Hanukkah on Bondi Beach was the coolest party of the year, recalled Yossi Segelman.

“There’s singing. There’s dancing. There’s sufganiyot … There’s clowns and petting zoos,” he said. “It brought all people together.”

Segelman, who was born in London, spent 16 years living in Sydney, and now resides in Los Angeles, used to attend the celebration every year.

It was Segelman who drew Rabbi Eli Schlanger, his childhood neighbor in London, to Australia almost 20 years ago. Segelman made the shidduch, or match, between Eli and his wife Chaya’s cousin. As they became family, Segelman and Schlanger also became close friends.

“He was just always happy … a rocket full of joy,” Segelman said. “I knew many people who were personally moved and touched and became more connected to Judaism and to Israel as a direct result of their impact and connection with Rabbi Eli.”

When Segelman logged on to WhatsApp on Sunday, he learned that terrorists had murdered Schlanger at the same yearly Hanukkah celebration. One of his nieces was in surgery.

“I had a number of other family members, nieces, nephews, who were ducking at the tables and had bullets whizzing overhead and had seen things that no one should ever see,” he said.

And yet hours later, Segelman, who is the executive director of the nonprofit Our Big Kitchen Los Angeles, still showed up to lead dozens of people in preparing 600 meals for Angelenos in need.

That Sunday was my second time volunteering at OBKLA. As I snapped on blue nitrile gloves and prepared to scoop meatballs from a tub of ground beef, I was stunned that Segelman felt capable of showing up with one family member dead and another on the operating table.

But he insisted, during the session and two days later when I came back to speak with him, that it’s precisely during dark times that a community needs a space to come together and serve others. As rising antisemitism and violent attacks like the one in Bondi might pressure Jews to turn inward, Segelman’s emphasis on both Jewish pride and welcoming all, no matter their background, offers us a path forward.

Giving back in times of crisis

Schlanger and Segelman both served as chaplains in Australia; Schlanger for corrective services and Segelman for the military.

“We were involved in the same thing and that is to try and bring peace, and comfort, and solace, encouragement, to those who found themselves in difficult situations,” Segelman said.

In parallel to his work as a chaplain, Segelman became involved as an early director of Our Big Kitchen in Sydney, which prepares meals for Australians in need. The organization’s Bondi kitchen is less than a mile from where Sunday’s terror attack took place. Though the food is kosher, most meals go to the broader community, and most volunteers aren’t Jewish.

A few years after moving to Los Angeles, at the height of the pandemic, the Segelman family sprung into action to distribute snacks to hospitals, unhoused people, and first responders. Their impulse to help has since grown into a smooth operation, one the Segelmans activated at full throttle during LA’s wildfires this year.

In his office, Segelman has a basket where he keeps empty rolls from the stickers volunteers use to package food. Each roll signified a thousand meals. The basket was overflowing. In the past year, Segelman said, OBK LA welcomed more than 24,000 volunteers who made 183,574 meals.

Segelman emphasized the impact of the meals not only on the recipients, but also on the volunteers who created them.

“Volunteering, it’s being hands-on. It’s a visceral experience. You’re immersing yourself in an act of goodness and kindness,” he said.

How we respond to terror

Segelman has more practice than most in taking action. But the attack in Sydney posed a new challenge.

“For me to get up Sunday morning and welcome everybody and do what we do usually at OBK with cheer and with love was not easy,” he said. But he knew that his job was “to inspire people, especially when the going gets tough, and to really transform those feelings of helplessness into hopefulness.”

When we spoke on Tuesday at noon, Segelman had just finished an event with 70 school kids, with more programs to come later that day. Schlanger’s funeral, which he would attend remotely, was at 4 p.m. His teenage niece’s operation was successful, though his entire family remained extremely traumatized.

Nevertheless, Segelman insisted the Hanukkah celebration must return to Bondi Beach.

“100%. Bigger and better,” he said. “To cancel events and close down events is contrary to the story of Hanukkah.”

“We need to continue doing what we’re doing, do it stronger, obviously be smart, be vigilant, but absolutely go out there and to continue to do what we do and do it proudly.”

When I asked if a terror attack like Sunday’s might complicate OBK’s practice of welcoming everyone into its kitchen, his answer was adamant: “We are an organization rooted in Jewish values of chesed, of tzedakah, and we’re proudly kosher, and we’re proudly based in the heart of the community. But we welcome absolutely everyone, both to volunteer and to receive a meal.”

Violence cannot shatter our empathy

To be proudly Jewish and yet welcome everyone is an essential message; one whose second component, I think, may be hard for some in our community to hear right now.

The brutality of Oct. 7, of the subsequent rise in antisemitism and terror like the kind unleashed in Sydney, rightfully activates Jewish fears. It also, however, threatens to make a drought of our empathy. At its very worst — as I’ve written about in the case of far-right Jews denying hunger in Gaza or using AI to spread hate — Jewish pain is contorted into a pretext to ignore others’ suffering or even inflict it on them.

But now is the time to lean into our values, not turn away from the rest of the world. Segelman’s message for all of us this Hannukah: Find a way to give our time in service to others, even if it’s just an hour a week, and to provide inspiration or love, even to just one other person.

On Sunday night, a few hours after the OBKLA event, my partner and I welcomed our friends, some Jewish, some not, for the first night of Hanukkah. We fried latkes and schnitzel. My hand shook, then steadied, as I sang and led a menorah lighting for the first time. The candle burned through its wick; yellow and blue wax dripping onto parchment paper. We sat in the gentle glow, affirming joy.

This Hannukah, Segelman and OBKLA show us that when faced with unimaginable violence, the best way to nourish our souls might be to come together, cook, and serve others.

The post His family was killed in Sydney. Hours later, he helped feed 600 unhoused people in LA. appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday as the next special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, an ambassador-level role at the State Department aimed at coordinating U.S. efforts to confront antisemitism globally.

His confirmation fills a post that had been vacant in a period marked by spikes in antisemitic incidents both in the United States and abroad.

Kaploun, a follower of the Chabad Hasidic movement, a Miami businessman and a 2024 Trump campaign surrogate, was confirmed as part of a broader package of nominations after the Senate agreed to bring the slate to the floor for debate and a vote. His confirmation came on a 53-43 vote split strictly along party lines, with Republicans voting yes and Democrats voting no.

Jewish organizations largely welcomed Kaploun’s confirmation.

The World Jewish Congress praised President Donald Trump’s choice, saying it ensures leadership to confront antisemitism at a time of rising threats to Jewish communities worldwide and that Kaploun “has already been working hard, engaging directly with dozens of special envoys and national coordinators from around the world.”

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and the Republican Jewish Coalition offered congratulations, calling the appointment timely and necessary given increasing antisemitic rhetoric and violence.

Kaploun testified in November that education and bipartisan engagement are central to combating Jew-hatred, a theme he reiterated in interviews and hearings leading up to his confirmation.

Kaploun was confirmed despite Democratic opposition, with critics arguing that his past statements and political activity reflected an overtly partisan approach and raised concerns about his ability to serve credibly in a role that has traditionally sought bipartisan trust.

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The 350-square-foot Brooklyn apartment where Malya and William Levin live with their four children is barely big enough for their family, much less their ambitions. From this compressed space, they’re reaching for something vast — the revival of one of America’s first Jewish farms, built by William’s ancestors in rural South Jersey.

Their quixotic quest is larger than acreage; it’s continuity, in a time and place where nothing stays rooted for long. It’s a tight staging ground for an unusually wide dream.

“We aren’t just trying to save land,” Malya said, their toddler Julius perched on her lap. “We are trying to save the story.”

The story she’s referring to reaches back to 1882, when 43 Jewish families fled pogroms in Russia and the Pale of Settlement. They carried what they could — and what they couldn’t bear to leave behind.

Backed by Baron de Hirsch and other Jewish benefactors who believed farming could offer both refuge and respectability, they were sent not to the teeming tenements of Manhattan but to a thousand acres of pine forest and sandy soil.

It was a bold wager: Eastern European Jews, often caricatured in their home countries as “unproductive,” could instead be seen growing their own food as capable, contributing citizens. Those same Jewish immigrants — tailors, peddlers, clerks — could become farmers, rooted and self-reliant, all trying to prove that Jews could stand on American land and make it yield.

“It’s almost a completely different story than we’re used to hearing,” said Adrienne Krone, a religious studies professor at Allegheny College and the author of Free-Range Religion. “We’re used to the Lower East Side and factories and crowded apartments, and what was happening in these farming communities was almost the exact opposite.”

Around the same time, dozens of such Jewish agricultural colonies were established across the United States, including in Louisiana, Utah, and both Dakotas. Yiddish-speaking socialists established a similar settlement, Happyville, in South Carolina.

In New Jersey, they called their 1,000-acre settlement the Alliance Colony.

What began as tents and barracks grew into a rural Jewish community of hundreds of families: homes, vineyards, chicken farms, a school, three synagogues, and a mikvah. The colonists built a tobacco factory that failed, and a button factory that didn’t. Reinvention wasn’t strategy so much as muscle memory.

Among the colony’s early leaders was William’s great-great-grandfather, Moses Bayuk. His generation carved Alliance out of wild ground: clearing land, organizing the community, building the institutions that held it together.

After World War II, a second wave of immigrants arrived in the region — Holocaust survivors who settled in nearby Vineland and Pittsgrove and built successful chicken farms. For decades they sustained a thriving Jewish agricultural center across South Jersey.

But by the 1970s, most families had moved into city jobs. The Jewish presence waned. The land quieted.

What led them back to the farm

For William and Malya, the draw toward Alliance was never just historical. It was personal.

Malya, 41, grew up in New Jersey steeped in Jewish text and memory. She is the daughter of Rabbi Arthur Kurzweil, the noted author whose career has long focused on Jewish continuity. Her childhood was Orthodox, threaded with rituals that made the past feel close enough to touch.

William, 54, arrived at Jewish life differently. He didn’t grow up religious. His first real brush with Judaism came through, of all things, animation: In the early 2000s, before the days of YouTube and social media, he was making viral Jewish videos that somehow found their way across the internet. Several, including a cartoon in which a robot meets 50 Cent and raps about the Ten Plagues, reached millions.

“I didn’t even know what the word frum meant until Frumster hired me,” he said of the Orthodox dating site. “They paid me in a Frumster.com membership.”

It worked.

He met Malya at a Jewish singles event in 2009. They married the next summer, on Tu B’Av, known as the Jewish festival of love.

“We both had a penchant for offbeat stuff,” Malya said. “Neither of us wanted to be accountants and move to the suburbs on Long Island.”

That sensibility carried them to Sukkahfest 2014 at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut, where they witnessed a modern Jewish farming movement that wove land, ritual, ecology and community into a single experience.

“It was beautiful and intoxicating,” William said.

“All these young Jews were so into farming,” Malya added. “And we were like: Wait, we have the first Jewish farm.”

Their cramped apartment in Brooklyn feels like the furthest thing from this expansive ideal. A desk presses into a couch, the couch brushes against the mattress where William and Malya sleep. In the lone bedroom, their four children climb into a handmade Jenga-tower of bunk beds.

William opens a cigar box filled with brittle letters from Alliance’s earliest families — the kind of fragile paper that survives only because someone keeps choosing to protect it. For the couple, preserving the land has always meant preserving the story stitched through it.

The idea gained force. The place that kept resurfacing was the 85 acres William’s extended family still owned in the old Alliance Colony, land that had never fully slipped from their hands.

So the couple, an animator and an elder justice attorney, did something audacious: They spent their life savings to buy it back.

When the vision met reality

Their vision was expansive. They imagined retreats, Shabbatons, Jewish holidays at the farm, a hybrid life where city and country sat side by side. But figuring out what the land could actually do required trying almost everything.

They planted organic vegetables and heirloom crops. Built raised beds. Experimented with fruit trees. Started a micro-vineyard. (“Who doesn’t want wine tasting on a kosher vineyard in a historic Jewish farm?” Malya asked.) They considered raising geese, then heritage chicken breeds with old-sounding names. Partnered with local growers. Applied for grants. Taught programs on Jewish agricultural history.

Some ideas lived a season. Some never made it out of the notebook. They tried all these things because not trying felt like betrayal.

They fielded proposals — some compelling, some outlandish. A solar company wanted to cover their fields with panels. A hemp grower pitched them on the green rush. One man wanted to install cryptocurrency servers in the barn, a futuristic-sounding plan that fizzled when William learned the man was tied to a dubious investment scheme.

The Levins were not just fighting weeds and property taxes. They were fighting the economics that hollowed out rural America; the cultural drift that carried Jews away from small towns; the logistical strain of raising four children while holding two demanding jobs.

“We weren’t trying to be homesteaders,” Malya said. “We were trying to find something sustainable that didn’t require uprooting our whole life in Brooklyn.”

Their approach — try, fail, adjust, try again — echoed the original colonists. “Honestly, it’s what we’re doing,” Malya said. “Throwing these things against the wall and seeing what sticks, just like they did.” Reinvention has always been part of Jewish life here, as it is for many small communities trying to stay alive.

Some things they tried did stick.

Descendants began returning for regular Alliance reunions, gatherings that grew each year. Young Jews from the city arrived curious about Jewish farming. And as activity grew, the synagogue — which has hosted High Holiday services continuously since 1889 — flickered back to life, hosting monthly Shabbat services.

A visit to the farm

Driving to the site of the Alliance Colony 60 miles west of Atlantic City, the landscape dissolves into fields of corn, hay and soybeans. The road straightens, the sky widens, and then the white wooden synagogue appears. Tall, narrow, arched windows, still standing after 136 years.

Howard Jaffe is waiting on the steps.

He is 70, with a long white beard, a ponytail, and a gold hoop earring. He looks like a Jewish Santa Claus who once sold jewelry at Grateful Dead concerts — which, as it happens, he did.

His grandfather prayed in this sanctuary. Howard has made it his mission to maintain it. “This place raised me,” he says, and swings the door open. “I guess now I raise it.”

The building is neither grand nor fragile. It simply persists. Inside, the sanctuary offers the cool hush of old buildings: sunlight slanting across pews, floorboards worn to a soft gloss by generations of feet from farmers, factory workers, and families.

He walks upstairs to the women’s gallery, a reminder of the building’s Orthodox roots. From here, the sanctuary stretches below like a diorama. Then Howard opens a small doorway into the attic, a low, sloping space where traveling rabbis once slept, the rafters forming a rib cage of wood.

The Alliance Cemetery, 20 acres across the road, tells the story more plainly than any archive. The early graves belong to the colonists who cleared the land; the later ones to the survivors who arrived after the war and tried to build something new.

Howard stops to brush leaves from one stone. Names repeat across the rows: Gershal, Shiff, Brotman — the same names that mark the roads nearby. Some headstones tilt like old teeth; others sink into the earth as if tired of holding their stories upright. A few mark children. Many bear Hebrew inscriptions weathered thin by rain and time.

Deeper in, on a small rise, stands the cemetery’s most arresting structure: a large Holocaust memorial carved with the names of camps: Auschwitz. Buchenwald. Dachau. Treblinka.

It was built in the 1990s, by Irving and Esther Raab, who met in Auschwitz and immigrated to the area after the war. It’s where they built a successful kosher poultry business, at one point employing 12 butchers. Howard worked for them for a stretch, managing the killing room.

Its heavy stone rises among wooden farmhouses built by immigrants who had fled an earlier era of violence. It’s a reminder that the colony, like so much of American Jewish life, was shaped both by those who fled Europe in the 1880s and those who survived it in the 1940s.

Today, thanks to the Levins’ efforts and a new documentary about Alliance, Howard finds himself giving more tours than he has in years — to school groups, descendants, even curious Mennonites.

The work of reanimation

To the left of the cemetery stands a bright mural, painted last summer, which retells the colony’s story in bold colors. A shtetl burning. A steamship crowded with families. A wide field waiting for them. The present looking back at the past, asking what it still requires.

The last panel centers on William’s own lineage. In vivid purples stands Moses Bayuk holding a cluster of grapes from the Alliance vineyards — grapes that Welch’s once bought from this very farm.

The mural is not decoration. It is instruction: a reminder of how the story began, painted so it cannot be forgotten by whoever comes next.

Past the mural stands William’s grandparents’ home, which had long sat empty. But the bones were good: the clean lines of midcentury design, a peaceful view of fields, the kind of quiet that city families crave.

So the Levins renovated it.

They’ve now opened it as a kosher Airbnb, a place where Jewish families could spend Shabbat, celebrate holidays, or simply breathe outside the city without worrying about kitchen logistics. It wasn’t the centerpiece of their vision, but it became a steady foothold — a way to bring people onto the land, reconnect them with Alliance, and slowly rebuild around the place.

When the Levins go down to Alliance, they line up events — a tour, a talk, a small gathering — that fold into their monthly visits. The point isn’t profit. It’s presence.

For Krone, the professor who studies Jewish agricultural communities, what the Levins are doing at Alliance is not a resurrection. It’s a reanimation.

“Alliance is unique in that they have this historic connection,” she said. “They’re part of a contemporary movement of Jews reconnecting to agriculture, but they’re doing it in a place where there has been that connection before, and they’re very intentional about that.”

In her view, the Levins have already begun shifting the trajectory.

“I think they’ve reinvigorated it,” she said. “They’re growing food through collaborations, hosting events, drawing descendants back at regular reunions, keeping the synagogue active. The community that’s forming around them — that’s already the project.”

In a world where Jewish stories often end with what was lost, Alliance is a rare one still asking what might yet be found.

When William and Malya talk about Alliance now, they sound like hopeful realists with a mortgage. The early, expansive dream has settled into something steadier — less about rebuilding a vanished colony and more about tending what remains so it can keep growing.

“We really like our life in Brooklyn, but we also really like having this other place that is meaningful,” Malya said. “It’s rare for Jewish kids in America to have a place where their family has six generations of history.”

Alliance has always been an exercise in reinvention: first by the colonists, then by the survivors, and now by a family trying to reconcile two very different forms of Jewish life. The Levins move between the noise of one life and the quiet persistence of another.

They are not trying to rebuild the past. They’re trying to keep it from disappearing. And in doing so, they’ve carved out a place where Jewish life, in all its improvisation and resilience, can still take root.

The post One of America’s first Jewish farms was nearly lost to history. Now these Brooklyn parents are risking everything to keep their family’s legacy alive. appeared first on The Forward.