(JTA) — Two teenagers were arrested this week for an alleged plot to drive through a Houston synagogue and “kill as many Jews as possible,” according to local authorities.

Angelina Han Hicks, 18, of Lexington, North Carolina, was arrested at her home on Wednesday and charged with conspiring with two other individuals to commit an attack on Congregation Beth Israel, the oldest Jewish house of worship in Texas, according to the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office. She is being held in the Davidson County jail under a $10 million bond.

In Houston, a 16-year-old boy was also arrested in relation to “a threat directed towards certain Jewish institutions in our area.” It was unclear whether the second arrest was connected to Hicks, but the judge who ordered Hicks detained said she should be prevented from communicating with unnamed co-conspirators.

“At this time, there is no other known credible threat,” the Houston Police Department said in a statement.

 

 

Congregation Beth Israel, a Reform synagogue, and the Shlenker School, a preschool and elementary school that shares its campus, closed following the threats on Wednesday.

District Court Judge Carlton Terry said the alleged conspiracy was “to kill as many Jews as possible by driving through a congregation at a synagogue.” He said Hicks should remain in custody after her arraignment.

“Allowing a co-conspirator a chance to communicate with either of those individuals or those who could relay a message puts lives at risk,” Terry wrote.

The arrests come one month after a man drove a fireworks-laden truck into Temple Israel in suburban Detroit. The attack, which left the assailant dead, also followed an arson attack on Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Mississippi, that left the synagogue’s library destroyed.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Houston announced on Wednesday that it would go forward with events that were planned to mark Israeli Independence Day despite the reported threats.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Teens in 2 states arrested over threat that shuttered Houston synagogue appeared first on The Forward.

I am what is called “a Dalton lifer.” I was born in Manhattan on Dec. 1, 1943, at Lenox Hill Hospital and was a New Yorker all my life before I married and moved away. For 14 of those years, from when I was 3 (going on 4) until I was 18, I attended the Dalton School.

My parents chose Dalton because it was a progressive school that was comfortable for Jewish children, who made up about one-third of the school’s population, and it admitted Black students. There were a number of such schools in Manhattan at the time; influenced by the educational philosophy of John Dewey, they believed learning should be taught by doing, and that education should include active inquiry and problem solving. (My father, in fact, had attended the University of Chicago Lab School that Dewey created in 1896.)

When I was little, I often walked with my older brothers from our apartment at 81st and Park Avenue to 89th where Dalton was located between Park and Lexington. On the way, we would pass a stationery store where adults would put down some change on top of the newspaper pile and take one or two of the papers that the shopkeeper had neatly arranged on a wooden bench outside of the store front. As a child, I sometimes stole some of that change and to this day I am horrified at myself.

By the time I was eight, I would walk back home by myself on Lexington Avenue, which formed the western boundary of Yorkville between 72nd Street and 96th. Yorkville was then populated by Germans and German-speaking immigrants such as Hungarians and Czechs. During the 1930s and World War II, it had been the headquarters of the German Bund. It was less than a decade after the end of World War II, and as Jews, my parents were keenly aware of Yorkville’s past. While they shopped on Lexington, they warned us it could be dangerous, and indeed, one of my brothers got held up there. My parents were reluctant to allow me, as a girl, to walk east of 86th and Lex – where there were still dance halls and beer parlors and clubs that seemed to me both alien and alluring.

Nevertheless, I strode down Lexington by myself, entranced by the wonderful shops. There was a fabulous marzipan store; I loved that candy, molded into tiny figurines small apples and lemons, hand-sculpted dogs and statuettes, and seasonal Christmas and Easter pieces. Near 82nd Street, there was a drug store with a soda counter that sold sandwiches and drinks where my mother would always order an egg salad sandwich and a coffee milkshake. There was an old-fashioned health-food store that sold specialty items such as nut bread, yogurt and whole grains.

Lexington was still a two-way street, and the bus price had recently gone up from a nickel to a dime. Later, when we were in high school, we would cheat on both the bus and subway and shove a whole bunch of us through without paying for everyone. But fixed in my memory is that contrast between the still-living fear of American Nazis that my parents embodied and the richness of store life on Lexington Avenue.

A privileged childhood

Of course, memories are tricky, and mine are probably filled with biases and mistakes. We misremember to be sure. And we imagine our childhood recollections through the prism of who we were. I was from a privileged German-Jewish family. At the time I did not think of myself as especially fortunate. It was just who I was.

When I went to college, I encountered the wonderful post-Civil-War writer, Henry Adams. Near the beginning of his masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, he tells the story of being about 5 or 6, and playing on the grounds of his grandfather John Quincy Adams’ house. Adams’ gardener declared that young Henry probably believed that he would grow up to be president too. Henry recalled that it had never occurred to him that he would not become president; that’s what his family did.

Not only are my recollections filtered through an unconscious perception of privilege, they are also intertwined with my identity as a young Jew. When I was a student in Dalton’s lower school, I don’t remember if I was aware of the double luck of having been born into money and what we then called culture; and into an America with no close relatives who had been murdered in the Holocaust. My grandmother worried about some of her family back in Europe; she’d been told some of them were still alive, but she could not find them.

In the 1940s and 1950s, America was still a country made up largely of white European nationals and Blacks whose grandparents or great-grandparents had been born into slavery. The distinctions between European nationalities defined much of my world. I knew I was not Irish, Italian, or Polish Catholic, nor was I German-Lutheran or Scandinavian Most of the white children — other than the Jews — who attended Dalton were WASPs and I wasn’t one of those either. I remember only one boy who was Catholic, Fitzhugh Seamus MacManus Mullin whose father’s family was Irish and whose mother’s family was Spanish. His grandfather would come to Dalton, sit on a chair in our wonderful theater, and enrapture us by reciting Celtic tales. I assume that he was Seumas MacManus, who according to Wikipedia was considered by many to be the last great seanchaí, or storyteller of the ancient oral tradition.

I knew there were barriers between Jews and Christians, but they never impeded upon my sense of self. Park Avenue apartment buildings were either Jewish or gentile, and my building, 941 Park Avenue, was occupied entirely by Jewish families. The only non-Jews with whom I interacted in my building worked for one the families who lived there, or for the building itself; they were maids and supers and doormen, and they were white and largely Irish.

When I was little and in the lower school, I did not think about religion. Most of my family had come from Germany and had been in America since before the Civil War. They were not observant, in fact quite the opposite. My parents believed that religion was the opiate of the masses, and we ate shellfish and ham. My father banned uncured pork as in pork chops, so my mother often served lamb chops, which was unusual in the America of that time. Both of my parents grew up in Chicago, my mother in the northern suburb of Kenilworth, my father on the south side of the city near the University of Chicago. My mother’s family was wealthy and lived in a very large house where I happily played as a child and where my best companion there was the son of my grandparents’ chauffeur, whose family lived in an apartment above the garage.

Their world was German-Jewish, and my grandfather was one of the founders of that communities’ local country club. My grandparents, seeking spiritual meaning in their lives, followed Christian Science, but they still considered themselves Jewish, though as members of the upper-class German-Jewish world they would never have considered joining a Conservative or Orthodox community.

My father’s family was split between Eastern and Central Europe. His father was Lithuanian and Orthodox, his mother was German and reform, and that divide contributed to my paternal grandparents’ divorce. After my parents had married and moved to New York, our father would take us on excursions to the Lower East Side where we would buy challah, which we never ate on Friday night. I understood — without knowing the word — that we were part of what the larger Jewish world called Yekke. That is, we were of German and Central European descent and our grandparents and their parents before them did not speak Yiddish. This was in contrast to the Jews from the areas of Eastern Europe where Jews did speak Yiddish, who had not yet assimilated into American culture and language as we had, were often poorer, and were looked down upon by the Yekke.

My parents may have disliked organized religion, but they certainly felt Jewish. In the late 1930s, my mother and her mother sponsored Jews trying to get out of Germany. My mother had a letter from Albert Einstein, written in German and addressed to Fraulein Spiegel (her maiden name) thanking her for trying to help a Jewish family of mathematicians. And in retrospect, their Jewish identity must also have been reinforced in 1948 by the establishment of Israel, then a small, scrappy, underdog state. Like most American Jews, they thought of Israel as a symbol of survival: Hitler had not wiped us off the face of the earth.

Later I learned that my parents’ largest contribution every year was to the United Jewish Appeal (UJA). But this was true of the vast majority of Jews of their generation, and I would guess was so for the parents of virtually every Jewish child in Dalton’s lower and middle school. One of the girls in my Dalton class was Elizabeth Rosenwald (Varet), the daughter of William Rosenwald (and granddaughter of Julius Rosenwald) who, along with much of his family, helped found the UJA. Another was Ruth Slawson, daughter of John Slawson, who was director of the American Jewish Committee from 1943 to 1968. But, in the lower school I felt simply part of my environment, and a very large part of that environment was Dalton.

A world of progressives and universalists

When we were in kindergarten, our schoolroom had its own sandbox: Dalton allowed us to play and simply grow. When we started 1st grade, however, we were meant to learn how to read. But I had no interest in reading except for comic books, especially Tarzan. Not knowing how to crack the code to read all those words contained in the bubbles attached to each character’s head, I happily made up my own stories. A group of us remained illiterate until the fall of 3rd grade, when we attended a remedial class and I learned how to decode letters and symbols. When we each finally conquered the art of literacy, we were given a very small penknife clad in mother of pearl. Comics were never the same.

Each lower school grade was split into two classes, each with its own teacher. The lower school teacher I remember best was Ellie Seeger, a fabulous storyteller who regaled our class with stories until the other second grade class got so jealous she had to stop. Her husband was John Seeger, brother of Pete Seeger. John Seeger taught middle school geography where we made papier mâché maps, something I adored doing. He would sing for us sometimes, and although I became a great fan of Pete Seeger, I think John was just as good.

School at Dalton would frequently begin with a morning assembly. We would march into our wonderful proscenium theater with red-covered theater seats to piano music. It was there that John Seeger sang for us. It was there that we put on plays and made costumes in a wonderful anteroom space. And it was also there that Dalton held its Christmas Pageant, a re-enactment of the birth of Jesus and the story of the wisemen from the east, to which none of our Jewish parents objected.

In 1951, we went on a trip to Otis, a farm in Massachusetts. We crossed over a gully or a stream on a log. I still have a photo of myself milking a cow into a metal bucket

I was friends with a Black girl named Judy Walker and we had sleepover dates. She would come with us to our summer house in Connecticut, and I went with her to the vacation home her family was building, and to her home in Harlem. Her father was a chemist and one morning at her house I woke up to music, thinking it was the theme to the Lone Ranger. Her parents must have liked classical music because it was the William Tell Overture.

The biggest event of 5th grade was the Greek Festival — a very Dewey-inspired production. Tessie Ross was our teacher, and we loved her. She taught at Dalton for 43 years beginning in 1944 after she had fled to the U.S. from Belgium and she led the Greek Festival, which took place in the gym and had carriages and spears and shields and armor. We played at being Greeks — Athenians against the Spartans, with parents as our audience.

In high school, I had one other teacher who was a refugee from Europe, our history teacher Nora Hodges. Mrs. Hodges was born in 1899 as Nora August Warndorfer, from Vienna. She came from a family of wealthy Jews, and fortunately she got out of Vienna many years before the Anschluss. She went back to Austria in the mid-1930’s and told us how she had listened to the radio, and, hearing a magnetic voice come over the air, felt captivated — until she learned that it was Adolph Hitler.

In the lower school, girls got to wear pants on Fridays. That was a big deal then because girls still wore skirts and dresses. Always. I remember mine as being corduroy with an elastic waist. I believe that going casual on Fridays, however, was not simply a symptom of Dalton progressive philosophy, but an indicator that it was populated by well-off families. Of course, the America of the 1950s was not as divided between rich and poor as it is now, and those who were upper middle class, or even rich, were not inclined to be ostentatious. But many families had either country homes or were members of country clubs. So, the school allowed girls to sport trousers on Fridays so they would be dressed to go to their second homes.

Not that all families were wealthy. Robert Newman, whose daughter Hila was a class or two above me, was a radio-drama playwright turned children’s book writer. Wally Shawn’s father WIlliam was the editor of The New Yorker, so he was very well-known but wasn’t paid a banker’s salary. Bettye George Dockery’s father was a dentist. Michael Lerner’s father, Max Lerner, was a writer, professor, and public intellectual, and also famous, but not wealthy. Pebble Baker’s father was a journalist for Time.

We ended our school year with a festival called “Arch Day.” Each class went through an arch on the auditorium stage. We went in as part of one grade and exited as part of the next. There were skits as well. My brother Paul finished 8th grade in 1954, when so many Americans were obsessed with the McCarthy hearings, so Paul’s class put together a skit entitled “Point of Order.”

Most Dalton students, and I assume most of the teachers, were liberal, but establishment liberal. We all assumed Alger Hiss was innocent. His son Tony went to Dalton and was a few years ahead of me. One of his lawyers was Helen Buttenweiser. The Buttenweiser children went to Dalton. She and her husband Benjamin were wealthy German Jewish New York philanthropists..

But while we were all aware of Joseph McCarthy, of the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC), and of Alger Hiss, we never talked about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Ethel Greenglass was a secretary and a member of the Young Communist League. Julius’ parents were immigrants from Russia who grew up on the Lower East Side and he also was a communist. Alger Hiss was accepted by much of German Jewish Yekke Manhattan, though he himself was not Jewish, but the Rosenbergs were not. They were the wrong kind of Jews — the ones who would never have sent their sons to Dalton.

That divide, between Hiss and the Rosenbergs, perhaps illuminates my Dalton world in the 1950s. We were comfortable progressives and post-World War II universalists. We believed in Civil Rights and the future of Blacks in the United States. We supported John Lindsay for congress and mayor. My father once chaperoned me and a friend to a Pete Seeger concert, and he was terrified by how Pete Seeger could whip up a crowd — it reminded him too much of Adolph Hitler.

In the 7th or 8th grade, I read The Diary of Anne Frank. I devoured it one summer when I was at my parents’ vacation house in Martha’s Vineyard. There was a great tick scare that summer, so I lay in my bed, clenching my teeth to ward off any ticks, reading Anne Frank and refashioning my identity.

By middle school, questions of my own identity began to intertwine with my Dalton childhood. My mother once told me that some of the girls whose parents sent them to Dalton in the lower and middle school did so in order to provide their children with a diverse environment but then put them elsewhere for high school so that they would not become romantically attached to a Jewish boy or too acculturated into Jewish (or at least Yekke) life.

A story worth preserving

 

When I went through the arch in June of 1957, I entered as an 8th grader and emerged as a high school student. Four years later, in 1961, I graduated — 65 years ago. America was a different world then. The gap between rich and poor was not as yawning, and the wealthy were not as excessive. For Jewish children today, the memory of the Holocaust is often a nearly untouchable past that they learn about in Hebrew School; the story of Anne Frank is recalled from a school assignment; and secular Jews like my family have left the emotional ghetto in which my parents still lived. Our public and private contexts have changed. And so I have decided to tell my story of one German Jewish child living in Manhattan in the 1940s and 1950s, attending one progressive grade school, during one slice of time that I feel is worth preserving.

 

The post A New York Jewish childhood at the Dalton School where privilege met progressivism appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Two floors underground, past dumpsters and oil-laden puddles, through a reinforced Cold War-era door, a bomb shelter is buried underneath Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station.

Built in 1993 to accommodate more than 16,000 Israelis, the shelter found a new life during the Israel-Iran war as a public refuge for residents of Neve Shaanan, among Tel Aviv’s most diverse neighborhoods and one of its poorest, home mainly to asylum seekers and foreign workers.

With few other options for public shelters in south Tel Aviv, residents pitched tents in the squalor of a space that had fallen into disrepair — with pipes dripping and rats scurrying — for more than 38 days as Israel and Iran exchanged missile fire until a ceasefire that began on April 8 halted the fighting.

“It’s very difficult. Not just because of the war, but because of the conditions we’re living in,” Gloria Arca, who took refuge inside the shelter with her son, Noam, said in Spanish during an interview in April. “We’re protected from the missiles, but inside we’re not safe.”

For many Israelis, the bus station occupies a space that balances between nostalgia and revulsion. Until 2018, the station was a main node for travel into and out of Tel Aviv. Since then, ridership has dropped, and now the hulking structure is seen as little more than an eyesore. During Israel’s 12-day war with Iran last year, a short video by Israeli comedians went viral for sharing the station’s GPS coordinates in a video that jokingly urged Iran, “Please don’t bomb this bus station.”

Yet the station also offers a concrete window into Israel’s widening reliance on foreign workers, which has surged in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.

When there is no war on, the shelter functions as a community center, complete with a Filipino church, a refugee health clinic, and retailers catering to customers in more than a dozen languages.

During wartime, the station takes on a new and vitally important role as a shelter for those who have none in their homes or neighborhoods, no family in the country whose homes they can flee to and little ability to pay for temporary accommodations somewhere safer.

Arca, who came to Israel more than two decades ago from Colombia and is in the country legally, knew that it would take her and Noam more than 10 minutes to get to a shelter from their home — longer than Israel’s advanced missile warning system allows. So they decided to move into the bus station, pitching a tent alongside some of their neighbors.

Depending on the day, more than 200 residents spent their nights in the shelter during the war, according to Sigal Rozen, public policy coordinator at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants.

“It’s not easy, especially with young children and families with special needs,” she said. “You can’t get up in the middle of the night and just run.”

The Hotline, with funding from the Tel Aviv Municipality, worked to improve conditions in the shelter, but the starting point was dire. During a visit in April, rats could be seen scurrying across newly installed artificial turf meant to brighten the space, and mosquitoes landed on visitors’ ankles before being chased off.

More than anything, Arca worries about safety in the shelter — but not from the war. “We’re protected from the missiles, but inside, we’re not safe,” she said. “Security is there, but they don’t do their job. Drug users come in and use the bathrooms. There are many children here, and we’re afraid.”

The challenging conditions were nothing new to many of the people who moved in, who represent an often unseen but growing sector of workers in Israel.

The category of “foreign worker,”  a term used in Israel to describe non-citizen laborers, most of them from countries such as the Philippines, India, and Thailand, who enter the country on temporary work visas tied to a specific employer, has long been a fraught designation.

Dominant in some industries, such as home health care, where there are so many foreign workers that the role is known as “filipina” in Hebrew, foreign workers have taken on greater shares of other sectors in recent years, particularly after Israel banned Palestinian workers from Gaza and the West Bank after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack. With Israelis increasingly reluctant to take low-paying manual labor jobs, the Israeli government has moved to fill the gap by permitting employers to hire more foreign workers.

Israel’s foreign worker population rose by 41% in 2024 alone to more than 156,000. By 2025, the total had reached 227,044. It is expected to grow even more in the coming years, as the government has set a ceiling of 300,000 workers.

For many Israelis, footage that circulated after the ceasefire showing long lines of foreign workers arriving at newly reopened government offices to renew their visas offered a stark illustration of the growing sector.

It is not uncommon around the world for people from impoverished countries to migrate to countries with more work and higher pay. For the workers, occupying a tenuous legal status can be worth it to be able to support their families, send their children to stronger schools and earn wages on a different scale than in their home countries.

Evelyn, a Filipina caregiver sheltering with her three children beneath the Central Bus Station, declined to give her last name out of fear of deportation. “In Israel, I can earn 10 times what I do in the Philippines. So I have money to send back to my family — not just taking care of my kids here, but my parents in Manila.”

But advocates for the workers say foreign worker status, and Israel’s increasing reliance on foreign workers, creates conditions that are ripe for abuse. Ohad Amar, executive director of Kav LaOved, a nonprofit that works to uphold equal labor rights for all workers in Israel, said the workers are “enduring conditions akin to modern slavery.”

Many foreign worker visas in Israel are tied to a specific employer and are non-transferable. Kav LaOved has documented numerous cases of delayed or unpaid wages, as well as workers who feel pressured to remain silent about abuse from their employers lest they lose their immigration status.

“Israel had not relied on migrant workers in the same way before. This is the first time at this scale,” Amar said. “Every day we are getting reports of workers’ rights violations, and we are completely overwhelmed.”

During wartime, foreign workers are frequently exposed to Israel’s unique dangers in extreme ways. On Oct. 7, as sirens blared, foreign workers were slaughtered in the fields of kibbutzes near Gaza. During the most recent war, videos circulated online of construction workers from China who filmed themselves stranded high in the air during missile barrages, afraid and without protection.

The first death in the latest round of fighting with Iran was Mary Anne Velasquez de Vera, a foreign worker in Israel from the Philippines. At the end of March, two other foreign workers were killed by a Hezbollah rocket while working in a field in northern Israel after they were unable to reach shelter.

Feeling physically vulnerable is an experience many foreign workers in Israel know well. Evelyn, a migrant from the Philippines who slept in the bus station with her children during the war, described how, in an industry as intimate as caregiving, working with elderly people who struggle to make it to a shelter, workers can feel pressured to stay in the building during an attack.

“They can’t exactly tell their employer they left grandma in the building during a missile attack, because they’ll get fired and lose their visa,” Amar said.

Some of the risks are much less visible. Evelyn was out of work as a housekeeper for the duration of the war, when her employer, an elderly woman, left the country. She lived on donations from community members and civil society organizations.

“Here is still better than back home,” she said. “But we are all struggling, and not just because of the shelter. If I can’t start working soon, I really don’t know what I will do.”

Workers like Evelyn who lack work visas must rely on informal employment, making them ineligible for compensation from Bituach Leumi, Israel’s national workers’ insurance, when they go unpaid. But having a visa did not solve the challenges of war, Rozen said.

The threat of losing their visa if they lose their employment hangs over the heads of the workers, forcing them into difficult decisions, like whether to leave their children with volunteers at the shelter or alone at home.

“Even those who still have work face a problem. If a single mother has children and there’s no school, where does she leave them? She can’t bring them along when there’s an alarm,” Rozen said. “So even when work exists, many can’t do it.”

She said the war had offered a glimpse into the as-yet-unaddressed challenges that come along with Israel’s increasing reliance on importing labor from abroad. The country’s labor market didn’t come to a standstill, as was the case in other countries in the region such as the United Arab Emirates where the vast majority of workers are migrants who tried to leave, but for Rozen, something new and troubling was laid bare.

“If you don’t want foreigners here, then don’t recruit them,” Rozen said. “But you can’t recruit them, triple their numbers, and then expect them to disappear when there’s a war.”

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