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This Israeli village on the Lebanon border was isolated for decades. Now it’s a tourist hotspot.
GHAJAR, Israel (JTA) – A group of 40 tourists filed into Khateb Sweets on a recent Sunday afternoon, bringing chatter — and their cash and credit cards — to what had been a quiet cafe in this equally sedate village in the Golan Heights.
They left after consuming pastries and hot tea spiced with ginger, anise and cinnamon, whereupon an Israeli Jewish couple came in, then an Israeli Arab family and three Canadians.
The steady foot traffic typifies the wave of tourists that since last fall has hit this community of 2,900 people, nearly all Alawites, an Islamic sect.
Ghajar (pronounced RA-zhar) had for decades been unusually cut off from the rest of Israel. Residents could come and go, but outsiders could visit only through prior arrangement with the Israel Defense Forces, which considered the village within a closed military area where Lebanon and Israel’s Galilee and Golan Heights regions intersect.
The IDF’s lifting of the restriction without explanation on Sept. 8 led to an immediate rush of visitors eager to explore Ghajar.
How immediate? Ahmad Khateb, a pastry chef who owns the eponymous cafe, was working that day at his consultancy job at a hotel in the Galilee town of Tzfat, when his employee called to report an unusual stream of tourists entering the shop. The following morning, Khateb resigned to work at his café full time.
People enjoy a food truck in a plaza in Ghajar, Oct. 14, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Approximately 4,000 people visited Ghajar the day the town opened, he said. Another 6,000 visited the following day — briefly tripling the number of people in town. For day three, a Saturday, Ghajar turned a soccer field into a parking lot.
“It’s like a gift that fell from the sky,” Khateb said of the village’s opening and his subsequent increase in sales. He’s now considering expansion to other locations.
Ghajar possesses a Forbidden City-like attraction for Israelis, who travel extensively inside their own country because it requires a flight to visit others.
“You know why we came here? Because there aren’t a lot of places [in Israel] we haven’t been,” said Shmuel Browns, a Jerusalem-based tour guide accompanying his brother and sister-in-law visiting from his native Toronto. “We wanted to get a sense of what makes this village unique.”
It is also notable as the only Israeli community of Alawites, a Syria-based ethnic minority best known as the group that the country’s dictatorial rulers for the past 52 years — current president Bashar al-Assad and his late father, Hafez — are descended from. Bilal Khatib, who is Ghajar’s accountant and spokesman, said Alawites tend to be secular people who value a person’s character and are respectful of other Muslim sects and different religions. Ghajar contains no mosques, since, except on holy days, people pray individually at home.
People gather in front of a shop in Ghajar, Oct. 14, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
“It’s a way of life,” Khatib said. “We respect people as people. Our religion is to be a good person, love everyone and hold no hatred against anyone, be they Druze, Jew, Christian or Circassian.”
But most unusual is Ghajar’s provenance, on which outsiders tend to stumble. “Ghajar was part of Lebanon, right?” the Israeli couple at the cafe asked Khateb.
No, he responded.
So began a short primer that residents are wont to recite to visitors — a timeline of a village of just one-fifth of a square mile. (The fields on Ghajar’s outskirts constitute an additional five square miles, on which the village plans to expand.)
Israel captured the Golan Heights, including Ghajar, from Syria during 1967’s Six-Day War and officially annexed it in 1981. After Israel ended its 18-year war in Lebanon in 2000, the United Nations certified the IDF’s withdrawal and established the two countries’ border going through, rather than around, Ghajar. Israel later announced plans to withdraw below the U.N. line. That would have split the village into northern and southern sections. Residents protested, preferring to remain under Israeli sovereignty rather than be divided. Ultimately, Israel didn’t erect a barrier inside the village.
A man drives a golf kart in Ghajar, Sept. 7, 2022. (Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images)
“It’s a headache,” Jamal Khatib, a physical education teacher at the village’s lone high school, said of the chronology.
Orna Mizrahi, an analyst at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, agrees with that characterization. As a member of the National Security Council, she briefed then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Ghajar at what proved to be his last Cabinet meeting hours before he suffered a debilitating and ultimately fatal stroke in 2006.
As to why the IDF recently opened the town, Mizrahi cited the completion of a security fence around Ghajar, along with the lessened threat of cross-border attacks by the Hezbollah terrorist organization, due in large part to the recent maritime border agreement between Israel and Lebanon that incentivizes the government in Beirut to restrain Hezbollah.
“The security considerations are different. The situation in Lebanon is different,” she said.
Exactly why the United Nations associated the town with Lebanon, even though most of its residents are from a Syrian sect, is a point of confusion for many who visit. A 1965 Syrian map that Bilal Khatib printed offers an explanation: It shows Ghajar as an enclave completely inside Lebanon except for a narrow sliver connecting it to Syria proper.
Bilal Khatib (he, Jamal Khatib and Ahmad Khateb are unrelated) lives in the northern section and said he would not want his sister, who lives south of the U.N.’s 2000 demarcation, to be inaccessible.
The U.N.’s dividing point, known as the Blue Line, would be “splitting families,” he said. “We have to be united.” In practice, this line exists only on maps and has no impact on the life of Ghajar residents, who are fully under Israeli rule.
Ghajar residents tend to see themselves as Syrians holding Israeli citizenship. It’s a high-achieving population: According to Jamal Khatib, 400 Ghajar residents hold a college degree, making the town far more educated, on average, than Israeli Arabs overall. He said there are 50 physicians, 30 lawyers, 27 dentists and two professors, most commuting to jobs in the Galilee. Until Syria’s civil war began in 2011, Ghajar residents legally crossed at nearby Kuneitra to attend Syrian universities, he said.
An Israeli soldier secures a checkpoint at the entrance of Ghajar, Sept. 7, 2022. (Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images)
“There’s no profession in Israel that’s not represented here,” he said.
Politically, Ghajar stands out for supporting mostly Jewish-majority parties. In the recent election, Benny Gantz’s centrist party got 24% of the 555 citizens who went to the polls in the village. The Arab party Raam got only 14% of the votes and the rest went to other Jewish lists, including the haredi Orthodox Shas party.
Ghajar puts a premium on livability. Fountains, parks and outdoor sculptures abound, landscaping and building façades are colorful and nary a speck of litter is evident. Homes are large and well-kept, on par with other upscale areas in Israel. Motorcycles and the honking of vehicles’ horns are prohibited. Visitors may not enter between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m., Jamal Khatib said, adding that Ghajar has long banned hotels and bed-and-breakfast inns and does not plan to change the rules in response to the flood of visitors.
Some visitors have littered and urinated in public, even entered residents’ homes without knocking, he said.
“A year ago, you wouldn’t have seen that,” said his son, Ryad, who works as Ghajar’s coordinator of volunteers, including handling traffic control on days when tourists abound.
Unlike many small towns in Israel, Ghajar operates its own sanitation service rather than linking up with other municipalities through a regional council. Doing so is an unusual expenditure, but it’s one that means visitors to the town may see Ghajar’s name on a garbage truck — a potentially powerful symbol.
Tourists explore the streets of Ghajar, Oct. 14, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
“We’re doing it not for you, but for ourselves,” Jamal Khatib said of the village’s quality-of-life values. “I like that people come, but they should respect the rules, respect our privacy.”
For its part, Ghajar projects respect for the wider society. Street signs and storefronts appear in Hebrew and Arabic. The Park of Peace includes a statue of the Virgin Mary, a sculpture of an open Koran, an Alawite sword symbol and a menorah.
“You and I believe in one God,” Jamal Khatib said. “Your deeds speak as to who you are.”
From his back porch a few moments later, a donkey’s braying could be clearly heard, hundreds of sheep observed and calls to prayer drifted over from a mosque – all in Aarab el Louaizeh, a village in Lebanon perhaps 100 yards away.
In a ravine below, soldiers of the United Nations and the Lebanese army in their separate posts walked outside. The U.N. soldiers entered two vehicles and began their twice-daily patrol of the border. Alongside the border road is the Hatzbani River, where Khatib fished as a young man. At his property line, a separate fence on Ghajar’s northern perimeter is nearly complete.
But the fence wasn’t erected to divide people or demarcate boundaries: It’s to keep boars, jackals and porcupines from scaling the slope and entering the village, Khatib said. He soon received an alert on his phone.
“The notification says there are cows on the road,” he explained. “It’s dark. Be careful.”
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Through missile strikes and sleepless nights, the persistent hope of being an Iranian Jew in Israel
For weeks, I lived in Tel Aviv as missiles streaked across the sky overhead. I heard sirens day and night, disrupting sleep and leaving me constantly bracing for the next alert. I ran to dozens of shelters across the city, waiting tensely as interceptions echoed overhead.
And yet, when I decided to leave Israel amid the ongoing war with Iran, I expected to feel relief. Instead, I felt a quiet, disorienting grief — as if I were stepping away from a moment I had spent my entire life waiting for.
For most of my life, Iran existed only in my mother’s memories. She was born and raised in Shiraz, Iran, one of hundreds of thousands of Jews that lived and thrived in Iran before the revolution. But as the war unfolded, I found myself thinking about it constantly — the life she had there, the one she was forced to leave behind, and the possibility it might not be lost forever.
My three identities — American, Iranian, and soon-to-be-Israeli — seemed to be converging in ways I never expected. For the first time in my life, I imagined what it might be like for all three to exist in the same physical reality — what if being American and Israeli did not mean being forever removed from my mother’s homeland? I imagined myself walking beside my mother through the tree-lined streets of Shiraz and bustling bazaars.
For most of my life that future belonged only to dreams. For the first time, it feels tangible.
A joyous Jewish life in Iran
Long before the Islamic Republic, Jews lived in Iran for thousands of years, creating a distinct culture of Judeo-Persian language, literature, and food. In photographs from Shiraz in the 1970s, my mother looks like many young women of the era. Long, wavy hair falls freely around her shoulders; she wears bell-bottoms and silky blouses in the European styles she admired, and a bright smile on her face.
She worked as an assistant for an Italian company; people of many diverse nationalities lived and worked in Iran at the time. She loved Shiraz with every ounce of her being. She loved her life and she loved her freedom.
In 1979, everything changed.
When the Iranian Revolution toppled the country’s monarchy, many people sensed that it was time to flee. Some left on the first flights out, but my mother stayed. For years, she navigated a shrinking life while holding onto hope that the turmoil would pass.
But the freedoms she once knew only vanished over time.
One day, seven years after the revolution, she was walking through a public square when a member of the morality police noticed that a small part of her hairline was visible beneath her hijab. He spat in her face, scolded her, and nearly arrested her for indecency. That was the moment that ended the waiting.
At 28, unmarried and knowing very little English, my mother decided to flee Iran alone. Leaving was not as simple as buying a plane ticket. After the revolution, the Islamic Republic restricted travel, particularly for religious minorities like Jews, and implemented strict exit visa requirements. She paid someone to smuggle her out of the country in disguise as a pilgrim traveling to Pakistan en route to Mecca.
Upon arriving in Pakistan, she spent three months in refugee housing for Iranian Jews. She lived in a crowded and unsanitary safe home, filled with rats and cockroaches. Given the proximity to Iran and that Jews were not particularly welcome in Pakistan, movement outside the facility was severely restricted.
Eventually she made it to Vienna, where HIAS resettled Jewish refugees. She waited there for months, pleading with the American embassy for entry to the United States, one of thousands of refugees awaiting resettlement. Almost a year after leaving Iran, my mother was granted asylum in the United States.
A sense of something missing
For the Iranian Jewish diaspora, the story of the rise of the Islamic Republic is not only one of political change. It is the story of families scattered across continents and futures permanently redirected by exile.
My mother built a life in America with urgency and survival in mind. Many of her choices were shaped by fear rather than possibility. She often says she is grateful for the life and family she built. But there is also a quiet absence in her story — the life she once expected in Iran, which never had the chance to unfold.
Children inherit many things from their parents: traditions, languages, recipes, and sometimes unfinished dreams. I grew up aware that my life contained possibilities my mother never had. I pursued an education she never had the opportunity to complete. I built a career that gave me financial independence. I traveled freely as an American, enjoying a life full of choices and novel adventures. And yet, something always felt unresolved.
Some of my earliest memories are of my mother listening to Iranian radio broadcasts from Los Angeles, which many in the diaspora call “Tehrangeles.” The morning broadcast always began with the national anthem of Iran from the time of the Shah. Commentators discussed Iranian politics, and the faint possibility that things in the country they loved might one day change.
At some point, my mother stopped listening. After decades in exile, she accepted that she would likely never return to her homeland.
The possibility of change
This war is certainly unsettling. But it has also brought a fragile, uneasy hope. For the first time in decades, the future of Iran’s regime seems uncertain enough that people like my mother dare to imagine change again.
I do not celebrate war. But change rarely comes without disruption.
My mother’s story is one of millions about the loss and misery inflicted by the Islamic Republic. So many people of so many different backgrounds fled Iran, carrying generations of memories and aspirations across unfamiliar continents. And so many more remained, living under oppression, under laws that restrict freedom, expression and basic human rights.
Most recently, tens of thousands died resisting that repression, fighting for the freedoms my mother once knew and cherished.
I know that many would say this war was undertaken unjustly, and that Iran’s future is not the responsibility of outside nations. But for me, and many like me, it is not so simple. After all, our futures were taken from us unjustly, too.
I left Israel for the time being, but I am grateful to have been there for the start of this strange and hopeful moment in history. Sitting in a shelter, listening to the sirens, I felt so close to what has always seemed impossible: a life in which Iranians across the diaspora are able to go home again. That hope is worth the sirens, sleepless nights, and waiting. It is a small price to pay for the promise we carry for healing from the past and securing a new future for generations to come.
The post Through missile strikes and sleepless nights, the persistent hope of being an Iranian Jew in Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world
In TikTok videos viewed tens of thousands of times, 31-year-old Dan Sheena dons a blond wig and acts out skits of a bickering Iraqi couple in a language that is nearly extinct: Judeo-Arabic.
Sheena began posting videos on TikTok in 2023, speaking the endangered language, which today is rarely spoken by anyone under the age of 60, following the mass exodus of Jews from Arab countries due to discrimination and religious persecution.
Raised by two parents from Baghdad, Sheena grew up in Israel and spoke the language at home. That’s a rarity among second- and third-generation Iraqi Jews, whose families often stopped passing it down in an effort to assimilate.
From a young age, Sheena, who still lives in Israel, knew he wanted to become an Arabic teacher. After years of teaching conversational Arabic in the public school system, he became determined to preserve the dialect he grew up with.
When Sheena told his family that he wanted to teach Judeo-Arabic, they urged him to focus on a more practical dialect. “They told me, ‘Oh, you are stupid. Why do you want to do that? No one wants to learn it. It’s going to die.’”
Despite their concerns, the initial response to his account and the Judeo-Arabic Zoom lessons he offered was overwhelming. “Many people registered. They told me, ‘Dan, this is my dream. I heard my parents speaking in Judeo Arabic, and I really want to learn it. And I finally have the opportunity.’”
He said that, for him, social media has been essential to his efforts to preserve the language. “Many people forward my videos between themselves” and “ask their parents about certain words,” he said. “This is the way to talk about Judeo-Arabic, to keep it alive. Social media lets me do that, not in the classic way of writing a book and trying to spread it and share it. This is the old way of keeping a language alive.”
In videos, he uses classic Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic phrases, including in equal measure cheeky insults like Wakka mazzalem (“may their luck run out”), and compliments like Asht eedak (“may your hands be blessed”), a phrase used to compliment someone’s cooking or hosting abilities.
Sheena has since built a TikTok following of more than 100,000 and teaches dozens of students around the world, who find him through social media, through Zoom-based courses each year.
A disappearing language
In the 1940s, nearly 1 million Jews lived across the Arab world. Today, an estimated 4,000 remain. In Iraq, where there was once a thriving Jewish community of around 120,000, just three Jews are believed to still live in the country.
Judeo-Arabic, a variety of different dialects of Arabic that were spoken by Jews in the Arab world, endured in active use for roughly 1,250 years. Since the mid-20th century, when Jews were forced to flee the region en masse, the language has been in rapid decline.
According to Assaf Bar Moshe, one of the world’s few Judeo-Arabic experts, Jews in the Middle East were usually bilingual. “They spoke one dialect with their community and families, and another dialect the moment they stepped out of their house,” to be able to communicate with their non-Jewish neighbors. A key feature of the language is words borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic, especially for religious objects or distinctly Jewish words.
Bar Moshe said today, there are around 6,000 native speakers of the Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic dialect worldwide. That dialect, he said, offers a glimpse into what the Arab world sounded like centuries ago. “Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic is actually the original dialect of Baghdad from the Middle Ages. The Jewish community preserved it, while the Muslim dialect came later with migrations in the 17th century. That’s why they are so different.”
Over the centuries, Jews in each country developed their own dialect, often with additional regional variation. While the spoken language is extremely varied depending on where it was developed, the written language became much more standardized, with Arabic transliterated into Hebrew script, similar to Yiddish or Ladino.
When Jews left the Arab world, most fleeing to Israel, the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, they commonly abandoned the language as they tried to integrate into new societies. In Israel, Bar Moshe said, “Arabic was seen as the language of the enemy, so children were embarrassed to speak it.”
There was a similar pressure to assimilate for Jews who fled to other countries. “We wanted to be British,” said Vicky Sweiry Tsur, a Bahraini Jew who grew up in the U.K. and now lives in California. “I used to feel very embarrassed when my friends heard my parents speak Arabic. And you know, slowly, slowly, if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
According to Sheena, many students come to him with a sense of regret for turning away from the language when they were younger.
“If we just listened to my mom way back then, you know, I wouldn’t be chasing after every word and phrase that I can possibly remember now,” said Sweiry Tsur. “What I wouldn’t give to go back.”
‘You learn it from your heart’
Sheena admits his parents had reason to protest his decision to delve into Judeo-Arabic. Students come to him all the time debating whether they should learn conversational Arabic or Judeo-Arabic, which, by most measures, cannot be revived and has no practical use outside of the shrinking circle of elderly individuals who still speak it. “I always answer, to learn the spoken Arabic, you do it from your brain because you want to use it daily. But the Judeo-Arabic, you don’t learn from your brain. You learn it from your heart.”
Sheena’s student Jason Mashal, 36, whose parents were born in Iraq, said he is learning the language out of a desire to preserve it. “I don’t even want to learn Modern Standard Arabic,” he said. “My motivation has always been that this is a dying language, and I guess I’m probably going to fail to save it, but I’m still going to try, you know, to be as functional as I can.”
Inspired by his progress, Mashal later traveled to Iraq, visiting the school his parents attended (where current students had no idea it used to be a school for Jews), the only synagogue left in Baghdad, and even a nightclub his father used to frequent. “It was a very magical and electric feeling to walk through those halls in the precise place where I know both my parents went to school many years ago. Speaking Jewish Arabic in Iraq was just as electric.”
For many of Sheena’s students, the language offers a way to reconnect with memories they can no longer access. “People say to me, ‘Dan, I want to smell again my grandmother. I can’t sit with her and listen to her stories again, but I can hear her by these words by this language.’”
“He comes out with a word or a phrase that literally I can say I have not heard for like, 40 or 50 years,” said Sweiry Tsur. “There’s no way I would have been able to bring it out from the depths of my brain, but then you hear it, and you know exactly what it means, and exactly in what context you would use it — and all the emotions that are tied to it, you know, Friday night dinners with all of the family.”
The post Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran’s President Says Immediate Cessation of US-Israeli Aggression Needed to End War
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian attends the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit 2025, in Tianjin, China, September 1, 2025. Iran’s Presidential website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Saturday that there needs to be an “immediate cessation” of what he described as US-Israeli aggression to end the war and wider regional conflict, Iran’s embassy in India said in an X post on Saturday.
Pezeshkian spoke with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi by phone earlier in the day.
Pezeshkian told Modi that there should be guarantees to prevent a recurrence of such “aggression” in the future. He also called on the BRICS bloc of major emerging economies to play an independent role in halting aggression against Iran.
The Iranian president proposed a regional security framework comprising West Asian countries to ensure peace without foreign interference, according to the country’s embassy in India.
In a separate post on X earlier on Saturday, Modi said he condemned attacks on critical infrastructure in the Middle East in the discussion with Pezeshkian.
The Indian Prime Minister further reiterated the importance of safeguarding freedom of navigation and ensuring shipping lanes remain open and secure.