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Passover at Rikers Island: How the notorious jail complex holds a seder for Jewish inmates
(New York Jewish Week) — Miriam Tohill, a Jewish chaplain intern at Rikers Island, is looking forward to co-leading Passover seders for Jewish inmates this year for the first time. But conditions at the New York City jail complex are not ideal.
For the seders, held on the first and second nights of the holiday, some 70 to 100 inmates will be bussed from different parts of the island complex to a gymnasium that “feels like a high school gym,” said Tohill, 32, who uses the pronouns “she” and “they.” Sending participants to hunt for the afikoman, a hidden piece of matzah, is “discouraged,” she added, “for obvious reasons.”
The seder tradition of putting pillows on the room’s flimsy folding chairs, they said, is likewise prohibited. And while the door of the gym, rather than a door to the outside, will be opened for Elijah the prophet, they said, “the symbolism is obviously muted.”
Beyond that, Tohill added, it may be a challenge to create a festive mood. Corrections officers will be sitting on bleachers at the side of the room, which has a “squeaky floor, very tall ceiling, [and] terrible acoustics.”
Nonetheless, Tohill expects the seders at Rikers to be filled with meaning. She and others who work with Jewish inmates at the jail say that the holiday — which celebrates the ancient Jewish exodus from slavery to freedom — takes on a different resonance when celebrated by people currently behind bars.
“It’s both easier and harder to talk about slavery, freedom and hope when you’re incarcerated, but we’re all hoping for freedom and rehabilitation and growth in the future,” said Rabbi Gabriel Kretzmer Seed, Rikers’ Jewish chaplain. “People had beautiful insights about what freedom means to them, especially talking about how they feel free even when they’re incarcerated. I was very inspired by that.”
Seed, who received ordination from Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, the liberal Orthodox seminary in the Bronx, began working as a chaplain at Rikers in 2018. The jail has been criticized for harsh conditions, which include evidence of inmates caged in tiny showers and sleeping on floors next to a pile of excrement. The complex has also been the site of suicides, beatings and more. Nineteen people died at Rikers in 2022 — the jail’s highest death rate since 2013, and the city is required by law to close it by 2027, though whether that will be possible is unclear.
Seed said that while Rikers can be a volatile and intense environment, it has also given him a sense of gratitude, highlighting the Jewish concept of teshuva, or repentance, and the idea that everyone deserves a second chance. Seed said Rikers’ Jewish inmates come from a range of religious backgrounds, from haredi Orthodox people educated in yeshivas to others who decided to explore their Judaism once they were incarcerated. He holds weekly services at the jail that draw up to 12 attendees; this week’s teachings discussed the concepts of freedom and slavery as a precursor to the seders.
“I’m kind of buoyed by those values,” Seed said, referring to teshuva. “When I’m having a rough day, I leave my office, go to a housing area, and people are just so grateful for even a few visits, a few minutes when I step into their housing area, or when I get to teach and engage with people, and that just lifts me up and reminds me why I do this work.”
Year round, Rikers Island offers kosher food, which is provided by the city. Seed and Department of Corrections officials would not provide specifics on where the food comes from, saying only that it comes from “different caterers.” And matzah isn’t only available on Passover: Jewish inmates eat the unleavened bread year-round at Rikers because it is a kosher food option that is easily available.
There are Orthodox volunteer groups that help bring kosher food into the jail, including members of L’asurim, a nonprofit that supports prisoners, and the Lubavitch Youth Organization, a branch of the Chabad Hasidic movement.
Rabbi Shmuel Tevel, who is active in the Lubavitch group, told the New York Jewish Week that he visits Jewish inmates regularly at Rikers and other prisons across the state. “For an inmate sitting in a prison cell in those darkest moments, in a state where they feel they’re at the end of their rope, they need to tie a knot and hang on,” he said. “That’s what we give them.”
The Lubavitch Youth Organization outside of Rikers Island doing outreach work during Purim. (Courtesy)
Ahead of Passover, his group is delivering 40 pounds of matzah, along with grape juice, haroset and vacuum-packed seder plates to some cells whose inmates won’t be allowed to attend the seder.
Zalman Tevel, Shmuel’s brother, who runs the group’s volunteer initiative at Rikers, told the New York Jewish Week that he spoke to a guard after visiting inmates during the holiday of Purim last month, and the guard told him the inmates were “in a better state.”
“They are closer to God,” he said. “It leaves a very good impact.”
Tohill described her work on Rikers, which includes working with inmates in other ways, in similar terms. Tohill said the work allows her to provide Jewish teachings in “a place that has so little space for joy, or God.” She compared the seder at Rikers to the tabernacle that the ancient Israelites built in the desert.
“We put all this care into it, knowing that it’s temporary, and we’re going to take it down again,” Tohill said. “We are in the wilderness and desperately need a place to meet Hashem. It is so temporary and imperfect, but that makes it even more worth putting the time into.”
For Tohill, co-leading the seders is part of their master’s project at the Union Theological Seminary, a traditionally Protestant seminary in Manhattan that now focuses on “training people of all faiths and none who are called to the work of social justice in the world.” Tohill’s project explores the meaning of Passover for oppressed people.
“I was in a position to ask, what does this Seder do for us spiritually, emotionally, communally?” Tohill said. “What does it promise to us if we have no access to freedom for people who are incarcerated? That became a big question for me, a theological question about what does this ritual do and how do we as Jews think about liberation?”
Tohill, who lives in the uptown Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, said that some of the inmates have written about their personal stories and will share how they relate to Passover at the seder.
“We have congregants who have written poems about what sense they make of the Exodus story or of the four cups of wine,” Tohill said, referencing a central ritual of the seder. “We have congregants who have done drawings about their family that, to them, feel related to the Passover story in different ways.”
Requests to speak to an inmate planning to attend a seder, or to see inmates’ drawings or writings, were denied by the Department of Corrections.
Tohill called Rikers “a broken system” and said celebrating Passover feels particularly urgent there. They compared Rikers Island to “a floating trash heap in the middle of the ocean that we don’t want anyone to notice.”
“Passover is an opportunity to notice and ask who is being made invisible,” Tohill said. “The rest of the people in New York City who are not directly impacted by the prison industrial complex get to pretend it’s not happening. I would like to ask that, this Pesach, people take the opportunity to stop pretending.”
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The post Passover at Rikers Island: How the notorious jail complex holds a seder for Jewish inmates appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump defends Tucker Carlson, whose interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes split Republicans
(JTA) — President Donald Trump defended Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes, weighing in on a debate over antisemitism that has roiled the Republican party.
“I’ve found him to be good. He’s said good things about me over the years,” Trump told a reporter over the weekend who asked about Carlson’s interview. “You can’t tell him who to interview. If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out.”
The president’s comments were his first on a growing divide within the Republican party over Carlson giving a platform on his top-rated podcast to Fuentes and over the growth of the antisemitic Fuentes-led “groyper” movement on the right.
Jewish conservatives and some of their allies have expressed alarm at explicit antisemitism within the movement. Conservative writer Rod Dreher recently estimating that as many as 40 percent of young GOP staffers in Washington, D.C. are followers of the 27-year-old Fuentes, who complained to Carlson that “organized Jewry” undermines American unity.
Yet neither Trump nor Vice President J.D. Vance has joined the chorus of condemnation for Fuentes’ brand of white supremacy. Vance, who employs Carlson’s son Buckley on his staff, in recent days defended Buckley from a right-wing Jewish activist’s accusations of antisemitism without directly addressing the Fuentes controversy. The vice president was also criticized for responding to a college student’s question about Israel and Jews without acknowledging the question’s antisemitic underpinnings.
The debate over Carlson was stoked when the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation defended Carlson. A growing number of Heritage Foundation staffers and associates, both Jewish and not, have since distanced themselves from the think tank. Legal fellow Adam Mossoff, who is Jewish, and former board member Robert George, a Princeton University professor and prominent public intellectual, recently left Heritage, citing its handling of Carlson.
And in the cultural sphere, the actress and podcaster Dasha Nekrasova was also dropped by her agent on Friday over a weeks-old interview with Fuentes that she and her co-host conducted on the podcast “Red Scare.” “Nekrasova had a recurring role on HBO’s “Succession,” and “Red Scare” was initially a thought leader on the young left before lurching hard to the right in recent years.
Carlson campaigned with Trump for his 2024 reelection and has significant influence within his administration, while Trump dined with Fuentes and the antisemitic rapper Ye in Mar-a-Lago in 2022, an incident that prompted criticism from staunch Jewish Republican allies. Trump has since claimed he didn’t know who Fuentes was at the time.
Meanwhile, Paul Ingrassia, a Trump administration staffer who attended a Fuentes rally last year and recently withdrew his nomination from a Cabinet-level post over the revelation of texts in which he said he had a “Nazi streak,” remains in the administration. Instead Ingrassia found a new position as deputy general counsel of the General Services Administration.
Carlson, for his part, has doubled down, even as some sponsors have quietly exited his show. Last week he disparaged Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi pastor who was executed in 1945 for his involvement in the German resistance movement. Carlson also compared the Israel Defense Forces to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
The GOP’s fault lines over Fuentes and antisemitism aren’t breaking as cleanly as those over other issues. Even a newly minted Trump adversary on the right, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, declined to condemn Carlson or Fuentes in a recent CNN interview.
“I defend every single person’s free speech rights. I think that’s incredibly important. So I don’t apologize for that. And I don’t believe in cancelling people. And I think it’s important for people like Tucker Carlson and yourself to interview everyone,” Greene told Dana Bash over the weekend.
On CNN Greene noted that she had spoken at a Fuentes-led conference in 2022, but claimed, “I don’t know Nick Fuentes. He’s someone I’ve never exchanged text messages with or phone calls.”
Asked specifically about Fuentes’s past antisemitic comments, Greene continued, “You should have Nick Fuentes on your show, and you can ask him questions about that. I myself am not antisemitic. I have never criticized the Jewish people or said anything about them in particular. I am critical of the government of Israel.”
The post Trump defends Tucker Carlson, whose interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes split Republicans appeared first on The Forward.
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How Mussolini’s Jewish lover changed Fascist art and design
Not even 70 years after Italy unified, Benito Mussolini’s staged march on Rome so unnerved the government that King Victor Emmanuel III named him prime minister, opening the door to Fascist rule. “And so then began the task of selling Italy: at home, abroad, and as an idea in itself,” according to “The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy.”
Now on view at Manhattan’s Poster House, the exhibition examines the intersection of propaganda and art in Mussolini’s Italy. Featuring 75 works on loan from the Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli in Bologna and curated by photographic artist and author B.A. Van Sise, the show explores how the regime used bold design, vivid color and modernist imagery to shape the nation’s self-image and fuel the Futurist movement.
But beyond the bombast, the sleek typefaces and arresting compositions lies a deeper, more complicated story. At its heart is Mussolini’s longtime lover and muse, Margherita Sarfatti, a Venetian Jew whose aesthetic sensibilities helped define the visual language of Italian Fascism.
“It’s not a Jewish show, though a person could argue it has a huge Jewish element since everything goes back to Margherita Sarfatti, who’s as Jewish as they come,” Van Sise said. “Fundamentally, Sarfatti’s the core of the show. The entire Italian art establishment changes gears because Mussolini’s girlfriend likes Futurism.”
Born in 1880 into a wealthy Jewish family, Sarfatti became a journalist, art critic and socialite who served as Mussolini’s adviser, biographer and cultural strategist. She funded Il Popolo d’Italia and was, as the exhibition text notes, “the uncrowned queen of Italy.”
“Think Gertrude Stein with better couture,” Van Sise said. “Every single thing in this show exists because of her — the Duce’s girlfriend adored Futurist art, and her taste dictated the direction of Italy’s visual culture. Artists and movements jumped ship to follow her lead, obeying in advance.”
Her influence is evident in pieces such as Marcello Dudovich’s 1936 poster “Esposizione Rhodia Albene alla Rinascente,” which depicts two elegantly dressed women striding in lockstep, evoking Sarfatti’s emphasis on fashion, modernity and movement.
The exhibit unfolds in three sections — “Italy as an Idea,” “Italy at Home,” and “Italy in the World” — each highlighting how Italian identity was constructed through imagery that linked domestic life, political messaging, and global ambition.
“Cioccolato Ali d’Italia,” a poster from 1931, depicts a sleek silver aircraft soaring across the page. Created to commemorate Minister of Aviation Italo Balbo’s transatlantic flights to South America, the image showcases Italy’s growing aviation prowess. A small rendering of Columbus’ ship tucked in the corner underscores the regime’s imperial aspirations.
The 1933 “Ardita Fiat” poster highlights the introduction of the Fiat Ardita, a streamlined, torpedo-shaped car whose name, which means “the daring one,” embodied Fascist vigor. In it a woman sits behind the wheel, her white gloves and black fez hat mirroring those worn by the Arditi, Italy’s elite assault troops.
Van Sise said it was essential to acknowledge the significant, though often overlooked, role Italian Jews played in Fascism’s early years. Among them were Gino Arias, an economist who addressed the National Fascist Party shortly before it seized power in 1922; Elisa Majer Rizzoli, who led the party’s women’s wing; and Guido Jung, an Orthodox Jew who served as finance minister.
“It was really important to include the Jewish history of the Italian Fascist period because it’s partly my own,” Van Sise said. “My family were Tunisian and Libyan Jews who came to Italy, and some branches were old-line Italian families — there for centuries, if not a millennium.”
Eventually Jews were targeted in Italy. By 1938 Mussolini had enacted racial laws, forcing thousands of Jews, including Sarfatti and Van Sise’s grandfather, to flee. Sarfatti spent her exile in Switzerland, Argentina, and Uruguay before returning after the war, only to learn her sister was among the more than seven thousand Italian Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Van Sise’s grandfather also returned, before the war’s end, and joined the partisans.
He provides the exhibition’s stark coda: a small black-and-white photograph showing the corpses of Mussolini and others hanging by their heels in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. The photographer was Van Sise’s grandfather.
“It’s a brutal image,” Van Sise said. “But it brings the story full circle — art, politics and identity collapsing into history itself.”
“The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy” runs through Feb. 22 at the Poster House.
The post How Mussolini’s Jewish lover changed Fascist art and design appeared first on The Forward.
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Berlin to Lift Suspension of Israel Weapons Sales, but Says Ceasefire Must Hold
A German and Israeli flag fly, on the day Chancellor Friedrich Merz meets with Israeli President Isaac Herzog for talks, in Berlin, Germany, May 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Liesa Johannssen
Germany on Monday moved to resume weapons sales to Israel that had been suspended since August over the war in Gaza, but said the decision is subject to the observance of the ceasefire and the large-scale provision of humanitarian aid.
Germany, the second-largest exporter of arms to Israel after the United States, announced a suspension of some arms exports to Israel in August, amid mounting popular pressure over the war.
The decision affected weapons and systems that could be used in Gaza but not others deemed necessary for Israel to defend itself from external attacks.
Berlin will lift the suspension order on Nov. 24 and return to a case-by-case review of arms exports to Israel, while continuing to monitor the developments on the ground, a German government spokesperson said on Monday.
HUMANITARIAN AID MUST CONTINUE ‘ON A LARGE SCALE’
The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas “is the basis for this decision, and we expect everyone to abide by the agreements that have been made – that includes maintaining the ceasefire,” a second government spokesperson said.
“It also means that humanitarian aid is provided on a large scale and that the process continues in an orderly manner, as agreed,” the spokesperson added.
Germany remains committed to supporting a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of a two-state solution and would continue to engage in supporting reconstruction in Gaza, the spokesperson said.
Germany is one of Israel‘s staunchest supporters, in part because of historical guilt for the Nazi Holocaust – a policy known as the “Staatsraison.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz came under massive criticism from his own conservatives for the decision to partially suspend the deliveries, which he said was in response to Israel‘s plan at the time to expand operations in Gaza.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Germany provided 30 percent of Israel‘s major arms imports in 2019-2023, primarily naval equipment including Sa’ar 6-class frigates (MEKO A-100 Light Frigates), which were used in the Gaza war.
ISRAEL CALLS ON OTHERS TO FOLLOW
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar on X lauded Germany for its decision to lift the order.
“I call on other governments to adopt similar decisions, following Germany,” he wrote.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said the decision, in which his ministry was closely involved, was “responsible and correct” and that the ceasefire appeared to be sustainable.