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Passover at Rikers Island: How the notorious jail complex holds a seder for Jewish inmates
(New York Jewish Week) — Miriam Tohill, a Jewish chaplain intern at Rikers Island, is looking forward to co-leading Passover seders for Jewish inmates this year for the first time. But conditions at the New York City jail complex are not ideal.
For the seders, held on the first and second nights of the holiday, some 70 to 100 inmates will be bussed from different parts of the island complex to a gymnasium that “feels like a high school gym,” said Tohill, 32, who uses the pronouns “she” and “they.” Sending participants to hunt for the afikoman, a hidden piece of matzah, is “discouraged,” she added, “for obvious reasons.”
The seder tradition of putting pillows on the room’s flimsy folding chairs, they said, is likewise prohibited. And while the door of the gym, rather than a door to the outside, will be opened for Elijah the prophet, they said, “the symbolism is obviously muted.”
Beyond that, Tohill added, it may be a challenge to create a festive mood. Corrections officers will be sitting on bleachers at the side of the room, which has a “squeaky floor, very tall ceiling, [and] terrible acoustics.”
Nonetheless, Tohill expects the seders at Rikers to be filled with meaning. She and others who work with Jewish inmates at the jail say that the holiday — which celebrates the ancient Jewish exodus from slavery to freedom — takes on a different resonance when celebrated by people currently behind bars.
“It’s both easier and harder to talk about slavery, freedom and hope when you’re incarcerated, but we’re all hoping for freedom and rehabilitation and growth in the future,” said Rabbi Gabriel Kretzmer Seed, Rikers’ Jewish chaplain. “People had beautiful insights about what freedom means to them, especially talking about how they feel free even when they’re incarcerated. I was very inspired by that.”
Seed, who received ordination from Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, the liberal Orthodox seminary in the Bronx, began working as a chaplain at Rikers in 2018. The jail has been criticized for harsh conditions, which include evidence of inmates caged in tiny showers and sleeping on floors next to a pile of excrement. The complex has also been the site of suicides, beatings and more. Nineteen people died at Rikers in 2022 — the jail’s highest death rate since 2013, and the city is required by law to close it by 2027, though whether that will be possible is unclear.
Seed said that while Rikers can be a volatile and intense environment, it has also given him a sense of gratitude, highlighting the Jewish concept of teshuva, or repentance, and the idea that everyone deserves a second chance. Seed said Rikers’ Jewish inmates come from a range of religious backgrounds, from haredi Orthodox people educated in yeshivas to others who decided to explore their Judaism once they were incarcerated. He holds weekly services at the jail that draw up to 12 attendees; this week’s teachings discussed the concepts of freedom and slavery as a precursor to the seders.
“I’m kind of buoyed by those values,” Seed said, referring to teshuva. “When I’m having a rough day, I leave my office, go to a housing area, and people are just so grateful for even a few visits, a few minutes when I step into their housing area, or when I get to teach and engage with people, and that just lifts me up and reminds me why I do this work.”
Year round, Rikers Island offers kosher food, which is provided by the city. Seed and Department of Corrections officials would not provide specifics on where the food comes from, saying only that it comes from “different caterers.” And matzah isn’t only available on Passover: Jewish inmates eat the unleavened bread year-round at Rikers because it is a kosher food option that is easily available.
There are Orthodox volunteer groups that help bring kosher food into the jail, including members of L’asurim, a nonprofit that supports prisoners, and the Lubavitch Youth Organization, a branch of the Chabad Hasidic movement.
Rabbi Shmuel Tevel, who is active in the Lubavitch group, told the New York Jewish Week that he visits Jewish inmates regularly at Rikers and other prisons across the state. “For an inmate sitting in a prison cell in those darkest moments, in a state where they feel they’re at the end of their rope, they need to tie a knot and hang on,” he said. “That’s what we give them.”
The Lubavitch Youth Organization outside of Rikers Island doing outreach work during Purim. (Courtesy)
Ahead of Passover, his group is delivering 40 pounds of matzah, along with grape juice, haroset and vacuum-packed seder plates to some cells whose inmates won’t be allowed to attend the seder.
Zalman Tevel, Shmuel’s brother, who runs the group’s volunteer initiative at Rikers, told the New York Jewish Week that he spoke to a guard after visiting inmates during the holiday of Purim last month, and the guard told him the inmates were “in a better state.”
“They are closer to God,” he said. “It leaves a very good impact.”
Tohill described her work on Rikers, which includes working with inmates in other ways, in similar terms. Tohill said the work allows her to provide Jewish teachings in “a place that has so little space for joy, or God.” She compared the seder at Rikers to the tabernacle that the ancient Israelites built in the desert.
“We put all this care into it, knowing that it’s temporary, and we’re going to take it down again,” Tohill said. “We are in the wilderness and desperately need a place to meet Hashem. It is so temporary and imperfect, but that makes it even more worth putting the time into.”
For Tohill, co-leading the seders is part of their master’s project at the Union Theological Seminary, a traditionally Protestant seminary in Manhattan that now focuses on “training people of all faiths and none who are called to the work of social justice in the world.” Tohill’s project explores the meaning of Passover for oppressed people.
“I was in a position to ask, what does this Seder do for us spiritually, emotionally, communally?” Tohill said. “What does it promise to us if we have no access to freedom for people who are incarcerated? That became a big question for me, a theological question about what does this ritual do and how do we as Jews think about liberation?”
Tohill, who lives in the uptown Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, said that some of the inmates have written about their personal stories and will share how they relate to Passover at the seder.
“We have congregants who have written poems about what sense they make of the Exodus story or of the four cups of wine,” Tohill said, referencing a central ritual of the seder. “We have congregants who have done drawings about their family that, to them, feel related to the Passover story in different ways.”
Requests to speak to an inmate planning to attend a seder, or to see inmates’ drawings or writings, were denied by the Department of Corrections.
Tohill called Rikers “a broken system” and said celebrating Passover feels particularly urgent there. They compared Rikers Island to “a floating trash heap in the middle of the ocean that we don’t want anyone to notice.”
“Passover is an opportunity to notice and ask who is being made invisible,” Tohill said. “The rest of the people in New York City who are not directly impacted by the prison industrial complex get to pretend it’s not happening. I would like to ask that, this Pesach, people take the opportunity to stop pretending.”
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‘This is sort of their normal’: Israelis confront yet another wartime flare after Iranian fire
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — As missiles flew toward Israel on Sunday night, beleaguered Israelis once again took to Facebook from their safe rooms.
“Whoever is in charge of naming wars over here, please do not give it a fierce animal name this time,” one Israeli wrote in an English-language group. “The last military operation was called ‘Roaring Lion,’ and the Twelve Day War in June 2025, ‘Rising Lion.’”
Another replied with a suggestion: “I hope it’s something like ‘The One Day War.’”
The idea may not have been far off. U.S. President Donald Trump said early Monday that he hoped both Iran and Israel would halt their fire. By mid-morning, Iran’s military announced the strikes were on pause, saying it had sufficiently retaliated for the Israeli strikes in Beirut, a tit-for-tat exchange. By Monday evening Israel time, Netanyahu, too, said the fighting was halted, but warned that Israel would respond “with force” to any future attacks.
Despite the tenuous pause — not quite a ceasefire — Home Front Command restrictions remained in place by Monday evening, touching every layer of daily life in Israel. Schools were closed through at least Wednesday. Or Erez, head spokesperson for Clalit, Israel’s largest health care network, told JTA, “We will continue to remain operating in shelters until the Home Front Command restrictions change.”
By 10 p.m. Sunday, NICU infants and those in critical care were already being moved to bunkers beneath Beilinson hospital, home to the largest emergency room in the Middle East.
“This is the third time within a year that we have carried out such a transition,” said Dr. Erez Barenboim, director of Beilinson and Hasharon Hospitals.
Hospital staff were visibly fatigued but resilient. Soroka University Medical Center was struck by an Iranian ballistic missile during the June 2025 conflict, and as is standard during attacks, health care staff canceled non-essential visits and moved operations to shelters.
Alexi Wirpel, a student at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, was on a Birthright trip in the Galilee when the first sirens rang out. “We could hear the dome working, so we knew we were going to be relatively okay,” she said.
It was not Wirpel’s first trip to Israel, but it was her first time hearing sirens signaling incoming missiles. Others on the Birthright trip were more anxious and had to be consoled by staff, she said.
When word came of a tenuous pause, Wirpel said, she and others didn’t believe it would last long.
“All day today we’ve all kind of been just waiting for something to go off again,” she said. “It’s become a very real reality that this is something that my family has to go through instead of just hearing about it.”
Caroline Flannery manages an after-school program at a Tel Aviv middle school and has watched the cumulative toll of two and a half years of conflict reshape an entire generation of Israeli children. Added to the time lost during the pandemic, students in those grades have missed the equivalent of a year of school.
“We have kids in fifth and sixth grade that still don’t know the alphabet,” Flannery said.
Israel’s education system has been among the hardest hit since Oct. 7. Leaked results of a government aptitude test found that only 3% of Israeli ninth graders met the national benchmark for science, and just 22% met the benchmark for English, figures that prompted opposition leaders to call for a declaration of a “national educational emergency.”
The disruption extends to staff, who are just as rattled as students when a siren sounds and a week of lesson plans is suddenly worthless.
Flannery moved to Israel in 2019 and hadn’t planned to stay, but the impact she could make on Israeli children convinced her to commit to another year, and then another, until she was running the after-school program herself.
The conclusion she has come to in the wake of Oct. 7 is that many of her students, faced with constant disruption, will never fully catch up.
“It’s not just that they miss school, so now they have to work extra hard and catch up,” she said. “Their whole routine was disrupted and they come back. They’re not ready, not used to, not prepared to sit, to come into class, to sit in their seats, to learn. Their minds aren’t there.”
With Trump pressing Israel and Iran to return to the negotiating table, Flannery discussed contingency plans already on the table — such as Zoom classes, home visits — should the war return to its March tempo.
“This,” she said, “is sort of their normal.”
The post ‘This is sort of their normal’: Israelis confront yet another wartime flare after Iranian fire appeared first on The Forward.
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Celebrated German Jewish bakery closes, saying ‘the hatred reached Berlin’ after Oct. 7
(JTA) — BERLIN — A Jewish bakery owned by Polish and Israeli immigrants in this city has shut its doors, citing a combination of economic pressure and antisemitic harassment.
Babka & Krantz opened in the Friedenau district in November 2022 and added a second location in December 2024, adjacent to the memorial at the site where the Nazis devised their “final solution” for the Jews during the Holocaust.
The second location at the House of the Wannsee Conference closed on Nov. 30, according to the bakery’s Instagram account, which directed followers to a statement from the memorial that has since been deleted from its website.
“We regret the verbal abuse and the difficult situation to which the managing directors and employees of BABKA & KRANTZ Meisterkonditorei were exposed and express our full understanding for the termination of the cooperation under these circumstances,” said the March 10 statement, which was preserved by the Internet Archive.
Now, the original location has closed, too.
Café owners and married couple Shahar Elkin and Marcin Liera-Elkin said in a statement to friends and supporters that a construction site had blocked access to the bakery for more than a year, curbing foot traffic.
But they also said they had been affected when, after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, “the hatred reached Berlin as well.” The bakery was “subjected to constant verbal abuse” since that time, they said in their statement, which has circulated on social media.
Elkin and Liera-Elkin declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, saying they were turning down all media inquiries for the time being. “We and our family need to settle down and attend to a few matters,” they said.
Some would-be customers in the neighborhood said they were already missing the Babka & Krantz on Sunday.
“I was actually going there every day recently, after I found out they were closing. I found that really unfortunate,” said Rebecca, who declined to share her last name. She said she had heard about both the economic impact of the construction and about harassment that had taken place at the store, adding, “It makes me sad that things are this way. I’m trying not to cry.”
Babka & Krantz joins a growing list of beloved eateries that have cited the aftermath of Oct. 7 in announcing their closures. Also in Berlin, the hummus bar Kanaan, which was jointly owned by an Israeli and a Palestinian, closed in March after experiencing protests. An Israeli restaurant in Portugal cited harassment when it announced its closure in January, as did an Ethiopian-Israeli eatery in New York City that recently ceased operating as a traditional restaurant. In Washington, D.C., a local chain of Israeli restaurants closed down late last year following a boycott campaign.
Elkin came to Berlin in 2012 from his home city of Haifa, Israel, and in 2019 earned a master baker’s certificate, becoming the first Jewish master baker accepted into the Berlin Bakers’ Guild. Liera-Elkin was born in Posen, Poland, and grew up in Berlin.
The couple said they were proud to be producing Jewish baked goods in a city with a resurging Jewish population.
“Our families come from cities with a vibrant Jewish life and a formative culture of debate. Today, few or no Jews live in these places anymore,” they said in their statement last week. “That’s why Berlin is such a miracle.”
Germany is home to an estimated 200,000 Jews, including many from the former Soviet Union and a large contingent of Israeli expats. The bakery catered to them, offering special menus for Jewish holidays, devising baked goods that reflect diverse Jewish traditions and even bringing in a rabbi to answer visitors’ questions.
But the bakery catered not only to Jewish customers. According to the owners, non-Jewish locals learned about Jewish culture at their tables. “Our neighbors have seen that different people can eat together at one table and speak to each other,” they wrote in their goodbye note.
The business also won professional recognition, earning a Craftsmanship Award sponsored by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs last year.
The couple said the good relations they had built as unofficial ambassadors of Jewish culture – introducing Berliners of all backgrounds to Jewish culinary specialties – were endangered when the construction site went up in their neighborhood, blocking the street view of their business. They lost customers and money, they said, and their anxiety was increasingly visible on their Instagram account, where they chronicled their fruitless efforts to make their story accessible again.
Speaking to the Berliner Morgenpost in November, Liera-Elkin hinted that the two-pronged pressure — economic and harassment — might force them to close. He reported that their vehicle had been vandalized and that they had “experienced numerous verbal and even physical attacks in our private life, received hate-filled letters and calls.” The couple said they had even sent their daughter to stay elsewhere for a time.
“We are just a bakery that wants to offer great products. But now we are only confronted with problems and politics that leave us in despair,“ he told the Morgenpost. “We really don‘t know if Berlin is still the right place for us.”
The post Celebrated German Jewish bakery closes, saying ‘the hatred reached Berlin’ after Oct. 7 appeared first on The Forward.
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Dave Matthews pushes back on claims his criticism of Israel is antisemitic
(JTA) — Dave Matthews, the frontman of the American rock band Dave Matthews Band, pushed back on allegations Friday that his vocal criticism of Israel in recent years had crossed into antisemitism.
Reading his remarks from a sheet of paper on stage at the Coastal Credit Union Music Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, Matthews, whose criticism of Israel has drawn backlash from some Jewish and pro-Israel voices, pushed back on accusations of antisemitism.
“It’s no secret, at least I don’t try to make it a secret, that I disagree with the policies of Israel and the United States, and their treatment of the civilian population in Gaza and the West Bank,” Matthews said. “But that should by no means be twisted into anybody thinking that I am bigoted or antisemitic in any way at all.”
Matthews continued: “On the contrary, I have a deep respect and love for all of my life that I can remember, and an admiration for the culture and history of the Jewish people.”
The frontman of the band continued to list a host of prominent Jewish figures he admired, including Albert Einstein, George Gershwin, Hannah Arendt and Anne Frank, and described being at a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel.
“I hold the Jewish people in the highest regard, and it breaks my heart that my opinions born out of deep commitment to nonviolent resolution and resistance can be twisted to serve any hateful or racist or bigoted ideas,” Matthews said.
Matthews’ remarks come after years of outspoken criticism of Israel, including in 2024 when he joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Washington, D.C., against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.
“I’m ashamed that my tax dollars are going to the brutalizing of an entire people,” Matthews told Al Jazeera at the time. “It’s shameful. And I’m ashamed that our government is welcoming him here.”
At a New Jersey concert last year, Matthews also donned a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf, and held up signs reading “Stop The Genocide” and “Stop Killing Children.”
A representative for Matthews did not immediately respond to a request for clarification of what prompted his remarks Friday.
Matthews is among a growing number of prominent artists who have become outspoken critics of Israel in recent years, including Macklemore, the Irish rap group Kneecap and the British punk band Bob Vylan.
Matthews’ statement Friday was not the first time the artist has defended his rhetoric. In a December 2023 letter to his Jewish fans obtained by JNS, he also assured fans that he “strongly and unequivocally condemn the horrific events of Oct. 7.”
“I will never stop calling for an end to the violence in Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon, and for that matter, the Congo and Sudan and Ukraine, or the violence, or the horrific violence against immigrants and their neighbors in our country,” Matthews concluded during his remarks Friday.
The post Dave Matthews pushes back on claims his criticism of Israel is antisemitic appeared first on The Forward.
