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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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Irish national soccer team won’t shake hands with Israel after win
(JTA) — It only took 25 minutes of play for the Irish national soccer team to build a 3-0 lead over Israel in the countries’ UEFA Nations League B match on Sunday. But there were decades of bad blood that preceded Ireland’s shutout victory in a game dominated more by the geopolitics of the Gaza war than about sports. One soccer writer described it as “arguably one of the most contentious football matches of this century.”
At the match, held in a mostly empty stadium in the neutral site of Debrecen, Hungary, the Irish players wore black armbands and bowed their heads in protest during the Israeli national anthem. There were no pre- or postgame handshakes, and one Irish player declined to participate altogether, citing his “personal belief that the killing of innocent people is wrong.”
Ireland’s soccer federation did not reserve tickets for its fans, and the country’s public broadcaster scaled back its coverage of the game. The teams are set to meet again on Oct. 4 in Serbia, this time with Ireland as the “home” team.
Ireland and Israel have a long history of icy relations. Ireland became the first member of the European Union to call for an independent Palestinian country in 1980, and was among the first of the Western European countries to recognize an official Palestinian state in 2024. Israel closed its embassy in Dublin in response. Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin has rejected claims that his country’s sharp criticism of Israel bleeds into antisemitism.
In the months leading up to Sunday’s match, Ireland’s football governing body faced intense pressure to boycott the match. At a meeting in July, the Football Association of Ireland voted 75-32, with three abstentions, in favor of proceeding with the match, “while acknowledging the strength of feeling regarding support for Palestine.” The motion also noted that a boycott would come with UEFA sanctions, both financial and competitive: In League B matches, mid-tier nations seek to advance to the top division and boost their chances of qualifying for the quadrennial World Cup tournament. The Irish team itself also held a last-minute vote over whether to participate.
Earlier this month, more than 160 Irish athletes and sports figures signed an open letter calling on the national team to pull out of the match. The signatories included former Irish national team head coach Brian Kerr — who had led Ireland to a 2-2 draw against Israel in a 2005 match in Dublin that also took place amid protests.
Former Irish national team star Kevin Kilbane also authored a column in The Irish Times, writing, “Ireland should not play Israel. Not in Dublin, not in Hungary, not in Serbia. Not when Israel is committing genocide.” Israel denies the charge of genocide.
There were also a number of public barbs exchanged between leaders of the two countries and their football associations.
At a press conference last week, Irish coach Heimir Hallgrímsson replied to questions about the match by saying, “We are not playing with genocide, we are playing against genocide. We are playing against Israel; we are not playing with Israel.”
Israel’s football association responded to that comment with a post on X, writing, “We have contributed to the world and humanity in countless fields, earning an impressive number of Nobel Prizes along the way. Unfortunately, we have not yet found a cure for stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy displayed by the @IrelandFootball team coach. We’re not playing with ignorance, hypocrisy and stupidity. We’re playing against the coach who embodies them.”
That drew a rebuke from Martin, who told reporters, “They are unacceptable remarks and should be withdrawn.”
And on Sunday, the morning of the match, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar posted a lengthy tweet referencing the 1939 Irish squad that gave a Nazi salute before a game against the German national team.
“Almost 90 years have passed. Ireland’s unique talent for finding itself on the wrong side of history remains intact,” Sa’ar wrote. “Back then, they gave the Nazi salute. This time, they stand on the side of Palestinian terrorism. Above the black armbands the Irish players will wear tonight flies the black flag of jihadism.”
After the match, Israeli captain Manor Solomon said the Irish players who bowed their heads during the Israeli anthem “don’t interest me.”
“We have a country 10 times better than theirs, stronger, an amazing country with amazing people,” said Solomon, who plays in the English Championship league. “We are proud to wear the team shirt and to be Israelis. We are proud of our state and of our soldiers. [The Irish] can play all their tricks. We are Israelis and love the country. And that will always be the case.”
The post Irish national soccer team won’t shake hands with Israel after win appeared first on The Forward.
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Why is Karl Rove supporting a progressive Jewish candidate in Texas?
(JTA) — Progressive Jewish Texas state Sen. Jon Rosenthal has earned an unusual distinction: He is the first Democrat to win the vote of GOP guru Karl Rove in more than 30 years.
What did the only Jew serving in the Texas state house do to earn this distinction? It’s more what he didn’t do: run for statewide office with a track record of spewing racially charged and antisemitic comments.
Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad commissioner, has a history of rhetoric targeting people of color, Muslims and Jews, including a social media poll last year asking whether “Jews” or “Muslims” pose “a bigger threat to America.”
He also faced bipartisan blowback for a recent post targeting college students of color, and this week a CNN investigation revealed that French, in since-deleted posts, had called for public executions for former President Barack Obama, Jewish California Sen. Adam Schiff and government workers targeted by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency last year.
The controversy has elevated the race for an obscure statewide office – albeit one that regulates the state’s all-important energy industry – into a larger referendum on the GOP’s tolerance for bigotry, including antisemitism, among its nominees.
Rove, for one, has made it clear where he thinks the party should stand.
“The GOP has a growing number of Bo Frenches — and not only in Texas,” Rove wrote in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month in explaining his decision to back Rosenthal.
Rove singled out growing antisemitism in the party: “There are ‘just asking questions’ Jew-haters, misogynists who worship hypermasculinity, conspiracy nuts seeking clicks for profit, and religious bigots who won’t differentiate between Muslim terrorists and Muslim American patriots.”
Rove isn’t the only GOP stalwart to turn on French.
“Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized,” outgoing Texas Sen. John Cornyn wrote in condemning French’s social media musings. “This is how great political parties self-destruct.”
Cornyn has stopped short of backing Rosenthal, instead saying he might leave the ballot blank.
Texas Rep. Jon E. Rosenthal inside the House Chamber at the Texas Capitol in Austin on Aug. 18, 2025. (Mikala Compton/Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images)
Rosenthal and French have agreed to a debate on Oct. 22. French leads the race in polling released last week from Texas Southern University, but by a much slimmer margin than GOP candidates are accustomed to in Texas. Rosenthal’s campaign could also see a boost from fellow statewide Democratic candidate James Talarico, who is polling neck-and-neck with his opponent in the U.S. Senate race.
On social media, Rosenthal celebrated Rove’s endorsement, writing, “When GOP architect Karl Rove breaks a 30-year voting streak to endorse our campaign, it proves this race isn’t about party lines, it’s about competence vs. chaos.”
A former county Republican Party chair who defeated the incumbent GOP state railroad commissioner in a runoff primary, French spurred widespread backlash earlier this month after posting a photo of students of color at the University of Texas celebrating a football win to the social network X.
“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it,” French had captioned the photo on Sept. 13. “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” He has since doubled down on the sentiment, replying, “I weep for the families in Texas who can’t get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans,” and using the backlash to solicit donations.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state House Speaker Dustin Burrows were among the other Republicans who criticized French for the post, though neither formally rescinded their support, and French continues to list Abbott’s endorsement on his site.
It was not French’s first brush with bigotry. In 2025, during his stint as Tarrant County GOP Chair, French posted an online “poll” asking his followers whether “Jews” or “Muslims” pose “a bigger threat to America.” In a follow-up post, he argued, “You may not like Jews, but to suggest they are a bigger threat to Americans is Jew Derangement Syndrome.”
French later deleted both posts, and has few visible tweets about Jews today. In later posts, he claimed, of himself, “There has never been any evidence of antisemitism. It would certainly be surprising to my Jewish partners.”
Jewish Republicans in the state and beyond are largely keeping their distance from French, with one exception. His campaign site currently touts an endorsement from American Jewish Conservatives, whose only listed chapter is in Dallas.
Neither French nor the group, formerly Dallas Jewish Conservatives, responded to JTA requests for comment on the endorsement. A spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition also did not return a request for comment on French.
Last month French cited a desire to combat antisemitism when arguing that Texas should not use mosques as polling places. In other posts, he accused a university in the state of “harboring radical left/antisemitic professors,” identified himself as both pro-Israel and pro-Tucker Carlson, the talk show host who has platformed antisemites and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and told one follower, “I have never served Israel. Don’t be a retard.”
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was among the GOP officials who condemned French’s tweet about Jews last year, calling on him to resign as county chair. “Antisemitism and religious bigotry have no place in Texas,” Patrick said then. French ultimately resigned months later in order to run for railroad commissioner.
Today, French lists Patrick as one of his endorsements. A spokesperson for Patrick, who recently told JTA he supported Texas schools assigning books on the Holocaust after public remarks apparently to the contrary, did not return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.
French’s other listed endorsements include Texas congressional candidate Brandon Herrera, who has made jokes about Hitler and the Holocaust in YouTube videos.
Rove’s essay led to President Donald Trump wading into the controversy, calling Rove “so bad for the Republican Party, and completely wrong so often,” in a post on his social network Truth Social. Trump’s post did not mention French, nor address his past post about Jews.
The Texas railroad commission, composed of three members, oversees the state’s large and powerful oil and gas industry. It has no oversight into immigration or religion. Even so, French’s campaign has drifted far afield from energy issues: One of his pledges is “Stop the Islamic Invasion of Texas.”
French’s controversies have elevated the profile of Rosenthal, who was raised a Reform Jew in an interfaith household and whose Houston-area district is home to large Muslim communities. This year Rosenthal marked Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur by sharing links to Chabad-Lubavitch webpages about the holidays.
Rosenthal’s campaign did not respond to a JTA request for comment, but he told the Forward last year that he identifies as agnostic and “multireligious,” and attends synagogues as well as mosques and churches.
Rosenthal is also a trained mechanical engineer, a background he has drawn on in his bid for railroad commissioner: one campaign ad, quoting a conservative radio host, approvingly calls him “a ‘drill, baby, drill’ Democrat.” He has accused French of “overt racism,” while French has dubbed his opponent “Radical Rosenthal” and posted images, generated using artificial intelligence, of cross-shaped Texas oil wells to promote his blending of energy policy with Christian iconography.
Last year, Rosenthal cited his Judaism in response to legislation that would require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom. Rosenthal introduced an amendment that would have required a “Jewish” version of the commandments to be displayed alongside the “Protestant” one. The amendment failed, and the bill passed.
The post Why is Karl Rove supporting a progressive Jewish candidate in Texas? appeared first on The Forward.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs bill to create safe spaces around synagogues
(JTA) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has signed a law that will create protective spaces around religious institutions, after a pro-Palestinian protest at a Los Angeles synagogue last year turned violent.
The legislation, AB 2664, establishes 100-foot zones around the entrances to houses of worship. Within the zones, no one will be allowed to come within eight feet of a congregant without consent to distribute leaflets, hold a sign or engage in oral protests that aim “to harass, obstruct, threaten or intimidate the person.”
Failure to comply could result in fines of up to $1,000 and/or imprisonment of no more than six months, with second violations raising those bars to $5,000 and one year, per the law.
“Every Californian should be able to walk into a synagogue, church, mosque, or other house of worship without fear,” Newsom said in a statement.
“California is continuing to protect these organizations and the people they serve, and we’re strengthening that work from the front door to expanding security resources to community events statewide.”
Newsom’s status as a leading Democrat – and one considering a 2028 presidential run – makes his enthusiastic endorsement notable. Progressives in other locales, including New York City, have pushed back against similar laws, saying they endanger speech protections.
The bill’s signing came less than a year after a violent protest rattled the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. At the December event, pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocked people from entering the synagogue and cut off parental access to the religious school. Protesters destroyed property and assaulted a security guard; one person was arrested for battery and another for vandalism.
At the time, Mayor Karen Bass denounced the incident, which took place at one of the largest synagogues in the city, as both “abhorrent” and antisemitic.
The following spring, California Assembly member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, a Democrat, introduced the legislation, drafted by Jewish California, a lobby representing a number of the state’s Jewish groups.Newsom signed the bill on Friday inside Wilshire Boulevard Temple, joined by Jewish California leaders, synagogue clergy and members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus and the broader community.
The legislation advanced despite vocal opposition. The Council on American-Islamic Relations slammed the bill for infringing upon free speech by creating “new criminal penalties that would put peaceful protesters and community advocates at risk.”
In a statement following Newsom’s signing ceremony, the council’s California CEO, Hussam Ayloush, argued that some sales of “illegally occupied land” are occurring “exclusively to Jewish Americans at events hosted by American synagogues.”
“If a house of worship in America chooses to serve as a platform for illegal land sales meant to normalize Palestinian displacement, Americans should be able to peacefully demonstrate against that immoral activity,” Ayloush said. The protest at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple did not target land sales, but a public safety and technology event organized by the Consulate General of Israel.
Jewish California stressed that the legislation not only gained support from dozens of Jewish groups but also from Muslim, Sikh, Christian and Hindu organizations. Ultimately, the bill passed with 34 out of 40 State Senate votes and 61 of 80 State Assembly votes.
“With the Governor’s signature, California is sending a clear message: everyone has the right to practice their faith safely and freely,” Bauer-Kahan said in a statement.
“Antisemitism is rising, and so is hostility towards other religious communities,” she added. “This law protects all worshippers of all faiths, and it ensures that faith can be practiced without fear.”
AB 2664 was one of six bills relevant to the Jewish community that passed in California’s state legislature last month. Newsom signed one of the other bills, AB 1853, on Monday afternoon — enacting a ban on including misleading or threatening information, like hate speech, in California voter guides.
The governor has until Sept. 30 to either sign or veto the other four pieces of legislation. Among the most contentious is SB 1387, a bill that would expand the definition of ethnicity “to include Jewish identity” on state agency data collection forms.
The post California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs bill to create safe spaces around synagogues appeared first on The Forward.
