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Jewish community groups host Afghan, Ukrainian evacuees for Thanksgiving meals
(JTA) — Four and a half feet of snow had just fallen on East Aurora, New York, but Kim Kaiser and her fellow volunteers through Jewish Family Services of Western New York weren’t willing to compromise on their Thanksgiving plans.
Those plans involved joining a community Thanksgiving feast on Tuesday night, two days before the holiday, at the Ukrainian American Civic Center in nearby Buffalo, along with the Ukrainian family of six that the volunteers had been supporting since their arrival to the United States at the end of the summer.
The event, which was sponsored by the Buffalo branch of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, was open to all new Ukrainian arrivals, their sponsors and their supporters. A buffet of traditional Thanksgiving foods was on offer, along with musical accompaniment by a Ukrainian singer and pianist.
For Kaiser, the evening was a can’t-miss milestone in her journey supporting recent immigrants who have come to the United States under duress. Last year, she began volunteering through Jewish Family Services to set up housing for Afghan, Congolese and Burmese refugees new to Buffalo, which has a very large refugee population.
“And then I heard of a family in our town that was going to be sponsoring a family from Ukraine,” Kaiser told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “My husband and I knew that we needed, that we wanted to do this.”
In joining the efforts to support refugees, Kaiser participated in an age-old Jewish tradition. The importance of welcoming strangers is so deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and experience that immigration issues have long enjoyed a bipartisan consensus in American Jewish communities even amid deep polarization on other topics. Many cities have social services agencies that began to support Jewish immigrants and now work with new arrivals of all backgrounds, often conscripting Jewish volunteers as the backbone of their work.
Over the last year, those networks have kicked into high gear as not just one but two significant waves of people unable to remain safely in their homes made their way to American shores: first Afghans last year after the U.S. military withdrawal from their country and then Ukrainians this year amid the war instigated by Russia there.
Now, as millions of Americans prepare for their Thanksgiving meals, Jewish volunteers are introducing Ukrainian and Afghan evacuees to Thanksgiving for the first time. Some are even setting aside their own reservations about the holiday to do so. (Thanksgiving’s cheery origin myth is seen by many as whitewashing the genocide of Native Americans that followed the arrival of Europeans in North America.)
In California, Gail Dratch and her husband Elliot have been volunteering through the Orange County Jewish Coalition for Refugees. They will celebrate the holiday on Thursday by inviting a family from Afghanistan into their home, where they’ll serve a halal turkey — in keeping with their Muslim guests’ religious requirements.
“For us, Thanksgiving has become just such a part of what we do,” Dratch told JTA. “And I know my family at least, we don’t think about the beginnings of Thanksgiving, which are really troubling. My daughters especially are very troubled by the original story. But clearly, this family is so thankful for having this opportunity to be in the United States.”
Both Kaiser and Dratch got support for their volunteer circles from their local Jewish federations, in Buffalo and Orange County. They were two of 15 local federations to get support from Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella group, to resettle nearly 2,000 Afghans through refugee welcome circles, according to Darcy Hirch, a spokesperson.
Gail and Elliot Dratch stand with their partners from the volunteer circle and their evacuee family from Afghanistan, whose faces have been blurred for their safety. (Courtesy of Jewish Federations of North America.)
The Dratches have done far more than cook a special dinner. The Afghan family they are working with arrived on a Special Immigrant Visa, so the father was able to obtain a driver’s license quickly and found work almost immediately. But the mother had to learn to drive from scratch.
“She cried the first time I took her to a big parking lot just to drive around Angel Stadium,” Dratch said, referring to the stadium in Anaheim where the Los Angeles Angels play. “And when she got behind the wheel, she cried because she said it’s been a dream of hers to drive but she never thought she’d be able to, living in Afghanistan.”
The couple’s son, who is in preschool, is learning English very quickly, Dratch said.
“They’re just charming, lovely people,” she said. “It was their dream to come to the United States and raise their son here because they knew he would have far more opportunities here than in Afghanistan. And so we are thankful that this family has come into our lives because they’ve been such a gift to us.”
Dratch’s experience working with displaced people began in 2016 when she went to Greece to work with Syrian refugees.
“I think in the future people are going to look back and say, ‘Why wasn’t more done?’” she said. “And I don’t want to look back and think, ‘Why didn’t I do something?’”
In Buffalo, Kaiser’s volunteer circle takes turns running errands and sharing the duties of a host family for the parents and with four children with whom they have been working since September. Though the family has only been in the United States for a few months, Kaiser said she has noticed a big difference in the children, who she says were initially downcast and shy but are now “smiles all around.”
At the meal on Tuesday, which was set up for 200 people, Kaiser says she saw evacuees mingling with each other, delighting in speaking Ukrainian without relying on Google translate to communicate with each other, and exchanging addresses and telephone numbers with where they can be reached in the Buffalo area. The kids went back to the buffet table multiple times for dessert.
Said Kaiser, “You can tell that every time you do something for them that they are thankful that there’s somebody there to help them and that they can start feeling, finally, a little bit at ease.”
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The post Jewish community groups host Afghan, Ukrainian evacuees for Thanksgiving meals appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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From Buenos Aires to Warsaw, ‘The Bride’ comes home
For almost 100 years, “The Bride,” a magnificent painting by Polish Jewish artist Maurycy Minkowski (1881–1930), has been in exile.
In 1930, Minkowski traveled to Buenos Aires for an exhibition of more than 200 of his works. And then tragedy struck. As a child, he had lost his hearing due to an accident. While walking on the street shortly before the exhibit’s opening, he was struck by an oncoming vehicle whose approach he couldn’t hear. The paintings, which were exhibited posthumously, stayed in Argentina and were dispersed.
Since then, Fundación IWO — the Buenos Aires branch of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna — managed to acquire more than 80 of Minkowski’s paintings, some at auction and many through a coordinated effort during the 1940s to rescue 60 works that had been pawned or were on consignment with dealers trying to sell them.
IWO’s Minkowski collection, the largest in the world, was almost lost during the 1994 bombing of the AMIA building (the Buenos Aires Jewish community center), where IWO’s holdings were kept. A volunteer rescue team led by IWO’s academic director Ester Szwarc saved the paintings from the rubble. “The Bride” was among them.
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw had long expressed strong interest in including this painting in its core exhibition. Already in 2007, Renata Piątkowska, Chief Curator of Collections, had proposed “The Bride” for the museum’s exhibit on the Jewish wedding and its transformations in the 19th century.
On Nov. 7, 2025, almost 20 years later, that dream came true. The painting arrived at POLIN Museum to great fanfare, as a landmark gift from IWO made possible by funding from philanthropist and POLIN Museum Council member, Ronald S. Lauder.
Maurycy Minkowski was born into a well-to-do Warsaw family. He attended a school for the deaf, which encouraged his artistic talent. Minkowski graduated from the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts with a gold medal in 1905 and returned to Warsaw. He was shaken by the bloody pogroms and devastation of the Jewish community that he witnessed there and elsewhere that year. This experience prompted him to shift his focus from landscapes and portraits to the trauma of Jews fleeing violence. Those powerful paintings capture the desperation of masses of Jews on the run with nowhere to go. He is best known for these works, although he was never fully appreciated in his lifetime, neither in Poland, nor in Argentina.
Minkowski moved to Paris in 1908 and in the years that followed turned to scenes of Jewish daily life, essentially in the shtetl. It was around 1920 that he painted “The Bride,” one of several of his works on this theme. The bride’s attire and that of the married women surrounding her recall the clothing of Jewish women more than a century earlier.
The married women are dressed in keeping with tsnies, modesty. Their short hair is covered with an elaborately embroidered bonnet, shimmering with metallic thread. There is also the hint of a shterntikhl, a bejeweled panel along the front of the head covering; a brusttukh, a decorative panel on their chest, and a helzl, a ruff, around their neck.
The bride’s hair has not yet been shorn and is not yet covered. All the women are holding a prayerbook — it was customary to give the bride a beautifully bound prayerbook as a wedding gift. Set in an exquisite wooden frame hand carved by Minkowski himself, the painting captures the solemnity of this moment, as the bride contemplates her future after the wedding. The lives of Jewish women — not only their dress and weddings — would be transformed beyond recognition in the decades that followed.
“This remarkable painting is a true testament to Maurycy Minkowski’s artistic talent and his deep connection to Jewish culture,” said Zygmunt Stępiński, Director of POLIN Museum, when the painting arrived. The work will be the centerpiece of a reimagined presentation in 2027 on the evolution of the Jewish wedding during the nineteenth century.
The post From Buenos Aires to Warsaw, ‘The Bride’ comes home appeared first on The Forward.
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Why Does the Palestinian Authority Still Promote Holocaust Denial? Because It Starts at the Top
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas looks on as he visits the Istishari Cancer Center in Ramallah, in the West Bank, May 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Torokman
Official Palestinian Authority (PA) television recently aired yet another segment questioning the reality of the Holocaust.
On Oct. 8, 2025, PA TV brought on Tunisian journalist Sufian Al-Arfawi to claim that the Jewish “victim narrative” is collapsing, and the PA TV host added that even the gas chambers could be dismissed with “simple evidence.”
Tunisian journalist Sufian Al-Arfawi: “The moral issue that they [the Jews] were victims and the issue that they were subjected to extermination by Hitler allowed them to receive support and a global popular embrace, because there was sympathy. This [victim] narrative has begun to collapse and to go in the right direction…”
Official PA TV host: “There is the narrative that says that the [German] soldier used to drag the Jews to the crematorium while calmly eating a sandwich. How does someone drag a person into a crematorium that has toxic gas and isn’t harmed by it? Meaning, even the narrative can be undone with very simple evidence.” [emphasis adde]
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals – Tunis, Oct. 8, 2025]
According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion, “Holocaust denial may include publicly denying or calling into doubt the use of principal mechanisms of destruction (such as gas chambers, mass shooting, starvation and torture) or the intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people.”
Given the ideology of the PA’s leadership, this denial is entirely predictable.
PA leader Mahmoud Abbas himself laid the groundwork for this narrative decades ago in his doctoral thesis, later published as The Other Side.
Abbas argued that Zionists intentionally inflated the number of Holocaust victims for political gain and that the real number of Jews killed was only “a few hundred thousand.” He even claimed that Jews were “offered up” to increase the victim count.
Having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over. However, since Zionism was not a fighting partner – suffering victims in a battle – it had no escape but to offer up human beings, under any name, to raise the number of victims, which they could then boast of at the moment of accounting …
It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement…is to inflate this figure so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.” [emphasis adde]
When the head of the PA has distorted the memory of the Holocaust throughout his life, such as when he suggested that Hitler killed Jews out of self-defense because “they caused ruin” and because of Jews’ “social role,” it is no surprise that PA TV echoes them.
This is not a new narrative; rather, it is a continuation of the Holocaust distortion that Mahmoud Abbas embedded into PA ideology and that its media still carries forward today.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.
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Israel Exposed Hamas’s Terror Network Across Europe. Will UK Media Now Stop Treating Its Leaders With Kid Gloves?
Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official in Gaza, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Istanbul, Turkey, Oct. 16, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Murad Sezer
Over the past two years, senior Hamas official Basem Naim has been granted multiple high‑profile interviews on UK platforms such as Sky News and the BBC — remarkable visibility for someone with a leadership position in a designated terrorist group. Now, in light of a startling disclosure by Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad concerning a Europe‑wide terror infrastructure attributed to Hamas, those media appearances demand re‑examination.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office released a statement this week on behalf of the Mossad saying the agency, in cooperation with European counterparts, has dismantled a network of terror cells across Germany, Austria, and beyond — cells that stockpiled weapons and stood ready to strike Jewish and Israeli targets on the continent.
Among the most striking details was a weapons cache seized in Vienna last September, consisting of pistols and explosives and traced to a certain Muhammad Naim, who was identified by Israeli intelligence as the son of Basem Naim. Investigators reportedly uncovered a meeting in Qatar between father and son, allegedly signaling leadership‑level approval of the European operation.
When one considers that Basem Naim has been treated in the UK media as a mainstream political figure, flattered with copious airtime, speaking from Istanbul and Doha, questions must be asked.
On Oct. 10, Sky News’ lightweight foreign news presenter Yalda Hakim interviewed Naim in Doha (perhaps she flew there on Sky News’ weather forecast sponsor Qatar Airways’ own fleet), where she didn’t once question Hamas’s international terrorism aimed at Jews. Instead, Naim was given time to claim Hamas was prepared to relinquish governing Gaza but would not agree to disarm.
Hakim’s three softball interviews of Naim never one challenged the terrorist and his organization’s evil, sadistic behaviors or ideology in as aggressive a way as she badgered me for doubting the discredited and disproven Hamas-supplied casualty figures during the Gaza war. Earlier, a BBC “HardTalk” session with Sarah Montague on Jan. 29 featured Naim on Gaza’s future, once again without evident interrogation of his organization’s international terror links.
I myself appeared on Hakim’s Sky studio show back in February 2024, immediately after another segment with Naim, and openly criticized the absurdity of the interview — from Turkey, during active warfare in Gaza — where no questions were asked about Hamas’s torture of its own people or its transnational terror ambitions. I pointed out that he had served as minister of health in the first government of arch-terrorist Ismael Haniyeh, only for the other guest, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, to jump in and suggest that his willingness to perpetuate the suffering of Gazans while he was safe in Turkey was somehow akin to Yair Netanyahu, the son of the Israeli Prime Minister and a private citizen, living in the US. In conversion outside the studio, she insisted to me that Israel’s main problem was its democratically elected leader but, when challenged, couldn’t name a single other Israeli leader who she thought would act differently in the circumstances. I’m not sure she could name any other Israeli politicians at all. No criticism of Dr. Naim, though.
Having highlighted this at the time, I hope that now the mainstream media and establishment’s choice to confer legitimacy on Naim without substantive challenge on important issues is reconsidered. (I haven’t had the opportunity to ask Hakim or Warsi since then).
To dismiss Palestinian terrorism as only a local Israeli problem is to ignore how Hamas has long viewed itself: as a regional, even global, movement, and an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood — a transnational Islamic jihadist movement. Indeed, senior Hamas leadership in Gaza have, for years, framed their cause not simply as liberation of the enclave but as vanguard of a broader “resistance” spanning all of Israel, with their own founding charter clear on its views of Jews in general. They want us dead. To anyone who claims it’s all just rhetoric, the European arrests and weapon caches expose their ambitions in operational form.
The recent arrest in London of a British man accused of helping move firearms into Europe for attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets should dispel any lingering doubt about how far these networks extend.
German authorities say the suspect was detained in the UK on a German warrant after a monthslong investigation into a Hamas-linked cell operating across Germany and Austria. According to Germany’s Federal Prosecutor, he was a member of Hamas and twice traveled to Berlin over the summer to meet a German citizen referred to as Abed Al G, who was arrested earlier alongside two others described as “foreign operatives” alleged to have been seeking weapons for attacks on Jewish sites. During those arrests police seized an AK-47, several handguns, and quantities of ammunition. Prosecutors say the suspect had already taken delivery of five handguns and ammunition and transported them to Vienna for safekeeping.
The picture emerging is of a network that now reaches into Britain itself.
In this context, Britain’s recent decision to admit young Palestinian students from Gaza with fully‑funded scholarships — and dependent family members — is disturbing. On the face of it, the initiative is humanitarian. But when set against the backdrop of a terror network active on European soil, rooted into Hamas leadership and stretched into host‑countries, it smacks of policy naïveté, or worse, “suicidal empathy.”
Granting access to students and their families from a territory under Hamas control where generations have been educated to idolize terrorists and carry out attacks like the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel seems more than a little foolish. UK campuses are experiencing rising extremism as it is, and radicalization is a known problem without importing the children of a Gazan education system built on antisemitism and violence.
The threat, it seems, is not only on Israel’s doorstep — it may be on our own. And while compassion is a noble instinct, in a world of asymmetric warfare, porous borders, and subterranean terror networks, we risk opening doors without knowing what, or whom, may walk through.
When the media treats a senior Hamas figure as legitimate without challenge, when Western academic institutions open their doors to students from societies led by terrorist groups, and when intelligence agencies expose the apparatus of terror on our continent, can we still afford to view Palestinian terrorism as someone else’s problem? Or have we now become part of that problem ourselves?
Jonathan Sacerdoti, a writer and broadcaster, is now a contributor to The Algemeiner.