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Standing on Albania’s Jew Street, I learned firsthand the country’s lifesaving culture of hospitality
BERAT, Albania (JTA) — Stone paths wind through the Ottoman-style houses built into the hillside of Berat, Albania. They lead to an imposing 13th-century castle at the peak — the top priority for most visitors to this 60,000-person town 90 minutes south of the capital, Tirana. I had other plans.
Albanians take pride in their ancient code of “besa,” which translates to “keep the promise” and leads them to prioritize guests and religion in their homes. For Albanian Jews or those who fled there from elsewhere in the Balkan Peninsula as German forces advanced during World War II, it promised safe harbor with Albanian families and even throughout entire towns. Albania is the only country in Europe whose Jewish population grew during the war.
Berat’s Solomoni Museum explains this history and that of earlier Jews in the area. At least, so I hear: Under the stone arches off the plaza, I found only locked doors.
Some people collect souvenir spoons or Starbucks city mugs when they travel, others collect memories. I collect fragments of Jewish identity. Planning this trip to Albania with friends, I insisted on a stop in Berat to see the small museum and wasn’t about to give up.
“I’ll call her,” offered the woman behind the desk at the Ethnographic Museum across the street. “Her” referred to the caretaker, the widow of the Orthodox Christian professor who started the museum — Albania’s only one dedicated to Jewish history — as a passion project funded by his pension. After Simon Vrusho’s death in 2019, the museum closed until a French-Albanian businessman heard the story and donated funds for it to reopen in a larger, permanent location.
But the call ended with bad news: The caretaker was sick, and the museum would remain closed. I grimaced. Seeing my reaction, the Ethnographic Museum docent did what all Albanians do — anything she could to make me feel better, to make sure I enjoyed my stay in her town. In this moment, that meant explaining everything she knew about Jews in Albania.
A view of the exterior of the Solomoni Museum, the country’s only museum about its Jewish history. (Naomi Tomky)
Jews first arrived in the country as Roman captives, almost 2,000 years ago. But the first major wave, especially to Berat, came from Spanish Jews fleeing the Inquisition. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled the area at the time, offered nominal religious freedom.
This month, the country’s prime minister announced plans to open a museum in Tirana dedicated to the stories of Albanian citizens who sheltered Jews during the Holocaust, when the country was occupied by both fascist Italy and later Nazi Germany. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance authority, has recognized at least 75 Albanians as Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jews.
“You can see the street where the Jews lived,” the docent noted. I perked up and jotted down her directions.
Six blocks away, I found a simple black plaque with white lettering, barely the size of my forearm and posted high on a white brick wall. It read, “Rruga Hebrentje.” I stared at it. Two millennia of Jewish history in the country, and one closed museum forced me to take heart in a little sign saying “Jew Street.”
A sign in Berat, Albania, reads Rruga Hebrentje, or Jew Street. (Naomi Tomky)
Jews have company in this razing of history: The brutal post-World War II communist regime of dictator Enver Hoxha shuttered all religious institutions in 1967, declaring Albania the world’s first atheist state. His forces destroyed more than 2,000 mosques, churches and other sacred buildings, arresting priests, clerics and imams, many of whom disappeared forever into labor camps and hidden graves. “Religion is the opium of the people,” Hoxha wrote, quoting Karl Marx.
It felt selfish to pout about the lack of Jewish history when so much religion, so many people and huge swaths of Albanian culture had been so recently and violently erased. I joined my friends to explore Berat’s exceptions to the wanton destruction, starting at the Sultan’s Mosque, which dates to the 15th century and boasts an intricately carved wooden ceiling. We expected to admire just the outside, since our guidebook said the doors opened only around Friday prayer.
But as we stared at the somewhat ordinary façade, a friendly gentleman chatted us up. He spoke Albanian, Greek and a bit of Italian, the last of which proved useful at matching up to our Spanish and French. He told us a little about the mosque and the casual styles of observance by most Albanian Muslims, but we only realized he worked there when he invited us inside, retrieving a key when we responded with excitement.
We marveled at the green, red and gold ceiling, illuminated by a round chandelier. He asked if we wanted to climb up the minaret, warning us about the ascent. Narrower than the width of my hips, the tightly coiled spiral of 94 stairs featured a layer of dust and cobwebs that stuck to our bare feet. But at the top, swallowing my fear of heights, confined spaces and bugs, I reaped the reward: a 360-degree view of the “thousand windows” that give the town its nickname, flanking both banks of the Osumi River, and the double eagle of Albania’s red flag flying proudly above it all from the castle.
A view of the ceiling inside the Sultans Mosque in Berat. (Naomi Tomky)
Back on the ground, we thanked the man profusely and dropped donations in the box outside the mosque door as we prepared to say goodbye. Instead, he led us across the square to another building – the Halveti Tekke, or Teqe. Light flowed through the high stained-glass windows onto the walls of the 700-year-old gathering place belonging to the mystic order of Sufi Muslims called Bektashi. Chains hung from the ornate gold-leaf-decorated ceiling over a space where, according to our new friend, the bektashi, or dervishes, used to perform their whirling rituals.
“You want to go up?” he asked my friend’s eight-year-old daughter. She nodded excitedly, and he tossed her a ring of keys, pointing the way to the balcony. As she climbed the stairs, I noticed a pair of six-pointed stars framing the main doorway, a reminder of my original mission, even if they were likely not Stars of David.
But if I felt sad about missing out on the Jewish museum, I was heartened by what I did receive: a first-hand lesson on Albania’s life-saving culture of hospitality.
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The post Standing on Albania’s Jew Street, I learned firsthand the country’s lifesaving culture of hospitality appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump-MBS Dealmaking Shaped Gaza Vote at UN, Empowering Hamas, Israeli Analysts Warn
US President Donald Trump greets Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, during a dinner at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Nov. 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Tom Brenner TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
This week’s UN Security Council resolution endorsing US President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan was timed to appease Western and Arab governments and deliberately crafted to blur the question of Palestinian statehood in pursuit of broader regional interests, according to Israeli analysts, who warned the move risked empowering Hamas and endangering Israel’s security.
Einat Wilf, a former member of Israel’s parliament, known as the Knesset, said the UN resolution intended to remove the Palestinian question from the headlines but could lay the groundwork for “another Oct. 7,” referring to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, by repeating the same policy of ambiguity that allowed the Palestinian terrorist organization to regroup under previous ceasefire agreements.
Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), argued the vote was strategically timed to coincide with Trump’s meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Washington. The US president sought to pair international endorsement of his 20-point Gaza plan with Saudi commitments toward normalizing relations with Israel. Bin Salman, also known as MBS, told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that he was open to joining the Abraham Accords, a series of US-brokered Arab-Israel normalization agreements, if credible progress toward Palestinian statehood could be demonstrated.
The Trump administration aimed to show that the “pathway to implementing Stage Two of the Gaza plan — which includes the International Stabilization Force and a framework for Palestinian statehood — is already in place,” Diker told The Algemeiner in a phone call. “The goal was to get international sanction through the UN so the White House could silence naysayers who claim the plan is a Trump-Israel conspiracy.”
A new poll conducted by the JCFA ahead of the Security Council vote found that 70% percent of Israelis opposed the creation of a Palestinian state under current conditions, with opposition rising to just under 80% among Jewish Israelis. Even when linked to Saudi normalization, the overwhelming majority (62%) remained opposed.
According to Diker, the UN resolution was largely declarative and would not bring the region closer to a Palestinian state. The real agenda rested with Saudi-US ties, with MBS telling Trump that Saudi investments in the United States would increase to nearly $1 trillion. Palestinian statehood figured mostly as lip service, and while Israel signed on, the Palestinian leadership in the form of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority has proven incapable of governing its own public, with polling consistently showing Hamas as the preferred choice among Palestinians — both in Gaza and the West Bank.
“It’s an ironic development that the great Western powers pushing for a Palestinian state are essentially strengthening Hamas’s hand as the effective leadership of the Palestinian people following the Oct. 7 massacres,” he said.
Wilf, who recently announced her return to politics with her newly formed Oz party, argued that Washington’s goal is to push the Palestinian issue “off the headlines” long enough to advance its broader Middle East agenda.
“The Abraham Accords are no longer about normalizing relations with Israel,” she said in a briefing with reporters on Wednesday. “It’s basically American shorthand for bringing the Islamic and Arab world into the Western orbit in a more structured way and pulling them as much as possible away from China.”
Wilf warned that while Washington’s approach of “constructive ambiguity — the vague language now anchoring the resolution — may serve its short-term strategic goals for the conflict, it puts Israel at risk. By avoiding clear definitions of what a reformed Palestinian Authority or a de-radicalized Gaza would mean, she argued, the resolution leaves the same loopholes that allowed Hamas to rebuild in the past.
The deeper problem, Wilf argued, is a pervasive Palestinian ideology built on rejecting Jewish sovereignty. Until that changes, efforts toward statehood will remain hollow, a dynamic she summed up as “Schrödinger’s Palestine” — a state when it comes to attacking Israel in international forums but not a state when it comes to taking responsibility for its own actions.
Diker said the tension Wilf described has already become a “built-in collision” between Western diplomacy and Palestinian realities.
“The West is acting in a rather colonialist manner by refusing to note the democratic choice of the Palestinian people,” he said. “Oct. 7 was Hamas’s crowning achievement to ultimately uproot and replace the Fatah-led leadership of the Palestinian street.”
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Iran ‘Has No Choice’ but to Move Capital as Water Crisis Deepens, Says President
People shop water storage tanks following a drought crisis in Tehran, Iran, Nov. 10, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian affirmed on Thursday that the country “has no choice” but to relocate its capital, warning that severe ecological strain has made Tehran impossible to sustain — even as the regime spends billions of dollars rebuilding its military and nuclear infrastructure and backing its terrorist proxies.
In a televised national address, the Iranian leader renewed his call to relocate the capital, asserting that the deepening crisis has “rendered the city uninhabitable.”
Pezeshkian said Iran’s water, land, and infrastructure systems are under such extreme pressure that relocating the capital is now unavoidable, adding that when the move was first proposed, the government lacked even a minimal budget to pursue it.
“The truth is, we have no choice left — relocating the capital is now a necessity,” he said during his speech.
With parts of the city sinking up to 30 centimeters a year and water supplies dwindling, Pezeshkian described Tehran’s current situation as a “catastrophe.”
He urged government ministries and public officials to coordinate their efforts to avert a grim future for the country.
“Protecting the environment is not a game,” the Iranian leader said.
“Ignoring it is signing our own destruction,” he continued, explaining that Tehran can no longer cope with population growth or the city’s expanding construction.
Among the solutions considered to tackle the crisis, one has been importing water from the Gulf of Oman. However, Pezeshkian noted that such an approach is extremely costly, with each cubic meter costing millions to deliver to Tehran.
Earlier this year, the Iranian regime announced it was considering relocating the capital to the Makran coast in the country’s south, a remote region overlooking the Gulf of Oman, in a bid to ease Tehran’s congestion and alleviate its water and energy shortages.
Advocates of this initiative emphasize its strategic benefits, including direct access to the Indian Ocean and significant economic potential through maritime trade, centered on the port of Chabahar, Iran’s crucial gateway to Central Asia.
However, critics argue that the region is still underdeveloped, fraught with security risks, and unprepared to function as a capital, warning that the move could cost tens of billions of dollars — an amount the country cannot bear amid economic turmoil, soaring inflation, and renewed United Nations sanctions.
Notably, the Iranian regime has focused its resources on bolstering its military and nuclear programs rather than addressing the country’s water crisis, a choice that has left citizens’ needs unmet while advancing its agenda against Israel.
The regime has also spent billions of dollars supporting its terrorist proxies across the region and operations abroad, with the Quds Force, Iran’s elite paramilitary unit, funneling funds to the Lebanese group Hezbollah, in defiance of international sanctions.
According to the US Treasury Department, Iran has provided more than $100 million per month to Hezbollah so far this year alone, with $1 billion representing only a portion of Tehran’s overall support for the terrorist group, using a “shadow financial system” to transfer funds to Lebanon.
Iran also provides weapons, training, logistical support, and political backing to the group along with other proxies, including Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, various militias in Iraq and Syria, and other Islamist entities.
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A shocking true story of Mexico’s Jewish community comes to Netflix
Growing up in Paris, an Italian castle, South Africa at the dawn of its civil rights movement and a kibbutz in the then-new state of Israel sounds like it would be enriching, the project of idealistic parents who wanted their children to see the world and witness history. But that wasn’t exactly how it unfolded for Tamara Trottner, née Salzberg, and her brother Isaac.
Instead, they lived in these locations for three years because they were on the run with their father Leo (Emiliano Zurita), who was being hunted by Interpol for kidnapping his own children. He had taken them to retaliate against his wife, Valeria (Tessa Ia), after she had an affair with his brother-in-law.
Trottner wrote a memoir about the experience and it has been adapted into a gripping and sumptuously-filmed Spanish-language miniseries, No One Saw Us Leave, which recently arrived on Netflix.
In the opening episode, we see a stylish wedding between a young Valeria and Leo, both children of leaders of Mexico City’s small Ashkenazi Jewish community. As she prepares to walk down the aisle, Valeria’s mother tells her she is destined to have “a sheyne lebn” — a beautiful life, in Yiddish — and the crowd dances to “Hava Negila.”
But even at their wedding, there’s little warmth between the two; their marriage is closer to a merger between their two families, and while they don’t hate each other, there’s little mutual understanding — Leo believes Valeria should be the woman of the house, but she is tapped into the burgeoning feminism of the 1960s and wants to get a Master’s degree.
We switch between flashbacks of the pair’s marriage — we see the beginnings of Valeria’s affair, as she dances with her brother-in-law Carlos — and Leo’s international run with his children, Tamara and Leo. Though the children, who begin the voyage aged 5 and 7, constantly ask about their mother, he alternates between telling them that she is coming to join them soon and that she did “something bad” and doesn’t want to see them anymore. In fact, Valeria is searching desperately, and has hired an ex-Mossad agent (Ari Brickman) to aid her in the international hunt.
It’s an emotional and suspenseful story as Leo routinely manages to evade the international police. But the subtle story driving all of the drama is that of the tight-knit Jewish community in Mexico City — even today, only 3% of Mexican Jews marry outside the community — and the interplay of respectability and influence within it.
As part of his retribution against Valeria — and to protect his own reputation as he flees Mexico — Leo spreads a story that his wife was unstable and an unfit mother, even alleging that she had been committed to a psychiatric facility. For at least the first episode of the show, the audience, too, is unsure why Leo has really taken the children, and the story about Valeria seems plausible; we’re not sure who to stand with.
The rest of the Jewish community, too, is unsure; at first, people ice out Valeria and her family as they try to gain information about the children’s whereabouts. The push and pull between two powerful families leaves the community confused and caught in the middle. And after Valeria launches a publicity campaign to clear her name and solicit clues, many of the other leaders worry about the damage to the community’s public image in Mexico, alluding to the European antisemitism they fled from. Leo’s father, meanwhile, is a domineering figure who asserts that his daughter-in-law’s affair is just as bad a blow to the community’s reputation as the kidnapping.
The confusion is helped by the fact that Leo is not presented as a villain; he’s a well-developed character, with his own issues with his marriage and with his overbearing father. An ardent socialist, we see him join an activist group against apartheid while hiding in South Africa, and later, when he flees to Israel, he joins the kibbutz he’d dreamed of, and is embraced for his politics and architectural talents.
(Leo’s time in Israel also gives the audience a window into the kibbutzim of the 1960s, which were still practicing an almost militant form of socialism they have since left behind — children were raised communally and told to call their parents by their first names.)
Eventually, Valeria finds her husband and the children, after checking nearly every kibbutz in the country — we see Kfar Aza, one of the towns destroyed on Oct. 7, get crossed off a list — and Israeli courts order Leo and the children back to Mexico. An end note summarizes the rest of the history: Valeria and Carlos, her affair partner, won and raised the children together, who didn’t see Leo again for 20 years.
Of course, much of the show’s drama is in the obvious: Leo’s flight, the children’s growing realization that their father has been lying to them, Valeria’s desperation. But the quiet conflict between families, the power of reputation — both within the small Jewish community and between that community’s relationship and the broader world — undergird every moment of the story. The power of Jewish community is, ultimately, inescapable.
The post A shocking true story of Mexico’s Jewish community comes to Netflix appeared first on The Forward.