Uncategorized
Meet the 2 Jews of Guyana, a South American nation with a tradition of religious tolerance
(JTA) — When Janet Jagan, an immigrant from the United States, made history by becoming Guyana’s prime minister in 1997, she was thought to be the country’s only Jew.
In fact, another Jew had recently purchased an island off the coast of Guyana, and 25 years later, there are at least two Jews living in the tiny South American nation. One is a Guyanese-British-Israeli guesthouse operator who has been working in Guyana since the 1970s. The other is a former Madison Avenue marketing executive from Chicago who until recently ran the country’s largest tour operator.
Both offer a window into three dynamics that define Guyana: a government that embraces all faiths, an economy based on extractive industries and an expansive rainforest the country hopes will be a draw for its growing ecotourism industry.
Guyana, an English-speaking country of roughly 800,000, came to international prominence in 1978 as the site of the Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 followers of cult leader Jim Jones were killed, either by suicide or murder.
These days, though, the country is drawing attention for the recent discovery of oil off its coast. ExxonMobil announced the discovery in 2015 and promptly began developing Guyana’s oil resources. With over 11 billion barrels of reserves and producing over 350,000 barrels per day, Guyana is on track to produce more than 1 million daily barrels by 2030, potentially transforming one of South America’s poorest countries.
It was an earlier extractive industry that first brought Raphael Ades to Guyana. Born in Tel Aviv in 1951 to an Italian-Jewish mother and a Syrian-Jewish father, Ades had a peripatetic childhood. The family moved first to Milan when Ades, who goes by Rafi, was 11, after his father Meyer entered the diamond trade, then two years later to southwestern Germany. They landed in Pforzheim, known at the time as Goldstadt because of the prominence of jewelry and precious stone trading locally.
But the family was not yet settled: In 1967, Meyer took the family to London, where Ades finished high school and took his university entrance exams, excelling in all of the languages he had picked up — English, French, Italian, German and Hebrew. As a psychology student at the University of London, Ades began helping his father, who maintained an office in London’s diamond district, at work. His father contracted out the polishing, and one of the polishers was Indo-Guyanese.
“That day, my dad took out the atlas and started to read up on Guyana,” Ades recalled. “‘This is somewhere I want to go,’ he told me.”
During a trip to visit an Israeli friend in Venezuela, Meyer went on a prospecting trip to Guyana, and registered the Guyana Diamond Export company. When he suffered a heart attack, Ades and his mother flew to Georgetown to be with him. Barely 21, Ades stepped in to take a larger role in the business. He flew with other diamond buyers into the rural mining areas, and learned the operations were producing thousands of carats of diamonds.
“I stayed in Guyana through the second half of 1972 and fell in love with the place,” Ades recalled. “I went to the [main] Stabroek market in Georgetown, seeing all of the iguanas and macaws. When my dad recuperated, I started going back to Guyana myself.”
His mining business thrived. In 1997, he bought Sloth Island, a 160-acre outpost about a two-hour journey from Guyana’s capital, Georgetown, requiring an hour-long car ride through the small villages that dot the Atlantic coast, and then an hour’s boat ride down the widening Essequibo River, passing pristine forests lined with mangroves and Indigenous villages.
When Ades bought the property, it was mostly underwater. He brought in workers from neighboring villages to pump out the water, build up the sand and retaining walls and add structures. Sloths were already there, but he brought ocelots and monkeys from neighboring islands, as well as other birds. (The ocelots, he said, used to eat the electrical wires and open the fridge.)
Now anchoring Sloth Island is a blue and white guesthouse, a series of covered huts for dining and hammock relaxation and a wooden walkway for nature walks through partially cleared forest. Indigenous guides identify the numerous species of plants and birds. The pandemic has receded as a threat to business, and the island hosts tourists every weekend — though climate change is presenting new issues.
“There are many times that the river floods part of the island and I lose sand and soil,” Ades said. “We have to keep on pumping out water and repairing damage to the buildings when that happens.”
The year after he bought the island, his widowed mother, then living in Belgium, broke her hip. When she was well enough to travel she moved to Guyana to be with her son, dividing her time between Georgetown and Sloth Island. When she died in 2009, Ades was at a loss given the lack of a Jewish cemetery, synagogue, and minyan required to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. He was interested in burying her across from Sloth Island, on a hill in the mining town of Bartica just across the river. But a Jewish friend from France facilitated a connection with the Surinamese Jewish community, who prepared the body for burial in the cemetery adjacent to Paramaribo’s main synagogue.
“That’s the last time I was in a synagogue, in 2010, after my mother passed,” Ades recalled.
A view of Raphael Ades’ resort on Sloth Island. (Seth Wikas)
The absence of Jews in Guyana is a notable lacuna in a country that otherwise boasts a broad range of religions. History records a colony of Dutch Jews who settled in northwestern Guyana in the 17th century to produce sugarcane, but the English destroyed that colony in 1666, dispersing the Jewish residents. Jews from Arab lands moved to Guyana in the late 19th and 20th centuries to escape persecution but then migrated elsewhere; Jews fleeing Europe came in 1939 but did not settle long enough to establish a sustained community.
Janet Jagan was an anomaly: Born Janet Rosenberg in Chicago, she married a Guyanese man in the United States and moved with him to Guyana in 1947. Her father Cheddi Jagan was trained as a dentist but entered politics as Guyana gained independence from Great Britain, serving as the first premier of the semi-independent colonial government in the early 1960s and then as the country’s fourth president in the 1990s. When he died in 1997, Janet Jagan was sworn in as his replacement and then won a term of her own later that year. She died in 2009.
According to the 2012 census, Guyana is about two-thirds Christian, a quarter Hindu, and less than 10% Muslim, with smaller populations of Rastafarians and Baha’is. Guyana’s cities and towns are dotted with churches, mandirs and mosques, and the country has enshrined freedom of religion in its constitution. Christian, Hindu and Muslim holy days are national holidays.
“We embrace all faiths and are always looking to build bridges across communities,” Mansoor Baksh, a leader within the country’s Islamic Ahmadiyya movement, told JTA. Omkaar Sharma, a member of the country’s Hindu Pandit Council, said something similar: “We have a long tradition of co-existence and celebrating each other’s holidays. It’s what makes Guyana special.”
On the occasion of the Hindu festival of Diwali last month, President Mohamed Irfaan Ali, South America’s only Muslim head of government, emphasized the country’s inclusivity when he told the nation: “Under the One Guyana banner, our people are coming together, rejecting the forces of division and hatred, and uniting in the pursuit of peace, progress and prosperity.”
The sentiments have had practical implications for the country’s two Jews. In 2017, when a Guyana Tourism Authority group was slated to travel to Suriname for a conference on travel catering to Muslim tourists, the Mauritanian organizer of the event protested the presence of Jewish participants. There were supposed to be two: Ades, and Andrea de Caires, then head of the country’s largest private tour operator, Wilderness Explorers.
“I got a call from the Guyanese Tourism Minister at 1 a.m., who asked me if I was Jewish, and he explained the situation. And I thought, this [antisemitism] is still going on in the world?” de Caires remembered.
The Guyanese tourism minister refused to abide by the ban, de Caires proudly said, and told the Surinamese hosts and conference organizers: “If Jews aren’t allowed, then none of us are going.” The Surinamese, long known for their religious tolerance, also refused to accept the prohibition, and said that all participants were welcome (in Suriname’s capital Paramaribo, a mosque stands next to a synagogue and they share a parking lot). Both de Caires and Ades attended the event.
“When I arrived at the conference, the Surinamese minister of tourism welcomed me, and the director general of Guyana’s tourism ministry gave me the microphone to open the conference. We [Rafi and I] went in with our heads held high,” de Caires said.
De Caires has lived in Guyana since 2010 but her path to Guyana took a different route from Ades’. Born Andrea Levine in Chicago as the granddaughter of a rabbi, she traveled extensively as a child with her physician father, who taught her the importance of creating a Jewish home.
“Judaism was always a part of my life — we celebrated the holidays, lit candles on Friday night, but my father would often say, ‘Going to temple doesn’t make you Jewish,’” Caires said.
De Caires moved to New Jersey and trained as a jeweler, working with clients that included Tiffany’s. She transitioned to working at Bloomingdale’s in sales and then management, and then she moved on to the cosmetic company Borghese, where she became vice president of sales and marketing.
“I got caught up in Madison Avenue, a single mom of three kids, and then I met Salvador,” she recalled. “And I knew there was no point in pursuing a relationship if I wouldn’t move to Guyana.”
Salvador is Salvador de Caires, her Guyanese husband whom she met through her sister. Visiting Guyana for the first time in 2008, she fondly recalled her first visit to the Karanambu Lodge in the country’s south, a former cattle ranch that is now a conservation hub sitting at the center of Guyana’s forests, rivers, and savannahs. The most accessible route is via airplane from Georgetown and then four-by-four vehicle. While based at the lodge, de Caires continued to take conference calls for her New York-based career, while learning more about Guyana and the business of running a tourist destination off the beaten path. She and Salvador moved permanently to Guyana in 2010 to take over the day-to-day management of the lodge.
“When we moved to Guyana, it never occurred to me there would never be a Jewish community here. There’s a Jewish community everywhere,” de Caires remembered thinking. “That was pretty startling.”
Andrea de Caires is shown with Guyanese President Irfaan Ali. (Courtesy of de Caires)
So when they moved from Karanambu in 2016 to work at (and eventually lead) Wilderness Explorers in Georgetown, de Caires was committed to opening her home to Guyanese friends and neighbors with Hanukkah parties and Passover seders.
“The first year we had a Hanukkah party, our invitation went out for latkes and black cake (a traditional Guyanese dish), and we had government ministers, ambassadors and local friends over,” she recalled. “I told the story of the holiday and we lit the candles.”
It wasn’t the first time de Caires had been single handedly responsible for the fostering Jewish traditions in Guyana. She recalled an incident in 2012 when a Colombian-Jewish tourist came to Karanambu Lodge during Passover and asked her to make matzah brei. Under a thatched roof, she was able to make the holiday delicacy for her visitor.
For Ades, too, it is hosting that makes him most appreciate his chosen home in Guyana.
“I will always remember Feb. 1, 1963, the day we left Israel. We had always planned to return,” he said. “But I’m still here. Between then and now I have lived in so many places, and Guyana has been my home for a very long time. One of the best parts of my week is meeting new people who come to Sloth Island — people of different backgrounds from around the world. It is wonderful to welcome them all.”
De Caires plans to share her Jewish traditions once again next month, hosting another Hanukkah party for her Guyanese friends and neighbors. And with the worst of the pandemic in the rearview mirror, both Ades and de Caires are looking forward to booming tourist seasons. De Caires and her husband are also ready to begin a new professional chapter: They recently accepted new positions with a Guyanese conglomerate to develop its tourism operations at a riverine resort.
Does de Caires feel like she has lost something by establishing roots in a place without an established Jewish community?
“If I left here, that would mean there’s one less person to support others [including Jews],” de Caires replied. “I think it’s interesting Rafi and I are both in tourism — you need to have a lot of tenacity, but it’s important that we welcome others to this beautiful country.”
—
The post Meet the 2 Jews of Guyana, a South American nation with a tradition of religious tolerance appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
After attacks, Jewish security watchdogs warn of ‘most elevated and complex threat environment’ in recent history
(JTA) — A string of recent synagogue attacks across North America and Europe has left security officials sounding the alarm bells.
“We are in the midst of the most elevated and complex threat environment the Jewish community and this country has seen in modern history,” said Kerry Sleeper, chief of threat management and information sharing for the Secure Community Network, a Jewish security organization.
Sleeper’s comment came during an SCN webinar on Friday, held in response to the previous day’s attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where an assailant rammed into the synagogue armed with rifles and smoke bombs.
Though the attack was successfully thwarted by existing security measures, Mitchell Silber, executive director of the Community Security Initiative, said in an interview that Jewish institutions may now need additional layers of protection.
“This might be a bit of a tipping point where we’ve gone to a new level, where really what’s required to secure a Jewish institution in the U.S. starts to look like almost a Europeanization of security,” Silber said.
That would include posting multiple armed guards outside entrances and requiring increased screening before entry, he said. Many European synagogues also require attendees to go through security screening at some distance from the building, rather than at their doors.
“Unfortunately that seems to be where we are right now — the Jewish community has to up its game in terms of the external security of its locations,” he said.
Currently, a shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security since Feb. 14 is halting the review of millions of dollars in security funding for nonprofits, constraining the ability of Jewish institutions and other vulnerable groups to upgrade their security infrastructure.
The Temple Israel attack came within two weeks of attacks in Austin, Texas, and at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Those other attacks were not on Jewish institutions, but Sleeper, a former FBI assistant director, said the “various motivations of the attackers appear to be affiliated with the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran.” He added that the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran, and President Donald Trump’s stated desire to facilitate a regime change, have “contributed to the extremely high threat environment.”
Meanwhile, things have escalated outside the United States. Three Toronto-area synagogues were hit with gunfire over the last couple of weeks, and a synagogue in Rotterdam was targeted by an arson attack early Friday morning, allegedly by a group that has also claimed credit for an explosion at a synagogue in Belgium.
The flurry of attacks has the entire Jewish world on edge going into Shabbat — and some watchdogs say things could soon get worse.
“It is not entirely shocking to those of us who’ve watched this space for a long time,” said Mike Jacobson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who served in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau. “I would think things would continue to ratchet up again, at least in the short term.”
He pointed to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ activation of sleeper cells — their agents lying in wait until called to action to commit an attack — across the West, as a danger to vulnerable targets, which includes Jewish communities.
Another source of danger, Jacobson said, comes from copycat attacks.
“There’s also this mix that makes it really hard to sort out in the initial stages, where you’ve got people, not only who may be directly tied to Iran, but people who are so-called ‘inspired’ by this,” Jacobson said. “Those are often really hard for law enforcement to get advance notice on.”
Not always does the threat come from direct orders from Iran, he said. “It’s often difficult to tell: Is this something that is directly tied to the organization, or is this something that is more by someone inspired [by the IRGC]?”
He added, “They are trying to inflict pain in as many directions as they can.”
As security organizations encourage increased caution and awareness of suspicious activity, they are also emphasizing that those measures shouldn’t come at the expense of gathering in communal Jewish spaces.
“We’re not going to let the terrorists take away our confidence or the ability to embrace our religion,” said Michael Masters, SCN’s national director, during the Zoom webinar.
Masters’ sentiment is also shared by congregational leaders like Rabbi Adam Roffman, of Congregation Shearith Israel in Dallas.
“Sure, security is something we think a lot about, and we’ve done our best to protect ourselves,” Roffman said. “And at the same time, the life of this community goes on.”
At Temple Israel, Shabbat services are being streamed from the nearby country club that served as a reunification center for families after the attack. The synagogue wrote on Facebook: “We’re so glad you’re joining us tonight as our community comes together to welcome this much needed Sabbath.”
The post After attacks, Jewish security watchdogs warn of ‘most elevated and complex threat environment’ in recent history appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Muslim advisor to Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission resigns to protest ‘Zionist political agenda’
(JTA) — The Trump administration’s Religious Liberties Commission was wracked again this week over anti-Israel sentiment, as a second affiliated individual has exited while claiming it had been hijacked by a “Zionist political agenda.”
Sameerah Munshi, a Muslim member of a board that advises the commission, announced late Thursday that she would be stepping down. Her reason, she said, was to protest the dismissal of commissioner Carrie Prejean Boller, who was ousted last month after she used a hearing on antisemitism to expound on her objections to Israel and Zionism.
“In this country, people of faith are having their free expression stripped away, and even their lives put at risk, because of their deeply held beliefs about Palestine, all for the sake of a Zionist political agenda,” Munshi wrote in a resignation letter she posted to Substack. “The removal of a Catholic commissioner for expressing dissenting views grounded in her faith is the exact affront to free expression and religious liberty that I spoke out against.”
Munshi posted her resignation to X just before 10 p.m. Thursday, hours after an attacker drove a car into a Michigan synagogue while a preschool was in session. She did not mention the incident in her letter, which she said instead was timed to Prejean Boller’s formal ousting by Trump earlier that day.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations praised both Munshi and Prejean Boller on Friday for their “courage.”
“Ms. Prejean Boller and Ms. Munshi fulfilled the commission’s stated purpose by opposing all forms of anti-religious bigotry and standing up for every person’s right to express their religious beliefs, including opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” the council said in a statement. “The commission is now clearly meant to protect Israel from criticism, not to protect religious freedom for the American people.”
Munshi is a recent Brown University graduate and onetime director of the Muslim organization Coalition of Virtue. She was embraced by the Christian right after publicly opposing a change in a Maryland public school system’s policy allowing parents to opt their children out of curriculum, including LGBTQ material, that went against their religious beliefs. The policy Munshi protested was eventually taken to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of parents who had challenged the school.
Munshi’s biography on the commission’s website was still active as of Friday. It states, “Sameerah has courageously spoken out against forcing children to learn radical gender ideology in schools.”
Munshi had been outspoken for weeks about her support of Prejean Boller, with whom she was ideologically aligned on Israel, after Prejean Boller’s remarks during the antisemitism hearing caused a firestorm.
Like Prejean Boller, Munshi is also a follower of Candace Owens, the right-wing pundit who has embraced a number of antisemitic conspiracy theories. She praised Owens’ conversation with Jewish pro-Palestinian academic Norman Finkelstein last fall, writing on Instagram that Owens had a “rare willingness to confront uncomfortable truths head-on,” and suggested future guests for Owens to interview.
Munshi has been aligned with Prejean Boller since the fall, when Prejean Boller approached her after Munshi testified to the commission in favor of public schools’ rights to protest Israel. “Carrie has been wonderful. We’ve become pretty good friends at this point, and we’ve shared a lot,” Munshi told Middle East Eye.
On her Instagram before last month’s antisemitism hearing, Munshi wrote that the two of them had pushed the commission to invite “fair witnesses” to the hearing that would have reflected their own perspectives, including Finkelstein, left-wing Israeli academic Miko Peled, anti-Zionist rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, and David Spevak, an American Jewish activist and descendant of Holocaust survivors who has compared Jewish summer camps and cultural programs to the Hitler Youth.
After Prejean Boller’s performance at the hearing, during which she told Jewish witnesses that her Catholic faith compelled her to oppose Israel and Zionism, Munshi defended her from blowback from Jewish groups and the Trump administration. The Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial that the two “left together and appeared to be texting amid the hearing,” appearing to allege collusion in Prejean Boller’s line of attack.
“Christian views and beliefs were targeted as ‘antisemitic’ for merely expressing concerns about the ongoing conflation between criticism of the state of Israel and anti-Jewish animus,” Munshi wrote on her Substack in February. “During the hearing, an attempt was made by a collection of ‘Israel First’ actors to redefine antisemitism to include all criticism of Israel, smear many concerned citizens as bigots, and even gatekeep what counts as ‘real’ Judaism by confining it to Israel-first Jews.”
Trump established the Religious Liberties Commission last year, with the order’s text stating that it would “offer diverse perspectives on how the Federal Government can defend religious liberty for all Americans.” Munshi was one of three Muslims on the commission and the only Muslim woman; all three were chosen to serve in an advisory capacity, rather than as full commissioners.
In her resignation letter Munshi also said she was resigning in protest of the Trump administration’s war with Iran, which she wrote was being done “at the urging of a genocidal state.”
“I support America over Israel, and unfortunately that means I cannot support Trump or this government,” Munshi continued.
The post Muslim advisor to Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission resigns to protest ‘Zionist political agenda’ appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Oklahoma attorney general accuses officials of rigging vote on proposed Jewish charter school
(JTA) — Oklahoma’s attorney general is accusing a state board of trying to rig the legal fight over a proposed Jewish charter school — a dispute that could open the door for publicly funded religious charter schools across the United States.
Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a motion this week asking an Oklahoma County district judge to intervene after the Statewide Charter School Board rejected an application to open the Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School, a virtual statewide school that would combine secular studies with Jewish religious instruction.
Drummond alleges that the board engineered its vote so the rejection would focus only on the school’s religious character, strengthening the legal case for the school’s supporters, who are preparing a federal lawsuit challenging Oklahoma’s ban on religious charter schools.
“A state agency that deliberately hobbles its own legal position is not doing its job — it is betraying Oklahoma taxpayers. I will not allow that,” Drummond said in a statement.
He added: “The Board deliberately suppressed those findings to manufacture a cleaner path to federal court. I will not allow this Board to rig the record at taxpayers’ expense.”
Drummond asked the court to order the board to issue a new rejection letter detailing all of the reasons the proposal was deficient.
The dispute centers on the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, led by former Florida Democratic Rep. Peter Deutsch. The group applied to open a statewide online charter school serving kindergarten through 12th grade students beginning next school year.
The proposal called for a curriculum combining secular coursework with daily Jewish religious studies. If approved, it would have become the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school.
Jewish groups in Oklahoma have opposed the proposal, saying they prefer not to be thrust into the middle of a debate over church-state separation and that there is little demand for such a school among local Jewish residents.
The charter board voted earlier this week to reject the application, citing a 2024 Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that charter schools must remain secular.
That ruling overturned a previous effort to open a Catholic charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court ended in a 4–4 tie after Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, leaving the state court decision in place.
Several board members said the precedent left them no choice but to reject Ben Gamla’s application.
At the same time, the board has signaled it may support the school’s broader constitutional argument in court. The board hired the conservative Christian legal group First Liberty Institute to represent it in the expected litigation and has indicated it could back the school’s position once a lawsuit is filed.
Drummond, who also fought the Catholic charter school proposal, said the legal question about religious charter schools had already been settled by the state courts and insisted his objection to the board’s vote was procedural rather than religious.
Among the issues he says the board improperly left out was a discrepancy in Ben Gamla’s projected enrollment.
Deutsch initially said the online school would serve about 40 high school students, but the formal application projected enrollment of 400 students across grades K-12.
State officials also raised questions about the composition of the school’s governing board. Oklahoma law requires a charter school board to include a parent or grandparent of a student. Ben Gamla listed Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, as its parent representative.
Supporters of the school have said they plan to challenge Oklahoma’s prohibition on religious charter schools in federal court, arguing that excluding religious schools from charter programs violates the Constitution’s protections for religious freedom.
The post Oklahoma attorney general accuses officials of rigging vote on proposed Jewish charter school appeared first on The Forward.