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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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Can an anti-Zionist Democrat win in a heavily Jewish South Florida district?
(JTA) — Democratic primary voters in Florida’s newly drawn 25th Congressional District are choosing on Tuesday between an anti-Zionist member of the Democratic Socialists of America and one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress.
The race offers a test of whether the Democratic Party’s progressive insurgency can extend to a district that includes Delray Beach, Boca Raton and Miami Beach and an electorate that is roughly 25% Jewish, highlighting the party’s widening divisions over Israel.
Redistricting has transformed what had been solidly Democratic territory into a district President Donald Trump would have carried in 2024. The new lines pit Oliver Larkin, a DSA member who has accused Israel of genocide and called for ending U.S. military aid to the country, against Jared Moskowitz, a two-term congressman who backs continued U.S. military aid even as support for it has eroded within his party.
Polling from Moskowitz-aligned firms has shown him with a lead of 30-plus percentage points, while a more recent poll from a Larkin-aligned outlet this month put the two in a statistical dead heat.
Larkin’s language has alarmed some Jews, including his labeling of modern-day Israel as a “religious supremacist” country and his call for Israel to become a “secular” state. “I do not support a religious supremacist regime, whether it be in Israel or Saudi Arabia, or any other country,” Larkin told Fox News.
Larkin supports a complete arms embargo on Israel, and told JTA that that should be “the minimum standard for anyone claiming to support democracy.” Asked by Fox News if he supports selling defensive weapons to Israel, Larkin responded, “I do not make a distinction between offensive and defensive weaponry.” He also backed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s goal of arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Larkin doubled down after Mamdani backed down from the stance, saying, “I believe that the United States, any federal or otherwise law enforcement entity that has the legal jurisdiction to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu for his war crimes — that should be enforced.”
Larkin has courted support from left-wing, anti-Zionist Jews who support his platform and says that he has spoken out against antisemitism on the campaign trail.
“Our campaign believes in collective liberation for all people and that includes the liberation of Jewish South Floridians and Jewish people the world over from antisemitism,” Larkin said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He said that there is a rise in fascism across the U.S. and that we “must recognize the link between antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and more and build a coalition to unite together to defeat these forces.”
Larkin said he supports a “one-state solution with equal and democratic rights for all people.”
Progressive, pro-Palestinian candidates with similar platforms have won the Democratic nomination this midterm cycle in deep-blue districts around the country. Larkin, who worked on Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, is betting he can match their success even in a heavily Jewish district that leans more to the center.
Moskowitz, who is endorsed by AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel, outright accused Larkin of fueling antisemitism, telling the Sun Sentinel editorial board in a letter that his opponent “has embraced the support of individuals and organizations that have repeatedly trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric and hostility toward the Jewish community.”
Last month, a Boca Raton rabbi encouraged Republican congregants to register as Democrats so they could cast their votes for Moskowitz. The far more moderate Democrat has refused to debate Larkin, saying that his opponent is contributing to antisemitism.
Moskowitz has also claimed that Larkin is “running against me solely on my religion.” The Sun Sentinel board rated Moskowitz’s claim “demonstrably untrue” and, in an unusual move, said it would not endorse him for reelection after he declined a joint interview with Larkin. The paper decried what it described as Moskowitz’s “lack of respect for voters.” Moskowitz’s campaign did not respond to a JTA request for comment.
Moskowitz has outraised Larkin 11-to-1, according to local media estimates. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has raised $667,200 of Moskowitz’s $2.5 million through June 30, according to campaign finance analyses done by the website Open Secrets.
Donna Nevel, a member of the South Florida chapter of the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, believes Larkin can win.
“There are thousands and thousands of us, from Jewish communities and all across South Florida, who are doing everything we can to make sure that Oliver will be our congressperson,” Nevel said to a cheering crowd, during a fundraiser held in New York City earlier this month.
She also said that “many Zionist organizations think that South Florida is their backyard.” She continued, “And we say, ‘Hell no!’”
In an email to JTA, Nevel said there are a “large and growing” number of Jews in the district supporting Larkin, including “well over a hundred Jewish canvassers on a regular basis.” Larkin joined a JVP-hosted Shabbat dinner with Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Florida’s left-wing U.S. Senate candidate Angie Nixon on Friday.
Larkin has said that we “should not be supporting or allowing AIPAC to influence our elections.” He told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that the group has a “corrupting influence” and that it only supports Congress members “on the condition, in my estimation, that they support wholesale U.S. military aid to Israel.”
Left-wing streamers Hasan Piker — a staunch Israel critic who’s drawn antisemitism accusations — and Michael Beyer, who was suspended from Twitch after calling Jews a “demon ethnicity,” have both fundraised for Larkin.
Asked about their support, Larkin told the Sun Sentinel that both figures have used “language that I personally have not used and will not use,” and said that as a candidate it is important “that I speak in respectful terms and based in fact.”
“But I believe that when those individuals have made those references it’s been towards members of the Israeli government,” Larkin said, as well as Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
“So certainly they’re not politicians and they don’t speak in political terms, and I don’t condone language that dehumanizes any individual,” he said. “I do think that they have legitimate criticism — even if it is rather unvarnished in how they convey it — of what the Israeli government has done.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Can an anti-Zionist Democrat win in a heavily Jewish South Florida district? appeared first on The Forward.
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Florida’s primaries have many pain points for Jews. Here are 5 races to watch
(JTA) — As an exhausting primary season begins to wind down, voters in Florida, the last remaining big state yet to hold its primaries, head to the polls Tuesday with several races on the Jewish community’s radar.
The conservative state is home to large numbers of Jews, including a growing number of Jewish emigres from more liberal enclaves, and features several marquee matchups on both sides of the aisle. The state has faced some political turmoil, including last-minute Republican-led redistricting that could hurt the chances of some pro-Israel Jewish Democrats at a moment when such figures are an endangered species in the U.S. House.
On the GOP side, the right’s civil war between hardline pro-Israel figures and a growing crop of white nationalist-adjacent Israel skeptics will be laid bare in multiple races.
Here are some of the storylines for Jews to watch for on Florida’s ballot:
The ‘groyper’ governor’s race
No other low-polling candidate this cycle has grabbed as much attention as James Fishback, the former investment banker running for governor in Florida.
Despite consistently trailing his rival, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, in the GOP primary, Fishback has raised concern among both Jewish conservatives and party elites. He has embraced online far-right figures including Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist and antisemitic influencer, and uses memes and coded phrases such as “goyslop” to court Fuentes’s “groyper” movement of young men who spread irony-laced antisemitic talking points online.
Asked earlier in the campaign about “goyslop,” a term that refers to low-quality food supposedly promoted by Jewish elites, Fishback told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency he employed it in a speech “because it’s funny. Get a life.”
Much of Fishback’s campaign has focused on the youth vote, fueling concerns that antisemitism could be a building block of the next generation of the right. His college campus visits have boasted high turnout, and young Republican groups that have hosted him have themselves been criticized for antisemitic behavior.
Few analysts expect Fishback to win the primary. His campaign has been mired by scandal and odd behavior, and Donalds, the Trump-endorsed frontrunner, leads most polls by comfortable margins. But Fishback is polling in the double digits in some recent analyses of likely voters from polling outlets including Cygnal, which also has him outpacing two other establishment candidates, and primary polling in Michigan and Wisconsin that turned out to be inaccurate further complicates the prognosis.
Even a reasonably strong performance from Fishback, particularly among the youth vote, would be met with alarm in some Jewish conservative corners.
A Jew who insults Muslims takes on a rival who insults Jews
Elsewhere in Florida’s Republican field, tensions between rising antisemitic and anti-Islamic sentiment within the party are mounting.
U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, the incumbent in the state’s deep-red 6th District, has prompted considerable ire on Capitol Hill for comments denigrating Muslims — including comparing them to dogs — and saying that Gazans should “starve away” until the Israeli hostages were released. As a hardline pro-Israel voter who also wears a kippah on the House floor, Fine has made his Judaism central to his political identity, making him a litmus test for both the right and organized Jewry.
Some of that ire has made it back to his home district, where Fine is facing primary challenger Dan Bilzerian, a celebrity poker player and Instagram influencer who routinely promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories. He has said he wants to “kill Israelis,” has called Fine a “fat Jew” and called antisemitism “a made-up term.” He has further claimed that Israel “wanted Oct. 7 to happen” and called reports of Hamas raping victims that day “bull—t.” Bilzerian has spent at least $1 million of his own money on the race.
The primary has been marked by inflammatory rhetoric and personal attacks. Fine responded to Bilzerian’s entry into the race by declaring that “we don’t want Armenians to be able to serve in Congress” (Bilzerian is Armenian), prompting anger from Armenian-American groups.
Last week a Fine campaign sign was defaced with a swastika, an act condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish groups. In a release, Fine accused Bilzerian’s supporters of having painted the swastika, a charge Bilzerian has denied and labeled “the most jew move of all time.”
On Friday, Fine’s campaign said the candidate had referred Bilzerian to federal investigators for allegedly receiving unreported campaign donations from China. Bilzerian’s pitch to voters heavily centers around antisemitism: “District 6 understands the jewish problem,” he wrote on social media over the weekend, accompanied by pictures of his campaign stops.
Some Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Committee, have condemned Fine’s rhetoric on Gaza and other matters. He still receives support from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, as well as the Republican Jewish Coalition, whose PAC has given his campaign thousands of dollars this cycle, according to federal election filings. In recent days, Republican leaders including House Speaker Mike Johnson — who had declined to condemn Fine’s earlier remarks about Muslims and dogs — have condemned Bilzerian’s antics as antisemitic.
The combined presence of Bilzerian and Fishback on the ballot is leading at least one GOP group to lump them together as similar threats. The Front Line, a Republican PAC aligned with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and formed with the goal of curbing antisemitism within the party, released an ad during the World Cup that attacked them both.
In the ad, which was generated with artificial intelligence, the two candidates are shown hosting a party with media personalities Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the pro-Palestinian group Code Pink and Iranian clerics who cut a giant cake made to look like a crossed-out Israeli flag.
One pro-Israel Dem faces a left-wing challenger…
Rep. Jared Moskowitz, one of the most pro-Israel Democrats in Congress, is finding himself in a familiar predicament this election cycle: fending off an anti-Zionist democratic socialist.
Activist Oliver Larkin is running against Moskowitz for the seat in the state’s 25th District, which is about 25% Jewish and is considered a toss-up in November after being redrawn this year. Moskowitz currently represents the 23rd District, which covers much of the same ground.
Moskowitz has outraised his challenger 11-to-1, according to local media estimates, and has refused to debate him. He has the support of AIPAC, which has raised at least $667,000 for him, according to analyses of federal campaign reports.
He also has a groundswell of Jewish support in the district, even from some unlikely corners: The rabbi of a large Orthodox synagogue in Boca Raton has encouraged his congregants to change their voter registrations from Republican to Democrat in order to cast votes for Moskowitz.
Polling from Moskowitz-aligned firms has shown him with a considerable lead, while a poll from a Larkin-aligned outlet this month put the two in a statistical dead heat.
Moskowitz has also outright accused Larkin of fomenting antisemitism, telling the South Florida Sun Sentinel editorial board in a letter that his opponent “has embraced the support of individuals and organizations that have repeatedly trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric and hostility toward the Jewish community.”
Moskowitz has also claimed that Larkin is “running against me solely on my religion.” The Sun Sentinel board rated Moskowitz’s claim “demonstrably untrue” and, in an unusual move, said it would not endorse him for reelection after he declined a joint interview with Larkin. The paper decried what it described as Moskowitz’s “lack of respect for voters.”
But Larkin’s own language has alarmed some Jews, including his labeling of modern-day Israel as a “religious supremacist” country and his call for Israel to become a “secular” state. Asked by Fox News if he supports selling defensive weapons to Israel, Larkin responded, “I do not make a distinction between offensive and defensive weaponry.” A rally he and other progressive candidates were scheduled to participate in with Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan on Friday was moved at the last minute after the venue, citing Jewish leaders’ concerns over Tlaib’s anti-Israel rhetoric, cancelled.
Larkin has denied charges of antisemitism and spoken positively about Judaism on the campaign trail. In a statement to JTA, his campaign said he would advocate for “the liberation of Jewish South Floridians and Jewish people the world over from antisemitism,” and said an arms embargo on Israel should be “the minimum standard for anyone claiming to support democracy.”
He also has the support of Jewish figureheads on the anti-Zionist left. Author and trans activist Abby Stein was among a group of progressive figures who hosted a fundraiser for him in Brooklyn earlier this month.
… while another faces a redistricting controversy
Things once seemed simpler for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, an establishment Jewish Democrat and former chair of the Democratic National Committee who has comfortably served in Congress since 2004 from a safe blue seat.
But after a late GOP-led redistricting push in Florida earlier this year, prompted by President Donald Trump’s demands for Republicans to redraw their districts to help them hold the House, Wasserman Schultz’s future is suddenly a lot less certain.
Instead of the district she has represented for decades and which many Democratic observers believed she could still win despite the gerrymandering, the congresswoman decided to run in the neighboring 20th — a heavily Black district that for three decades has been represented by a Black lawmaker.
And Wasserman Schultz’s primary opponents, including a former congresswoman facing a federal fraud trial and 2 Live Crew rap star “Uncle Luke” Campbell, aren’t happy she’s gunning for the seat. Critics accuse Wasserman Schultz of carpetbagging and say her decision to run in an easier seat will harm Black representation in government. Campbell has said her decision to run would harm Black-Jewish relations.
Even congressional leaders normally in Wasserman Schultz’s corner have balked at her decision. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries withheld an endorsement in the race, citing what he called the “sensitivities of the moment.”
Florida’s third Jewish Democratic mainstay in the House, Rep. Lois Frankel, is facing her own primary challenge in a new district — though in her case, the boundaries are similar to her old district. Frankel, a staunch Israel supporter, will have to defeat progressive challenger Victoria Doyle, a retired attorney. The close resemblance to her old district and lack of substantive groundswell support behind Doyle likely means Frankel will retain the party’s nomination.
Besides redistricting, Wasserman Schultz and Frankel, as with other institutional Democrat figures, are also facing a voter base unhappy with the party’s status quo. This year the state’s LGBTQ+ Democratic Caucus withheld endorsements in both races, despite Wasserman Schultz’s and Frankel’s historically good relationships with the caucus. Rep. Jared Moskovitz, meanwhile, did receive the caucus’s endorsement.
DSA vs. Soviet refugee in Dem Senate primary
Democrats haven’t held a U.S. Senate seat in Florida since 2019. But in a midterm environment expected to favor the party, the state could prove pivotal, and the primary to replace former Sen. Marco Rubio is putting one of the party’s biggest division points — “socialist” branding — in the spotlight.
The frontrunner for the nomination, retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, is a Kyiv-born Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union. Vindman, whose twin brother is a congressman in Virginia, attained broader name recognition during the first Trump administration, when he publicly testified about a controversial phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Vindman’s opponent is state Rep. Angie Nixon, who, in contrast to her opponent’s family history of fleeing from socialism, recently joined the Democratic Socialists of America. Nixon has made noise in her party for pushing pro-Palestinian legislation on the state level — including a push, less than a month after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, for “de-escalation and cease-fire in the state of Israel and occupied Palestine.”
Nixon has campaigned alongside Oliver Larkin, as well as far-left elected figures in the party including Tlaib, and her pro-Palestinian positions are a big point of worry for some Jewish figures. But in a state with high numbers of voters, particularly Latinos, who have fled socialist or Communist regimes, it’s the candidates’ associations with the “S”-word that may prove the deciding factor.
Vindman has far outraised Nixon to date, and leads in the scant polling that has been conducted so far. A July poll from the University of North Florida, however, suggests that Nixon fares slightly better against the Republican nominee, appointed Sen. Ashley Moody.
Joseph Strauss contributed reporting.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Florida’s primaries have many pain points for Jews. Here are 5 races to watch appeared first on The Forward.
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Vandals attack prominent Reform synagogue in Jerusalem
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Vandals broke into a Reform synagogue in Jerusalem over the weekend, damaging the building and artwork and tearing down Pride flags displayed by the congregation.
Shortly after midnight a group of youths entered the grounds of Kol HaNeshamah in Jerusalem’s Baka neighborhood, smashed a window and made their way into the prayer hall.
Security footage released by the Reform movement shows at least three people at the site. No congregants were present at the time.
“This past weekend we experienced a serious incident at our synagogue, when unknown individuals broke into the compound, damaged the building, vandalized a work of art and tore down the Pride flags that represent the community’s values of inclusion and acceptance,” Debi Shoua Haim, a rabbi at Kol HaNeshamah, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Precisely during the month of mercy and forgiveness, it is painful to see displays of hatred and violence that have no place in a properly functioning society,” Shoua Haim said, referring to the Hebrew month of Elul, traditionally a period of repentance leading up to the Jewish High Holidays.
The congregation turned over security footage from the incident to police, who opened an investigation through Jerusalem’s Moriah station, Shoua Haim said. Police also sent a detective to the synagogue on Saturday to examine the footage and collect fingerprints, according to Shoua Haim.
Kol HaNeshamah is one of Israel’s best-known Reform congregations and has previously been targeted in attacks involving its support for the LGBTQ community. In 2018, a large rock was hurled into its courtyard while more than 200 people were taking part in Simchat Torah celebrations, prompting the congregation to file a police complaint. No one was injured.
In June 2023, the synagogue reported two break-ins within a matter of weeks in which Pride flags displayed for Pride Month were torn down. During one of those incidents, intruders also entered the sanctuary, although nothing was stolen.
Security footage from the 2023 incidents showed two youths entering the synagogue. Rabbi Oded Mazor, another rabbi at Kol HaNeshamah, said at the time that the intruders had entered through a kitchen window before moving through the building, kicking objects and pulling down the flag. Police complaints were filed after both attacks.
The latest attack drew condemnation from Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi and lawmaker from Israel’s Democrats party who previously headed the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism.
Kariv called those responsible “incited hooligans” and accused the Israeli government of contributing to hostility toward Reform and other liberal Jewish denominations.
“This is a government that specializes in spreading hatred for free and in delegitimizing the liberal Jewish streams,” he wrote on X.
Kariv also called on Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion to visit Kol HaNeshamah and publicly stand with the congregation. Reform and Conservative communities in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel face similar attacks “on a weekly basis,” he said.
Lion has not yet publicly commented on the incident but Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Yossi Havilio described it as part of a “wave of hate crimes against the LGBTQ community in Jerusalem,” saying the Pride flag had been taken from the synagogue and urged police not to dismiss the vandalism as a prank.
“A hate crime is not a ‘prank,’” Havilio wrote on social media.
The incident also came within hours of an attack at Central Synagogue, a major Reform congregation in Manhattan, where an assailant disrupted a Friday night Shabbat service and attacked a congregant and a security guard. There has been no indication that the two incidents were connected.
Kol HaNeshamah was founded in Jerusalem in 1984 and has become a prominent center of Reform Judaism in the city, combining egalitarian religious practice with support for religious pluralism and LGBTQ inclusion. Its presence in Jerusalem has also periodically made it a target of opposition from critics of non-Orthodox Judaism.
Police have not publicly identified the perpetrators or declared a motive for Saturday’s break-in, and there have been no arrests announced in the case.
Shoua Haim said the congregation would not change course in response to the attack.
“To all those who are trying to extinguish our light, the Kol HaNeshamah community will continue to be an open, embracing and accepting house of prayer,” she said. “Hatred will not defeat our values, and we will continue to work for togetherness, love and tolerance.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Vandals attack prominent Reform synagogue in Jerusalem appeared first on The Forward.
