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Aruba’s new rabbi comes out of retirement to lead a congregation in ‘paradise’
ORANJESTAD, Aruba (JTA) — One of Alberto Zeilicovich’s first duties as a Conservative rabbi was to officiate the funeral of a 20-year-old congregant, murdered by a drug cartel while enjoying a night out with his friends at a disco.
It was the late 1980s in Medellin, Colombia, and Zeilicovich had entered the pulpit at the height of the Colombian drug wars and the reign of notorious kingpin Pablo Escobar. Two years later, he would bury another member of the congregation murdered by the cartel.
“We felt fear,” Zeilicovich, who goes by Baruch, said about his six years in Medellin. “The president of the congregation told me you cannot walk on Shabbos to the synagogue. ‘You should come with a car.’ I asked, ‘Are you afraid someone is going to kidnap me?’ He said, ‘No, I am afraid somebody will kill you.’”
To give him a break, a congregant sent Zeilicovich on a trip to Aruba and Curacao, islands where, he recalled, he could “unplug a little bit from a situation that was very dangerous.”
That 1990 trip would ultimately result in the other bookend of his career: Zeilicovich recently came out of retirement to begin a three-year contract as the rabbi of Beth Israel Synagogue, a small synagogue on the Dutch island of Aruba in the southern Caribbean Sea. He had visited the island at least once a year for the past 32 years.
Temple Beth Israel, a Conservative-style synagogue in Oranjestad, Aruba, was consecrated in 1962. (Dan Fellner)
“First, the people are very friendly,” he says of Aruba, which has a population of about 100,000 and is officially called a “constituent country” of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. “Second, it’s a very safe place. And third, the island is a paradise. Everything is so beautiful.”
The synagogue, located in the island’s capital city of Oranjestad, is not affiliated with any movement of Judaism but operates in the style of the egalitarian Conservative movement. It is just a block from one of Aruba’s signature white-sand beaches and a five-minute drive to Eagle Beach, perhaps its most famous.
While Zeilicovich no longer needs armed security guards to accompany him to synagogue as he did in Medellin, he still brings to the pulpit the difficult life lessons he learned during those tumultuous years in Colombia.
“Being in Medellin made me realize how a rabbi should teach the congregation about what are the most important things in life,” he says. “That shaped me in understanding what the role of a rabbi should be — a facilitator for everybody to be a better Jew, a better person.”
Zeilicovich, who speaks five languages, was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he experienced antisemitism and life under an oppressive military regime. He studied at a rabbinical seminary in Buenos Aires before completing his ordination at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem.
Following his six years in Medellin, Zeilicovich moved to a synagogue in Bogota, the capital city of Colombia, before rabbinical stints in Puerto Rico, Texas and most recently New Jersey, where he announced his retirement from Temple Beth Sholom in Fair Lawn in late 2020.
Zeilicovich and his wife Graciela had moved to Israel when he got a phone call from Daniel Kripper, a friend and fellow Argentine who was retiring as the rabbi of Aruba’s Beth Israel.
“He called me and said, ‘Baruch, what are you doing in Israel?’ I said I’m going to the beach. He said, ‘Why don’t you come to the beach in Aruba where you can have a congregation again?’ And I said, ‘Why not?’”
According to Richenella Wever, a member of the Beth Israel board, Zeilicovich has been a good fit with the synagogue’s diverse congregation. “His way of thinking, teaching and his ability to connect the Torah with daily life is amazing,” she said.
Jewish life in Aruba dates back to the 16th century, when immigrants arrived from the Netherlands and Portugal. In 1754, Moses Solomon Levie Maduro, who came from a prominent Portuguese Jewish family in Curacao, settled in Aruba, where he founded the Aruba branch of the Dutch West Indies Company. Maduro paved the way for more immigrants but the island’s Jewish population has always remained small. It’s now about 100.
In 1956, the Dutch Kingdom officially recognized the Jewish community of Aruba; Beth Israel was consecrated six years later. The synagogue calls itself a “Conservative egalitarian temple keeping Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions.” In addition to Beth Israel, there is a Chabad chapter on the island that opened in 2013.
With a membership of just 50 local families and a few dozen overseas residents, Beth Israel has limited resources. A Dutch law stipulating that the salaries of clergy in Holland’s overseas territories be paid by the government helps the synagogue remain solvent.
“This is really unique,” says Zeilicovich. “You can be a minister of an evangelical church, a Roman Catholic priest, an imam from a mosque or a rabbi from a synagogue — the government pays the salary.
“When I want to brag about myself, I say I am an employee of the Crown of Holland,” he added with a laugh.
Zeilicovich says the Aruban government has been highly supportive of the Jewish community, even erecting a life-sized bronze statue in 2010 of Anne Frank in Queen Wilhelmina Park in downtown Oranjestad.
A bronze statue of Anne Frank stands in the Queen Wilhelmina Park in downtown Oranjestad, Aruba, at left; at right, a T-shirt for sale in the Beth Israel gift shop in Aruba reads “Bon Bini,” meaning “welcome” in Papiamento, the local language. (Dan Fellner)
“That means they have respect for the Jewish community,” he says. “And they are very sympathetic with us about the Holocaust.”
Zeilicovich says a typical Friday night Shabbat service attracts about 20 people, about one-third of whom are tourists. Some arrive on the many cruise ships that dock just a mile away from the synagogue; others stay at condos or at one of Aruba’s posh resorts.
If there aren’t enough worshippers for a prayer quorum of 10 on Saturday mornings, a Torah study group meets instead. The synagogue’s small sanctuary can hold 60 worshippers, and is normally full for the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur each fall.
“We are a friendly, welcoming congregation,” Zeilicovich says. “We are family — mishpocha. When you come here, we try to make you feel that way.”
Indeed, a popular item in the synagogue’s small gift shop is a T-shirt imprinted with the words “Bon Bini Shalom.” Bon Bini means “welcome” in Papiamento, the Portuguese-based Creole language spoken in the Dutch Caribbean.
Zeilicovich says one of his priorities as the new rabbi is to improve the synagogue’s marketing efforts and revamp its website. He adds that Aruba’s Jewish community often is overshadowed by Curacao, its Dutch neighbor to the east that is home to the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Americas.
“We are behind in marketing,” he said. “And we understand we are missing a huge opportunity.”
For now, Zeilicovich is enjoying his time in Aruba and can’t help but marvel at how his life has changed since his days as a rabbi in Medellin when just getting from his home to the synagogue was a dangerous ordeal.
“I think about that and look to heaven and say, ‘God, thank you.’”
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Free Speech Advocacy Group Walks Back Condemnation of Israeli Comedian’s Shows Being Abruptly Canceled
The Israeli national flag flutters as apartments are seen in the background in the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim in the West Bank, Aug. 16, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
An organization dedicated to protecting free speech has withdrawn a statement in which it condemned the last-minute cancellations of two performances by Israeli comedian Guy Hochman, after he faced backlash over his support for Israel.
Two venues, in New York and California, canceled Hochman’s scheduled performances last month.
Hochman’s show in New York City was canceled by its venue due to safety concerns after anti-Israel protesters picketed outside of the establishment.
The Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills, California, then called off Hochman’s gig after receiving pressure from anti-Israel activists, including threats of violence. The theater said it made the decision also after Hochman declined the venue’s demands to publicly condemn his home country of Israel for the alleged “genocide, rape, starvation, and torture of Palestinian civilians.”
PEN America initially condemned the cancellations of Hochman’s shows in a statement shared on its website on Jan. 29. At the time, Jonathan Friedman, the managing director of US free expression programs at PEN America, said, “It is a profound violation of free expression to demand artists, writers, or comedians agree to ideological litmus tests as a condition to appear on a stage.”
“People have every right to protest his events, but those who wish to hear from Hochman also have a right to do so,” Friedman added. The statement accused Hochman of “dehumanizing social media posts about Palestinians” but also noted that “shutting down cultural events is not the solution.”
On Tuesday, however, PEN America removed the message from its website and replaced it with another statement explaining the move: “On further consideration, PEN America has decided to withdraw this statement. We remain committed to open and respectful dialogue about the divisions that arise in the course of defending free expression.” A spokesperson for PEN America did not immediately respond to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment to further explain the organization’s change of heart.
In 2024, a campaign was launched to boycott PEN America after the group was accused of being apologetic to the alleged “genocide” of Palestinians and “apartheid” in Israel, as well as of “normalizing Zionism.”
Members of PEN America include novelists, journalists, nonfiction writers, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, agents, and other writing professionals, according to its website. The organization has a page on its website dedicated to information about “Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” which begins by claiming that the “Israeli government has cracked down on free expression of writers and public intellectuals in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas.” The webpage is highly critical of the Jewish state and its military actions in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war, which started in response to the deadly rampage orchestrated by the US-designated terror organization across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The same webpage highlights a list of “individual cases” of Palestinian activists and writers that Israel has allegedly detained, arrested, or convicted, but there are no specific details shared about their offenses. The list includes Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, who was convicted of incitement to terrorism for a poem she wrote and comments she made on social media during a wave of Palestinian attacks against Jews.
The list also includes Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, but the provided description about Tamimi does not mention that she was convicted on four counts of assaulting an IDF officer and soldier, incitement, and interference with IDF forces in March 2018.
A third writer on the list is Mosab Abu Toha, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist who tried to justify Hamas’s abduction of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.
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Faith in Judaism Demands Grappling With Sacred Words
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The Reformation firebrand Martin Luther was not a gentle soul. He was brilliant, courageous, and historically transformative, but he was also volatile, cruel, and spectacularly foul-mouthed. When Luther disliked someone, he didn’t merely disagree with them – he eviscerated them.
His pamphlets dripped with bile, his language was obscene, and when it came to Jews, his writings were vicious, laying the groundwork for some of the darkest chapters of later European history. None of this, to be clear, negates the fact that Luther correctly identified real corruption and hypocrisy within the Catholic Church of his day.
Luther’s stock response to his critics within the Church was deceptively simple: prove me wrong from the text of the Bible. If it wasn’t written explicitly in Scripture, he dismissed it as human invention, manmade directives masquerading as divine command.
He had no time for tradition, accumulated wisdom, or interpretation; everything was suspect unless it could be nailed down to “chapter and verse,” as he liked to put it. Luther’s position appeared principled and even pious, but it placed enormous – and ultimately destructive – weight on the written word alone.
Of course, as is often the case with sweeping theological positions, consistency proved difficult. At one point, Luther came up against a short New Testament text that stubbornly refused to cooperate with his theology. The Epistle of James insists that faith without works is dead, a line that clashed directly with Luther’s doctrine of salvation by faith alone.
In a telling moment, Luther remarked, “We should throw the Epistle of James out of this school, for it doesn’t amount to much.” Instead of wrestling with the verse or considering how generations of Christians had understood it, he dismissed the book altogether. And that was that. If it didn’t fit, it didn’t count.
The episode is almost comic, but it exposes the fatal fault line in Luther’s entire approach. A theology that insists on absolute fidelity to the text grants enormous power to the reader. When interpretation is denied, selection takes its place.
From a Jewish perspective, there is something eerily familiar about this obsession with textual literalism. The Second Temple–era Sadducees rejected ancient traditions and rabbinic interpretation in favor of the bare biblical text.
Centuries later, the Karaites would do the same, insisting that anything not spelled out explicitly in the Torah was illegitimate. Their position was internally consistent – and completely unworkable. A faith that forbids interpretation does not preserve religious observance; it paralyzes it.
The Torah reveals its intention regarding the centrality of interpretation at the very moment of revelation in Parshat Yitro. When God speaks at Sinai, He does not present the Jewish people with a comprehensive legal code, nor does He offer an exhaustively detailed constitution. Instead, He presents ten short statements – majestic and memorable, but remarkably sparse.
Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not commit adultery. Honor your parents. These are not radical moral breakthroughs. Any functioning society would struggle to survive without them.
Even the commandments that sound more overtly theological – belief in God, rejection of idolatry, observing Shabbat – are delivered with little definition or elaboration. What does it mean to believe? What counts as idolatry? What does remembering Shabbat actually require? The text does not say.
That silence is no oversight. If the Torah had intended to function as a closed book, the Ten Commandments as they are presented would be inexplicably inadequate. They contain no legal thresholds, no procedural detail, and no guidance for variation or complexity.
“Do not steal” tells us nothing about business partnerships, contracts, fraud, or intellectual property. “Do not murder” offers no framework for intent, self-defense, negligence, or the rules of war. “Remember the Sabbath day” may be stirring rhetoric, but as law, it is unusable. What, precisely, are we supposed to remember? And what are the practical applications?
The answer, of course, is that the Torah itself never expected these questions to be answered by the text alone. The Ten Commandments were never meant to stand by themselves. They are headline principles – foundational truths that demand explanation, expansion, and application.
And the Torah provides that expansion not in footnotes or appendices, but through an interpretive process that unfolds across generations. The law was not frozen at the moment of revelation; it was activated by it.
This is where Judaism parts ways decisively with Luther’s instinctive literalism. At Sinai, God makes clear that the written word is sacred – but it is not sufficient. Meaning is not trapped inside the text; it emerges only through engagement with it. So how does the Torah move from lofty principle to lived law?
The answer Judaism gives is Torah Shebaal Peh, the Oral Law. This is not a later workaround or a rabbinic ploy to fill in gaps, but an interpretive framework indicated by the way the text itself was given. The written Torah is the text God gave us at Sinai; the Oral Law is the method He gave us to understand it.
That method is neither whimsical nor arbitrary. It is disciplined, structured, and demanding. The Talmudic sage Rabbi Yishmael articulated thirteen interpretive principles – rules for extracting meaning from text through literary association, contextual reading, and logical deduction.
Verses illuminate one another. Words echo elsewhere. Broad principles generate specific applications. Law emerges not because it is spelled out, but because it is derived.
And then there is another category altogether: traditions that do not emerge from textual analysis at all. The Torah commands us to bind tefillin – but never tells us their shape, their color, or even how many compartments they should contain. These, too, are traditions transmitted through the Oral Law.
The Torah prohibits “work” on the seventh day but offers no definition of what work means – until the Oral Law teaches that the categories of creative labor are learned from the acts required to build the Tabernacle.
This is why the demand to “prove everything from the text” is not piety but misunderstanding. The Torah does not operate like a legal statute book, and it never pretended to be one.
Seen this way, the Ten Commandments are not deficient because they lack detail. They are magnificent precisely because they force us beyond the page. They announce that God speaks – and then expect human beings to listen, interpret, and take responsibility for what those words will mean in the real world.
Martin Luther believed that unless an idea could be anchored explicitly in the biblical text, it was suspect and therefore expendable. In theory, that sounds like reverence. In practice, it collapses the moment the text refuses to cooperate. Judaism chose a different path.
The Ten Commandments stand at the center of our faith not because they tell us everything we need to know, but because they tell us so little. They are moral declarations without detail, principles without procedure – and for that very reason, they demand interpretation rather than submission.
Faith, in Judaism, is not proven by quoting sacred words, but by grappling honestly with what those words require of us.
Ultimately, this is what the revelation at Sinai teaches us about Judaism. God gives us a text — but also a task. He entrusts human beings with the responsibility to interpret, apply, and live His word in a world that is endlessly complex and morally demanding.
The Torah is certainly sacred, but it is not self-sufficient. It comes alive only when it is studied, debated, transmitted, and lived.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Palestinian Authority Again Admits UNRWA Is Political
A truck, marked with United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) logo, crosses into Egypt from Gaza, at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, during a temporary truce between Hamas and Israel, in Rafah, Egypt, Nov. 27, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
The Palestinian Authority has again admitted — three times in two weeks — that UNRWA is all about politics as it seeks to preserve the organization so it can keep alive the demand to flood Israel with “returning refugees.”
Last month, a column in the official PA daily defined what it views as the very mandate of UNRWA:
“The Fatah Revolutionary Council … emphasized … that all the patriots must … defend UNRWA and its mandate because it is a testimony to the Nakba (i.e., “the catastrophe,” the Palestinian term for the establishment of the State of Israel) and the sanctity of the refugees’ right of return.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 11, 2026]
This is the PA admitting, openly, that the central value of UNRWA is ideological and political. It is why the PA frames challenges to UNRWA as an Israeli plot to erase the refugee issue and the dream of “return” into Israel. In the following statement by a PA spokesman on official PA TV, the claim is taken a step further and tied directly to Israel’s sovereignty and to Jerusalem, again showing clearly that this is not actually a humanitarian issue for the PA but a political one, with the mission of UNRWA being to ultimately undo Israel through “return.”
PA Jerusalem District Spokesman Ma’arouf Al-Rifai: “Since Oct. 7, [2023], Israel has started a campaign of incitement against UNRWA to eliminate the refugee issue, to eliminate what we Palestinians are dreaming of, namely the right of return and compensation. Israel is attempting to impose full sovereignty over Jerusalem and annex it to the cities of the occupation (i.e., Israel) like any city that was occupied in 1948.”
[Official PA TV News, Jan. 20, 2026]
Note that the PA spokesman reiterated what Palestinian Media Watch has stressed many times, which is that the PA sees all of Israel as “occupied in 1948.”
A senior PLO official also made a similar admission on official PA radio several days later:
Head of the PLO Department of Jerusalem Affairs Adnan Al-Husseini: “UNRWA is an institution of the UN, but for the Palestinians, it has great significance. Its significance is the [Palestinian refugees’] right of return. The right of return is an expression that, from the perspective of the occupation (i.e., Israel), is unacceptable… [but] in Palestine the matter is not over, because people have rights, and they are waiting for the day when they will achieve their rights. UNRWA has been confirming this and strengthening it for decades.”
[The Voice of Palestine (official PA radio station), Facebook page, Jan. 26, 2026]
What makes UNRWA different?
UNRWA was created by the UN General Assembly in 1949, and its mandate has been regularly renewed ever since. Today, UNRWA itself says about 5.9 million “Palestine refugees” are eligible for its services.
A normal humanitarian system would aim to end refugee status through resettlement, integration, and permanent solutions. That is the logic of the global refugee agency, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which operates worldwide and explicitly provides lifesaving aid while pursuing durable solutions.
UNRWA, however, is different by design. It exists as a separate, exceptional framework — one that intentionally refuses to end the suffering of the 5.9 million descendants of the 750,000 refugees with the only possible solution, which is resettlement. Instead, it keeps them in their camps chained as refugees as a central political policy for generations.
Much of the international community deludes itself that UNRWA primarily is a humanitarian necessity, yet the PA consistently tells the truth on this issue by defining it as one of “return.” In other words, it is political, and that is why the PA insists that it must remain. UNRWA is not just a service provider but a vehicle for the “right of return.” The PA has no intention of ending Palestinian refugeehood. Instead, it exploits UNRWA and the suffering “refugees” for political gain.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.