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This Jewish non-profit in Brooklyn helps refugees furnish their new homes
(New York Jewish Week) – When S., a Pakistani refugee, finally moved to a stable living situation in New York City, there was still one thing missing: furniture.
S. had left Pakistan for New York hoping to provide a better, healthier life for her younger brother R., who has Down syndrome. After a year of moving around the city, applying for asylum and trying to get on her feet, S. — who asked that her name not be used while the rest of her family waits for their asylum cases to be approved — found a room in a semi-basement apartment in Jamaica, Queens in March 2022.
But even though they had a roof over their heads, S., 44, and R. hardly had any household items to their names. Instead of beds, for example, they slept on a shared rug on the floor.
Enter Ruth’s Refuge. The Brooklyn-based Jewish non-profit aims to provide New York’s refugee community with items needed to help jumpstart their new lives and fill their homes. The organization helped S. and R. secure many household essentials both large and small, from mugs to furniture.
“It’s one thing if you’re going to drop something on a doorstep; it’s another to bring every single thing into my house and help me set it up,” S. told the New York Jewish Week about the assistance she got from Ruth’s Refuge. “We cannot do much because it’s only me and R. But they did everything — every single thing. To be very honest, I’m really blessed.”
Ruth’s Refuge emerged from a task force at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope that started in 2016 as a response to an influx of refugees fleeing Syria. Since then, they’ve expanded to a team of 120 volunteers and three full-time staff dedicated to meeting the needs of the thousands of refugees arriving in New York — first from Syria, then from Afghanistan, South and Central America and Ukraine. Last year, Ruth’s Refuge furnished over 100 households, providing more than $150,000 worth of furnishings and home goods, mostly accumulated from individual donations.
“I grew up embedded in the Jewish community and very much raised with the concept of ‘never again,’” said Leah Cover, the organization’s founder and executive director. “I always viewed that in a very universal way, that ‘never again’ meant for anybody, not just the Jewish people.”
“The idea that you would have this kind of thing repeating itself when we built the refugee system in response to the Holocaust, primarily, and then to have it just completely break down when it was most needed again was just really horrifying to watch,” she added.
Ruth’s Refuge joins a cadre of other Jewish-aligned organizations that endeavor to create softer landings for refugees in New York. Among them are Masbia, which has been meeting arriving migrants at Port Authority Bus Terminal with shoes, clothing and food, and New Neighbors Partnership, which matches incoming refugee families with small children with a New York-based family to receive clothing, toys and advice. HIAS, one of the largest refugee resettlement agencies in the country, was founded in New York City in 1902 to aid incoming Jewish refugees fleeing persecution and pogroms in Eastern Europe.
Cover said watching the worldwide response to the Syrian refugee crisis animated her to start the refugee task force at the Reform synagogue and eventually found Ruth’s Refuge — named for the biblical figure Ruth, who was welcomed as a stranger and integrated into the community. “One of the very heartening things in starting the refugee task force was just seeing how much the Jewish community wanted to be involved in a response to this and making sure that we lived our values,” she said.
At first, Cover and other volunteers fielded a lot of “ad hoc requests,” she said. Over time, resettlement agencies began to rely upon her team more and more, especially to help with apartment setups — including managing donations of homegoods, renting U-Hauls to transport them and assisting with building furniture.
Ruth’s Refuge became its own independent 501(c)(3) organization in the spring of 2019. These days, they work with a number of resettlement agencies, primarily HIAS, Catholic Charities, International Rescue Committee and Queer Detainee Empowerment Project.
Once asylum seekers have secured permanent housing, Ruth’s Refuge will assign each family a volunteer who acts as a personal shopper. Generally there is no limit to the amount of furniture a family can pick out — as long as it fits in their home, although for certain items like dish sets and TVs, Ruth’s Refuge can usually only provide one per family, Cover said.
The items, housed in storage units in Gowanus, are then packed up and delivered all over the city by teams of volunteers.
Kathy Fenelly, a retired professor of public policy and immigration policy, is one such volunteer. “I’ve worked on advising immigrants on immigration policy for a number of years,” she said. “But this is the first [organization] I’ve ever seen that has such a focused and specific mission to work with immigrants and refugees in order to be sure that they have the basics that they need in their apartments.”
Fenelly has been a part of the organization since it was founded at CBE, and said its mission strongly reflects the Jewish value of welcoming the stranger. “Everyday, I get to say, ‘Welcome to New York. I’m really happy that you’re here,’” she said.
As for S., Ruth’s Refuge helped her and R. secure a hair dryer, soap, towels and a table. Their modest room wasn’t big enough for two beds, so a bunk bed was ordered on Amazon and volunteers helped build the furniture when it arrived.
A group of volunteers from Ruth’s Refuge smile in front of a U-Haul van hired to bring furniture and household goods to a refugee family. (Courtesy Ruth’s Refuge)
S. had left Pakistan in February 2021 with R. with the intent to visit Chicago, where her father had relatives, and then New York, which she had visited before. She had planned to stay a few weeks; traveling with her brother, she assumed it would be a harrowing journey — in Pakistan, she said, her brother’s Down syndrome was often met with contempt, anger and confusion.
Here in the United States, however, S. was surprised by the degree of acceptance, warmth and respect shown to her brother. That’s why she came to believe immigration was necessary: As S. told the New York Jewish Week, she felt her and her brother’s lives were at stake, so she applied for asylum in April 2021.
S. learned their asylum applications were approved at the end of October 2022. Catholic Charities then helped S. and R. get IDs, Social Security numbers and health care, and also provided a few hundred dollars a month to help them get on her feet.
These days, S. works as a home health aide. “It’s becoming home,” she said. “It’s surprising because I was raised in Pakistan, but I never felt like this in my country.”
Left behind in Pakistan are her husband, two other brothers and her 21-year-old son. But her son’s asylum application was approved last month, she said, and she thinks her husband’s will be soon as well, so she’s optimistic they’ll be able to join her in New York later this year.
“I buy things [now] because I can save the money for it,” S. said. “But the first step was Catholic Charities and the second step was Ruth’s Refuge.”
“I’m very, very satisfied in the United States,” she added. “I’m very blessed.”
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Trump administration drops demand that Penn turn over list of Jewish employees
(JTA) — The Trump administration has withdrawn a controversial demand for the University of Pennsylvania to produce a list of Jewish employees as part of a larger investigation into alleged employment discrimination at the Ivy League university.
The withdrawal ends a round of lawsuits over the legality of such a demand, which alarmed Jewish groups on campus and beyond.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is overseeing the probe, did not explain its decision to drop the subpoena in its Thursday court filing. A representative for the agency declined further comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In its own statement, Penn, which had been engaged in a legal back-and-forth over the school’s refusal to compile such a list, said it had “protected its employees’ rights.” The school had shared the names of Jewish staff who had consented to the probe, but resisted sharing the names of all Jewish staff.
“Penn remains committed to fighting antisemitism and all other forms of discrimination, to ensure everyone it serves can learn, work, and thrive,” a university spokesperson said.
The unusual demand, first made in November, came as the Trump administration has aggressively targeted a handful of elite schools accused of failing to curb antisemitism on campus. Most of the time, its intervention has come through the education and health and human services departments, which have cited civil rights violations in seeking to yank billions of dollars in federal funding.
But the EEOC has gotten involved, too, arguing that Penn, in particular, had failed to protect its Jewish and Israeli employees from discrimination. Its case against Penn originated in 2023, and its subpoena had included demands to reveal members of “all clubs, groups, organizations and recreation groups” that were “related to the Jewish religion, faith, ancestry/national origin.” The subpoena also targeted the school’s Jewish studies personnel.
Jewish groups, including Penn Hillel, had argued against the demand, as did free-speech organizations. In an email, Penn Hillel’s director, Rabbi Gabe Greenberg, told JTA the organization welcomed the news.
“Over the past year, I have spoken with hundreds of students, faculty, and staff across the University of Pennsylvania regarding this issue. Every single person expressed objections to the EEOC’s attempt to compel the University to surrender data on Jewish identity and affiliation,” Greenberg said.
He continued, “While many in our community share Penn Hillel’s conviction that campus antisemitism requires urgent, sustained action, demanding ‘lists of Jews’ was a fundamentally incorrect and inappropriate way to address it.”
Earlier this year the agency chair, Andrea Lucas, defended the list-of-Jews demand during an antisemitism conference at Harvard. Lucas told the roomful of Jewish professionals that her office needed the list to identify “potential victims,” including as a means of distributing potential payouts.
(L-r) Andrea Lucas, chair of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, speaks with Brandeis Center founder Kenneth Marcus at an antisemitism conference held at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 16, 2026. (Dillon Meyer Media)
“At some point, either the government will know information about individuals related to their religion or we will not be able to enforce the laws on their behalf,” Lucas said at the time.
A federal judge had ruled in March that the request was reasonable, dismissing efforts by Penn and Jewish groups to declare the ruling unconstitutional. However, the judge delayed the deadline by which Penn would have been forced to comply, giving the university more time to appeal.
The EEOC’s larger antisemitism inquiry into Penn continues.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Austrian town turns Hitler’s birthplace into a police station to keep neo-Nazis at bay
(JTA) — How do you stop neo-Nazis from meeting up at Adolf Hitler’s birthplace? Station officers there around the clock, of course.
That is just what the small town of Braunau in Austria has done — but the officers are not providing surveillance. Instead, they will be on site as part of their regular duties, because Hitler’s first home has become a police station.
After years of discussion, planning and construction, the new police station on a corner near Braunau’s town square opened July 22, in the house where the future Nazi dictator was born in 1889 and spent the first few months of his life.
The building looks different, and there will now be surveillance cameras out front. The city’s aim was “to prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique,” the head of the Austrian interior ministry’s history department, Stephan Mlczoch, told reporters on a recent tour.
At Wednesday’s opening ceremony, Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner emphasized that today’s police are “the exact opposite of the symbolism tied to this place. Our police stand … for democracy and the rule of law,” The Associated Press reported.
Some 50 local and district police officers will be stationed at the new site. And there will also reportedly be a police training program on issues related to human rights.
“They will probably also do antisemitism training. And I think that’s a good thing,” Hannah Lessing, who was on the expert commission to decide what should be done with the property, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview. Lessing, who co-chairs the Austrian delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, was opposed to tearing down the building:
Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau, Austria, as seen on Jan. 15, 2015, as the Austrian government considered forcing a sale to prevent the site’s misuse. A commemorative plaque denouncing fascism was preserved during a later renovation into a police station. (Johannes Simon/Getty Images)
“I don’t like historical cancellation. But we should use it for something,” she said. “A museum was for me not a good idea, because it would attract automatically people who are probably Hitler fans.”
Thomas Ulmer is a retired officer with the Stuttgart police who fought to turn a former Gestapo headquarters in his German city into a place of remembrance. He said the new site could benefit the officers who are stationed there.
“It’s very important to convey the memory and the history to young people, to young police trainees,” he said.
Today — as an activist in the VelsPol advocacy organization for queer staff in the police and justice system — Ulmer brings police recruits to the Hotel Silber Memorial and Learning Center, where they learn how police were co-opted into the Nazi machine.
Recently, he helped design an exhibit in another former Hitler dwelling that became a police station: a nine-room apartment on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich. The exhibit, which spanned 100 years of history, included the years in which Hitler’s popularity grew after the Beer Hall Putsch, his attempted coup in 1923.
The Munich station’s head, Andreas Franken, doesn’t hide the building’s history, Ulmer said. In his office, Franken even has the famous photo of the American war photographer Lee Miller sitting in Hitler’s bathtub.
“When people come to him, whether they’re new police officers or just other people, they always ask him about this picture, and then he can tell the story of the building again,” Ulmer said.
Back in Braunau, the new police station “will continue to be known as ‘Hitler’s birthplace’ and will attract visitors accordingly,” laments Austrian filmmaker Günter Schwaiger, who had opposed the plan back in 2023. In his documentary, “Who’s afraid of Braunau?”, he claimed that Hitler himself wanted to have local officials move into the rooms where he was born.
“It used to be a modest house, but now the Austrian government has turned it into a monument,” he said in an email to the JTA. “We probably need a different generation — one that isn’t afraid of the truth and has the courage to truly come to terms with the past. I hope that generation will emerge.”
A swastika flag flies outside the birthplace of Adolf Hitler in Braunau, Austria, around 1933. (Imagno/Getty Images)
Also disappointed is California attorney Cary Lowe, who was born in Braunau to Holocaust survivors. He was originally in favor of turning the site into a “House of Responsibility.” That plan is still alive, with another local site in mind. The city did “their best to come up with a result that’s acceptable to everybody,” he said. “And now it’s a done deal, so I think we just have to move on.”
The building where Hitler was born dates back to the early to mid-19th century and sits, along with some other structures, on about three quarters of an acre. It has been privately owned, and over the years has housed a school and a branch of a disability support organization.
In 1989, a memorial stone taken from the quarry at the Mauthausen concentration camp was erected in front of the house, and inscribed with a warning “Never again fascism.” Noticeable visits by neo-Nazis declined since then, Cary Lowe told JTA.
“Yes, they still get the occasional individual that wants to carry out a pilgrimage or do a photo op or something in front of the house,” he said. “But it’s on a much smaller scale.”
Braunau’s mayor, Johannes Waidbacher, stands outside the renovated police station in Hitler’s birthplace, July 16, 2026. (Photo by Kerstin Joensson / AFP via Getty Images)
In 2017, the city of Braunau expropriated the vacant property and organized an expert commission to debate possible uses, or even demolition. Suggestions ranged from the serious — a museum — to the wild: An Austrian artist collective called Total Refusal suggested that a controversial statue of Vienna’s wartime mayor Karl Luegers, a devoted antisemite, be picked up by helicopter and dropped over Hitler’s birth house.
But that was not to be. After deciding on the police station option, renovation began. Even then, the idea that Hitler fanatics might seek relics led the city to grind down all the construction rubble and bury it in a secret location.
Lessing hopes that the new police station will reach the younger generation, with lessons of the past accessible in Braunau without having to journey to concentration camp sites in the region.
“We didn’t need another museum,” she said. “We have Mauthausen for that.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Stabbing of Jewish man in Manhattan prompts calls for Mamdani to turn down temperature
The stabbing of two men on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Thursday — one of whom was wearing a kippah on his way home from a Tisha B’Av service at a modern Orthodox shul — has intensified New Yorkers’ fears of being visibly Jewish in public, leaders and community members said.
“Fear has become a lived experience for far too many Jewish New Yorkers. That is not normal,” Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, said at a press conference Friday near the location of the stabbing. “Today, Jewish parents are asking whether it is safe for their children to wear a kippah or a Magen David in public. Synagogues preparing for Shabbat are wondering whether they can afford additional security.”
Police said on Thursday afternoon, the suspect — identified as 51-year-old Raul Morales — stabbed an Asian man in the back with a knife before approaching a Jewish man and stabbing him in the torso with a screwdriver. Authorities said he yelled “Allahu akbar” during the attack. Both victims are expected to recover.
Morales is expected to face charges on Friday. Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime, and New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said in a statement Thursday that while the attacker did not have a known history of mental health issues, “the initial investigation suggests that mental health may have been a factor.”
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the attack as “horrifying” and wrote on X that “these hateful and despicable attacks have no place in our city.”
At Friday’s press conference, City Council Speaker Julie Menin said she was having conversations with her daughter about whether it was safe to wear a Jewish star and with her sons about whether they should wear yarmulkes.
“How can this be normal?” Menin said. “We have to change what is happening in our city.”
But even as New York Attorney General Letitia James urged people not to “assign any particular outcome to this investigation,” adding she did not want to “draw any conclusions,” some leaders were quick to link the attack to a rising political temperature.
Some directly expressed their anger with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who on Wednesday issued a video address conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while also calling Netanyahu a war criminal and accusing him of orchestrating a genocide. Unable to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani encouraged New Yorkers to protest instead.
The UJA-Federation of New York and Orthodox Union said at the time that the mayor’s words put Jews in greater danger.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the spiritual leader of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, wrote in an open letter addressed to Mamdani that “you promised during and after your campaign to lead this city with unity rather than fear. Instead, you continue to divide Jews into those whose politics you deem acceptable and Zionists whom you cast beyond the pale.”
Mamdani was not at the press conference, and organizers did not answer a question about whether he had been invited.
“His words have profound, real-world consequence on us,” Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, told the crowd. “Shame on him for doing this for perceived political benefit when it has real-world consequence for the Jews of New York. He must stop. He must stop.”
Rabbi Yosie Levine of the Jewish Center — where the victim had attended a Tisha B’Av service before he was stabbed — also expressed disappointment at Mamdani’s remarks.
“When I was growing up, the only time we saw security outside of my synagogue or outside of my Jewish day school was when the mayor came to speak,” Levine said. “The police were there to protect him. Today, every time the mayor speaks, we need the police to protect us.”
“No elected official is responsible for every act of hate, but every leader is responsible for helping shape the climate in which we all live,” Treyger said.
New York City Comptroller Mark Levine at Friday’s press conference cast the attack as part of a broader trend of rising attacks on Jewish New Yorkers, citing 178 acts of antisemitic hate crimes in the first six months of this year.
Menin pointed to the dozens of swastikas painted on a playground at a Brooklyn playground earlier this year and swastikas spray painted on homes and a synagogue in Queens last month. On Wednesday, a Jewish man was shoved to the ground in Brooklyn, with the attacker making antisemitic remarks, leaving the victim with back and hip injuries.
Thursday’s attacks were just the latest in a series of crimes targeting the Jewish community, they said.
Rabbi Mark Wildes of the Manhattan Jewish Experience told the Forward he was teaching his weekly class when the attacks occurred nearby.
“It literally happened on my block,” he said. “Two of my kids were out and about, and this guy was still at large before they had caught him.” Wildes, whose children are visibly Jewish, said he and his wife immediately tried to get them home. “We were saying, ‘Where are they? Get them inside.’”
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