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Israel’s most dangerous war is with itself
My friend Rabbi Heshy Grossman recently invited me to Jerusalem to meet top Haredi rabbis. Unhappy with my critical writings about the Haredim, this well-meaning true believer hoped to jump-start fruitful dialogue.
So I took the train to Jerusalem, and spent a fascinating day with pleasant and welcoming scholars who left me in even greater despair.
The background: Angst is now dominating Israeli discourse amid a strong feeling among non-Haredi Jews that the country is running out of time to save itself. This can seem related to the Palestinian conflict, or to disputes over authoritarian reforms. But at the end of the day the main issue — for the non-Haredi Jews who are still a majority in the land — is the Haredim.
Concerns used to be about the Haredim — who have always held sway over right-wing coalitions — trying to impose religious strictures, like banning commerce and public transport on the Sabbath, which they have done with varying degrees of success. But the clash has gone far beyond such matters. The wars that began on Oct. 7, 2023 have exposed profound tensions over this large minority evading military service, and the opposition promises to enlist them should it win this fall’s election.
But even that change — heavy lift though it may be — wouldn’t come close to fixing the actual problem.
The Haredi system largely refuses to teach high school boys math, science, English and other non-religious topics. It routes as many men as possible to religious study well into adulthood, for which they expect to receive state stipends rather than pay tuition. With very low male participation in the economy, the community pays minimal taxes and depends on a huge web of ever-expanding welfare. Increasingly, Haredi women do work, but rarely in high-end jobs. The community, which currently makes up about a sixth of the population, is exploding as family sizes approach seven children on average, certainly among the highest for any significant community in the developed world.
This will clearly lead to an economic collapse if nothing changes. On top of that, it does not seem as if the Israeli Haredim can coexist happily with others from a philosophical and cultural standpoint, and the feeling is very much mutual.
‘A sense of separatism’
Heshy drove me all over the city in a whirlwind tour that included the head of the Hebron Yeshiva, one of the most senior rabbis of the Mirer Yeshiva — the world’s largest — the head of a major yeshiva serving mainly youth from the United States, a visiting U.S. Haredi rabbi much involved in the local political scene, and Heshy’s own charming father-in-law, who was the chief rabbi of Atlanta and has long been a beloved columnist for the iconic Mishpacha Magazine.
The tone throughout was cordial, at times warm, somewhat prickly and occasionally intellectual. These were serious men who are easy to like. That made the substance of what they said doubly unsettling.
The first fault line, as expected, was education. My question to the rabbis was straightforward: How can a modern economy function when a large and growing share of its population receives little to no instruction in mathematics, science or “secular” language skills?
Rabbi Moshe Meiselman, who holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was dismissive of the premise. Meiselman, the U.S.-born founder and head of Yeshivat Toras Moshe, described secular studies as an “intellectual game” that he had experienced at the highest levels and found vastly inferior to studying the Torah. He said that Haredi communities from the beginning of the state perceived an aggressive and arrogant stance from the Zionist authorities, who felt “that no intelligent person” would want to be Haredi.
“There is a basic tension in society, and that tension is what created, more than anything else, a sense of separatism within our own environment,” he said.
“Even at the cost of self-harm?” I asked.
“In your view it’s self-harm,” he said. And if the state cut off funding, he added, “we’d simply get money from our people abroad to support us … we will handle it.”
Like the others, he seemed to believe that whatever practical skills are needed for work can be acquired in a year or two. He offered the existence of certain successful Haredi professionals — lawyers, doctors, accountants — as proof. “What relevance does my knowledge of trigonometry have to anyone’s employment? Where does Euclid come in?” he said. “I don’t have to learn to talk with Plato in order to get a profession.”
I was glad to find a more flexible position expressed by Heshy’s father-in-law, Rabbi Emanuel Feldman.
“I’m not sure personally why they should not be able to study physics or chemistry or mathematics,” he said. “I don’t understand why there’s an objection to it.” He argued that this “is not ideological but political and a decision based upon circumstances.” I suggested the circumstances were the Haredi leadership’s preference for a compliant and unquestioning flock. “It’s unfortunate that there is no effective communication and there are elements on both sides who are interested in maintaining a conflict,” he sighed.
Menachem Zupnik, the U.S.-based rabbi, from Passaic, N.J., was also more pragmatic than the Israeli cohort.
“The biggest problem,” he said, “is that nobody goes to work and has a profession… many, many issues are the outgrowth of the fact that they believe that everybody has to sit and learn Torah all the time.” But even he rejected the idea that external pressure — including cutting subsidies and restructuring incentives — would change behavior. “All you’re going to do is cause more hatred.”
Rabbi Shlomo Spitzer, who preferred that I not mention his affiliation, explained the indifference to practical outcomes this way: From the Haredi perspective, Torah and mitzvot are the organizing principles of life. Everything else a person does — work, eating, recreation — is secondary: “these are means, not ends.”
I asked: “When you describe unwavering commitment to Torah, doesn’t that risk becoming fanaticism?”
“What is fanaticism? That is a serious question,” he argued, explaining that following the Torah “to the end” means accepting it literally. “But societies change,” I said. “Values evolve. Why shouldn’t religious frameworks adapt?” His answer was that there are foundations that must be regarded as absolute.
Military tensions
The issue of military service brings the divide between secular and Haredi priorities into the sharpest relief for most Israelis. Here, too, the argument is about identity.
Again and again, the concern surfaced that exposure to the army would erode the religious character of Haredi young men. The fear was personal, and almost visceral. It is not without foundation: Many Israelis would love to have more of the Haredim join mainstream society — and indeed, exposure to that society is well understood as a trigger for leaving Haredi life.
Rabbi Chaim Yitzhak Kaplan, the dean of students at Hebron Yeshiva, put it plainly: “There’s no way that a young man… is going to go in for two, three years in the army and come out the same Haredi.” Moreover, he noted that the specific ages in question — late teens and early twenties — are precisely when he needs youth to be studying, lest they go astray.
It was clear he was sharing a genuinely felt defense of a way of life, not speaking out of cowardice or selfishness.
“Our nation is about learning,” Kaplan said, describing Torah study as the defining activity of Jewish existence. Once that premise is accepted, the hierarchy of obligations shifts. But the truth is that most secular Israelis cannot in honesty accept this idea. Many don’t ascribe much importance to religion as a vocation. It is one of many things that might be important to a person, but seems imbalanced to insist must be important to a country. So the Haredi argument becomes a little like someone telling you they cannot serve in the military because they must become a pilot, plumber, poet or mathematician, and do nothing else, ever. “Very nice,” many Israelis would say, “I’ll see you in the army.”
Kaplan did concede that at some point in the future Haredim may have to either agree to serve or leave the country. Meiselman was more strident, saying, in effect, that sages were more valuable than soldiers. “Wars in the world are caused by people not being sufficiently Jewish, religious. … if the Jews were here, acting as they’re supposed to act, then there would be no more war, ” he said. Then the Arab world would not be as antagonist.”
I asked: “Do you think Hitler carried out the Holocaust because the Jews were insufficiently religious?” Exactly, he replied, to my despair. I told him this is the language of an irreconcilable cultural war. “I’m a very honest person,” he replied, quite calmly.
Joy, and denial
In general, there is a pleasingly cerebral atmosphere of learning and debate in these institutions. Study can go on, Kaplan noted proudly, well into the night. The Mirer Yeshiva especially positively teems with boys, many from the U.S., who clearly care deeply about the culture they’re preserving. The entire Mea Shearim neighborhood seems designed to serve that yeshiva, with nary a business visible that is not somehow involved — whether that be the kosher eateries or bookstore full of young men reading and debating in a joyous scene for which I could not recall a secular equivalent.
It was an appealing environment in a strange way, and I understood the desire to preserve it. I proposed to some of those I met that the conflict might remain manageable, enabling that preservation, if the community that was at such loggerheads with society were stable in size.
This line of argument is an awkward and delicate business, as it’s not normally advisable to advise others on reproduction. But it’s also the heart of the matter — and Heshy, for one, knows it, frequently bragging, with eyes twinkling, that his side is “winning.”
“Why don’t you go fight with all the people in Tel Aviv that they should get rid of their dogs and they should have five children?” asked Rabbi Zupnick. My points — that the explosive growth of a welfare-dependent sector risks collapsing the very economy it depends on to sustain it — went unacknowledged.
The theological problem
It was when the conversation moved from policy into theology that things got especially hopeless.
Rabbi Spitzer, for example, said scripture allowed no leeway on the matter of the halakhic prescription of capital punishment by stoning for Sabbath violations. When pressed on whether he’d apply it to his own child, he said: “I don’t want to, I have to.” He clarified, though, that the institutional framework required to implement such sanctions is presently absent — for example, there is no Sanhedrin or Jewish Temple.
But then again, if the Haredim end up as the large majority, there will be.
In the car, as we zoomed around Mea Shearim, Heshy tried to explain that the Haredi community and I simply speak different languages, and I had not understood what the learned rabbi meant. “So I shouldn’t take it literally?” I asked, grasping at a straw.
“I didn’t say that,” Heshy snapped.
A modern state depends on a set of shared assumptions: that citizens will be educated in ways that allow them to participate in a complex economy, that they will contribute to collective defense, that public policy will operate within a framework of shared accountability.
What came across very clearly in my listening tour was that a society organized around Torah study operates according to a different set of assumptions: that insulation from external influence is a virtue, that the Torah is the only valuable truth and that no moral or legal framework except what is ordained therein has any meaning.
These two systems can coexist for a time, if the Haredim are in the minority and they are economically supported. If the Haredim become a majority, as is inevitable unless the birth rate comes down fast, that fragile peace will break. Even though demographic predictions must be couched, it seems clear that without change, soon, non-Haredim will start to despair, and many will flee the country.
Correcting the course
Heshy will not be so happy, but the meetings he set up convinced me all the more that radical steps are needed to completely upend the current dynamic. The leaders of Israel’s opposition say they will move to draft the Haredim if they win the upcoming election. They should go much further. Among the steps necessary:
- Impose a secular core curriculum for all religious schools, and completely cut off state funding to any schools in any sector that resist.
- Eliminate most yeshiva stipends, or funds for those who study Torah full-time.The original draft exemption allowed by Israel’s first leader, David Ben-Gurion, allowed for funds for several hundred students, and that’s a number most Israelis could live with.
- Cap the number of child stipends — state funds allocated per child, to help support young families — at three per family. The idea here would be to encourage the birthrate to come down.
- Generously fund adult education and professional training for Haredim, and set up a state authority for absorbing, housing, training and assisting those who want to leave the fold altogether.
Recently, an Israeli news program interviewed a Haredi mother of nine who works to support her husband’s study. She seemed proud of his economic cluelessness since his job was to “keep the flame alive.” She predicted the Haredim will never join the army no matter what. When the exasperated reporter — himself religious but not Haredi — asked whether it was fair that other mothers should spend their days in fear for their sons’ lives as they serve, she replied that she too spends her days in fear of her children becoming secular. She seemed very serious, and not at all apologetic.
Is she an exception? Can this way of thinking be changed? If the answers to these questions are no, we have a national emergency.
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Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing
(JTA) — President Donald Trump’s pick for general counsel of the agency that oversees federal workers’ labor rights testified in Congress on Wednesday that he does not believe a cartoon he published in college that depicted a Jewish student with devil horns was antisemitic.
Charlton Allen appeared at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for his confirmation hearing Wednesday afternoon. There, Sen. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona Democrat, pressed him about the cartoon.
“If you look behind me, you’ll see the front cover of an edition of the Carolina Review depicting Aaron Nelson, a Jewish candidate for student body president. Your magazine altered Nelson’s photo depicting him with the horns and a pitchfork. Inside the article says, ‘The difference between Aaron Nelson is simple. He’s Jewish.’” Gallego said. “Yes or no, Mr. Nelson. Do you stand by this depiction?”
The cartoon ignited a firestorm when it was published in the Carolina Review, a campus conservative magazine that Allen founded as an undergraduate at UNC. The magazine’s faculty advisor said he resigned after it went to print against his advice, and nearly two dozen Jewish faculty members pressed UNC’s chancellor to denounce the cartoon and censure the magazine, which he did.
Allen fended off allegations of antisemitism at the time and again during a 2014 hearing to confirm him for a position in North Carolina. He did so again on Tuesday.
“I would not say that it’s antisemitic,” he said. “We were the group that was calling for the equal treatment of all student religions.”
“If I were 30 years ago advocating for The Review, I would say, ‘don’t run that cover,’” he testified. “I think it was a mistake.”
According to reports from the time, Nelson had been accused by the Carolina Review of discriminating against a Christian campus group by voting not to fund it. He had voted in favor of funding a “majority” of other campus Christian groups while he was a representative in the student congress.
Facing backlash, Allen denied at the time that the depiction of Nelson with horns was meant to channel longstanding antisemitic stereotypes.
“Our cartoonist lampooned [Nelson] as such because her perception was that Aaron was evil,” Allen told the Duke Chronicle in April 1996. “Newspapers in the past few weeks have run cartoons lampooning public figures such as Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and even myself as ‘devils’ with horns and pitchforks. Where’s the public outcry over these cartoons?”
On Wednesday, Allen offered a slightly different explanation. He said the picture was meant to channel UNC’s historic and enduring rivalry with nearby Duke University, whose mascot is the “Blue Devil.”
“The cartoonist’s intention was to make an analogy to that,” he said.
In 2014, during his confirmation hearing ahead of his appointment for commissioner of the state Industrial Commission of North Carolina, Allen addressed criticisms of the cartoon by saying his grandfather had helped to liberate Jews in Europe from concentration camps during World War II, the Indy Week reported at the time.
Trump nominated Allen to the Office of the Special Council — the agency that protects whistleblowers from unlawful conduct — in May 2025 but withdrew the nomination less than a week later. In September, he nominated Allen to the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Nelson, meanwhile, won the election handily to become UNC’s student body president. Now president of The Chamber, Chapel Hill’s chamber of commerce, Nelson did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment.
The post Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing appeared first on The Forward.
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Former antisemitic activist Lucas Gage explains to Jewish podcast why he left the movement
(JTA) — In July 2024, X suspended antisemitic influencer Lucas Gage for six months for making “repeated and clear calls for violence.”
This month, Gage was in Lakewood, New Jersey, explaining to two Jewish interviewers why he no longer considers himself an antisemite.
“It’s like a disease. I’m serious. It was like this compulsion and look, it comes from a justified place in some, but then it’s like what have I become honestly and it’s like I was sick of myself,” Gage told Yaakov Langer and Jake Turx on the podcast “Inspiration for the Nation.” “Looking back at the videos that got me knocked off of Twitter … I was out of my mind.”
Gage, a longtime white nationalist activist from New Jersey formerly known as Angelo John Gage, spent more than a decade promoting conspiracy theories and hate towards Jews online before publicly renouncing antisemitism earlier this year.
He told Langer and Turx that a pivotal moment for him was seeing antisemitic theories proliferate about the September murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. From there, his conversations changed.
“The more I sit down and talk to Jewish people, the more I realize how maligned they are,” Gage wrote in a post on X announcing the interview. “The lies the JQ crowd now tell about me are similar to those they tell about Jews. I was part of that crowd, but now I’m glad to say I’m no longer an antisemite.”
Gage announced in a March post on Substack that he was “abandoning” antisemitism, explaining that while his declaration was “not an apology,” his “focus on Jewish supremacy alone has become a self-destructive and futile endeavor, which does not even solve the problem.”
“The problem, however, is that I got sucked into the mob—the very mob I identified as ‘my people,’ who are just as problematic as the Jewish mob,” Gage wrote. “With that being said, I do not denounce my beliefs about Jewish supremacy and criminality in certain areas of society nor Jewish overrepresentation, which are all well substantiated.”
When asked by Langer, the founder of Living Lchaim and host of the podcast, why he had the “strength” to publicly renounce antisemitism and meet with Jews, Gage said he felt an obligation to engage with the Jewish community after spending years attacking it online.
Gage told the Jewish hosts that he thought it would be wrong for him “to walk away and not speak to a community I’ve been at war with for 14 years, and to see why I was at war with you guys in the first place.”
Turx, the senior White House correspondent for Mishpacha Magazine, an Orthodox publication, said the meeting took place after he reached out to Langer multiple times.
Langer did not respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment, and efforts to reach Gage were unsuccessful.
During the nearly two-hour interview, Gage recounted his journey from an Iraq war veteran to antisemitic activist and, more recently, to a public critic of the online movement he once helped build.
Gage, who is Roman Catholic, said his descent into antisemitic conspiracy theories began after serving in Kuwait and Iraq, when he became obsessed with identifying who was responsible for sending him to a war he described as “a lie.”
“I went through all the conspiracy theories until I ran into the Jews and that was in 2012 when I read ‘Mein Kampf’ and I was like ‘whoa,’” Gage said.
That year, Gage began posting on the racist Web forum Stormfront that he had recently found out about “the real Jewish question” and that “EVERYTHING connects and leads back to the jews — the evil jews,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Stormfront played a role in one of the best-known recent conversion-from-white supremacy stories, in which the child of the site’s founder renounced extremism and antisemitism after being invited to Shabbat dinners in college.
For Gage, Stormfront was a site of his radicalization. After beginning to post there, he became a regular fixture in white nationalist circles, appearing on far-right podcasts, organizing activists and eventually taking a shot at elected office.
In 2014, Gage ran unsuccessfully for the House in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District under the far-right white supremacist American Freedom Party but was disqualified before the campaign season began because of incorrectly filed paperwork. Following that bid, he served as the chairman of the National Youth Front, the youth wing of the party.
Gage’s online presence and influence within white nationalist circles grew rapidly, appearing alongside former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke and Stormfront founder Andrew Anglin on their platforms. He also frequently promoted the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which is widely considered antisemitic and claims that Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white people in Western countries with nonwhite immigrants.
Following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Gage said that he shifted the focus of his online accounts to railing against Israel, posting on X over the ensuing months that “every supporter of Israel is a terrorist” and that “Zionists are worse than pedophiles,” according to screenshots of his account posted by the Anti-Defamation League.
Gage said his departure from the movement was driven in part by frustration with what he called “low-IQ antisemitism,” or conspiracy theories that reflexively blame Jews for unrelated events.
“What was the final straw? Charlie Kirk. Okay. Why? Because I keep talking about low IQ antisemitism. What is that? It’s when you blame Jews for things they haven’t even done,” Gage said, explaining that he couldn’t agree with conspiratorial claims swirling on the far-right that Israel had been behind the Turning Point USA leader’s murder.
Gage said that he believed even if it was proven that the man accused of Kirk’s killing, Tyler Robinson, had committed the crime, the far-right crowd he had surrounded himself with would have still blamed the Jews.
“There’s no hope for these people, and then they’re turning on me just for disagreeing,” Gage said.
Gage’s shift quickly earned him the ire of antisemitic influencers he had once aligned himself with, including far-right antisemitic media personalities Jake Shields and Stew Peters.
“Imagine if Lucas Gage had never existed. What a beautiful world it would be. The world would be a much better place if Lucas Gage did not exist in it,” Peters said during a podcast appearance with Shields last month. “I mean, that guy singlehandedly destroyed the most cohesive movement in modern history.”
Looking ahead, Gage stressed the importance of engaging with figures who hold antisemitic views, citing the deadly terror attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia in December.
“I want to talk to different groups of people and say, look, yeah, we have to sit down and have these conversations, because if we don’t, if we isolate the antisemites, ‘oh, they’re just maniacs, they’re jealous, we don’t care,’ they’re going to go crazy,” Gage said. “I didn’t, but someone else did. Remember the guy who shot up the beach in Australia?”
Since announcing the interview, Langer said that his inbox had been “flooded” with messages asking him if he believed Gage was sincere, to which he responded “100%.”
“I wish more people were as authentic and honest as he is,” Langer said. “While it wasn’t easy to make change in his life, he did it.”
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This year’s biggest World Cup upset came from its most Jew-ish team
Cape Verde, an island nation of about 530,000 people off the coast of Africa, shocked soccer fans around the globe by holding Spain without a goal in their debut World Cup match this week. But Carol Castiel saw it coming.
For the better part of four decades, Castiel has been working to document and preserve the island nation’s rich but little-known Sephardic heritage. And while there are no known practicing Jews in Cape Verde today, Castiel said connection to Jewish identity remains in the country and in its soccer team.
The proof, she said, was in the team’s first result.
Cape Verde’s stout defense — led by 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha’s seven saves — shut out the team FIFA ranked second-best in the world, and a country whose GDP is 600 times greater than its own. Cape Verde, ranked 67th, didn’t buckle as Spain fired shot after shot on the goal. The game ended in a 0-0 stalemate.
“In the face of hardship, they just keep going, and they find ways,” Castiel said. “They’re the underdog.”
But there was also a Jewish genealogical connection on the Cape Verde team sheet: Reserve forward Gilson Benchimol’s surname dates back some 150 years to Sephardic Jews on the island.
The 2026 World Cup’s biggest upset to date has put the spotlight on the 10-island archipelago about 350 miles west of Senegal. Castiel, an American Jew and ex-journalist who is obtaining citizenship in Cape Verde, is also hoping it brings attention to her effort to preserve Jewish memory there.
An island nation’s Jewish roots
Jewish life on Cape Verde dates back to the 16th century, when the Portuguese Inquisition caused Jewish converts to Christianity — known then as “New Christians” — to emigrate en masse from the Iberian peninsula. (The Portuguese Inquisition started a couple decades after the Spanish Inquisition.)
The islands were far from the center of the Inquisition, perhaps allowing some of the exiled to resume practicing Judaism in secret. They also offered New Christians the chance to pursue commercial opportunities in international trade. These New Christians lived under surveillance even in Cape Verde, though, and one of the islands had a Jewish ghetto in the 16th century.
That first wave of migrants eventually assimilated through marriage or out-migrated, and the archipelago’s Jewish footprint largely disappeared. Some historians suggest that last names on the island related to trees and animals, like Carvalho (oak) or Pinto (chick), hint at possible Jewish ancestry. (Some Sephardic Jews and conversos adopted or were assigned last names during the Inquisition.)
Cape Verde became a popular Jewish destination again in the second half of the 19th century, after the Inquisition ended. The territory was still a Portuguese colony with a powerful grip on transatlantic trade, and Jewish emigres — many from the northern Morocco city of Tetouan — found success in agriculture and international shipping.
“They were key to the economy in those days,” Castiel said.
Some of the primary exports from that era, like coffee and rum, continue today. (The islands were also a hub of slave trade, and historians believe New Christians were among the slave traders.)
Few in number and mostly male, the latter wave of Jewish immigrants also married out of the religion, Castiel said, and their descendants today are Catholic. But their Jewish surnames remain prevalent on the islands. Castiel said names like Cohen and Levy, as well as variations on common Sephardic names like Ohayon and Benchimol, show that “the blood of Jews is running through the veins of a lot of people there.”
Castiel said she did not believe the national team’s Benchimol — who plays professionally for the Russian club Akron Tolyatti — identifies as Jewish. (The Forward has reached out to the player for comment.)
Though the Cape Verdeans with common Jewish surnames don’t tend to identify as Jewish, many embrace their Jewish ancestry.
One of them is Jose Levy. His great-grandfather, Fortunato Levy, emigrated from Morocco in the late 19th century and started a business doing sea-transportation around the islands. His father worked for the Portuguese government until Cape Verde won independence in 1975.
Levy, who worked for the United Nations before retiring recently, said many Jewish Cape Verde families returned to Portugal after independence. But to this day, many of his friends in Praia — the Cape Verde capital, where he lives — have Jewish names.
“Neither me nor my father were directly exposed to Jewish religion,” Levy, 68, said in an interview. “But our grandparents and great-grandparents were proud Jews, and they made a great contribution to what Cape Verde is now.”
Historic preservation
There are no known synagogues on the islands — even historic ones — and Cape Verde is one of the rare places in the world without a Chabad. But there are at least four small Jewish cemeteries spread across three islands, Castiel said. Modeled after Moroccan cemeteries, each has white horizontal stones with inscriptions in Hebrew and Portuguese — but they were overgrown, eroding or otherwise disarrayed when Castiel first visited.
“In Judaism, the most important thing is to create burial grounds to rest the souls,” Castiel said. “In that regard, these Jews did that. It’s just that they couldn’t sustain it.”
The nonprofit she founded in 2007, the Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project, aims to restore the sites and expand the documentation and of Jewish life on the island through research, oral history and tourism. In 2018, the nonprofit installed a series of plaques to commemorate the 19th-century Jewish settlers interred at the cemeteries.
According to Castiel, the nonprofit’s primary funder is Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, whose Jewish historic preservation efforts in Morocco — the ancestral homeland of many Cape Verde migrants — are well-documented. Levy sits on the board.
“We carry the last name, but the religion aspect was not transferred, so we are Catholic,” Levy said. “But we are very proud of our Jewish ancestors.”
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