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Bipin Joshi was in Israel for 23 days before Oct. 7. This week, he was buried in his native Nepal.
This story was excerpted and adapted from the book “10/7: 100 Human Stories,” winner of the National Jewish Book Awards’ 2024 Jewish Book of the Year and The Natan Fund’s 2025 Notable Book Award.
Bipin Joshi wasn’t supposed to be sent to the Gaza border.
At 23, the tall young man carried his family’s aspirations on his shoulders — he was their firstborn son, their vessel of promise.
Home was Kanchanpur in Nepal’s fertile westernmost reaches, where the Mahakali River nourishes borderlands renowned for abundant harvests. There, Bipin first envisioned transforming agricultural knowledge into prosperity — he dreamed of a banana plantation that would secure his family’s future.
Israel was meant to be just a brief detour on his path to building something lasting back home.
When he enrolled in the Learn and Earn program that purported to offer students from Africa and Asia the opportunity of earning relatively high wages while taking classes in high-tech agriculture. Bipin had been assured placement in Israel’s heartland. But his assignment was changed at the last moment, and he was placed at Kibbutz Alumim, two miles from the Gaza border. Yet any disappointment he felt gave way to relief: He would be working with Himachal Kattel, his best friend and roommate from college in Nepal. In Alumim, the two Nepali young men resumed their familiar schooldays routine, sharing a modest room where, after exhausting days of fieldwork, they would unwind with cold beers and songs from home.
A month later, Himachal and Bipin were some of the only students left alive from their cohort, nearly 3,000 miles from their home in Nepal, when Hamas attacked Alumim.Through the lemon and orange orchards, dozens of Hamas terrorists rampaged the Kibbutz, shooting indiscriminately. They killed 22 Thai and Nepali citizens, kidnapped eight, and injured a few more.
Tribhuvan International Airport, Kathmandu | Sept. 13, 2023
Himachal, a 25-year-old from a small village in the mountains of Gorkha, sported a large red Tika on his forehead at the Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu. This was a blessing from his older sister, Niruta. He was the youngest of four siblings.
All 17 students awaiting their midnight flight were adorned with Tikas, a token of pride and blessing from their families.
In Nepali culture, they serve as good-luck charms and vouchsafes for significant journeys. Many parents had come to the airport, some in tears, others bearing gifts. It was a long goodbye — their children were leaving for 11 months.
They were making the trip for the money, and the education: they were supposed to earn more in a year in Israel than they’d earn in a few in Nepal, as well as gain skills that would advance their careers.
Aged between 22 and 25, most of the students had been raised in poverty.
Prabin Dangi, 24, was hoping to support his chronically ill mother back home, but found that despite his education, good jobs in Nepal were scarce. This was a common dilemma in his family, as one of his brothers was working in Dubai and another in Saudi Arabia for the same reason. His mother pleaded with him, her youngest son, not to leave, but he was determined to provide her with the best possible care.
Students take part in a candlelight vigil in Lalitpur, Nepal, on Oct. 9, 2023, in memory of Nepali citizens who were killed in Kibbutz Alumim, in Israel. (Prakash Mathema/AFP via Getty Images)
Ananda Sah, 25, had promised his grandmother that he’d build a house for her. Dipesh Raj Bista, 24, planned to finance his younger brother’s medical studies, being the sole supporter of his family after the death of his father.
And Joshi traded his musical ambitions and writing talent for practical skill: He wanted to learn advanced agricultural techniques that he could apply back home.
The group was sent to a classic “old-style” kibbutz named Alumim, where they shared responsibilities and lived communally. The kibbutz population — a community of 500 — was a mixture of religious jewish immigrants from Arab countries, members of the U.K.’s largest Orthodox Jewish youth movement, agricultural workers from Thailand and now, them as well.
Thai labor, along with Nepali labor, became Israel’s agricultural backbone after Palestinians (who had previously replaced Israeli farmers) were restricted from working in Israel in large numbers following the first intifada in the 1980s. Security concerns about terror attacks led Israel to seek an inexpensive workforce sourced from countries uninvolved in the conflict.
Kibbutz Alumim | Sept. 14-Oct. 6
The students arrived in Israel in mid-September: warm, sunny days.
Soon after arriving, the students’ expectations collided with reality. The communal socialist principles they’d heard about didn’t seem to apply to them.
Their accommodation consisted of small cramped rooms equipped with bunk beds to maximize space.
Their days began around 4 a.m., when they’d gather in the cramped, gray kitchen to cook the lunch they’d bring with them to the fields, before heading out to do arduous physical labor under the sun, which typically lasted until approximately 4 p.m.
Prabin, Padam and Rajan were responsible for managing the kibbutz’s irrigation system. Their duties included carrying heavy pipes out to the fields, assembling the pipes and connecting them to the irrigation system, and fixing malfunctions.
Himachal and Bipin worked together in the orchards, trimming trees, and picking and packing pomelos and oranges. The work was simple, not technically advanced; it was difficult for them to ignore a sense of disappointment.
Each evening of the three weeks the Nepalese cohort spent there, many students called home, reassuring their families that their time in Israel, though it was draining, was a wise investment in their future.
They clung to the hope that their situation would improve once the university opened in October – the “Learn” portion of the program, which involved attending classes at Ben Gurion Negev University once a week.
On Oct. 3, an earthquake struck Nepal, and many were concerned for their families. Padam Thapa called home anxious on October 6. His sister-in-law, Mekhu Adhikari, told him about the frightening aftershocks. Ganesh Nepali urged his elder brother to look after their parents and stay safe, as their family home had sustained structural damage.
Kibbutz Alumin, the Foreign Workers Zone | Oct. 7
Himachal had stayed up until 3 a.m., engrossed in the final season of “Vikings” on Netflix. Saturdays offered the only chance for sleeping in.
Drifting off with his earphones in, he didn’t hear the sirens. At 6:30 a.m., Bipin woke him, urging, “We need to get to the shelter quickly.”
In the other room, Prabin, still half-dressed, rushed to the bunker, witnessing rockets slicing through the sky.
Padma (screen) and Pushpa (podium) Joshi, the mother and sister of Nepalese national Bipin Joshi held hostage by Palestinian militants in Gaza since 2023, address a demonstration organized by the families of hostages calling for action to secure their release in Tel Aviv on Aug. 16, 2025. (Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)
The 17 students were confined in the open-door shelter for more than an hour, waiting for instructions. This was the first missile attack they’d ever experienced. They’d been reassured before that rocket attacks from Gaza were common but rarely harmful, and told that staying inside a shelter would keep them safe. To pass the time, they divided into teams, playing Ludo on their phones.
Meanwhile, Rafi Babian, a kibbutz member and the security officer of the Sdot Negev Regional Council, was worried: The sheer number of missiles being fired was unusual. He headed to the council’s headquarters to activate the emergency center. En route, he was warned at the Reim intersection about the presence of terrorists nearby and soon after received an alert about terrorists approaching the gate of his home, Kibbutz Alumim. He notified the kibbutz a few minutes before Hamas arrived. By 6:45 a.m., the entire kibbutz emergency response squad, comprising a dozen members, was armed and ready. Fifteen minutes later, about 20 terrorists were at the kibbutz gate.
The Nepali students didn’t know any of this. They assumed the noises they heard were from missiles. They didn’t know that terrorists riding motorcycles and mopeds were already firing RPGs.
The emergency squad prevented the terrorist from reaching the kibbutz’s residential area — a few civilian-volunteers and soldiers were killed in the battle — but no kibbutz members were harmed.
The terrorists, having been repelled, went looking for another target. They found the workers’ quarters, near the cows and orchards.
From their shelter, the students heard loud Arabic being spoken by the approaching terrorists. Thinking the Arabic was Hebrew, they were relieved: someone had come to help them.
Dipesh Raj Bista stepped out of the shelter, followed by Ganesh Nepali, who just needed to use the restroom.
Outside the shelter, they were met by two men in black, pointing guns at them. Realizing these weren’t kibbutz-members, Dipesh Raj Bista yelled, “We are Nepalese!”
Gunfire was the response.
Dipesh and Ganesh were killed on the spot.
Soon after, a grenade was thrown into the shelter where the 15 other students were hiding. Bipin immediately realized what happened and threw the grenade back out. But he couldn’t catch the grenade that followed, and five of the students were injured. Ananda Shah was severely bleeding, clutching a pillow to stifle his screams. Lokendra Singh Dhami, bleeding too, was whispering about his wife, his 5-year old daughter, and his 2-year-old son.
Prabin, Himachal and Bipin weren’t hurt. They had huddled in a corner of the room, squeezing so tight together that it was hard to breathe. Together, they called one of their bosses, pleading, “Please help us, we’re in trouble.”
The response was short: “I’m so sorry, I can’t help you. There are terrorists attacking all over, I’m hiding too.”
Narayan Prasad Neupane wasn’t as gravely injured as the others: despite having lost three toes, he could still walk. He happened to have remembered the number of the Israeli emergency medical services and called for an ambulance. The operator, speaking English, assured him that help would arrive.
Soon after, two men in blue uniforms entered the shelter. “Please don’t hurt us,” the few students still alive begged.
“We’re the police, the Israeli police,” the men assured them.
“Please, take us to a hospital … these people are dying … get us out of here.”
“There are still terrorists outside,” the police said. “It’s impossible to move you now, but we’ll be back. Everyone who can walk, you need to move to a different place; it’s not safe in the shelter. Go to the kitchen or to your room.”
“And leave the wounded here?”
They had no choice.
Nepal’s interim Prime Minister Sushila Karki pays respects after draping the country’s national flag over the coffin of Bipin Joshi at the Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu on Oct. 20, 2025. (Prakash Mathema / AFP via Getty Images)
Bipin, Himachal, Rajan, Prabin, Prabesh and Padam, leaping over the corpses and injured bodies of their friends, made their way into the dining room.
There, a few Thai workers were also hiding. Some of their friends had been murdered while sleeping in their beds.
Narayan, Lokendra and Dhan decided to move to the residency area. Upon hearing a car outside, Narayan went out to check if it was the ambulance he was waiting for. He was shot twice by a passing terrorist.
Crawling back into the room, covered in blood, water was his last request.
Kibbutz Alumim, Kitchen | Oct. 7
A defensive wall of Persian rice sacks — that’s what they constructed to shield themselves from further grenade attacks. Prabin came up with the idea, and they quickly stacked the sacks on top of each other.
It was a small kitchen; options for shelter were limited. Most of the Nepalese and Thai workers crouched behind the “rice wall,” under a wooden table, with Parmod hiding under the sink. Bipin, positioned in the middle and not shielded at all, grew increasingly worried about their friends left in the shelter.
As time passed without any sign of rescue, Bipin considered going back to help them. “We need to think about our next steps. Will you come with me and help bring our friends here?” he asked Himachal.
They sought the opinion of a Thai worker who’d been hiding in the kitchen before them. His name was Phonsawan Pinakalo, a 30-year-old tractor driver who’d arrived in Israel four years earlier, to earn a salary that was four times what he would’ve earned in Thailand. They communicated using Google Translate, going back and forth between Nepali and Thai.
Phonsawan’s response was unequivocal: “Don’t do it. If you do it, you’ll die. We’ve heard the terrorists walking around here for hours.”
On the other side of the table, Rajan tried to reassure his roommates Prabin, Prabesh, and Padam. “Don’t worry, nothing will happen. Help will come soon.”
Exhausted by their ordeal in Israel, Prabesh declared, “If we survive, we’re heading back to Nepal as soon as possible.”
An hour and a half later, Hamas terrorists broke down the kitchen door, shouting “Allah-hu Akbar” and shooting indiscriminately. The makeshift wall of rice sacks offered no protection.
The bullets pierced the sacks and hit them. Blood and rice was spilled on the floor.
“Prabin, how bad is your leg?”
“It’s bad. I can’t feel much of it. And you, Himachal?”
“You see the holes in my chest and shoulder, right? It’s getting harder to breathe.”
“We need water. I can’t bear this.”
Struggling, Himachal rose from their hiding spot under a cheap wooden table to fetch water. As he moved, he aggravated his chest wound and lost more blood. He managed to collect some water in a shallow plate, but half of it spilled as he returned to Prabin on the kitchen floor.
Israelis attend a farewell ceremony for Bipin Joshi at Ben Gurion Airport on Oct. 19, 2025. One holds a sign that says, “Sorry you got caught up in our disaster.” (Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
It wasn’t enough. Prabin’s throat was parched and he was writhing in agony.
“Pramod, do you have any water to give me? I beg you.”
Pramod didn’t respond. Hidden under the sink in a small plumbing cabinet, he was the only student unharmed, unseen by the Hamas shooters.
“Pramod, there’s water in the sink above. I beg you, I can’t move to get it. I’m so thirsty, I might scream, and they’ll come again and finish us off.”
He pleaded again and again, until Pramod made a small hole in the sink pipe and collected some of the murky water in a pot. Extending his hand from the cabinet, Pramod whispered, “Here, this is all we have.”
Prabin lapped up the mixture of water and urine. His roommates, Rajan and Prabesh, lay under the table as well: They were dead, killed immediately.
Padam, a fourth roommate, took longer to die. “I am dying, bhauju,” he managed to send a short text-message to his sister-in-law, then plead with his friends to help him: “Kill me. I can’t stand this anymore, kill me with a knife if you can.”
“Please, friend, bear this pain. The police will come for us,” Himachal said, though he believed they were all doomed. Beneath the table, he noticed his own breathing growing heavier and heavier, matching the heavy breathing of Padam and Parbin.
Oct. 8 – The Present
The men who arrived in Israel as “neutral” replacements for Palestinian workers ultimately returned to their home countries either empty-handed or in coffins.
Out of the 17 Nepalese students at Alumim, 10 were killed, four injured, two survived unharmed — and Bipin was taken hostage alongside Phonsawan.
From their hiding spot in the kitchen, Himachal and Prabin overheard one of the terrorists questioning the two hostages about their religion, to which Phonsawan responded, “Buddhist, Buddhist, Thailand, Thailand.”
Two hours later, Bipin and Phonsawan were seen with their captors being pushed into a-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
With the onset of war, the thousands of Thai and Nepalese workers in Israel left the country, causing the collapse of the Israeli agricultural sector.
In the midst of harvest season, Israel was once again in desperate need of guest workers. In December 2023, the government of Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, announced it would send about five thousand young people to work in Israeli agriculture. Hundreds of Sri Lankans also joined, putting money over safety.
Men take the coffin of Bipin Joshi, to a car after a farewell ceremony for Bipin Joshi, a young Nepalese man who was taken hostage on Oct. 7, 2023 and later died in captivity in Gaza, at Ben Gurion airport on Oct. 19, 2025. (Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
Himachal and Prabin spent several months in Israeli hospitals, lonely, unable to communicate adequately, facing a range of complex surgeries and medical procedures. Eventually, they managed to recover and even continue their studies, earning their master’s degree from Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment in Rehovot last month.
At some point, Phonsawan was added to the list of dead; his body was returned and flown to Thailand this week. But Bipin’s fate remained unknown.
During two years of war, Bipin’s family lived in agonizing uncertainty, not knowing whether their son was alive or dead. They were disappointed through two ceasefires, when Thai citizens who’d been taken hostage were released, and as government officials expressed “grave concern” for his life. Clinging to hope, they did everything in their power to raise public awareness about their son, a young man trapped in a foreign conflict.
Their worst fears were confirmed last week when Bipin’s corpse was returned to Israel, on the first day of a new ceasefire that brought with it the release of all 20 living hostages in Gaza.
“With immense pain, we received the worst news imaginable. Our dear son, Bipin — brother and soulmate to our daughter Pushpa — was murdered in Hamas captivity. Bipin left us full of excitement, setting out for a year of study in Israel. We never imagined that the hug we gave him then would be our last,” the Joshi family said in a statement.
Family members mourn during the funeral ceremony of Bipin Joshi at his residence in Kanchanpur, Nepal, on Oct. 21, 2025. Prakash Chandra Timilsena/AFP via Getty Images)
“Before you were taken, you managed to send a message to your cousin, asking him to be strong and always look toward the future. It is hard to imagine a future without you, Bipin,” the statement continued. “Every flower in the garden we planted for you will remind us of you — every orchard, every field. You are part of the landscape of Nepal, and now also part of the landscape of the Land of Israel.”
On Monday, Bipin made his journey home. The first stop was a ceremony at Ben Gurion Airport, where a top government official praised his heroism and addressed him directly, saying, “I am sorry. It shouldn’t have ended this way.”
Then, Bipin’s body was flown to Kathmandu, where Prime Minister Sushila Karki draped Nepal’s flag over it during a brief ceremony at the airport.
And from there, his coffin was taken to his village where on Tuesday morning, after a night in which his family was reportedly accompanied by so many who had provided comfort over the last two years, his body was cremated in a ceremony on the banks of the Mahakali River. Government representatives were present, and the photograph that had become famous in Israel and beyond was on display. Bipin was home in Kanchanpur, the borderland district whose soil nurtured his dreams and now his memory.
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The post Bipin Joshi was in Israel for 23 days before Oct. 7. This week, he was buried in his native Nepal. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Assailant attacks congregant, guard at NYC Shabbat services
(JTA) —A man who attacked a congregant and a security guard at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue on Friday night is now in custody, according to the New York Police Department.
The individual disrupted Shabbat services before allegedly assaulting the two individuals.
“As synagogue security was escorting him out, he struck a member of the congregation, damaged synagogue property, and then spit at and headbutted a member of the security team,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch stated in a post on X.
Tisch, who grew up attending the iconic Reform synagogue, said that an NYPD sergeant who was working on a paid detail on site “immediately stepped in and took the individual into custody.”
“I have spoken with the rabbi of the synagogue, and I’m relieved that no one was seriously injured,” she said, confirming that those who were hurt are now doing well.
While noting that the investigation is still ongoing, Tisch confirmed that there are no other known threats at the moment, and that additional NYPD resources were deployed to Central Synagogue.
For the police commissioner, however, the event was also personal, as she described the synagogue of her childhood as “a place of comfort and peace,” both “in joy and in sorrow.”
“What happened there tonight is deeply painful,” Tisch added. “A place of worship should never be a crime scene.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote on X that he was “horrified by the assault at Central Synagogue during services today.”
“I can only imagine the pain and fear an attack like this, during Shabbat services, causes for the congregation and for Jewish New Yorkers across our city,” Mamdani stated.
The mayor emphasized that every New Yorker should be able to practice their religion without fearing violence, describing the event as a “despicable act” that “has no place in our city.”
“Our administration will do everything in our power to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe,” Mamdani added.
Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council, commended the NYPD for its “swift response that brought the individual into custody,” adding that she was “disturbed” by the incident.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James described the assault as “appalling and unacceptable” in a social media statement. She stressed that “no one should feel threatened in their place of worship.”
“I am relieved that everyone is okay and recovering, and my heart is with the Central Synagogue community this evening,” James added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Assailant attacks congregant, guard at NYC Shabbat services appeared first on The Forward.
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Nigeria has more than 100 synagogues — but no local rabbis. This summer camp wants to change that.
On summer mornings in Abuja, Nigeria, a small fleet of cars fan out across the sprawling capital city carrying unusual cargo: children headed to Jewish day camp.
In a one-story synagogue on a dirt road in Kubwa, a densely populated suburb, children who spend most of the year as the only Jew in their school spill out of cars alongside dozens of their peers. They might spend the day acting out scenes from the Torah, crocheting kippot or competing in color war.
It’s an untraditional location, but almost everything else about Camp Sarah is inspired by Jewish summer camps in the U.S. After all, it was founded by an American.
Debbie Isser, who moved to Nigeria in 2021 for her work with the World Bank, started the camp with members of Abuja’s Jewish community after local mothers told her they wanted their children to have some kind of Jewish education. For Isser, whose own childhood summers at Jewish camp in New Hampshire had been formative, the solution felt obvious.
“I just felt like it was in my genes,” she told the Forward.
Now in its fourth year, Camp Sarah, a two-week-long day camp hosting 80 campers and 20 staff, is trying to give a new generation of Nigerian Jews something their small, dispersed community has struggled to provide: Jewish teachings that will allow them to sustain religious life there.
The hope, of course, is that the children make Jewish friends and learn Torah stories. But organizers also want Camp Sarah to begin producing the religious leaders the community currently lacks — perhaps, one day, even a homegrown rabbi or a shochet, ritual slaughterer, so that kosher Nigerian Jews can finally enjoy meat with their jollof rice.
Fifteen-year-old Shedrack, who is one of two Jewish students at his public school, attended Camp Sarah for the first time last summer. When, during the following school year, his classmates made fun of him for not believing in Jesus, he called his camp friends.
“It’s like being with myself,” he told the Forward. “They understand me. When it’s closing hour from school, I usually call them. We have some chats, ask ourselves some questions and we talk about Torah.”
Nigeria’s Jewish community is itself an unlikely story. Most of its members are Igbo, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, some of whom believe they are descended from one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Igbo identification with Jewish identity intensified during and after the devastating Nigerian Civil War between 1967 and 1970, when the Igbo-led breakaway state of Biafra was defeated, and at least a million people died.
In the decades that followed, a small number of Igbo who had been raised Christian began practicing Judaism, teaching themselves Hebrew, seeking out Jewish texts and eventually establishing synagogues. Today, thousands of Nigerians practice Judaism, though those who have not formally converted are not considered Jewish by many mainstream Jewish institutions.
But maintaining a Jewish community in Nigeria is no easy feat. While Nigeria has over 100 synagogues, the community has no resident rabbi of its own. Jewish books and ritual objects are few and far between, usually arriving from donations abroad.
Moshe Hezekiah Nwafor, 28, a Nigerian Jew who founded the camp alongside Isser, told the Forward that when he celebrated his bar mitzvah, there was only one Torah scroll in the country. Today, he estimates there are about 10. And without a shochet, his community relies heavily on fish and vegetables because there is no way to access kosher meat.
Nwafor and Isser met by chance. While Isser was looking for a synagogue to celebrate the Jewish holidays after she moved to Nigeria, she came across a WhatsApp number for Nwafor’s congregation. Nwafor answered her message and immediately arranged for someone to pick her up and bring her to the synagogue to celebrate Sukkot.
That night, they made kiddush in a sukkah with walls fashioned from banana leaves; afterward came a l’chaim with local schnapps.
“I thought, OK, I’ve really found a Jewish community here,” Isser recalled.
Isser began returning from trips to the United States with suitcases stuffed with donated tallitot (prayer shawls), siddurim (prayer books) and other Jewish books. Eventually, after one Shabbat service, she sat down with elders of the congregation to ask what a more systematic relationship with American Jews might look like.
The clearest request, she said, came from the mothers. Most of their children attended schools where they were the only Jew. Instead of letting their kids sit idle over the summers, the mothers wanted them to receive a Jewish education and know what it feels like to have Jewish friends – in other words: Jewish summer camp.
The request resonated with Isser, a mother too, for whom Jewish camp had been a formative part of childhood. Her parents had met at Camp Ramah, the camp of the Conservative movement, when they were 16. Her mother went on to become a Jewish educator.
At first, Isser considered sending Nigerian children to camps in the U.S. But she and Nwafor, who had worked as a traveling Jewish teacher among Nigerian communities, quickly landed on a more ambitious idea.
“Immediately, we’re like ‘no, no, no,’” Isser recalled. “’We should do camp in Nigeria.’”
They named it Camp Sarah, in honor of Isser’s mother.
The first summer required some improvisation. Organizers borrowed a car to collect children from around Abuja. Isser recalls one trip taking two hours, the car breaking down and, at one point, 15 children squeezing into a sedan.
Rabbi Kerrith Solomon from Adas Israel, a Conservative congregation in Washington, D.C., came with her two children to help run the camp. Looking back, Isser said, “We kind of laugh because it was pretty disorganized.”
Today, anyone who grew up going to camp would recognize much of Camp Sarah, where campers spend their days competing in relay races or Jewish trivia and writing songs to perform for their peers. Four-year-olds act out Torah stories. Older campers study the Jewish life cycle and discuss what it means to become role models in their communities. Counselors from Nigeria, Uganda and the U.S. compare their Jewish traditions over lunchtime.
But some camp traditions require distinctly Nigerian adaptations. Each Friday, the camp bakes challah. With no conventional oven, sand is poured into the bottom of a cooking pot that rests on a charcoal stove, before unbraided challah dough is placed in the pot and covered for hours.
Many of the Jewish songs sung at camp were written in Nigeria and sound nothing like the standard repertoire in America. Sung in harmony, they are accompanied by traditional Nigerian instruments like the konga drum, a shallow gourd covered in beads known as the shekere and a metal hand bell called an ogene.
Camp Sarah’s ambitions also extend beyond Jewish education. Isser said that during her work at the World Bank, she has watched young Nigerians earn university degrees only to struggle to find jobs in their fields. This year, the team introduced leadership training for the counselors, and activities like soap-making, candle-making and crocheting – skills they hope campers and counselors can turn into sources of income. Organizers have even discussed creating a camp store where staff can sell their handmade tallitot and kippot.
The 20 Nigerian counselors who take long overnight buses from Jewish communities across the country to camp each summer have already started bringing what they’ve learned back home, hosting events for their communities during the Jewish holidays.
Debbie Hezekiah Nwafor, a 25-year-old counselor, said that when she first arrived at camp four years ago, she was terrified of public speaking, but her role forced her to propose activities, teach dozens of children and command the attention of the rowdy group. Today, she leads the camp’s division for 14- to 16-year-olds.
“I used to have stage fright; I thought I’m not really bold enough for leadership,” she said. “But whatever idea I’m bringing, camp is implementing it.”
“This is not just a camp to us.” she added. “For real, this is something really big. I would say camp really changed me.”
Camp Sarah has also become a place to experiment in a way that has proven difficult within established Nigerian congregations. According to Nwafor, women have traditionally played smaller leadership roles in local Jewish communities both because of cultural expectations around gender in Nigeria and because of the community’s limited access to Jewish religious instruction.
For communities that have had limited access to rabbis and other sources of contemporary Jewish religious instruction, Nwafor said, biblical texts have sometimes served as a primary guide for how to live Jewishly.
Isser has seen some of those tensions surface in surprisingly fundamental questions. When visiting rabbis have taught at Camp Sarah, she said, mothers have asked whether Jewish law would require them to marry their husband’s brother if their husband died — a practice described in the Torah’s Book of Deuteronomy known as yibbum, or levirate marriage.
But last year, the camp held a service led by women and they did an encore this week. Some of them have even said they would like to become rabbis.
“That’s something you don’t see here, but I’m like, ‘why not?’” Nwafor said. “Just go for it.”
Ruth Munghoho, a Ugandan Jew, flew through Ethiopia to Camp Sarah to teach after studying under Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the first native-born black rabbi in Sub-Saharan Africa. She sees her younger self in her campers.
“I grew up in a Christian community where we had no Jewish friends or neighbors,” she said. It took until young adulthood for her to be able to learn about Judaism. “If I could get this knowledge from childhood,” she said, “I know that I could be more than what I am now.”
The post Nigeria has more than 100 synagogues — but no local rabbis. This summer camp wants to change that. appeared first on The Forward.
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U.S. ambassador calls settlers who sieged Palestinian homes in Qusra ‘terrorists’
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – The West Bank settlement movement’s leadership joined with one of its most prominent defenders, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, in condemning an Israeli settler outpost set up in a Palestinian family’s yard.
Huckabee’s remarks are a signal of the degree to which a group of radicals is rattling Israeli politics and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Israelis affiliated with the West Bank’s Tel Talpiot outpost, which is illegal under Israeli law, set up temporary structures at the entrances to Palestinian homes on the outskirts of the village of Qusra on Sunday.
Earlier this week, cables connecting the homes to the electricity grid and to solar panels were cut, and water pipes were damaged, leaving the Palestinian families unable to leave or bring in food. Israeli activists in the area who monitor settler attacks on Palestinians confirmed the account to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Huckabee wrote on X on Thursday that Israeli forces had gone to Qusra at the U.S. Embassy’s request and described the people who set up the outpost as “Israeli terrorists.” He posted that “the IDF & Israel Police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this.”
The language was a departure for the ambassador, who told Israel’s Channel 14 last September that the United States “respects Israel as a sovereign state and will not tell Israel what to do” regarding sovereignty in the West Bank. Huckabee has also consistently described the territory by its biblical names Judea and Samaria. He routinely takes to social media to dismantle what he says are lies depicting Israelis as unfairly treating Palestinians.
He has condemned settler violence before, but has rarely done so in language as blunt as what he used on Thursday. In July 2025, he visited the Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank after an arson attack at its fifth-century church and called it an “act of terror and crime.”
The actions of Israeli settler extremists have been a major concern to Democrats in the U.S. Congress in recent months, adding fodder to their calls to condition aid to Israel on its behavior. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists the reports are overblown, and that Palestinian violence is much more serious. President Donald Trump, who has often supported Netanyahu, has called on the prime minister to crack down on the violence, seeing it as an impediment to his hopes for a broader Middle East peace. Huckabee’s intervention suggests that the Trump administration is increasingly concerned about ending the violence.
Yisrael Ganz, who chairs the Yesha Council and governs the Binyamin Regional Council, condemned the outpost.
“The events in Qusra are serious and do not reflect our values or our way of conducting ourselves,” Ganz said. “There is no place for individuals to take matters into their own hands and establish an outpost in someone’s backyard, even when dealing with an illegal home or an attempt to seize control of the land. There is no justification whatsoever for violence against uninvolved civilians or security forces.”
He added that some were “exploiting these events as part of a campaign against the Jewish communities,” but that this “must not obscure the simple truth: What happened in Qusra was wrong and is unacceptable to us.”
Huckabee amplified Ganz’s statement later on Thursday, writing on X, “’Settlers’ are not the problem in Judea/Samaria. ‘Unsettlers’ are,” he wrote, describing them as “very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families & to Israel.”
The village is located in Area B, territory that is under the civil jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority and security control of the Israeli military and where Israeli settlement is not permitted. The Israel Defense Forces called such takeovers illegal and reprehensible on Tuesday. Overnight Wednesday, Israeli security forces said they demolished the structures at Qusra and detained one Israeli.
Marmar Odeh, a village representative, told JTA that the Israeli military remained inside Qusra, and footage circulating on social media showed Israeli soldiers stationed inside the homes of evacuated residents.
“I won’t be going anywhere. I am staying in my house and on my land,” Odeh said. “I may not be scared, but the children are all the time.”
In a voice memo recorded on August 12 and obtained by JTA, Aisha Abu Rida, a Qusra resident, spoke from inside one of the besieged homes.
“We are surrounded by settlers, but we are steadfast,” she said. “Despite the water and electricity being cut off, we will remain steadfast … and stay in our homes.”
By Thursday, the structures were gone, but settlers remained on the hillsides above the homes, Odeh said, an account supported by footage he provided to JTA. Soldiers had left most of the homes they had entered, residents said Friday, but were informed the military operation could last until Sunday.
One of the affected homes belongs to Loui Ridi, a Toledo, Ohio, business owner who was born in Qusra and has followed the standoff through security cameras installed at the property. JTA attempted to reach Ridi through several channels and was unsuccessful.
Asked whether the State Department shared Huckabee’s characterization and whether the Embassy had requested the Israeli operation, a State Department spokesperson did not directly reply. “We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank,” the spokesperson said. “We condemn criminal violence by any party in the West Bank. A stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration’s goal to achieve peace in the region.”
In a statement to JTA, the Israeli military said soldiers had been deployed in Qusra since Thursday morning “to protect the residents and maintain security in the area” and that they had been instructed that “the Qusra residents will remain in their homes.”
It added that troops would not operate inside the Palestinian family’s home near the site “where the tent that was evacuated and dismantled had been erected” and said Civil Administration liaison officers were in contact with Qusra’s local leadership and “working to avoid disruption to the daily lives of the residents in the area.”
Footage circulating earlier in the week appeared to show Israeli soldiers praying alongside the settlers at the outpost. The military said that the incident is under review and that soldiers found to have taken part in illegal activity would be disciplined.
The designation of Area B is the source of the ambiguity, according to Hanan Greenwood, head of the spokesperson and public diplomacy unit at the Binyamin Regional Council.
The council’s jurisdiction covers the settlements themselves, Greenwood said, not Area B land, meaning Qusra sits inside the council’s footprint but outside its authority. Its residents fall under Palestinian Authority civil jurisdiction and pay the council no arnona, the Israeli municipal tax.
“Geographically, Qusra is very much in our area,” Greenwood said. “But in real life, it’s not that we could go there, and it’s not that the residents of Qusra pay us.”
He described the result as a governance vacuum. “It’s ours, it isn’t ours,” he said. “It’s a whole mess, and the reason is that there’s no sovereignty.”
Israeli rights groups reject that framing, arguing that the military has the authority to remove outposts and does not use it.
The Israeli rights group B’Tselem said the events reflect a broader pattern.
“What is happening in Qusra is not an isolated incident,” said Yuli Novak, the organization’s executive director. “Settler militias, backed by the Israeli military, are expanding their attacks into Palestinian villages and towns, seizing land, attacking homes and forcing families out. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in plain sight.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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