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An Illinois farmer thought he knew how his family survived the Nazis. Then he went to the town that saved them.
STADSKANAAL, THE NETHERLANDS — The lights dimmed and through the old church’s stained glass windows, the afternoon sun scattered color across the wooden pews. Sitting among them, Nik Jakobs watched his family’s past come to life on a stage in front of the room.
In a 90-minute play, actors reenacted what happened in this small town in the northern Netherlands during the Holocaust: A Christian farmer who hid more than a dozen Jews in a single room of his farmhouse. A village — nearly 100 people — that knew, and said nothing. A child born in hiding, to a Jewish man and the farmer’s daughter.
And an 11-year-old girl who lived in that room for nearly three years, survived, and became Nik’s grandmother.
Nik, a 41-year-old cattle farmer from Illinois, thought he knew her story. He had grown up with it — hearing from his grandmother about the hiding, the silence, the survival. But sitting at one of four sold-out performances with his parents, his wife and his four daughters, he realized he was watching a version of his family’s past that stretched far beyond what he had been told.
“We only really had her lens,” Nik said of his grandmother, Edith, who at 95 was unable to travel from the U.S. to see her own story staged. “To hear it from other people, it’s like seeing the same story from different vantage points. And suddenly it’s deeper.”
Nearby, his cousin Hannah had a similar reaction: “I didn’t realize how many people were part of this.”
Even the venue was part of the story. The play was staged in the church where the Dutch farmer’s family prayed — a story of hiding, retold in the open, on holy ground.
This wasn’t just his family’s story. Non-Jews were carrying an extinguished Jewish community on their backs — a memorial, a play, a shul — because almost no Jews were left to carry it themselves. Stadskanaal’s Jewish community was erased in the war: deported, murdered, never rebuilt.
What survives of it now survives because non-Jews decided it should — historians pulling records, docents leading tours, a playwright and a cast of actors performing a story none of them lived. That’s what Nik was taking back home: the fact that Jewish presence doesn’t restore itself once it’s gone. Somebody has to keep doing the work, whether or not there are Jews left to do it.
Nik recognized the work, because it is his own. In a two-acre cornfield in Sterling, Illinois, two hours west of Chicago, he is building a synagogue from the remnants of closing congregations — gathering the scattered pieces of American Jewish communities that are themselves disappearing — alongside a museum of tolerance rooted in his family’s past. An ocean apart, a Dutch town and an Illinois farmer are doing the same thing: refusing to let a Jewish story vanish from the landscape.
He came thinking the story belonged to his family. He left knowing it belonged to a village.
A country of contradictions
The Holocaust in the Netherlands is remembered through a single image: a teenage girl keeping a diary in a secret annex in Amsterdam. The story of Anne Frank has become universal — a shorthand for innocence, for persecution, for the human face of genocide.
For decades, hers has been the defining Dutch story of hiding. Others — like the one that brought Nik to Stadskanaal — are less famous. But this story has had a life here for decades.
The story of the Stadskanaal farmhouse has been pieced back together — first by historians racing to preserve fading memories, then through a book, a museum exhibit, a memorial on the site and even a musical.
It had nearly disappeared after the war, lost as the country rebuilt and moved on. But in recent years, it has been revived and retold, a lesser-known counterpart to Anne Frank but with a happy ending, and a love story: one in which the family survives, a child is born, and generations later, a grandson returns. Nik exists because it did not end in tragedy. That effort, as much as the story itself, is what Nik came to see.
But it exists alongside a harder truth. Roughly 75% of Dutch Jews were murdered during the Holocaust — one of the highest death rates in Western Europe. And yet the Netherlands also has one of the highest numbers of people recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations” — more than 6,000 individuals, including the family that saved Nik’s grandmother.
The country’s memory has long lived in that tension: between loss and rescue, between what was done and what was not.
After the Holocaust, the national story leaned heavily toward one side of that equation. “The Dutch are very proud,” said local historian Geert Volders, “that about 25% of Jews survived because of the resistance.” He paused, looking frustrated. “But only 25%.”
What has emerged more recently is something closer to a reckoning — a shift from pride to responsibility. Geert, 37, is part of that shift. He is not Jewish, like so many others who have taken on the work of remembering.
The story they are keeping alive is one of those rescues. It begins with a bicycle.
The cast of the play warming up backstage. 🎭 pic.twitter.com/i5nu2DyzTg
— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) July 28, 2026
A rural refuge
Before the Holocaust, Stadskanaal was a peaceful place. Edith Delevie, Nik’s grandmother, remembered skating in the winter, canoeing in the summer, a small Jewish community, everyone knowing everyone else.
Then the Germans came. And then came the rules. No school. No theater. A yellow star stitched onto coats and shirts. And then, one night, there was a bicycle.
A man named Willem Drenth rode out to their house. Nathan Delevie, Edith’s father, had gone into hiding months earlier. Now it was time for his wife, Hertha, and the children — Edith, 11 years old, and Herb, just 7 — to follow.
Drenth was a socialist, shaped by working-class politics and a distrust of authority. His wife, Hindertje, was a devout Protestant. Nathan, a cattle trader who had done business with Willem, asked for refuge. When Willem relayed the request to his wife, she turned to her husband and asked a simple question: “You said yes, right?”
The Drenth farmhouse sat at the edge of town, alone, with a canal running in front of it and almost no traffic beyond the small bridge that led there. It was poor even by the standards of the time and place: no electricity, no running water, a pump outside, rainwater collected when it fell.
Inside, the house had a kitchen and a few rooms. The biggest was a formal parlor, about 215 square feet, only used on Sundays and holidays. It was here, with the windows covered, where those in hiding would live.
For a while, the Drenths were just hiding Edith’s immediate family. Then others arrived: an aunt and uncle, cousins, friends, strangers who became kin by necessity. Within a year, there were 13 Jews hidden inside. Eight adults. Five children.
The toilet was a wooden plank with a hole cut into it, set over a bucket. The children slept on straw tucked into cabinets, sheets pulled tight to soften the edges of the world.
Edith never saw the rest of the house. For two years and eight months, she lived in that single room. They woke. They kept quiet. They waited. “You were under tension most of the time because you had to repress your anger, your frustrations,” Edith recalled in a 2022 oral testimony she gave of the experience. “You took it in stride.”
No noise, no movement that could be seen from the outside, no mistakes. If someone coughed, a pillow went over their face to muffle it. If danger was lurking, someone would knock three times on the wall — a signal to freeze into stillness.
Bennie Kosses, 21, a distant relative of Edith’s who worked in the family butchering business, joined them in hiding. There was no formal school, but Bennie taught the kids arithmetic and geography, just enough to keep their minds from collapsing inward.
Books arrived, smuggled in by the Dutch resistance and by the younger of the two teenaged Drenth daughters, Fennie, who brought them home from school. Herb read constantly — thousands of books, he said years later in an oral testimony — devouring anything that entered the room.
Later, his son would recall that Herb rarely spoke of this time to his family. “He wanted us to grow up American without the albatross of things,” said Brian Delevie, a professor of visual storytelling at Vanderbilt University.
Inside that one room, the family did more than endure.
While in hiding, Edith learned to crochet, to knit, to embroider. They were skills taught out of necessity, to keep hands busy, minds occupied. One of those embroidered cloths survived. It is stitched with the Hebrew words “L’kavod Shabbat V’Yom Tov,” which means “In honor of Shabbat and the holidays,” and will now be used to wrap the Torah scrolls in the new synagogue Nik is building — a thread pulled taut across continents and generations.
They played cards, board games, anything that could pass the hours and blunt the edge of fear. Luck, chance, risk. These were not abstractions. They were daily realities.
Food was its own quiet operation.
The Drenths had a garden, and vegetables came from the soil behind the house. They butchered a hog for meat. It was, of course, not kosher. But it kept them alive. Extra ration cards, obtained through an underground network, allowed them to buy more than a household of their size should have needed.
Lammie, the eldest Drenth daughter at 17, traveled to different towns to shop so no one store would notice the excess.
She also took a job with the NSB — the Dutch Nazi collaborators — as camouflage. If people got suspicious, the focus would be less likely to fall on a household whose daughter worked for the enemy. It was the kind of moral contortion survival required: to hide Jews, you sometimes had to appear to side with those hunting them.
Still, there were moments that bordered on the surreal.
A Nazi officer’s wife once came to the house for tea, sitting casually at the kitchen table while, just beyond the wall, Edith and her family held their breath. And later, near the end of the war, a defector — a Nazi soldier who had abandoned his post — was taken in and hidden alongside the Jews he might once have been ordered to kill.
An improbable love story
And then there was the other kind of life that took root in the house, the kind no one could have anticipated.
Lammie moved between two worlds: the outside, where she worked, gathered supplies and performed a careful version of normalcy; and the inside, where more than a dozen people depended on her family for their lives.
Somewhere in that narrow space between risk and routine, Bennie and Lammie fell in love.
In a room defined by scarcity, something as expansive as love still took hold. They had no privacy, no future to plan for, no safe place even to imagine what came next.
And yet. They found ways to speak, to connect, to carve out something like intimacy in a space where even breathing too loudly could be dangerous. Lammie became pregnant.
Outside the house, that alone would have been complicated enough: the scandal of an unwed teen carrying a child. Inside the house, it was something else entirely: a risk layered on top of risk, a new life emerging in a place where survival itself was uncertain.
When the time came, Lammie gave birth there, inside the house, while the others remained hidden — a baby entering the world in a room designed, above all else, to keep death out.
That child was named Hennie. After the war, Bennie and Lammie emerged from hiding and wed in front of the house on May 8, 1945. It was Victory in Europe (VE) Day. A photo of both extended families, and baby Hennie, marks the occasion. Lammie eventually converted to Judaism.
When the story was staged this spring as a play in Stadskanaal, that moment — the birth, the love, the impossibility of it all — unfolded again, this time under lights, before an audience.
Hennie, now 81, sat in the audience with her daughter, watching the story of her own beginning play out in front of her — the room, the fear, the love that had brought her into the world.
A scene from the play about a Dutch farmer hiding Jews in his home during the Holocaust. pic.twitter.com/82i73j6B7M
— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) July 29, 2026
When the lights came up, the crowd shifted toward her. People asked for photos. They wanted to meet her, to touch the story they had just watched. She smiled and obliged, a little shy, a little overwhelmed, a reluctant celebrity.
Afterward, she walked to the stage. The young actress playing Lammie stood waiting. Hennie took her hands. Looked at her. “You’re my mother.”
After the show, performed on the 81st anniversary of Stadskanaal’s liberation, descendants of the Drenths introduced themselves to Nik’s family. “We wouldn’t be alive, standing here right now, if it wasn’t for your family,” Nik’s mom, Margo Jakobs, told two of Fennie’s daughters.
Hannah, Nik’s cousin and another of Edith’s grandchildren, moved through the church hall, embracing cast members and descendants of the Drenth family — people she had only just met, but who carried pieces of the same story.
Nik lingered by the stage, tracing the distance between the actors and the ones they had been asked to become. He kept returning to one man in particular, pulling others over to meet him.
“This,” he said, beaming, “is my great-grandfather!”
The actor had been playing Nathan Delevie. Everyone called him Nicco. It is the name Nik carries.
Later, he would struggle to explain what that moment felt like.
“It was almost like his character coming to life,” Nik said. “It was a very spiritual experience. I knew so little about my great-grandfather. And here was someone who had studied him, who had put himself into that role. It gave me a reference point I never had before.”
What stayed with him most was the choice his great-grandfather made. “When you’re named after someone, you don’t always think about it,” Nik said. “But now I look at it differently. I have a 10-year-old daughter. He had an 11-year-old. And I ask myself: Would I have had that courage? Would I have made that decision for my family?”
The gratitude he had for years, he said, had shifted into something deeper. “It was always something I understood,” he said. “But now it’s something I feel.”
Nearly 100 villagers were aware of the Jews hidden in the Drenth home — and no one betrayed them. The secret did not end with the war. Between performances, the story moved back to the place where it began. At the site of the Drenth house — long gone now — a memorial stands, built in 2021, its sculpted panels shaped like the pages of an open book. Each one represents a person who found refuge there, a life preserved not just in memory, but in form.
The cast gathered there, placing stones at the memorial’s base and singing a song from the play. Their voices carried across the field, another layer added to a story that has been told and retold in Stadskanaal.
For Moon Suijs, the actress who portrays Edith’s mom, Nik’s great-grandmother, the lesson feels unmistakable. “These people risked their lives,” she said. “Without hesitation.”
The cast of the play placing rocks at the memorial on the site of the Drenth home, where more than a dozen Jews hid during the Holocaust. pic.twitter.com/tD5XxMCsQp
— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) July 27, 2026
A history inherited
The play about the Drenths expands the frame — showing not just what happened inside the house, but how far beyond its walls the story reached.
About 45 miles north of Stadskanaal, at the lone surviving synagogue in the Groningen province, Geert, the local historian, and many of the docents guiding visitors through that sacred space are not Jewish, including a former vicar. They have, in a sense, inherited a history that is not their own. And yet they speak of it in terms of obligation. “This synagogue and museum exists because non-Jews help,” Geert said.
Geert has seen echoes of the 1930s reemerging, old prejudices resurfacing in new forms. “That’s worrying me,” he said, adding, “It’s also motivating me.”
Motivation, here, is not abstract. It looks like school groups, about 100 a year, walking through this synagogue. It looks like maps, salvaged artifacts, reconstructed ones — and plays.
For Peter Meijer, 68, the playwright and director of the Stadskanaal production, the motivation was both personal and deliberate. He grew up in a family shaped by the war — a grandfather in the Dutch resistance who rarely spoke about it — and spent decades asking the same questions: “Why do people want to hurt each other? Why do people follow a leader that is obviously bad? And most of all: How was it possible that the world allowed this to happen?”
The story of the Drenth farmhouse was one he felt compelled to tell. “They were ready to help anyone who was suffering from evil,” Peter said. “I strongly admire that and I try to live like that, too.”
When he began assembling the cast, he found no shortage of volunteers. Many had never heard the story before. All of them understood why it needed to be told. “It serves as a reminder,” said actor Luca van der Pol, “that we cannot allow something like this to happen ever again.”
The past, in the Netherlands, is not just a story of what happened. It is a story of choices: of people who said yes, and of a country still trying to understand why more did not.
Inside the Groningen synagogue hang two carved wooden signs: the Ten Commandments and a board painted with the words of the Shema prayer.
They came from the synagogue in Stadskanaal where, before the war, there were 180 Jews in the community. After, only 44 remained. When that congregation collapsed after the war, its sacred objects were dispersed. Torah scrolls and ritual items were sent to a Jewish home for the elderly in the town of Bussum. Other pieces, deemed to have little financial value, disappeared into private hands.
Decades later, those two wall hangings resurfaced at a flea market. Someone called Geert. Did he want them? Of course. When Nik saw them, he traced the lettering with his eyes. He has spent the past year rescuing pieces of closing shuls across America to include in the new one he is erecting in an Illinois cornfield. Now, he said, he wants to replicate these two pieces that once adorned the walls of the synagogue where his ancestors prayed.
As the sun set, the work of remembering extended beyond the stage. At the Jewish cemetery in Stadskanaal, Geert led Nik’s family past rows of headstones whose dates abruptly end in 1942 — a record of lives cut short, but not erased. He opened a small bag of black velvet yarmulkes, placed one on his head, then handed the rest to Nik and other men in the group.
He brought a binder he had assembled — obituaries, family trees, fragments of lives pieced back together.
At one point, he pulled out an old newspaper advertisement featuring the family’s butchering logo, preserved in print. Nik’s ancestors had been cattle traders here, the same work he and his brothers do now in Illinois. He plans to revive the historic logo and use it along with the family’s present-day one to honor their legacy.
Standing there, among the graves, Geert watched Nik’s daughters running between the stones, their voices carrying lightly in the evening air.
He thought of a line from the Talmud. “He who saves a life, saves a world.”
A banality of good
For Jan Erik Dubbelman, that world, and the decision to save it, is of central importance.
After decades working at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Dubbelman, 71, who is not Jewish, launched an online mapping project of the hiding places across the Netherlands, linking stories to specific addresses. Click a house, and a story appears: sometimes a sentence, sometimes an entire book.
What he found unsettled him. “Every single house I lived in as a child,” he said, “had histories of hiding or persecution nearby.”
The Holocaust was not distant. It was embedded. And within those stories, a pattern emerged. They often began small. Can you take the baby? Then the mother. Then another relative. What started as a temporary act expanded into something larger.
“The minute people start to care,” Dubbelman said, “they continue to care.”
He said it was a counterpoint to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” describing it as “a banality of good.” Not heroes. Not saints. Just people who said yes, and then kept saying it.
While Nik was in the Netherlands, he brought his daughters to the Anne Frank House. Taylor, 10, is a few years younger than Anne was when she went into hiding.
Inside, they moved through the narrow rooms, past the bookcase that concealed the annex, the walls where Anne and her sister marked their height as they grew.
Nik watched his daughters absorb it all. “Anne’s story ends,” Nik said. “My grandmother’s didn’t.”
A new life
Stadskanaal was liberated on April 12, 1945.
When Edith stepped outside for the first time in nearly three years, the world felt impossibly large. She could not walk properly. Her legs, unused to distance, had to be retrained. Her voice, conditioned to a whisper, never regained its full volume. Her story did.
After the war, the family traveled back to their home in the Dutch countryside. The Germans had used it as an office but left it largely intact. There was a black cat waiting, still there after all that time. Some things, improbably, had endured. Others had not.
Edith’s grandparents, who had refused to go into hiding for fear of endangering the others, were murdered in the concentration camps. This, too, would become part of the inheritance.
Life resumed, or something like it. And then, in 1949, they left.
America was not a dream so much as a direction. A place to rebuild, to start again. Edith arrived at 19, stepping onto Ellis Island and into a country she did not yet understand, watching Christmas lights in New York City with the same curiosity she had once reserved for the canals of Stadskanaal. She learned English by watching television commercials.
Edith and her family settled in Madison, Wisconsin, picked up at the train station by Manfred Swarsensky, the local rabbi and a fellow Holocaust survivor. Her dad got a job in a banana warehouse; her mom, at a bridal shop. Edith found work in an Oscar Mayer sausage factory, and Herb got an after-school job delivering newspapers. They eventually pooled enough money between them to buy their first cow. And a pickup truck. Soon, Edith’s dad restarted his pre-war cattle business.
In Madison, at a synagogue dance, Edith met Norbert Jakobs, another Dutch Holocaust survivor — a man who had been hidden in a home in Nijmegen, about 100 miles south of Stadskanaal. Like Edith, he was rescued by neighbors who also chose to say yes. (Decades later, a great-granddaughter would be named Madison to honor the origin of their love story.)
Edith and Norbert married and moved to Sterling, Illinois, where Norbert started his own cattle business. Two generations later, Nik and his brothers, Alex and Ricky, run it.
In 2015, Edith and Norbert would return to visit the Netherlands and stumble upon something they hadn’t known existed: a model of the Drenth house, recreated in Amsterdam’s Dutch Resistance Museum. Seeing it — the layout, the space, the memory rendered in miniature — hit Edith, she recalled, “like a sledgehammer.”
As a child, she had never seen the full house. Only the one room. Only the limits of survival.
Years later, her grandson Nik would ask Edith a question that had lingered. Why didn’t she blame the Nazis? Why no anger, no bitterness? “What good will it do?” Edith always responds.
The model has since moved to the public library in Stadskanaal, and one afternoon during the trip, the family crowded around it. Margo’s voice shook as she looked at the tiny house. “It’s overwhelming,” she said. “This moment is divine.” Beside her, Hennie — born inside the real house — wiped tears from under her glasses.
From Stadskanaal to Sterling
The family story has been passed down, altered in the telling: some details fading, others taking their place. And now, in a two-acre cornfield in Illinois, it is taking shape again.
The 5,000-square-foot synagogue and museum they are building in Sterling is not just a house of worship. It is an attempt to gather what has been scattered — the physical remnants of communities that no longer exist, and the stories that risk disappearing with them.
Several dying congregations from American small towns have donated sacred items to Nik. An ark from a Rust Belt town in Pennsylvania. Stained glass from a Chicago suburb. Ritual objects carried across state lines, across decades, across lives. Each piece arrives with a history. Each one asks to be remembered. Nik plans to honor each with exhibits that tell their stories.
He is building the synagogue, in other words, the way his family survived: out of what other people were willing to give. When Hindertje Drenth asked her husband the simple question — “You said yes, right?” — it echoed across history. When Nik broke ground on the synagogue this spring, his neighbors — farmers of many faiths — showed up with their equipment to help.
“You go fast by yourself, you go far with others,” Nik said. “I have a community and a family and so many other people who, with their open arms, want to be part of this project.”
For Nik, the trip altered something more fundamental. “You sometimes feel like you’re on an island as a Jew, especially in rural America,” he said. “But being in the Netherlands, seeing how many people care about this story, it made me feel like you’re not running this race alone.”
When he talks about what he’s building, Nik does not describe it as preservation. He describes it as continuation. Preservation implies something fixed — a past held in place. What he is trying to do is something else: carry it forward, leave something behind so the next generation knows where to begin.
The synagogue, when it is finished, will include a museum to tell the stories of the Holocaust and of several now-shuttered shuls across America. Among the exhibits, Nik plans to recreate the room where his grandmother Edith spent nearly three years in hiding.
His childhood friend John Carroll, who is Lutheran, is the contractor on the project. “We want to allow people to transport themselves back to that time and space,” John said. “Not just to tell Edith’s story, but to feel the solemnity of it, and to walk out wanting to stand in the way of tyrants and do the human thing: be kind.”
And, like the synagogue in Groningen, it will be a place where schoolchildren come. Where the past is not just preserved, but taught. Where Holocaust stories that once survived in silence are spoken aloud.
“If you don’t share the story,” Nik’s mother, Margo, said, “it gets watered down until nothing is left.”
Nik’s cousin Hannah felt similarly. “My grandmother told the story,” she said. “My aunt Margo tells it. Nik tells it. And I’m one of the next people in line to do it.” She made it sound less like a burden than an honor. “What do you get to be responsible for? It’s really a blessing.”
In the Netherlands, Nik found himself circling the same idea. That the story he inherited is not just something to remember, but something to propel him forward. The Holocaust, for him, is not distant history. It is a presence, shaping decisions, framing urgency, making the question of what comes next feel less abstract.
For David Jakobs, Edith’s son and Nik’s father, that presence has always been harder to name. “We’re true children of survivors,” he said. “It’s something you feel inside. It’s a duty.”
In a moment when antisemitism is rising, when Jewish communities are once again thinking about safety and survival, the work they are doing takes on a different kind of weight. Not symbolic. Practical. What does it mean to build something that lasts? What does it mean to make it visible?
The synagogue will be filled. With prayer. With people. With noise. With life. Work on the site has begun and, if construction stays on track, the building could open in the fall of 2027. The first service, they hope, will be the bat mitzvah of Nik’s oldest daughter, Taylor.
It will likely be a large gathering. Members of the now-closed Temple B’nai Israel in McKeesport, Pennsylvania — the congregation that gave many of its sacred objects so that Nik’s could be built — are planning to take a bus trip to Illinois for the occasion. Their former rabbi has offered to officiate.
A congregation that no longer has a building will come to celebrate in one that does — the past arriving in the present, and continuing forward.
Nik has already begun thinking about what will happen inside the building once it is open. Among his ideas: bringing the story full circle. The play performed in Stadskanaal — the one that told the story of the Drenth family saving his own — could be staged again, this time in Illinois, inside the new sanctuary.
A Dutch story, performed for an American audience. One more thread carried across time and place.
The project, Nik said, has grown in ways he didn’t anticipate — each discovery leading to another, each story opening onto the next. “You pull a thread,” he said, “and more yarn comes.”
A tree replanted
That thread keeps unspooling. There is one more thing he hopes to plant.
Outside the synagogue, in the Illinois soil, Nik plans to grow a sapling from the chestnut tree Anne Frank saw from the attic window where she hid — the tree she wrote about as it changed with the seasons, marking time in a life suspended.
The original tree, weakened by disease, fell in a storm in 2010. But before it did, cuttings were taken and nurtured into saplings, now planted at schools, museums and memorial sites around the world, living descendants of the original.
Now, one will take root in Sterling. The offer came from Lauren Bairnsfather, the CEO of the Anne Frank Center USA — who, as it happens, grew up attending the same Pennsylvania congregation whose sacred objects are going to fill Nik’s synagogue.
For her, the connection felt unavoidable. “There are too many interwoven threads to ignore,” she said, pointing to the links between her family’s synagogue, Nik’s project and the story of Anne Frank.
Of all the work her organization does, she added, this project feels different. “This is the most hopeful,” she said. “We don’t plant a tree for ourselves. We plant it for the future.”
For Nik, the idea landed immediately. “My brothers and I, when we think about our farm, we think of ourselves as stewards — caretakers of it to pass on to another generation,” he said. “I feel the same way about this temple, and the same way about this tree.”
He views it as a responsibility. “It’s our honor to take care of the tree,” he said — to tend it, as he does his land, his livestock, his family, “and let it grow.”
When it is planted, the tree will stand just beyond the sanctuary — its branches stretching upward, its roots sunk into the same ground where a new synagogue is rising from the remnants of others.
A tree once glimpsed from hiding. A new one planted in the open.
The post An Illinois farmer thought he knew how his family survived the Nazis. Then he went to the town that saved them. appeared first on The Forward.
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Assailant attacks congregant, guard at NYC Shabbat services
(JTA) —A man who attacked a congregant and a security guard at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue on Friday night is now in custody, according to the New York Police Department.
The individual disrupted Shabbat services before allegedly assaulting the two individuals.
“As synagogue security was escorting him out, he struck a member of the congregation, damaged synagogue property, and then spit at and headbutted a member of the security team,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch stated in a post on X.
Tisch, who grew up attending the iconic Reform synagogue, said that an NYPD sergeant who was working on a paid detail on site “immediately stepped in and took the individual into custody.”
“I have spoken with the rabbi of the synagogue, and I’m relieved that no one was seriously injured,” she said, confirming that those who were hurt are now doing well.
While noting that the investigation is still ongoing, Tisch confirmed that there are no other known threats at the moment, and that additional NYPD resources were deployed to Central Synagogue.
For the police commissioner, however, the event was also personal, as she described the synagogue of her childhood as “a place of comfort and peace,” both “in joy and in sorrow.”
“What happened there tonight is deeply painful,” Tisch added. “A place of worship should never be a crime scene.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote on X that he was “horrified by the assault at Central Synagogue during services today.”
“I can only imagine the pain and fear an attack like this, during Shabbat services, causes for the congregation and for Jewish New Yorkers across our city,” Mamdani stated.
The mayor emphasized that every New Yorker should be able to practice their religion without fearing violence, describing the event as a “despicable act” that “has no place in our city.”
“Our administration will do everything in our power to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe,” Mamdani added.
Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council, commended the NYPD for its “swift response that brought the individual into custody,” adding that she was “disturbed” by the incident.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James described the assault as “appalling and unacceptable” in a social media statement. She stressed that “no one should feel threatened in their place of worship.”
“I am relieved that everyone is okay and recovering, and my heart is with the Central Synagogue community this evening,” James added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Assailant attacks congregant, guard at NYC Shabbat services appeared first on The Forward.
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Nigeria has more than 100 synagogues — but no local rabbis. This summer camp wants to change that.
On summer mornings in Abuja, Nigeria, a small fleet of cars fan out across the sprawling capital city carrying unusual cargo: children headed to Jewish day camp.
In a one-story synagogue on a dirt road in Kubwa, a densely populated suburb, children who spend most of the year as the only Jew in their school spill out of cars alongside dozens of their peers. They might spend the day acting out scenes from the Torah, crocheting kippot or competing in color war.
It’s an untraditional location, but almost everything else about Camp Sarah is inspired by Jewish summer camps in the U.S. After all, it was founded by an American.
Debbie Isser, who moved to Nigeria in 2021 for her work with the World Bank, started the camp with members of Abuja’s Jewish community after local mothers told her they wanted their children to have some kind of Jewish education. For Isser, whose own childhood summers at Jewish camp in New Hampshire had been formative, the solution felt obvious.
“I just felt like it was in my genes,” she told the Forward.
Now in its fourth year, Camp Sarah, a two-week-long day camp hosting 80 campers and 20 staff, is trying to give a new generation of Nigerian Jews something their small, dispersed community has struggled to provide: Jewish teachings that will allow them to sustain religious life there.
The hope, of course, is that the children make Jewish friends and learn Torah stories. But organizers also want Camp Sarah to begin producing the religious leaders the community currently lacks — perhaps, one day, even a homegrown rabbi or a shochet, ritual slaughterer, so that kosher Nigerian Jews can finally enjoy meat with their jollof rice.
Fifteen-year-old Shedrack, who is one of two Jewish students at his public school, attended Camp Sarah for the first time last summer. When, during the following school year, his classmates made fun of him for not believing in Jesus, he called his camp friends.
“It’s like being with myself,” he told the Forward. “They understand me. When it’s closing hour from school, I usually call them. We have some chats, ask ourselves some questions and we talk about Torah.”
Nigeria’s Jewish community is itself an unlikely story. Most of its members are Igbo, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, some of whom believe they are descended from one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Igbo identification with Jewish identity intensified during and after the devastating Nigerian Civil War between 1967 and 1970, when the Igbo-led breakaway state of Biafra was defeated, and at least a million people died.
In the decades that followed, a small number of Igbo who had been raised Christian began practicing Judaism, teaching themselves Hebrew, seeking out Jewish texts and eventually establishing synagogues. Today, thousands of Nigerians practice Judaism, though those who have not formally converted are not considered Jewish by many mainstream Jewish institutions.
But maintaining a Jewish community in Nigeria is no easy feat. While Nigeria has over 100 synagogues, the community has no resident rabbi of its own. Jewish books and ritual objects are few and far between, usually arriving from donations abroad.
Moshe Hezekiah Nwafor, 28, a Nigerian Jew who founded the camp alongside Isser, told the Forward that when he celebrated his bar mitzvah, there was only one Torah scroll in the country. Today, he estimates there are about 10. And without a shochet, his community relies heavily on fish and vegetables because there is no way to access kosher meat.
Nwafor and Isser met by chance. While Isser was looking for a synagogue to celebrate the Jewish holidays after she moved to Nigeria, she came across a WhatsApp number for Nwafor’s congregation. Nwafor answered her message and immediately arranged for someone to pick her up and bring her to the synagogue to celebrate Sukkot.
That night, they made kiddush in a sukkah with walls fashioned from banana leaves; afterward came a l’chaim with local schnapps.
“I thought, OK, I’ve really found a Jewish community here,” Isser recalled.
Isser began returning from trips to the United States with suitcases stuffed with donated tallitot (prayer shawls), siddurim (prayer books) and other Jewish books. Eventually, after one Shabbat service, she sat down with elders of the congregation to ask what a more systematic relationship with American Jews might look like.
The clearest request, she said, came from the mothers. Most of their children attended schools where they were the only Jew. Instead of letting their kids sit idle over the summers, the mothers wanted them to receive a Jewish education and know what it feels like to have Jewish friends – in other words: Jewish summer camp.
The request resonated with Isser, a mother too, for whom Jewish camp had been a formative part of childhood. Her parents had met at Camp Ramah, the camp of the Conservative movement, when they were 16. Her mother went on to become a Jewish educator.
At first, Isser considered sending Nigerian children to camps in the U.S. But she and Nwafor, who had worked as a traveling Jewish teacher among Nigerian communities, quickly landed on a more ambitious idea.
“Immediately, we’re like ‘no, no, no,’” Isser recalled. “’We should do camp in Nigeria.’”
They named it Camp Sarah, in honor of Isser’s mother.
The first summer required some improvisation. Organizers borrowed a car to collect children from around Abuja. Isser recalls one trip taking two hours, the car breaking down and, at one point, 15 children squeezing into a sedan.
Rabbi Kerrith Solomon from Adas Israel, a Conservative congregation in Washington, D.C., came with her two children to help run the camp. Looking back, Isser said, “We kind of laugh because it was pretty disorganized.”
Today, anyone who grew up going to camp would recognize much of Camp Sarah, where campers spend their days competing in relay races or Jewish trivia and writing songs to perform for their peers. Four-year-olds act out Torah stories. Older campers study the Jewish life cycle and discuss what it means to become role models in their communities. Counselors from Nigeria, Uganda and the U.S. compare their Jewish traditions over lunchtime.
But some camp traditions require distinctly Nigerian adaptations. Each Friday, the camp bakes challah. With no conventional oven, sand is poured into the bottom of a cooking pot that rests on a charcoal stove, before unbraided challah dough is placed in the pot and covered for hours.
Many of the Jewish songs sung at camp were written in Nigeria and sound nothing like the standard repertoire in America. Sung in harmony, they are accompanied by traditional Nigerian instruments like the konga drum, a shallow gourd covered in beads known as the shekere and a metal hand bell called an ogene.
Camp Sarah’s ambitions also extend beyond Jewish education. Isser said that during her work at the World Bank, she has watched young Nigerians earn university degrees only to struggle to find jobs in their fields. This year, the team introduced leadership training for the counselors, and activities like soap-making, candle-making and crocheting – skills they hope campers and counselors can turn into sources of income. Organizers have even discussed creating a camp store where staff can sell their handmade tallitot and kippot.
The 20 Nigerian counselors who take long overnight buses from Jewish communities across the country to camp each summer have already started bringing what they’ve learned back home, hosting events for their communities during the Jewish holidays.
Debbie Hezekiah Nwafor, a 25-year-old counselor, said that when she first arrived at camp four years ago, she was terrified of public speaking, but her role forced her to propose activities, teach dozens of children and command the attention of the rowdy group. Today, she leads the camp’s division for 14- to 16-year-olds.
“I used to have stage fright; I thought I’m not really bold enough for leadership,” she said. “But whatever idea I’m bringing, camp is implementing it.”
“This is not just a camp to us.” she added. “For real, this is something really big. I would say camp really changed me.”
Camp Sarah has also become a place to experiment in a way that has proven difficult within established Nigerian congregations. According to Nwafor, women have traditionally played smaller leadership roles in local Jewish communities both because of cultural expectations around gender in Nigeria and because of the community’s limited access to Jewish religious instruction.
For communities that have had limited access to rabbis and other sources of contemporary Jewish religious instruction, Nwafor said, biblical texts have sometimes served as a primary guide for how to live Jewishly.
Isser has seen some of those tensions surface in surprisingly fundamental questions. When visiting rabbis have taught at Camp Sarah, she said, mothers have asked whether Jewish law would require them to marry their husband’s brother if their husband died — a practice described in the Torah’s Book of Deuteronomy known as yibbum, or levirate marriage.
But last year, the camp held a service led by women and they did an encore this week. Some of them have even said they would like to become rabbis.
“That’s something you don’t see here, but I’m like, ‘why not?’” Nwafor said. “Just go for it.”
Ruth Munghoho, a Ugandan Jew, flew through Ethiopia to Camp Sarah to teach after studying under Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the first native-born black rabbi in Sub-Saharan Africa. She sees her younger self in her campers.
“I grew up in a Christian community where we had no Jewish friends or neighbors,” she said. It took until young adulthood for her to be able to learn about Judaism. “If I could get this knowledge from childhood,” she said, “I know that I could be more than what I am now.”
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U.S. ambassador calls settlers who sieged Palestinian homes in Qusra ‘terrorists’
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – The West Bank settlement movement’s leadership joined with one of its most prominent defenders, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, in condemning an Israeli settler outpost set up in a Palestinian family’s yard.
Huckabee’s remarks are a signal of the degree to which a group of radicals is rattling Israeli politics and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Israelis affiliated with the West Bank’s Tel Talpiot outpost, which is illegal under Israeli law, set up temporary structures at the entrances to Palestinian homes on the outskirts of the village of Qusra on Sunday.
Earlier this week, cables connecting the homes to the electricity grid and to solar panels were cut, and water pipes were damaged, leaving the Palestinian families unable to leave or bring in food. Israeli activists in the area who monitor settler attacks on Palestinians confirmed the account to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Huckabee wrote on X on Thursday that Israeli forces had gone to Qusra at the U.S. Embassy’s request and described the people who set up the outpost as “Israeli terrorists.” He posted that “the IDF & Israel Police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this.”
The language was a departure for the ambassador, who told Israel’s Channel 14 last September that the United States “respects Israel as a sovereign state and will not tell Israel what to do” regarding sovereignty in the West Bank. Huckabee has also consistently described the territory by its biblical names Judea and Samaria. He routinely takes to social media to dismantle what he says are lies depicting Israelis as unfairly treating Palestinians.
He has condemned settler violence before, but has rarely done so in language as blunt as what he used on Thursday. In July 2025, he visited the Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank after an arson attack at its fifth-century church and called it an “act of terror and crime.”
The actions of Israeli settler extremists have been a major concern to Democrats in the U.S. Congress in recent months, adding fodder to their calls to condition aid to Israel on its behavior. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists the reports are overblown, and that Palestinian violence is much more serious. President Donald Trump, who has often supported Netanyahu, has called on the prime minister to crack down on the violence, seeing it as an impediment to his hopes for a broader Middle East peace. Huckabee’s intervention suggests that the Trump administration is increasingly concerned about ending the violence.
Yisrael Ganz, who chairs the Yesha Council and governs the Binyamin Regional Council, condemned the outpost.
“The events in Qusra are serious and do not reflect our values or our way of conducting ourselves,” Ganz said. “There is no place for individuals to take matters into their own hands and establish an outpost in someone’s backyard, even when dealing with an illegal home or an attempt to seize control of the land. There is no justification whatsoever for violence against uninvolved civilians or security forces.”
He added that some were “exploiting these events as part of a campaign against the Jewish communities,” but that this “must not obscure the simple truth: What happened in Qusra was wrong and is unacceptable to us.”
Huckabee amplified Ganz’s statement later on Thursday, writing on X, “’Settlers’ are not the problem in Judea/Samaria. ‘Unsettlers’ are,” he wrote, describing them as “very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families & to Israel.”
The village is located in Area B, territory that is under the civil jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority and security control of the Israeli military and where Israeli settlement is not permitted. The Israel Defense Forces called such takeovers illegal and reprehensible on Tuesday. Overnight Wednesday, Israeli security forces said they demolished the structures at Qusra and detained one Israeli.
Marmar Odeh, a village representative, told JTA that the Israeli military remained inside Qusra, and footage circulating on social media showed Israeli soldiers stationed inside the homes of evacuated residents.
“I won’t be going anywhere. I am staying in my house and on my land,” Odeh said. “I may not be scared, but the children are all the time.”
In a voice memo recorded on August 12 and obtained by JTA, Aisha Abu Rida, a Qusra resident, spoke from inside one of the besieged homes.
“We are surrounded by settlers, but we are steadfast,” she said. “Despite the water and electricity being cut off, we will remain steadfast … and stay in our homes.”
By Thursday, the structures were gone, but settlers remained on the hillsides above the homes, Odeh said, an account supported by footage he provided to JTA. Soldiers had left most of the homes they had entered, residents said Friday, but were informed the military operation could last until Sunday.
One of the affected homes belongs to Loui Ridi, a Toledo, Ohio, business owner who was born in Qusra and has followed the standoff through security cameras installed at the property. JTA attempted to reach Ridi through several channels and was unsuccessful.
Asked whether the State Department shared Huckabee’s characterization and whether the Embassy had requested the Israeli operation, a State Department spokesperson did not directly reply. “We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank,” the spokesperson said. “We condemn criminal violence by any party in the West Bank. A stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration’s goal to achieve peace in the region.”
In a statement to JTA, the Israeli military said soldiers had been deployed in Qusra since Thursday morning “to protect the residents and maintain security in the area” and that they had been instructed that “the Qusra residents will remain in their homes.”
It added that troops would not operate inside the Palestinian family’s home near the site “where the tent that was evacuated and dismantled had been erected” and said Civil Administration liaison officers were in contact with Qusra’s local leadership and “working to avoid disruption to the daily lives of the residents in the area.”
Footage circulating earlier in the week appeared to show Israeli soldiers praying alongside the settlers at the outpost. The military said that the incident is under review and that soldiers found to have taken part in illegal activity would be disciplined.
The designation of Area B is the source of the ambiguity, according to Hanan Greenwood, head of the spokesperson and public diplomacy unit at the Binyamin Regional Council.
The council’s jurisdiction covers the settlements themselves, Greenwood said, not Area B land, meaning Qusra sits inside the council’s footprint but outside its authority. Its residents fall under Palestinian Authority civil jurisdiction and pay the council no arnona, the Israeli municipal tax.
“Geographically, Qusra is very much in our area,” Greenwood said. “But in real life, it’s not that we could go there, and it’s not that the residents of Qusra pay us.”
He described the result as a governance vacuum. “It’s ours, it isn’t ours,” he said. “It’s a whole mess, and the reason is that there’s no sovereignty.”
Israeli rights groups reject that framing, arguing that the military has the authority to remove outposts and does not use it.
The Israeli rights group B’Tselem said the events reflect a broader pattern.
“What is happening in Qusra is not an isolated incident,” said Yuli Novak, the organization’s executive director. “Settler militias, backed by the Israeli military, are expanding their attacks into Palestinian villages and towns, seizing land, attacking homes and forcing families out. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in plain sight.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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