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Meet the woman who built a home for Latin Jewish youth in Miami
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
MIAMI (JTA) —After spending her early childhood in Venezuela, it was not always easy for Gabriella Koenig to feel connected to the Jewish community she grew up around in Miami.
“When I moved from Venezuela, I had to leave behind the whole community and my friends. Living in a new place, it was difficult to meet and connect with other Latin Jewish friends. That is until I found La Casa,” said Koenig, 14. “La Casa has allowed me to connect with other Latin Jewish teenagers and has inspired me to learn Torah and grow to a higher spiritual level.”
La Casa is the first Latino chapter of the Orthodox youth group National Conference of Synagogue Youth in the United States. The person responsible for building this community for Koeing and other Latino Jews in Miami is Lea Bekhar.
When Bekhar moved to Miami from Panama at the age of 29 to start working for NCSY, she had one goal in mind: to make a home for the large population of Latin American Jewish teenagers in the Miami-Dade area through La Casa.
“There were no classes for teens, everything available in the area was for young professionals — 20 and up,” Bekhar said. She noticed that the few programs that were available for teens were often tailored for those who did not keep Shabbat, having meetings every Saturday. With this in mind she began running her own events for all teens.
Each Thursday after school, La Casa hosts events mean to be both community-building and educational. The meetings include a meal, religious education and an activity — which ranges from movies to discussions to games — to end the night. There isn’t a physical building; instead, each week a teenager from the group opens their home for the gathering.
Although aimed towards the Latino audience, La Casa is open for all teenagers seeking religious studies, guidance and community. And while the staff and institution is Orthodox, the organization serves Jewish kids from many backgrounds. About 40% of individuals in attendance don’t observe Shabbat or keep kosher and about 1% are not Latino, according to La Casa membership data.
“The slogan is ‘a home for your soul.’ It’s a place where they know there is no judgment, they could ask all the questions and they could find a community of like-minded people that they’re going to feel safe to open up,” Bekhar, 31, said.
Her goals for La Casa stem from her own teenage experience in Panama.
“When I was a teenager, I found that the one thing that kept me grounded was that aspect of faith,” Bekhar said. “And that’s what I want [here]. I want them to thrive for meaning in their life and to find a Jewish family, outside of their nuclear family.”
After teaching Judaic studies at the high school level in Panama for two years and through her previous work in NCSY, Bekhar learned to recognize an engaged community in which members are eager to attend and participate in events and programs. Yet, upon her arrival to the Miami-Dade area she saw first-hand the lack of opportunities for engagement, specifically for Latino teens. The Jewish Latino teens she met that were part of other religious groups didn’t seem to actually enjoy the youth community. La Casa marked a shift in engagement and provided an opportunity which teenagers were excited to participate in, she said.
“I never thought I would see so many kids go to an optional, after-school shiur [Torah lesson] on a Thursday night. Bringing all of us together, from both religious and non-religious backgrounds, La Casa provided us an opportunity to bond and still enjoy some words of Torah,” one teen participant, Jaime Mizrahi, said. “I look forward to the La Casa events throughout the week to be able to enjoy myself with my friends while still learning. In fact, even when I have already studied Torah throughout the day, I still go to La Casa because it is a nice environment to be in.”
Creating an engaged community did not come easy, and Bekhar had to do much research before beginning her mission.
“Every community is different. This is a community of Latin Jews, so it was important to recognize the community in Miami as Latino and treat it as such,” Bekhar said. In one of her first updates to her bosses prior to the September kickoff event, Bekhar recognized that the Latino population mostly lives in the Aventura and Bal Harbor area, and “they are divided into communities according to where they came from.” Some differences she noticed were that “Argentinians are less open about religion” while “Mexicans and Colombians are more open but aren’t part of the same community.”
Bekhar was able to use this knowledge to better target her audience.
“I have had to really mold the program to my audience. Many of the kids who regularly attend are second generation Latinos, so although their parents relate to their Latin origin, many of the kids not so much,” said Bekhar. “The Latin group is very different to their American counterparts culturally. Parents want them to connect not only to their religion, but to their Latin roots.”
Bekhar also incorporated program ideas from the Latin communities in Chile and Argentina.
“Programming made for American teens tends to have a very educational base, ours is more rooted in community,” Bekhar said. “The content is always very morally oriented and is centered on character development.”
One of the biggest hurdles for her was distrust from parents in the community. New and unknown, she had to create “an open relationship with all [the] mothers” in order for them to “feel comfortable voicing any concern.” Her approach worked.
“Since meeting Lea and becoming familiar with La Casa I’ve been impressed with her incredible personality and her ability to connect not only with young people, but with people of all ages. She’s a kind and empathetic young woman who will change the future of many Jewish souls,” said Anat Garzo, a mother to a La Casa teen and former board member of the Jewish Community Services Latin Committee.
Despite troubles she faced at first, Bekhar persevered and in the six months she’s been building La Casa, she grew participation to 120 teens.
One of those teens is Sofia Wengrowsky, a second-generation Mexican teenager. She recognizes the influence La Casa has on all aspects of her life.
“La Casa has allowed me to grow as an individual and has given me the opportunity to open a door to other young teenagers who are looking to grow in Judaism,” Wengrowsky, 17, said. “I leave every activity being able to learn something of impact.”
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Australia’s Jewish History Might Have Unfolded Differently
People attend the ‘Light Over Darkness’ vigil honoring victims and survivors of a deadly mass shooting during a Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Dec. 14, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
The deadly pogrom that took place in Australia at a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach was the culmination of more than two years of hate and violence directed at Jews following the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel.
Australian Jews have learned that what they once considered to be one of the safest and most comfortable places in the world to be a Jew, is anything but. Yet the Jewish experience in Australia might have been very different.
The idea of a Jewish refuge somewhere other than Israel predates the modern Zionist movement. In the 20th century, two possible havens for Jewish refugees were considered during the lead up to World War II; both were rejected.
The more widely known effort involved a proposal for a refuge in Alaska. It was the initiative of Harold Ickes, US Secretary of the Interior, who was concerned that Alaska’s sparse population (only 70,000) would make it a tempting target for attack. (This story is the historical basis for Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.) The proposal received only lukewarm support from President Roosevelt and after three days of presentations to the US Senate Committee on Territories and Insular Affairs in May 1940, it died.
The second effort, less widely known, involved a proposed Jewish sanctuary in Australia, a possibility I learned about only recently when I was going through some Yiddish literature left by my parents.
I grew up in Montreal, the son of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.
For the first half of the 20th century, Montreal, the home of writers such as the poet J. I. Segal, was a major center of North American Yiddish culture. My parents would often mention Melech Ravitch, pen name for Zecharia-Chune Bergner, a well- known Yiddish poet and essayist, who was a leading figure in Montreal Yiddish circles.
I discovered that Ravitch, originally from Poland, spent several years during the 1930s in Australia, before ending up in Montreal. While there, he investigated the feasibility of establishing a haven for Jewish refugees in a sparsely inhabited region of northwestern Australia known as the Kimberley.
The proposal, backed by a European group, the Freeland League, would involve the purchase of land (a little over 10,000 square miles) in Western and Northern Australia. An advance contingent of 500 Jewish refugees from Europe would begin the process of creating a settlement, followed by 75,000 to 100,000 people to follow. Ravich envisioned an eventual population of one million, this at a time when the population of Australia as a whole was less than seven million.
The company that owned the land agreed to sell the desired tract, and leading religious and public figures, including the Premier of Western Australia, were in favor. But opposition at the federal level prevented the plan from moving forward. The League was informed that the Australian Government, led by Prime Minister John Curtin, was not in favor of “alien settlement in Australia.”
The Australian government was consistent. The Évian Conference, held in July 1938 at the French resort city of Évian les Bains, was initiated by President Roosevelt to find a solution to the plight of hundreds of thousands of stateless European Jews. Thirty-two nations, including Australia, participated. The conference achieved very little. The Australian chief delegate, Colonel T. W. White, declared “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration.”
The Jews murdered in the Holocaust were doomed by worldwide indifference to their fate, but also by the fact that there was no independent Jewish state that could have served as a refuge when they needed one. That’s why Israel is needed now — and why an Australian refuge would have made such a huge difference nearly 100 years ago.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.
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Debunked Hamas Casualty Figures and Their Impact on Reporting
Palestinian gunmen stand guard on the day that hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, are handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Since October 7, 2023, Hamas has shaped global public opinion through its propaganda warfare. The terrorist organization excitedly recorded and uploaded the atrocities committed against Israelis that day to social media platforms, and those who saw any trace of it were rightfully horrified.
But shortly after, when the images weren’t as fresh and no longer front-page news, Hamas turned to a new strategy — playing victim to the Israeli army. And since then, the media has run with it.
For instance, on October 17, 2023, reports claimed an explosion occurred inside the Al-Ahli Hospital. The media rushed to re-print Hamas’ claim that more than 500 people had been killed.
Evidence then came out that displayed it was a parking lot adjacent to the hospital that had been hit by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, and the casualties were fewer than reported.
The media has continued this pattern since. Any death toll that the Hamas-run Ministry of Health (MoH) publishes is immediately reported on by Western media, oftentimes without any attribution to Hamas.
This has resulted in blood libels being printed on the front pages of newspapers, blaming Israel for targeting non-combatants, including women and children.
But the vast majority of the casualty numbers that have been used throughout the war have been purposefully misrepresented by Hamas.
As of December 2025, the Hamas-run MoH has claimed that over 70,000 people have died in Gaza since the start of the war.
But further analysis done by Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, displays that this includes the casualties of Hamas fighters, natural deaths, and internal fighting amongst Gazans.
While the analysis is based on informed estimates, and the precise toll may take years to verify, it nonetheless highlights the extent to which Gaza casualty figures have been misrepresented in media coverage over the past two years.
Although it is difficult to determine the exact number of terrorists killed by the IDF since the beginning of the war, estimates suggest the number to be more than 22,000 as of October 2025, not including those who were killed during the terrorist attacks on October 7. President Donald Trump has confirmed the number to be greater than 25,000, the number used in Aizenberg’s analysis.
Beyond combatants, throughout the war, there were likely to be around 11,000 natural deaths, based on pre-war patterns. Another 4,000 deaths were caused by internal fighting within Gaza from different factions, including firing on civilians at aid sites or executions of individuals Hamas deemed to be collaborating with Israel. An additional 1,000 estimated deaths can be attributed to errors in reporting.
After removing these casualty numbers from the total of 70,000, there are a remaining 54,000 deaths. Of the 54,000, one can reasonably assume that around 25,000 were terrorists, leaving 36,000 civilian casualties. While every innocent civilian casualty is a tragedy, this is nonetheless a remarkably low civilian-to-combatant ratio of 1.45:1, especially given the circumstances of urban warfare.
Visualization based on data by Salo Aizenberg.
These numbers entirely dispute the claims that the majority of deaths are civilians — a claim the media has previously made. One “investigative” piece done by The Guardian and +972 Magazine, published in the summer of 2025, claimed that 83% of casualties were civilians.
What the outlets willfully omitted, however, was that this figure counted only terrorists whom the IDF had identified before the war and could conclusively confirm as eliminated, excluding thousands of combatants who could not be identified during the fighting. By presenting this partial dataset as comprehensive, the article created a misleading impression that was then cited as authoritative.
This information is not necessarily new either.
A December 2024 report by the Henry Jackson Society found that 84% of the publications analyzed failed to make the critical distinction in total numbers between combatant deaths and civilian deaths, further illustrating the extent to which misleading casualty narratives have been allowed to take hold. The report also found that men of combat age were disproportionally represented, and natural deaths were included in casualty statistics.
Perhaps even more telling is the ratio between male and female casualties. Males of combat age (18-59) died at 3x the rate of women the same age, resulting in a 3:1 ratio. The 32,690 deaths of men of combat age account for 46.7% of total casualties.
Visualization based on data by Salo Aizenberg.
Outlets, including the Associated Press, BBC, and Washington Post, have all previously parroted the claim that 70% of the casualties in the war were women and children. Naturally, it was based on falsified data, and the new casualty analysis once again disproves this claim.
Even after the UN walked back this percentage due to incomplete information, news outlets have continued to print that more than half of the casualties are women and children.
Throughout the two years of war, the media have repeatedly reprinted Hamas’ libels and casualty figures with little skepticism, allowing a terrorist organization to shape the narrative without rigorous analysis or verification.
Inflated civilian casualty claims will continue to distort public understanding of the war by obscuring the true civilian-to-combatant and male-to-female casualty ratios.
It is therefore only responsible journalism for every outlet that published Hamas’ casualty figures without questioning them to issue corrections and acknowledge that not every casualty during the war has been the result of IDF action.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Fatah’s Gender Equality Terror: ‘Since the Start, Women Have Been Partners in the Struggle’
Palestinian demonstrators display a poster showing terrorist Dalal Mughrabi alongside the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Photo: File.
In two recent videos, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Movement highlights its message to youth: Female terrorist murderers are heroes, and should be emulated.
Fatah’s university student group for women, “Sisters of Dalal,” is named after terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who led the murder of 37 people, 12 of them children.
Introducing one of the videos, Fatah presented “Sisters of Dalal” as a continuation of terrorist murderer Dalal Mughrabi:
Posted text: “The Sisters of Dalal Mughrabi
Not only yesterday, but today on every front; symbols of sacrifice and creators of pride and self-sacrifice.“
Fatah’s video showed various images of Mughrabi. At the end of the video, young female students are seen standing in formation while wearing vests with the text: “Al-Asifa Forces (i.e., Fatah terror unit) — Sisters of Dalal.” The video included a song with the following lyrics:
Lyrics of song: “O lady of the girls, O noble and brave one, O women wrapped in keffiyehs
O lady of the girls, O daughter of the Shabiba. Pride and firmness. She is equal to a brigade”
[Fatah Commission of Information and Culture, Facebook page, Nov. 26, 2025]
In a second video, a Fatah official praised murderer Mughrabi as the woman “who led a group of men” to carry out “a self-sacrificing operation” — i.e., the hijacking of a bus and taking Israeli passengers hostage, eventually murdering 37 of them, 12 of them children.
The Fatah official presented as an achievement that women have always been “partners in the struggle,” and that the student group for women is named after a murderer:
Fatah intellectual academy leadership council member Ala’ Mleitat: “Since the start of Fatah, women have been partners in the struggle.
‘The Sisters of Dalal’ in the Fatah Shabiba [Student Movement] are named after our sister Dalal Mughrabi, the great Martyr who led a group of men to the Palestinian [i.e., Israeli] coast to carry out a self-sacrificing operation.” [emphasis added]
[Fatah-run Awdah TV Live, Facebook page, Nov. 25, 2025]
Palestinian Media Watch has previously documented the status of role model given to Dalal Mughrabi by the PA.
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.