terminology used by academic scholars.
“Genazym found a formula to make books and manuscripts really exciting for the layperson, especially in the Orthodox community,” said Yoel Finkelman, a former curator of the Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel. “They are not using the vocabulary of experts, they’re using plain ordinary language, like ‘very old’ or ‘very rare.’ No one at Sotheby’s would ever refer even to a thousand-year-old book that way.”
Genazym’s unique approach extends to the delivery of items to buyers. A traditional buyer in the rare Jewish book market, like Michelle Margolis, Columbia University’s Jewish studies librarian, might only care that the book they bought is safely delivered. But with Genazym, the books come wrapped in a proper clamshell and velvet bag. “I rolled my eyes when my delivery arrived, but at the same time that’s a lot of investment,” Margolis said, adding that many other auction houses have been cutting costs, for example, by doing away with their customary printed catalogs.
Jacob Djmal, who lives in Brooklyn, has dabbled in Judaica collecting for many years, an interest he picked up from his grandfather. He remembers suddenly seeing Genazym’s advertising everywhere. “They started reaching out to you in every way possible, finding a demographic that wasn’t aware before. Every Genazym auction I have people texting me — ‘Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that?’ — as if something is happening that had never happened before.”
Sometimes, that is true. A breakout moment came during the December auction, when Genazym cleared $4.4 million in sales, about $2.6 million above total starting prices.
“If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on Earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for at least twice [the estimated amount],” a major British book collector living in France said on his anonymous Twitter account, which has around 110,000 followers, in December.
If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for *at least* twice estimate…. 1/https://t.co/iAC4sQudIz pic.twitter.com/eeunjqWzAs
— Incunabula (@incunabula) December 13, 2022
It remains to be seen whether Genazym can challenge Sotheby’s Judaica division as the destination for sellers with the rarest and most valuable books. Last year, a medieval prayer book sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s and this year, the New York auction house is accepting bids for the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible, which is expected to fetch as much as $50 million.
But Djmal considers especially remarkable about Genazym is not just the high prices but also the way in which rare books have caught on among Orthodox youth as something cool. “My son and his friends in yeshiva are talking about these items,” Djmal said. “These books represent rabbis they have heard about from a young age.”
The team behind Genazym’s success is led by three brothers from the Stefansky family who live in Jerusalem and New York. Before starting an auction house they worked for many years as private dealers in the rare book market. Their names, Chaim, Moshe and Bezalel, rarely appear anywhere and they almost never grant interviews. Chaim Stefansky made an exception for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and requested that this article not put him in the spotlight nor portray Genazym’s success as a product of his business acumen.
Stefansky said Genazym has tapped into a universal and deep-seated desire of people to strengthen their identities by connecting with the past. The Jewish community, he said, has been poorly served by an emphasis on historical and even current persecution.
“Always, we are victimized and we cry,” Stefansky said. “What we have in common maybe is that your grandmother and my grandmother were sharing the same bed in Auschwitz. Give me something positive of my past to be proud of. Your heritage has not only sorrow but also a happy, rich, and huge intellectual tradition. So Genazym comes and tells people about their heritage. It’s yours. It belongs to you.”
He said the same thing can be done with any ethnic or religious group.
“If you go to the Irish community and press the right buttons in terms of what you know that every Irish person is extremely proud of, I think you’ll be very successful,” Stefansky said.
He rejected the impression that Genazym’s buyers come primarily from the ranks of the nouveau riche in the Hasidic world.
“It’s coming from all sections,” Stefansky said. “People will say that there’s a lot of fresh money in the market. But we also have very good old money. We have institutions. And, also, the regular man. Mostly, the regular man, who never knew he could have access to any of this.”
One of the only customers who agreed to be identified and interviewed for this article is Rick Probstein, who says he’s spent more than $100,000 at the company’s auctions. He can’t remember when he started seeing Genazym catalogs but he had never collected Judaica before, which is perhaps surprising given that he’s an Orthodox Jew who’s been working in the collectibles business since he was a child trading baseball cards.
Today, at 53, Probstein is one of the largest sellers of sports collectibles in the world, operating through a dedicated account on eBay. “I run a humongous business — I am doing something like $160 million a year,” he said of his sales volume.
Probstein, who lives in Passaic, New Jersey, had long felt a pang of guilt about the lack of Jewish content in his collection. “I collect things but what do I have of my own heritage?” he recalled thinking to himself. “So when I started getting the catalogs, I said, ‘I gotta be a good Jew.’ I started bidding on things and I got really into it.”
Once Probstein got started, the Stefansky brothers began checking in on him, providing concierge service and cultivating him as a client.
“This is a boutique run by a Jewish family with a personal touch,” Probstein said “They call me on the phone, saying, ‘Rick, did you get the catalog? What did you think? Here are some items that you could really like.’”
Bidding on Genayzm items is not purely sentimental for Probstein. “I’m putting real money into it because I think that from an investment standpoint, it has a lot of upside,” he said.
Still, the items he buys tend to have personal significance.
“I am partial to items relating to the Chofetz Chaim,” Probstein said, referring to the rabbi and Jewish scholar Yisrael Meir Kagan, who died in 1933. Probstein’s oldest son is named Yisrael Meir in his honor. The Chofetz Chaim also appeals to Probstein because of his writings about lashon hara, the prohibition in Jewish law against speaking evil of people. “I think that speech is important and he’s sort of the embodiment of that,” Probstein said.
Genazym has sold six letters and a handwritten blessing signed or written by the Chofetz Chaim at prices ranging from about $16,000 to $68,000.
Ever since Probstein started collecting Judaica, these items have served as a draw for family and friends visiting his home.
“People in my community that come over for kiddush [refreshments after Shabbat service] know that I have this stuff and they always want to see it,” Probstein said. “Nobody ever looks at my sports memorabilia collection because it’s in my office but my Judaica stuff is in my house. They look at the letters and talk about the historical context. People love it.”
The revelation that so many Jews appear fascinated with their own history and want to engage with scholarly tradition comes at a time when many Jewish libraries have been struggling.
The library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, which has the most comprehensive and significant collection of Jewish books outside of Israel, has seen its footprint downsized amid budget cuts at the Conservative movement seminary. Also under financial pressure, American Jewish University was forced to sell its Bel Air campus in Los Angeles, which housed a library. Hebrew Union College, meanwhile, opted to end its Reform rabbinical training program in Cincinnati and even though the campus library has survived the cuts, financial uncertainty remains.
Genazym’s populist approach might hold lessons for Jewish institutions and university libraries with significant Judaica collections that hope to engage the public around books.
“The lesson is to lay off the snobbery a little bit,” said Finkelman, the former Judaica curator at the National Library of Israel, which is slated to reopen in a new and more accessible space later this year. “The goal of public institutions is to enable preservation but also to enable public access and public education. There are great stories in books and archives.”
Finkleman said he has encountered sneering reactions to the way Genazym promotes books, and they are similar to the response in the United States when the pop star Lizzo played a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison on stage at the Library of Congress.
“There are echoes of the same thing here,” he said. “Get out of the snobby ivory tower and realize you are preserving history for people.”
—
The post Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world 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.”
The post These Jews are looking for a ‘runner’s chai’ appeared first on The Forward.
