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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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The post Passover at Rikers Island: How the notorious jail complex holds a seder for Jewish inmates appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Four Seats or No Seats? Why Israel’s Final Polls Disagree Over Amcha Yisrael
Conflicting projections for Ofer Winter’s party illustrate the uncertainty of measuring public support near an electoral threshold.
A Channel 12 poll gives Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael four parliamentary seats.
An i24NEWS survey reaches the same seat total.
Other final polls find that the party does not qualify for representation.
How can surveys conducted close to the same election produce such different results?
The answer lies partly in the difference between measuring a vote share and converting it into parliamentary seats.
A Statistical Boundary
Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent.
For a party receiving substantially more than that percentage, modest sampling fluctuations may change its expected number of seats without calling its parliamentary presence into question.
For a party whose support lies near 3.25 percent, the same type of fluctuation may change its projected representation from several seats to zero.
This does not necessarily mean the polls are measuring completely different political realities.
They may be producing estimates close to the same threshold but on opposite sides of it.
Sample Size Is Only One Factor
The i24NEWS survey conducted on October 22 included 5,124 adult respondents and reported a sampling error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
That is a substantial sample by conventional political polling standards.
But a larger sample does not eliminate every source of uncertainty.
Different pollsters may employ different recruitment methods, weighting systems and procedures for estimating turnout.
They may also differ in how they handle respondents who are undecided or reluctant to state their preferences.
These choices can matter particularly for smaller parties.
The Problem of Turnout
Opinion polls generally estimate voting preferences before actual voting takes place.
Election results reflect the ballots cast by people who participate.
Differences between intended and actual turnout can affect parties in different ways.
Analysts must therefore consider not only how many respondents express support for a party, but also whether the poll’s turnout model accurately reflects the eventual electorate.
Without transparent, comparable information about the methods used by each polling organization, it is difficult to identify which methodological difference is responsible for a particular disagreement.
Reading the Final Surveys
The appropriate interpretation of Amcha Yisrael’s polling is neither that its parliamentary representation is guaranteed nor that exclusion is certain.
The available surveys demonstrate uncertainty around a legally decisive boundary.
The four-seat projections reported by Channel 12 and i24NEWS are meaningful observations.
So are the below-threshold findings published by Channel 13, Maariv and Zman Yisrael.
Each survey is a measurement of electoral intentions under a particular methodology, not a count of actual votes.
For readers following Israel’s election, this makes Amcha Yisrael an instructive case study in how polling uncertainty interacts with electoral law.
The final result will provide the definitive seat allocation. The polls explain why the outcome was difficult to measure in advance.
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As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich
In Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain and France signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler that caved to the Nazi leader’s demand that Germany be given a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Five months later, Hitler ordered the German military to forcibly take the remainder of the neighboring country.
On Oct. 9, 2026, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck a deal allowing Russia to sell diesel fuel to global markets, most importantly to the US. Then Trump waived a package of sanctions on Russia that had been passed by Congress. By replenishing Russia’s war coffers, it is likely more Ukrainians will die because of these twin gifts from America’s president to the warmongering Russian autocrat.
Why is Trump doing this? He seems to be hoping the diesel deal will help him avert disaster in the upcoming midterms. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Trump seriously thinks that this will get him the Nobel Peace Prize by ending the war in Ukraine through helping Putin win it. Perhaps it’s one more scheme to further enrich himself and his family. Or maybe Putin really does have something on Trump.
In any event, it feels like Munich all over again.
There are some remarkable parallels between Czechoslovakia’s predicament in 1938 and Ukraine’s nine decades later: separatists in two vulnerable Central European democracies were encouraged and supported by a neighboring authoritarian regime that sought to seize adjacent territory under the pretext of protecting a minority from oppression.
And at the center of both narratives is betrayal: of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France, and Ukraine by Trump.
In the spring and summer of 1938, Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-allied Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, held secret meetings with Hitler and other Nazi officials. They concocted a plan: Cause so much disorder in the Sudetenland that the Czech government would declare martial law, thus creating an excuse for German troops to march in to protect the ethnic German minority.
Tensions that had long existed along the Czech frontier erupted into gunfire and death in the Sudeten town of Habersbirk on the morning of Sept. 13, 1938. A mob of German separatists hung a swastika banner from a church tower, stormed the police station, kidnapped the wife of a cop, and engaged in gunfights with police officers that lasted hours. Four Czech police officers and four insurgents died. Outbreaks of violence, terror and torture raged along the border for days, backed by Freikorps paramilitary troops who crossed from Germany and by SA and SS men who took part in cross-border sabotage and armed attacks.
The uprising had the desired impact. Just 17 days later — on Sept. 30, 1938 — Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany signed the Munich Agreement, yielding to Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to him. After landing at an airport outside London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a document in his hand and jubilantly proclaimed:
“The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.”
“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said later that day.
But it didn’t take long for Hitler to show he could not be trusted. Hitler’s army marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland followed less than six months later, and by 1942 German forces controlled territory spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to deep inside the Soviet Union.
Ethnic Germans’ uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1938 found an echo nine decades later in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where unrest that began with pro-Russia protests in 2014 evolved into the war Russia has been waging on its neighbor for nearly five years.
In the spring of 2014, paramilitary units led by Russian intelligence officers stormed government office buildings in several towns and cities in Donbas, seizing weapons and clashing with police. In a scene reminiscent of the Habersbirk siege of 1938, on April 14, 2014, pro-Russian militants seized the police station in Horlivka, beat up the police chief, and murdered a member of the city council, whose body was found in a river. Similar clashes occurred throughout Donbas.
Two Kremlin-backed pseudo-states soon emerged: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russia funneled tanks, artillery, air defense systems and fighters into Donbas, fueling a war between separatists and Ukrainian forces that dragged on for years.
Like Hitler in the Sudetenland, Russia’s de facto occupation of Donbas was not enough for Vladimir Putin. His eyes were on all of Ukraine, and he spent years manufacturing pretexts for the full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Trump has been buttering up Putin for more than a decade, starting with his 2015 campaign for president, when he effusively praised the ruthless Russian autocrat’s leadership style. Putin is a “strong leader,” is “far more respected than our president,” meaning the immensely popular Barack Obama, and was someone he “would get along with very well,” Trump said back then.
Trump’s admiration for Putin took on ominous tones after becoming president. During a press conference after the two leaders’ 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump questioned intelligence findings on Russian election interference and said he believed Putin’s denial. “I don’t see any reason it would be Russia,” Trump told reporters, with the Russian strongman standing at his side.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, Trump called it “a pretty smart move,” praised Putin as a “genius,” and also said it wouldn’t have happened if Trump was still president, remarks that were amplified by Russian state media.
During Trump’s second term, his buddy-buddy relationship with Putin has turned into a virtual strategic alliance, as the American president repeatedly makes moves and statements that seem designed to please the Russian autocrat. There are Trump’s threats to abandon NATO, his humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 2025 meeting inside the Oval Office, and most recently Trump’s demand that Ukraine cease its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, his call for Zelensky’s ouster, and envoy Steve Witkoff thanking Putin for being a “humanitarian.”
Putin has proposed a summit between himself, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. It’s notable that Ukraine has not been invited. This is also what happened in Munich nine decades ago, when Czech delegates were excluded from the room, and others decided Czechoslovakia’s fate.
Last October, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters the Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.”
It seems the fate Trump envisions for Ukraine is similar to the one Hitler envisioned for Czechoslovakia. It would be naïve to think that Putin’s expansionist ambitions would stop there.
The post As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich appeared first on The Forward.
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A Chabad Jew was stabbed in NYC. He returned the next day to continue wrapping tefillin.
(JTA) — Less than 24 hours after he was stabbed in midtown Manhattan, Yosef, a Chabad-Lubavitch man from Crown Heights, was back on the same street where he’d been assaulted, popping into Diamond District businesses as usual to help employees wrap tefillin.
Yosef, 26, who did not share his last name to maintain his privacy, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he was back on 47th Street on Thursday afternoon, the day after the stabbing, without missing a beat in his Monday-through-Thursday rounds even as police investigate the incident as a possible hate crime.
A number of the people he visited pieced together that the widely circulated footage of a man being stabbed the previous night was of him.
“They were in shock. They were obviously scared for me,” said Yosef, who has been wrapping tefillin and distributing Shabbat candles to Jewish Diamond District employees for about three years. He started that routine when his father, a Chabad Jew who works in the jewelry business, realized he needed his son’s help to handle the demand for those acts. Yosef told Chabad.org that he was “still shaken” by the attack a day later.
Still, he told JTA, “We can’t allow some hate to stop us.”
Yosef said he felt it was important to communicate that message because “we need more mitzvahs in the world, we need more light in the world.”
Yosef was taken to Bellevue Hospital on Wednesday evening around 6 p.m., where medical staff assessed that he had no internal bleeding and would not need stitches. No arrests have been made, but the assailant has been described as a woman in her 40s.
The attack has renewed concerns about security that have faced Chabad adherents and institutions, which often host public events and maintain a visible street presence. But the threat didn’t diminish their presence in midtown Manhattan on Friday.
Multiple Chabad men stood under a bright yellow tent on the sidewalk wrapping tefillin for a steady stream of workers in the heavily Jewish Diamond District.
“The Rebbe says that the way to defeat darkness is only through the addition of light,” said Shmuel Cohen, who was handing out small photographs of the movement’s late leader, the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Cohen told JTA that he had not heard about the attack that took place just down the block two days earlier, though his partner under the sidewalk tent had. Cohen said that the best way to respond is through “the observance of Torah and mitzvot without being ashamed of our Judaism but presenting it to everyone.”
Also on Friday, Chabad officials met with New York Police Department representatives for their annual meeting about security ahead of Chabad’s international conference in Crown Heights, the Brooklyn neighborhood where the movement is headquartered. The conference begins on Nov. 5.
Chabad has been targeted in multiple high-profile attacks in the past year, including the deadly Bondi Beach shooting in Australia in December. The following month, a man rammed a car into the doors of the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn, raising further questions over how the movement should balance its commitment to making its events accessible with security.
Meanwhile, Jews have been targeted in more than half of hate crimes committed in New York City in 2026, despite making up about 12% of the city’s population.
“Security is our top priority. Our goal is to provide an environment where every participant feels safe and can fully experience the purpose and spirit of the gathering,” said Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky, a top organizer of the upcoming conference.
In the wake of the attack, Yosef said he is not concerned about going out in public as a visibly Jewish person and doesn’t plan to change how he approaches the world.
“I was wearing the same clothes on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday,” he said. “I didn’t change my routine.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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