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Few Jews, many aliens: Inside Roswell’s vanishing Jewish community
(JTA) — ROSWELL, New Mexico — If it weren’t for an Ashkenazi Jew named Stanton T. Friedman, the world might have long ago forgotten what’s come to be known simply as the “Roswell incident.”
Instead, countless books, documentaries and made-for-TV dramas have explored the 1947 discovery of mysterious materials found on a New Mexico ranch that Friedman argued were the relics of extraterrestrials. A wave of successors, including a prominent Israeli-American physicist, continue to press the case for alien contact. And this dusty desert town has been transformed according to an unusual paradox: It’s shaped by conspiracy theories, yet is home to virtually no Jews.
Roswell’s only synagogue, Congregation B’nai Israel, closed up and moved to Albuquerque five years ago.
“They didn’t have a rabbi and they only met twice a month, on Fridays,” said Leslie Lawner, who made the move with her husband in 2020, reducing Roswell’s tiny Jewish population by two. “There was really nothing we could do for them.”
The Lawners left behind a town that is largely defined by what happened in the summer of 1947, when local rancher W.W. “Mac” Brazen found rubber strips, tin foil, thick paper and other debris on his property and shared the material with Sheriff George Wilcox of Roswell. The sheriff brought the unusual artifacts to the attention of the Roswell Army Air Field, which on July 9 of that year announced that it had recovered the remains of a “flying disc.”
The outrageous RAAF claim was quickly denounced as erroneous by local military officials who said the debris was actually the wreckage of a crashed weather balloon and related equipment.
That would have been the end of it, if not for Friedman, a nuclear physicist and highly regarded “ufologist” who revisited the incident in the 1970s, devoting the rest of his life to proving the existence of flying saucers. In 1987, Friedman — who died six years ago — told the New York Times that federal officials had engaged in a “cosmic Watergate” to cover up the truth.
Now, this remote city of 47,000, located east of the White Sands Missile Range and about a three-hour drive southeast of Albuquerque, is known for one thing and one thing only: flying saucers.
Here in Roswell, those saucers are ubiquitous — beginning with one atop the “Welcome to Roswell” sign east of town along U.S. 380. There’s also a UFO-shaped McDonald’s, along with a bug-eyed little green alien relaxing under an umbrella in front of the nearby Western Inn.
Another extraterrestrial creature reclines on a bed in the display window of White Mattress, not to mention yet another, even more tacky, E.T. proudly holding up the Dunkin Donuts marquee along Main Street. Not surprisingly, Martians are a common theme in Halloween displays here.
In 1997, the Air Force — attempting to dispel rumors that had persisted for decades — released a 231-page report concluding that alien bodies recovered at the Roswell crash site weren’t aliens at all, but dummies used in parachute tests. It also said that the “spacecraft” that had fallen to Earth on Brazen’s ranch was really an Air Force balloon used in a top-secret program code-named Project Mogul to monitor the atmosphere for evidence of Soviet nuclear tests.
Asked at the time if the new report would finally put the matter to rest, retired Air Force Col. Richard Weaver told NBC’s Today show said: “No, I doubt it. This has become a religion to many people. It’s almost a cult. Certainly, an unbelievable financial opportunity for many folks. So I think this is going to endure.”
Now, the town has taken on added prominence with the Pentagon’s recent establishment of an All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. President Donald Trump is a known skeptic of UFOs. But in a 2020 campaign video, he said, “Roswell’s a very interesting place with a lot of people that would like to know what’s going on.”
In a town forged around the religion of aliens, Jewish life is virtually nonexistent. There aren’t enough Jews here to make a minyan — let alone support a synagogue — and the few who did live here have mostly died off or moved away.
Lawner and her husband Bob rarely attended services at Congregation B’nai Israel, located a block from their house at 8th and Washington, during their 27 years in Roswell. But Lawner did help develop a curriculum on Holocaust studies for Sidney Gutierrez Middle School, which she helped found and where she taught for 17 years.
It was an area of inquiry that overlapped with one outlandish but persistent theory about the Roswell incident. Annie Jacobsen claims in her 2012 book, “Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base,” that just before the Roswell crash, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin recruited Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele — the infamous Auschwitz “angel of death” — to create “grotesque, child-size aviators” to pilot a plane in order to trigger widespread panic throughout the United States.
The obsession with aliens has divided Jewish voices. An Orthodox Jewish rabbinical authority, Rabbi Pini Dunner of Beverly Hills, California, has called the Roswell incident “nonsense.”
“Most people don’t believe any of this, nor, for that matter, do we entertain the claims of those who maintain that the Apollo moon landings were all an elaborate hoax, or that Denver International Airport stands above an underground city that serves as a headquarters for the masonically inspired New World Order,” Dunner wrote in an online post. “It’s not that any of these conspiracy stories can be categorically disproved, but we feel they do not need to be. The question is: why would any intelligent person believe such nonsense to be true?”
But some Jews are attached to the idea that aliens are out there — including one of the most prominent scientists making the case today. The Israeli-American physicist Avi Loeb, who runs a lab at Harvard University, argues that some objects and phenomena in space cannot be explained except as evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
Loeb has emphasized the appeal of aliens and space exploration on Jewish grounds. “It is reasonable to imagine the absence of antisemitism in interstellar space,” he wrote earlier this year, noting that anything traveling from the other side of the Milky Way would have had to set out before there were Jews.
This month, Loeb released new data that he said suggested that an object in space that will come within 269 million kilometers of Earth later this year may have extraterrestrial origins. The resulting frenzy has embroiled U.S. transportation officials and even Kim Kardashian.
Loeb’s argument is rooted in theoretical physics. But here in Roswell, aliens are experienced in concrete terms. Factual or not, this past July, Roswell marked 78 years since the mysterious 1947 event, with an annual Roswell UFO Festival that lures thousands of tourists from all 50 states and beyond.
Every year, sidewalk vendors do a brisk business selling funnel cakes, alien salt-and-pepper shakers and other trinkets, while tourists happily pay $5 each to visit the downtown International UFO Museum and Research Center.
“These exhibits are designed not to convince anyone to believe one way or another about their subjects,” says a sign at the museum’s entrance. “Visitors are encouraged to ask questions.”
Local merchants don’t seem to care much what really transpired that night in 1947. They’re just grateful for all the desperately needed cash this festival generates.
“Roswell didn’t have a tourist industry and one of my friends was telling me about this UFO stuff. So we started the UFO Festival,” said Tim Jennings, the town’s mayor. “I don’t know what happened, but something definitely happened. It’s not unreasonable. We live out in the middle of the desert, and without a lot of bright lights, at night you can see a lot.”
Added Todd Wildermuth, Roswell’s public information officer: “I don’t have an opinion about it. I haven’t really given it any deep thought.”
To say Roswell is remote is a vast understatement. Some 140 miles from the nearest interstate highway, the town is also unbearably hot and dry. One quickly learns not to go anywhere without a water bottle; it’s even better to stay inside where there’s air-conditioning.
Roswell is certainly not the kind of place to visit if you don’t like reptiles and other poisonous creatures. At the local Home Depot, two of the biggest-selling items, along with plywood and barbecue grills, are Harris Scorpion Killer and Snake-A-Way pellets.
These days, only a handful of Jews remain in Roswell. A Google search for “Roswell” and “Jewish” reveals three synagogues in Roswell, Georgia — a suburb of Atlanta — one of which is a Messianic church.
“There was never a large community here,” said Cymantha Liakos, a Philadelphia native who wasn’t raised as a Jew but recently took a DNA test and discovered she has Jewish ancestry. Liakos, a former geologist, settled in Roswell with her husband, William, a doctor.
Her 23-year-old son, John, a graduate of the nearby New Mexico Military Institute, visited Israel in 2022 as the first Roswell native (and quite possibly the last) ever to participate in Birthright, the program that takes young Jews to Israel on free trips.
Today, the corner structure that had housed B’nai Israel since its establishment in the 1940s is a medical clinic.
“The building was deteriorating and there was no one within the group who knew how to keep it up,” said Judy Stubbs, B’nai Israel’s former treasurer. “Since there was so few of us left, we decided it was in our best interests to sell it.”
The community’s Torah, meanwhile, has found a new home at Congregation Nahalat Shalom in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city and home to many of the state’s estimated 25,000 Jews. In 2018, Roswell’s dwindling Jewish community agreed to “indefinitely loan” Nahalat Shalom the sacred scroll, which had been rescued from a small town in Czechoslovakia by the Karnowsky family during World War II.
In 2018, Nahalat Shalom’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Min Kantrowitz, led a special Simchat Torah dedication service in the presence of Kathryn Karnowsky and her Jewish friends from Roswell.
So what do the handful of Jews remaining in Roswell think about the 1947 “incident” that made their town famous?
“My husband is from a ranching family with longtime roots in this area, and all of their ranch neighbors strongly believe it is not a hoax,” said Liakos. “There was an incident, and a government cover-up. Both of us are scientists, and we’re not shrugging it off as ridiculous.”
Stubbs, a longtime resident of Roswell and former city council member, agrees with her friend.
“People ask me that all the time,” said Stubbs, who remains active in politics. “With all the continued hype, I believe something must have happened. A lot of people come here to find out, but no one has the answer. Unless the federal government chooses to open the records, it’s a question that will never be answered.”
The post Few Jews, many aliens: Inside Roswell’s vanishing Jewish community appeared first on The Forward.
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After facing backlash, California congressional hopeful Scott Wiener says Israel is committing ‘genocide’
(JTA) — After declining to say whether he believed “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza” during a debate last week, California congressional candidate Scott Wiener has announced that he does, in fact, believe Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide.
Wiener’s demurral during the Wednesday debate, during which his two Democratic opponents endorsed the genocide charge without hesitation, elicited jeers from the audience. Afterwards, Wiener said he thought the lightning-round format was inappropriate for such a complex question but said he believed Israel’s actions in Gaza represented “an absolute moral stain.”
Facing ongoing criticism over his stance, Wiener — a leader of the Jewish caucus in California’s legislature — issued a video statement on Sunday saying that he had come to a clear conclusion.
“For years, I’ve condemned Netanyahu and his extremist government and the devastation they’ve inflicted on Gaza,” he wrote on X, introducing his statement. “It’s why I’ve been clear I won’t support U.S. funding for the destruction of Palestinian communities. I’ve stopped short of calling it genocide, but I can’t anymore.”
Wiener is running for the seat being vacated by Nancy Pelosi, a pro-Israel stalwart. His comments mean that all three Democratic candidates for the seat have firmly taken the position that Israel is committing genocide, a charge that Israel and the United States reject.
In the video, Wiener elaborated on his thinking.
“As a Jew, I am deeply aware that the word genocide was created in the wake of the Holocaust, which was the industrial extermination of 6 million Jews. For many Jews, associating the word genocide with the Jewish state of Israel is deeply painful and frankly traumatic,” he said. “But despite that pain and that trauma, we all have eyes, and we see the absolute devastation and catastrophic death toll in Gaza inflicted by the Israeli government. And we all have ears, and we hear the genocidal statements by certain senior members of the Israeli government. And to me, the Israeli government has tried to destroy Gaza and to push Palestinians out, and that qualifies as genocide.”
Wiener’s statement comes as harsh criticism of Israel becomes de rigueur among Democrats amid a bottoming-out of support among Democratic voters. Anti-Israel sentiment is on the rise among Republicans, too, shattering a decades-old consensus on the right about support for Israel.
Wiener has faced sustained protest from pro-Palestinian activists over his liberal Zionist stances. He has also long faced right-wing scorn as well as antisemitism-laced criticism over his stance on transgender rights, which he supports.
The post After facing backlash, California congressional hopeful Scott Wiener says Israel is committing ‘genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran threatens to attack Israel if Trump strikes Tehran over crackdown on protesters
(JTA) — Iranian leaders say they could attack Israel if the United States strikes Iran over its response to a sweeping anti-government protest movement.
“Let us be clear: in the case of an attack on Iran, the occupied territories as well as all U.S. bases and ships will be our legitimate target,” Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former commander in the country’s Revolutionary Guards, said on Saturday. Iranian officials use “the occupied territories” to refer to Israel, which the Iranian Islamic Republic regime has sworn to destroy and attacked repeatedly.
Qalibaf was responding to U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated comments signaling potential U.S. retaliation against Iran in the event that Iranian officials begin killing anti-government protesters who have been demonstrating with increasing strength since late last month.
On Monday, Qalibaf reportedly escalated his threats at a pro-government rally in Tehran, saying Iran would deal Trump “an unforgettable lesson” if he follows through on his continued threats to intervene. Agence France Presse reported that he spoke in front of banners reading “Death to Israel, Death to America” in Persian.
Trump has openly said the United States is considering weighing in against the Iranian government. “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before,” he wrote on Truth Social, his social media network, on Saturday. “The USA stands ready to help!!!”
On Sunday, amid reports that the Iranian regime had embarked on a bloody crackdown, Trump said again that he was considering “very strong options” against Iran, though he also said Tehran had reached out to negotiate. Amid reports that he expected to be briefed on military options against Iran on Tuesday, Trump indicated that the United States could act sooner.
“Iran wants to negotiate, yes. We may meet with them — I mean a meeting is being set up,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One late Sunday. “But we may have to act, because of what’s happening, before the meeting.”
Protest leaders said hundreds if not thousands of protesters had been shot to death in Tehran on Sunday, though official numbers were much lower and impossible for independent news organizations to verify in part because of an internet blackout that the government put in place last week.
“There seem to be some people killed that aren’t supposed to be killed,” Trump said. “These are violent — if you call them leaders, I don’t know if they’re leaders or just if they rule through violence. And we’re looking at some very strong options. We’ll make a determination.”
The potential for armed conflict between the United States and Iran, Israel’s sworn enemy, has prompted sharp concerns in Israel, which last year waged a 12-day war with Iran that ended under U.S. pressure following a U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on Sunday to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Reuters reported that Israeli intelligence officials said the country was on “high alert.”
At least one Israeli official has indicated that Israeli agents are active on the ground in Iran during the swelling protest movement, fueling criticism from Tehran that the protests have been stoked by foreign actors.
Demonstrations in support of the Iranian protesters, who are responding not only to the country’s repressive religious leadership but also an economic crisis, took place in cities around the world over the weekend. Some of the protests included Jewish Iranian expats and expressions of support for Israel.
The post Iran threatens to attack Israel if Trump strikes Tehran over crackdown on protesters appeared first on The Forward.
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Cuba Defiant After Trump Says Island to Receive No More Venezuelan Oil or Money
A view shows part of Havana as U.S.-Cuba tensions rise after U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to stop Venezuelan oil and money from reaching Cuba and suggested the communist-run island to strike a deal with Washington, in Havana, Cuba, January 11, 2026. REUTERS/Norlys Perez
US President Donald Trump on Sunday said no more Venezuelan oil or money will go to Cuba and suggested the Communist-run island should strike a deal with Washington, ramping up pressure on the long-time US nemesis and provoking defiant words from the island’s leadership.
Venezuela is Cuba’s biggest oil supplier, but no cargoes have departed from Venezuelan ports to the Caribbean country since the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by US forces in early January amid a strict US oil blockade on the OPEC country, shipping data shows.
Meanwhile, Caracas and Washington are progressing on a $2 billion deal to supply up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil to the US with proceeds to be deposited in US Treasury-supervised accounts, a major test of the emerging relationship between Trump and interim President Delcy Rodriguez.
“THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday.
“Cuba lived, for many years, on large amounts of OIL and MONEY from Venezuela,” Trump added.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel rejected Trump’s threat on social media, suggesting the US had no moral authority to force a deal on Cuba.
“Cuba is a free, independent, and sovereign nation. Nobody dictates what we do,” Diaz-Canel said on X. “Cuba does not attack; it has been attacked by the US for 66 years, and it does not threaten; it prepares, ready to defend the homeland to the last drop of blood.”
The US president did not elaborate on his suggested deal.
But Trump’s push on Cuba represents the latest escalation in his move to bring regional powers in line with the United States and underscores the seriousness of the administration’s ambition to dominate the Western Hemisphere.
Trump’s top officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have made no secret of their expectation that the recent US intervention in Venezuela could push Cuba over the edge.
US officials have hardened their rhetoric against Cuba in recent weeks, though the two countries have been at odds since former leader Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.
CUBA DEFENDS IMPORT RIGHTS
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said in another post on X on Sunday that Cuba had the right to import fuel from any suppliers willing to export it. He also denied that Cuba had received financial or other “material” compensation in return for security services provided to any country.
Thirty-two members of Cuba’s armed forces and intelligence services were killed during the US raid on Venezuela. Cuba said those killed were responsible for “security and defense” but did not provide details on the arrangement between the two long-time allies.
Cuba relies on imported crude and fuel mainly provided by Venezuela, and Mexico in smaller volumes, purchased on the open market to keep its power generators and vehicles running.
As its operational refining capacity dwindled in recent years, Venezuela’s supply of crude and fuel to Cuba has fallen. But the South American country is still the largest provider with some 26,500 barrels per day exported last year, according to ship tracking data and internal documents of state-run PDVSA, which covered roughly 50 percent of Cuba’s oil deficit.
Havana produce vendor Alberto Jimenez, 45, said Cuba would not back down in the face of Trump’s threat.
“That doesn’t scare me. Not at all. The Cuban people are prepared for anything,” Jimenez said.
It’s hard for many Cubans to imagine a situation much worse. The island’s government has been struggling to keep the lights on. A majority live without electricity for much of the day, and even the capital Havana has seen its economy crippled by hours-long rolling blackouts.
Shortages of food, fuel and medicine have put Cubans on edge and have prompted a record-breaking exodus, primarily to the United States, in the past five years.
MEXICO BECOMES KEY SUPPLIER
Mexico has emerged in recent weeks as a critical alternative oil supplier to the island, but the supply remains small, according to the shipping data.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum last week said her country had not increased supply volumes, but given recent political events in Venezuela, Mexico had turned into an “important supplier” of crude to Cuba.
US intelligence has painted a grim picture of Cuba’s economic and political situation, but its assessments offer no clear support for Trump’s prediction that the island is “ready to fall,” Reuters reported on Saturday, citing three people familiar with the confidential assessments.
The CIA’s view is that key sectors of the Cuban economy, such as agriculture and tourism, are severely strained by frequent blackouts, trade sanctions and other problems. The potential loss of oil imports and other support from Venezuela could make governing more difficult for Diaz-Canel.
Havana resident and parking attendant Maria Elena Sabina, a 58-year-old born shortly after Castro took power, said it was time for Cuba’s leaders to make changes amid so much suffering.
“There’s no electricity here, no gas, not even liquefied gas. There’s nothing here,” Sabina said. “So yes, a change is needed, a change is needed, and quickly.”