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A new destination for troubled Jewish youth trying to kick drug dependency: Cyprus
TEL AVIV — Young people with substance-abuse dependencies often face a stark challenge when trying to overcome their problem: Any kind of lapse is seen as a failure, and if they backslide even occasionally they start to see themselves as hopeless recidivists.
“This 12-step idea says that once you’re an addict, you’re always an addict — that as soon as you touch drugs, you’re off the wagon,” said psychologist Tamir Rotman. “But it’s very detrimental to teens at such an early stage of their lives and self-exploration. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Rotman is the director of change at Free Spirit Experience, a program in Israel for troubled Jewish teens and young adults struggling with issues such as anxiety, depression, or other social and emotional problems.
Now Free Spirit Experience is launching a new program for Diaspora Jewish teens and young people with drug or alcohol dependencies that interfere with their daily living. This new therapy program, Free Spirit Holina, is organized around the idea that their problems can best be addressed by zeroing in on the core impetus for the substance abuse.
“It’s a different paradigm than the traditional rehab center; we deal much more with the underlying issues of drug usage, rather than the usage itself,” said Rotman, stressing that it is not meant to be a full-blown rehab center or a detox clinic. “We expect these kids to have a better sense of self that will enable them to function on a daily basis. The main point is for them to be productive and positive in life.”
The program, which opens in May, will be run by Israeli therapists but situated in Cyprus, a Mediterranean island about a 45-minute flight from Tel Aviv. Designed to be a three-month course, the program will enroll 15 youths per session, divided into two groups: one for ages 14-17 and the other for ages 18-26.
The campus of Free Spirit Holina Cyprus is located about half an hour’s drive northeast of Larnaca, a port city on the island with an international airport. (Courtesy of Free Spirit Holina)
The site for Free Spirit Holina Cyprus, located about half an hour’s drive northeast of the airport in Larnaca, is a 2.5-acre tract of land with horses, farm animals, a swimming pool and fruit trees. The farm previously was used by Chabad-Lubavitch of Cyprus, which will be involved in some aspects of the new program including kosher food, communal Shabbat dinners and celebration of Jewish holidays for those who choose to participate.
The therapists behind the program are importing many of the practices and principles that undergird their successful Israeli therapy program, Free Spirit Experience, an immersive therapy program located at Kibbutz Hazorea in Israel’s Carmel mountains. While some participants of that program have struggled with drug or alcohol use, the new program in Cyprus is geared toward young Jews from North America for whom substance-abuse is their primary problem.
Free Spirit Holina will be staffed by 12 employees in Cyprus, most of them Israelis with specialized training in addiction issues. Besides taking care of horses and other animals, daily activities will include routine farm labor, building projects, meditation and yoga.
There’s to be more than just farm chores and mindfulness, however. The program will include excursions to the Troodos Mountains, cliff jumping off the Mediterranean coast near Ayia Napa, and eventually sailing to Israel — a trip that takes 24 hours — on a yacht that can accommodate seven participants and two staffers.
“It’s the same Free Spirit program for people with dependencies who need a more isolated environment,” said Rotman, explaining that Kibbutz Hazorea “is not an appropriate environment for people with addictions because it’s a living community and it’s not isolated enough.”
Rotman and Free Spirit’s managing director, Rami Bader, had been looking to expand their program for a while, scouting out potential sites in Israel’s Negev. But then an opportunity appeared from an unexpected source: Thailand.
Holina, an addiction treatment and wellness center on a remote island in the Gulf of Thailand called Koh Pahngan, works exclusively with adults. When Holina began fielding numerous inquiries from parents looking for treatment solutions for their teenage children, Holina’s owner approached Free Spirit. The two eventually entered into a partnership to run the center in Cyprus.
Israelis Tamir Rotman, left, and Rami Bader founded a therapy program in northern Israel for emotionally troubled Diaspora Jewish youth, Free Spirit Experience, and now are opening a therapy program in Cyprus focused on Jewish youths with drug problems. (Larry Luxner)
Tuition will cost $20,000 per month for the three-month course. Comparable programs in the United States can cost as much as $30,000 to $40,000 a month, according to Rotman.
Chabad’s Cyprus director, Rabbi Arie Raskin, has lived in Larnaca since 2003. He says the new program will fill a gap because drug use among youths is high — and Orthodox Jews are no exception.
“Cannabis and alcohol use is becoming almost normal, and among haredim as well,” Raskin said. “Recently I was at an Orthodox wedding in B’nai Brak [Israel] and I smelled grass everywhere. In the past, when people smoked marijuana, they were ashamed. Today, they hold a joint in their hand and smile at you. This is very worrying.”
Rotman agreed, though he noted that dependency on marijuana is not necessary the main issue; it’s the underlying anxieties and depression that may have led youths to cannabis use in the first place. While most marijuana users can smoke pot occasionally and be OK with it, about 20% of youths become depressed and anxious.
“We’re seeing a lot of weed issues,” he said. “The idea that weed isn’t addictive or harmful is medically true, but that allows teens to be persistent in their usage.”
This, in turn, leads to a lack of motivation. In some cases, youths reach a point where they aren’t motivated to do much other than smoke weed, Rotman said.
“A lot of these kids don’t have coping skills,” Rotman added. “They learn to deal with their emotions via medications, so they don’t develop sufficient emotion regulation skills. Feeling anxious or depressed are normal parts of life. But for them, it just means they need more medication.”
In order to enroll in Free Spirit Holina Cyprus, Rotman insists on a crucial condition: The kids themselves must agree to the treatment. “We need to hear them say in their own the voice, ‘We want to come.’”
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The post A new destination for troubled Jewish youth trying to kick drug dependency: Cyprus appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Mamdani visits Holocaust survivor at her apartment on Holocaust Remembrance Day
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday made a private visit to the Manhattan apartment of an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor, a gesture to a Jewish community divided over his positions, and reflecting his focus on affordability and dignity for New Yorkers living on fixed incomes.
Marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Mamdani spent 40 minutes talking with Olga Spiegel, who was born in France in 1943 after her family fled there, believing French children would not be separated from their parents. Her father was later deported to a concentration camp. Spiegel escaped with her mother into Italy, hiding for months in a stable before being sheltered by a priest in Rome until liberation, according to Blue Card, an organization that assists Holocaust survivors in need and organized the visit.
Mamdani allocated discretionary funds to the organization while serving as a member of the New York State Assembly, and its executive director, Masha Pearl, was a member of Mamdani’s transition team.
New York is home to the largest population of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel, with an estimated 14,000 to 15,000 living in the metropolitan area. More than 5,000 are at or below the poverty line, most live alone and many are homebound. Nearly 40% struggle to meet basic needs such as food, housing and medical care, according to the organization, and 84% survive on less than $24,000 a year, largely from Social Security and modest pensions.
City Hall described the private visit, which was not listed on the mayor’s public schedule, as warm and welcoming.
“It was an incredibly powerful meeting,” said Monica Klein, a spokesperson for the mayor, “and drove home that the Holocaust is not simply a thing of the past, but something that impacts countless New Yorkers every single day.”
An artist, Spiegel settled in New York in the mid-1960s and has spent the past 48 years in the same rent-stabilized apartment on the lower east side of Manhattan. Spiegel showed Mamdani her studio and artwork, and the two bonded over their shared love of art. The mayor also shared his family’s immigration story.
The visit came amid growing scrutiny of Mamdani’s approach to Jewish issues. His anti-Zionist worldview and revocation of executive orders tied to antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests on his first day in office were met with criticism from mainstream Jewish organizations.
During the mayoral primary last year, Mamdani faced backlash over his decision not to co-sponsor a resolution commemorating the Holocaust in the state legislature. Mamdani pushed back, saying he voted in favor of the Holocaust Remembrance Day resolution every year since he entered the Assembly in 2021 “to honor the more than 6 million Jewish people murdered by the Nazis.”
In a statement posted on X earlier Tuesday, Mamdani said Holocaust Remembrance Day “calls on us to do more than reflect; it calls on us to act — to confront antisemitism wherever it exists and to reject all forms of hatred and dehumanization.”
The post Mamdani visits Holocaust survivor at her apartment on Holocaust Remembrance Day appeared first on The Forward.
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ISIS Threat Surges Across Syria and Beyond, Raising Alarm Bells From Iraq to Sub-Saharan Africa
Islamic State – Central Africa Province released documentary entitled “Jihad and Dawah” covering group’s campaigns in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo and battles against Congolese and Ugandan armies. Photo: Screenshot
US and Iraqi officials are warning of a resurgent terrorist threat posed by Islamic State (ISIS), with the number of militants in Syria reportedly soaring to 10,000 and regional instability raising concern from Iraq to Sub-Saharan Africa.
Earlier this week, Iraqi intelligence services sounded the alarm over the surging ISIS threat, warning of a sharp increase in the terrorist group’s fighters in northern Syria, the country’s western neighbor, and expressing growing concerns among officials.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Iraqi intelligence chief Hamid al-Shatri revealed that ISIS fighters in Syria have skyrocketed from roughly 2,000 to 10,000 in just one year.
This number far surpasses last year’s estimate in the UN Security Council report, which placed the total of ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq at roughly 3,000 as of August.
“This represents a real danger for Iraq, because ISIS — whether in Syria, Iraq, or anywhere else in the world — is a single organization and will likely seek to establish a new foothold to launch attacks,” al-Shatri told the Washington Post.
He also noted that the terrorists who joined ISIS in Syria over the past year include men previously linked to Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa and al-Qaeda, many of whom have expressed dissatisfaction with the current political leadership.
As the Syrian government advances to retake territory long controlled by Kurdish forces, Iraqi officials are increasingly concerned about a resurgent ISIS threat.
In the wake of escalating violent clashes across Syria over the past few weeks, chaos erupted in regional prisons holding thousands of ISIS members, allowing many to escape into the desert.
Even though many escaped ISIS members were later recaptured, the Iraqi government rapidly deployed thousands of troops to bolster its border with Syria, warning that the threat of further attacks remained high.
Last week, the US military began relocating ISIS detainees from northeastern Syrian prisons, formerly controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to Iraqi facilities following the SDF’s withdrawal as Syrian government forces advanced into the area.
On Sunday, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said the decision to temporarily transfer ISIS detainees to local prisons aims to safeguard both Iraq’s national security and the stability of the broader region.
According to the US Central Command, around 2,500 ISIS fighters remained at large in Syria and Iraq in 2024, but no updates have been released since.
These latest warnings from the Iraqi government come amid rising concerns following the departure this month of the last US troops from Ain al-Asad Airbase in western Anbar province, bringing to a close a mission that had supported local forces in combating ISIS terrorism.
The United States is now focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa, where analysts have identified rising Islamist terrorist threats, making the region a central concern in the fight against global jihadist terrorism.
Last week, the deputy commander of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), Lt. General John Brennan, said Washington is stepping up equipment shipments and intelligence support to Nigeria as part of a wider government effort to strengthen its presence across the region and assist African forces in combating Islamic State-linked militants.
Brennan also revealed that the US military continues to engage closely with the armed forces of the junta-led Sahel nations — Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali.
Under US President Donald Trump, “we’ve gotten a lot more aggressive and are working with partners to target … [regional] threats, mainly ISIS,” Brennan told reporters.
“From Somalia to Nigeria, the problem set is connected. So, we’re trying to take it apart and then provide partners with the information they need,” he continued. “It’s been about more enabling partners and then providing them equipment and capabilities with less restrictions so that they can be more successful.”
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Antisemitism Witnessed by 78% of EU Teachers in Classrooms, UN Survey Finds
Krakow, Poland – Oct. 5, 2024: Pro-Palestinian activists in front of the Institute of Sociology at Jagiellonian University. Photo: Artur Widak via Reuters Connect
Teachers across the European Union are witnessing antisemitism as a near daily social occurrence in the classroom and the workplace, according to a new survey issued by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Released on Tuesday, the survey of 2,030 teachers found that 78 percent have “encountered at least one antisemitic incident between students,” and 27 percent have “witnessed nine or more such incidents.” It added that 61 percent saw students promoting Holocaust denialism, while others had students who drew or wore Nazi symbols. Forty-two percent witnessed “other teachers being antisemitic.”
“Hate speech, notably antisemitism and Holocaust denial, has reached levels not seen since World War II,” UNESCO Director-General Khaled El-Enany said in a statement. “Most teachers have never received specific training to confront this reality, including the consequences related to AI development. UNESCO provides policymakers with unique tools to empower teachers in more than 30 countries — from classrooms and campuses to sports clubs — and soon even more.”
Included in a UNESCO report titled “Addressing Antisemitism Through Education: A Survey of Teachers’ Knowledge and Understanding,” the survey comes amid a global rise in antisemitism following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
Since then, many European antisemitic incidents have occurred on college campuses, including someone assaulting a group of Jewish students while shouting “Zionist fascists” at the University of Strasbourg and the University of Vienna hosting an “Intifada Camp,” a pro-Hamas encampment. At the Free University of Brussels campus in Solbosch, a pro-Hamas group illegally occupied an administrative building and renamed it after a terrorist. Elsewhere across Europe, anti-Zionists damaged property to the tune of hundreds of thousands of Euros, desecrated Jewish religious symbols, graffitied Jewish students’ dormitories with swastikas, and carried out gang assaults on Jewish student leaders.
Violence in the streets of Europe’s major cities is also a regular occurrence. In July 2025, a group of people wielding knives attacked Jews walking home from an event on the Greek island of Rhodes; in Davos, Switzerland a man spat on, attacked, and verbally abused a Jewish couple— an offense he reportedly perpetrated multiple times against other Jewish people.
European governments are responding to the antisemitism crisis by paying closer attention to its linkage with the politics and ideology of anti-Zionism, a connection many political leaders hesitated to acknowledge and which UNESCO, despite having exuded anti-Zionist hostility in the past, also cited as a leading cause of rising antisemitism.
“Almost half of teachers (43.6 percent) had encountered students articulating hateful comments in relation to the State of Israel either once or twice, or often,” the report, summarizing the survey results, stated. “Hateful comments targeted at the State of Israel might not necessarily be antisemitism and may be motivated by other forms of hostility. However, comments motivated by hate are significantly more likely to include prejudice, or incite further dehumanization and violence.”
The document added, “Moreover, the prevalence of emotionally charged comments around the conflict in the Middle East highlights the salience of this topic and the need for targeted training and guidance for teachers on how to handle difficult conversations in an increasingly polarized environment.”
Across the Atlantic, teachers in the US have seen a surge of antisemitism in K-12 schools.
According to another survey conducted by the StandWithUs Jewish advocacy organization, 61.6 of teachers have been both targets and witnesses of antisemitic conduct in a professional setting. Meanwhile, nearly half suffered antisemitism perpetrated by their teachers unions, purportedly their advocates and representatives in collective bargaining.
School districts, obligated to comply with civil rights laws which proscribe discrimination, fail at prevention, according to the data. Of the 65 percent of respondents who said they are required to take anti-bias trainings, only 10 percent said those trainings address antisemitism.
“This first of its kind empirical study sought to understand antisemitism experienced by Jewish educators in K-12 education. Over 60 percent of respondents reporting that they personally experienced or witnessed antisemitism in their profession is an astounding number,” StandWithUs data and analytics director Dr. Alexandra Fishman said in a statement. “StandWithUs is deeply committed to rigorous research that serves both academic and lay audiences.”
Civil rights groups have argued that pushing anti-Zionism in the classroom can have a profound impact on students, who in many cases perpetrate antisemitic incidents. On Thursday, for example, local media reported that two 15-year-olds were arrested on suspicion of having graffitied 60 swastikas all over a playground in Brooklyn, New York.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.