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This kosher cafe in Riverdale attracts a diverse clientele from across the Bronx
(New York Jewish Week) — When Emily Weisberg arrived in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale in 2014, she was surprised that the coffee options didn’t extend far beyond Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts.
So she set out to create a cafe of her own, one that would not only serve up third-wave coffee but also function as a community hub outside of the relatively insular worlds of her kids’ daycare or her synagogue, the open Orthodox Hebrew Institute of Riverdale. She wanted a place where she could get to know everyone who lived in the neighborhood.
Nearly a decade later, Moss Cafe stands out the northern Bronx neighborhood — both because of its vivid mural of carrots, beets and red onions that pops on its otherwise drab block, and because of its unusual combination of seasonal foods, ethical practices and kosher supervision.
“Our clientele is really diverse, and I think that’s my greatest accomplishment here,” Weisberg told the New York Jewish Week. “We made a restaurant that everyone wants to come to that also happens to be kosher.”
Much of what a visitor to Moss encounters would not be out of place in any hip, upscale cafe. A selection of seasonal pastries, all baked in house, changes throughout the year; flowers in mason jars brighten every table. Moms with yoga mats tucked under their arms grab lattes to go and high schoolers cluster around the window seat with their laptops. The shakshuka is fragrant with garlic and za’atar, and chef Brian Engel’s kale salad, enriched with parmesan and pepitas and studded with roasted beets, is as good as any in the city. The restaurant recently added dinner service, with a menu including a “picky plate” designed to accommodate families.
At the same time, the cafe is strictly kosher — it serves fish and dairy, but not meat, under the supervision of the Vaad of Riverdale — and closes on Shabbat. Its bakery case includes fluffy challahs on Friday mornings, and special catering menus feature traditional foods for Jewish holidays. Customers can often be overheard discussing Jewish texts, the neighborhood’s multiple day schools and upcoming trips to Israel.
On a recent breezy April day — the first spring morning that rhubarb appeared in the cafe’s farm deliveries — Moss was jammed with neighborhood regulars and visitors from all walks of life. Samuel Marder, a nonagenarian violinist and Holocaust survivor — whose wife, the pianist Sonia Vargas, was Riverdale native Regina Spektor’s music teacher — sat at a table adjacent to Sage Vasquez and Diamond Wynn, two culinary professionals from the South Bronx. It was their first visit, but they discovered that a friend worked at Moss and felt at home.
Moss’ pastry counter is always filled with seasonal items. (Ben Resnick)
“I see a lot of people who look like me, and that’s important when I go out to eat,” says Vasquez, a pastry chef. “The neighborhood is like a breath of fresh air from the South Bronx.”
Moss also stands out for its commitment to mutual aid in the borough. Case in point: Few other independent neighborhood coffee shops employ a dedicated director of community outreach. Tess Watts, who has that role at Moss, started at the cafe as a server while she was a student at nearby Manhattan College. Now, she leads Moss’s collaborations with neighborhood nonprofits such as the Riverdale Community House.
Last year, the cafe donated nearly $11,000 of its revenue to local nonprofits and charities, and raised an additional $2,900 for those groups. It also donated more than $7,400 worth of excess food to local community fridges, putting food directly into the hands of those who needed it. Watts says as a community-oriented cafe located in a well-to-do enclave in New York’s poorest borough, Moss has a responsibility to help its neighbors, not just its customers.
“If your mission is to build community around food, you can’t discount the ways that the community is impacted by food,” she said. “You have to look at food insecurity, you have to look at economic inequality. In order to operate a restaurant and call ourselves ethical, we have to do it.”
Moss Cafe sits on a nondescript block in the commercial heart of Riverdale in New York City. (Ike Allen)
Moss has stuck with that commitment since it opened in 2015. Weisberg, the co-owner and face of the cafe, was raised in the rural Midwest, where she got a job at 16 in a small-town coffee shop. That cafe — Perc Place in Hartford, Wisconsin — gave her a lasting appreciation for the communal spaces that coffee shops can provide. Even in a small heartland town like hers, many of the cafe’s workers were immigrants from Latin America, and people from all walks of life chatted together at the tables over cups brewed from beans grown in the highlands of Guatemala and Colombia.
“Living in a place that was not very diverse, I always longed for that,” Weisberg said. “This was a special way to connect with where I was and also to open up my world, through food and coffee and through my coworkers.”
Weisberg lived for a time in Peru and took classes in Latin American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, intending to eventually practice immigration law. While living in Madison, Wisconsin, she worked at restaurants and frequented the local farmers market where, she said, “local food was a thing before it was on a national scale.”
At the same time, her spiritual interests steered her toward Judaism — she was raised Catholic — and she converted at 21, after studying with a campus Chabad rabbi and rebbetzin. In Madison, she also met Alex Weisberg, who had been raised by a secular Jewish family in New York’s Westchester County but became more interested in religion after a Birthright trip.
The two got married in Jerusalem and lived there for three years, where Weisberg opened a coffee and pastry window from their home, where customers would sit on chairs set up on the cobblestone street.
That was the experience she hoped to recreate in Riverdale after they moved to New York City in 2014 — Weisberg felt she could help her community as a good employer. The ethical mission of Moss, she said, starts with pay and conditions for its own employees.
Snapshots of Moss Cafe’s menu and interior. (Courtesy of Moss Cafe)
“These people are the heart and soul of our neighborhoods,” she said. “It’s true that I opened Moss, but Moss is really the people who are, day in and day out, showing up at 4 in the morning to bake things, or scrubbing tables at 4 p.m. on a Friday.”
But Moss also stays afloat because its entire team is committed to the ethical mission of the cafe, including its close relationships with small New York and Pennsylvania farms — during the early days of the pandemic, Weisberg helped support farms and her own business by selling produce boxes from the cafe — and postpartum meals for new mothers through the Bronx doula groups the Birthing Place and Ashe Birthing Services.
With a large and growing Orthodox community in Riverdale, it was important to Weisberg for Moss Cafe to be strictly kosher. But while the certification allows some diners who wouldn’t otherwise be able to eat there, not all customers come looking for a kosher dining experience.
“I grew up Jewish and all the Passover and kosher food can be very bland,” said Brian Silbert, a former Manhattanite who plans to open an ice cream shop nearby. “This is savory and flavorful without it suffering. Across the board, everything is done right.”
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Number of Holocaust Survivors Falls Below 200,000, Half Reside in Israel, New Figures Show
People with Israeli flags attend the International March of the Living at the former Auschwitz Nazi German death camp, in Brzezinka near Oswiecim, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki
The number of living Holocaust survivors around the world fell from 220,000 to 196,600 over the course of 2025, according to newly released data.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), a nonprofit organization that negotiates and secures compensation for survivors of the Nazis’ atrocities worldwide, unveiled its latest figures on Tuesday.
Tracking survivors across more than 90 countries, the Claims Conference found that 50 percent of them live in Israel, totaling 97,600. The country with the next highest population is the United States with 31,000, representing 16 percent.
Seventeen percent of survivors live in Western Europe, with 9 percent in France (17,300 people) and 5 percent in Germany (10,700). Meanwhile, 11 percent reside in former countries of the Soviet Union. Seven percent (14,300) live in Russia, and 3 percent (5,200) live in Ukraine.
Other countries with notable populations of Holocaust survivors include Canada (4,800), Hungary (2,800), Australia (2,000), and Belarus (1,600).
The Claims Conference describes nearly all — 97 percent — of remaining Jewish Holocaust survivors as “child survivors,” those born between 1928 and 1946, now with a median age of 87. The youngest survivors are 79, while just over 1 percent of them are over 100. Thirty percent are over 90, and most — 62 percent — are female.
Social services provide for a sizable portion of the survivors with 71 percent — approximately 139,000 — currently or previously receiving support and grants administered through the Claims Conference. Through its Basic Needs Fund, the organization provides for 67,600 who are not receiving monthly pensions, and the organization delivers “targeted food security assistance to the most economically vulnerable Holocaust survivors.”
These new figures were released a week before International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday.
They followed new data from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust showing the number of schools in the United Kingdom memorializing the Holocaust has fallen by nearly 60 percent since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as such discussions have now been labeled “political” and “propaganda” by some pro-Palestinian advocates.
Last year, the Claims Conference released the results of an eight-country survey investigating Holocaust knowledge across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. The group found that 48 percent of those surveyed in the US could not name a single concentration camp used by the Nazi regime to imprison and murder Jews during World War II — including Auschwitz, the largest and most infamous of the Nazi camps. This figure fell to about 25 percent of those answering in the UK, France, and Romania. In Germany and Hungary, the level of ignorance reached 18 percent, while in Austria it hit 10 percent and in Poland it stood at 7 percent.
The same study found that many respondents did not know that the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. The number of people who believed that 2 million or fewer Jews died reached 28 percent in Romania, 27 percent in Hungary, 24 percent in Poland, 20 percent in the UK, and 18 percent in Germany. In France, the US, and Austria, 21 percent of respondents expressed ignorance about the total death count.
A new survey released this month by the Claims Conference asked 1,000 Irish adults about their views on the Holocaust, finding that half did not know the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews and that 19 percent of young people believed accounts of the mass slaughter had been “greatly exaggerated.” Among all respondents, 12 percent said they had never heard of the Holocaust, a number that increased to 15 percent for younger adults. Of all adults surveyed, 8 percent said they believed the Holocaust was a myth.
Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference, called this moment an “inflection point” in a statement and warned that “soon we are going to live in a world without Holocaust survivors, without a Holocaust survivor voice.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) also released research results last year which showed high levels of global confusion about the historical reality of the Holocaust.
The ADL found that “20 percent of respondents worldwide have not heard about the Holocaust. Less than half (48 percent) recognize the Holocaust’s historical accuracy, which falls to 39 percent among 18- to 34-year-olds, highlighting a worrying demographic trend. Respondents younger than 35 also have elevated levels of antisemitic sentiments (50 percent), 13 percentage points higher than respondents over 50.”
The Claims conference also revealed that worries about another potential Holocaust to destroy the Jews people were highest in the United States, where 76 percent of adults thought it could happen again.
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University of Toronto Jewish Studies Department Targeted With Anti-Israel Posters
Students walk outside one of the exam buildings on the campus of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, on Dec. 13, 2025. Photo: Mike Campbell via Reuters Connect
Agitators at the University of Toronto kicked off the new academic year by tacking posters promoting anti-Israel propaganda near the Jewish Studies Department, continuing to fuel concerns of a hostile environment for Jews and Israelis.
The posters accused Israel of being a “colonial settler state” and claimed that Israeli officials have uttered the falsehood themselves. According to The J.CA, an online Jewish media outlet, the posters also came with QR codes linked to a website containing atrocity propaganda regarding Israel’s conduct in the war with Hamas in Gaza.
“Some claims reference the destruction of universities and the deaths of academics and students, without attribution to independent or verifiable sources,” the outlet said. “Several QR codes direct viewers to advocacy materials calling for political action against Israel.”
Speaking to The J.CA, a local Jewish organization said, “Posting highly charged political material outside Jewish Studies is not neutral. It sends a message to Jewish students that their academic spaces are contested and that their identity is inseparable from geopolitical accusations.”
The Algemeiner reached out to the University of Toronto for comment and is waiting to hear back.
The school previously faced antisemitic incidents and came under fire for refusing, in response, to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is widely used by governments, corporations, and nonprofits around the world.
According to the definition, antisemitism “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It provides 11 specific, contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere. Beyond classic antisemitic behavior associated with the likes of the medieval period and Nazi Germany, the examples include denial of the Holocaust and newer forms of antisemitism targeting Israel such as demonizing the Jewish state, denying its right to exist, and holding it to standards not expected of any other democratic state.
In 2022, the university said it believes that IHRA’s definition “is both insufficiently responsive to many of the most troubling instances of antisemitism in the university context and in tension with the university as a place where difficult and controversial questions are addressed.” It added that “protecting these freedoms is essential to our university’s mandate and mission of discovery, research and education, which can only thrive in an environment of free expression and critical inquiry.”
Critics have argued the IHRA definition unfairly categorizes criticism of Israel as antisemitic. Proponents counter that the definition makes a clear distinction between legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and efforts to demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. According to research and civil rights groups, anti-Israel animus has motivated an increasingly significant percentage of antisemitic incidents, especially following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The University of Toronto has witnessed multiple examples of such outrages in recent years.
In 2021, for example, a student union at the Scarborough Campus passed a resolution which called for sourcing kosher food from providers that do not support Israel, a measure which would have effectively banned kosher food on campus, while a second motion was stripped of language proposed to protect Jewish students. The measure also endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign — and, in another provision that would have marginalized Jews, pledged to “refrain from engaging with organizations, services, or participating in events that further normalize Israeli apartheid.”
Earlier that year, the University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU) voted to sign an open letter accusing Israel of “genocide and demanding the cancellation of trips to Israel. Then in February 2022, it endorsed a motion linked to the BDS campaign against Israel.
Campus antisemitism continues to affect Jewish faculty, students, and staff at colleges across Canada.
In November, a pro-Hamas mob spilled blood and caused the hospitalization of at least one Jewish student at Toronto Metropolitan University after forcibly breaching a venue in which the advocacy group Students Supporting Israel had convened for an event featuring veterans of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
The former soldiers agreed to meet Students Supporting Israel (SSI) to discuss their experiences at a “private space” on campus which had to be reserved because TMU denied the group a room reservation and, therefore, security personnel that would have been afforded to it. However, someone leaked the event location, leading to one of the most violent incidents of campus antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel sparked a surge of anti-Jewish hostility in higher education.
Six suspects, including Qabil Ibrahim, 26, were ultimately arrested on suspicion of being involved in the incident and appeared in court this month.
Canadian Jews have been hit by a wave of antisemitic incidents, with at least 32 reported across five provinces in just the past week alone, according to data collected by the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith.
“Antisemitism in Canada is now accelerating at an increasing rate, spreading across provinces, platforms, and public spaces. That is a warning signal, and it demands more than piecemeal reactions” the group wrote on Wednesday in a letter urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to create a Royal Commission that would explore the problem and draft policy proposals for solving it.
According to the group’s latest audit of antisemitism in Canada released last year, antisemitic incidents in 2024 rose 7.4 percent from 2023, with 6,219 adding up to the highest total recorded since it began tracking such data in 1982. Seventeen incidents occurred on average every day, while online antisemitism exploded a harrowing 161 percent since 2022. As standalone provinces, Quebec and Alberta saw the largest percentage increases, by 215 percent and 160 percent, respectively.
According to the report, incidents included someone firing a gun at a Jewish school for girls in Toronto, Ontario; a man trying to burn down the Tzedeck Synagogue in Vancouver, British Columbia; and a newspaper in Quebec depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the vampire Nosferatu, a Nazi-era trope.
“We cannot permit this to become normalized,” B’nai Brith Canada research and advocacy director Richard Robertson said in a statement. “Antisemitism is not only a threat to Jews — it represents a total repudiation of Canadian values. Those who foment hate against any marginalized group stand in direct opposition to our multicultural, diverse national identity.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iranian Regime Crackdown Went Beyond Protesters, Hitting Bystanders Too, Witnesses Say
People attend the funeral of the security forces who were killed in the protests that erupted over the collapse of the currency’s value in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 14, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Art student Arash was walking home through the streets of Tehran when a shotgun blast ended his life. He had not shouted slogans, joined protesters, or raised a fist.
A friend, speaking by telephone from the Iranian capital, described the moment in a voice cracking with grief: Arash fell instantly, lifeless on the pavement. He was 22.
The friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear for his security, said they had paused on the sidewalk to watch a protest in nearby Vanak Square when security forces in black uniforms arrived and began firing randomly toward the demonstrators.
Arash’s death on Jan. 8 is an example of what witnesses say has been a reality of the country’s latest anti-government protests — bystanders uninvolved in the unrest caught in gunfire, or killed as they tried to flee the chaos.
Reuters was unable to independently verify this account or similar witness reports of deaths during the state’s crackdown on the unrest, and could not determine how many of the thousands killed were bystanders or people merely near the protests when they were shot.
But accounts from families and witnesses suggest that indiscriminate force used by security forces to crush the unrest killed many civilians who were not participating, leaving relatives to scour hospitals, morgues, and detention centers for answers.
UNLAWFUL LETHAL FORCE USED IN IRAN, AMNESTY REPORTS
Officials in Iran could not be reached for comment about the deaths described in this story as authorities began blocking telephone lines and internet connections from Jan. 8, when protests spread nationwide. From Jan. 13, Iranians have been able to make outgoing international phone calls, while calls into the country remain blocked.
There was no immediate response to requests for comment sent to the Iranian UN missions in Geneva and New York.
Authorities have blamed the unrest and deaths on “terrorists and rioters” backed by exiled opponents and foreign adversaries, the United States and Israel. State TV aired footage of burned police and government buildings, mosques and smashed banks it said had been attacked by “terrorists and rioters.”
The US-based HRANA rights group said it has so far verified 4,519 unrest-linked deaths, including 4,251 protesters, 197 security personnel, 35 people aged under 18 and 38 bystanders who it says were neither protesters nor security personnel.
HRANA has 9,049 additional deaths under review. An Iranian official told Reuters the confirmed death toll until Sunday was more than 5,000, including 500 members of the security forces.
The protests began on Dec. 28 as modest demonstrations in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar over economic hardship and quickly spread nationwide.
INDISCRIMINATE FIRE REPORTED BY WITNESSES
Within days crowds in cities and towns were calling for an end to clerical rule, and state TV showed footage of what it called “rioters” burning images of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Amnesty International said in a report it had documented security forces positioned on streets, rooftops — including those of residential buildings, mosques, and police stations — repeatedly firing rifles and shotguns loaded with metal pellets, often aiming at unarmed individuals’ heads and torsos.
It said the evidence points to a coordinated nationwide escalation in the security forces’ unlawful use of lethal force against mostly peaceful protesters and bystanders since the evening of Jan. 8.
The unrest has posed one of the gravest threats to Iran’s clerical establishment in years, with US President Donald Trump repeatedly threatening to intervene if protesters continued to be killed on the streets or were executed.
Iran‘s judiciary has indicated that execution of those detained during protests may go ahead.
Numerous accounts from inside Iran, including from people who have since left the country, said security forces fired live ammunition indiscriminately, turning streets — particularly on Ja. 8 and 9 — into what witnesses likened to war zones.
Among the victims was Fariba, a 16-year-old girl described by her mother, Manijeh, as curious and full of life.
On a night when she went with her mother to a nearby square simply to observe, security forces on motorcycles attacked the protesters.
‘THEY KILLED MY CHILD,’ SAYS MOTHER OF 16-YEAR-OLD
Manijeh clutched her daughter’s hand and sought shelter behind a parked car amid the gunfire. In the ensuing panic, she lost her grip and mother and daughter became separated.
“I searched street after street, screaming her name,” Manijeh recounted, sobbing over the phone. “She was gone.”
That night, the family scoured police stations and hospitals. They found Fariba two days later in a black body bag inside the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Center in south Tehran, shot in the heart, her body cold.
Officials told the family that “terrorists” had killed her.
“No,” her mother said. “I was there that night. The security forces opened fire on people. They killed my child.”
Videos on social media showed footage of families searching for their relatives among hundreds of body bags in morgues and the Kahrizak Center. Reuters verified the location of the videos as Kahrizak Center, although the identity of the people and the date when the videos were filmed could not be verified.
A physician who left Iran on Jan. 14 said hospitals were overwhelmed with gunshot victims. In Karaj, west of Tehran, a resident described security forces deploying automatic rifles against protesters and bystanders on Jan. 8.
Similar accounts emerged from the western city of Kermanshah, where Revolutionary Guards used armored vehicles and tanks to contain demonstrations.
‘THEY SMASHED DOORS, CURSING,’ SAYS BROTHER OF MISSING WOMAN
In Isfahan, the brother of a 43-year-old man recounted holding his sibling’s blood-soaked body after security forces shot him. “His only act was sheltering teenage protesters fleeing into his shop,” said Masoud, 38, by telephone.
Like other Iranians interviewed for this story, Masoud asked for his full name to be withheld for fear of reprisals.
In another case, the family of Nastaran, a 28-year-old elementary school teacher in Tehran, spent days searching for her after she visited a cousin on Jan. 9 and never returned.
They found her body in a warehouse near Tehran. She had been shot by security forces, said Nastaran’s father.
Authorities allowed retrieval only on condition of burial in the family’s hometown in central Iran and pressured them to blame “terrorists” — a claim the relatives rejected, he said.
Another family in the northern city of Rasht said security forces stormed their apartment after spotting their 33-year-old daughter, Sepideh, watching protests from a window.
“They smashed doors, cursing and yelling. They detained her. We don’t know where she is,” said Morteza, her brother.
“My sister’s two young children cry for her; her husband has been warned of arrest if he keeps searching for her.”