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Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022
(JTA) — All year long, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports about the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our community. To close out the year, we wanted to turn our attention to people who may not have been such household names but whose stories deserve to be remembered.
Here, with the help of readers who shared the names of people they are remembering, we recall 18 Jews who shaped their local communities and made a difference in the lives of those close to them. They include rabbis whose impact extended for decades, teachers who inspired generations of students and activists who were working to build a better world. May their memories be a blessing.
Harriet Bograd
A champion of emerging Jewish communities in far-flung places.
Harriet Bograd, center, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a visit to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish community in Ghana in an undated photo. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)
Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported emerging Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and other places far beyond the usual centers of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart at the West End Synagogue, she was inspired by a visit in 2004 to a remote village in Ghana, where about two dozen families considered themselves Jewish. In the years to come, she and Kulanu would provide support to emerging Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more. She once said of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the idea [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities that have their own richness and variety.”
Henry Berg-Brousseau
Transgender activist from Kentucky
Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Campaign)
Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied history, political science and Jewish studies at George Washington University, where he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had recently gotten a major promotion at the Human Rights Campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, home, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him,” his mother, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in a statement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was important to him to make the world a more accepting place. At 24 years old. he had finally found a community but that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Orthodox advocate for women’s rights
Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)
Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a leading figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for women’s rights within Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included creating a rabbinical court to support “agunot” — women whose husbands refused to divorce them — frequently earned him scorn from traditionalists within Orthodoxy. But many others saw him as a “gentle giant” who wielded his years of study and experience to fight for women’s rights in Jewish law. Krauss was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1948. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Young Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. During his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva University and began to get more involved in issues related to the role of women in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 came back to New York to found the International Beit Din, or religious court, to work on agunot cases. “Some say it is a modern revolution,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “I say that’s the way you should do it.”
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni
A survivor and scholar who teased out the many voices of the Talmud
Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was associated with Columbia University for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia University professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for many years at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, until leaving the institution in 1983 over its decision to ordain women rabbis. He later became dean of the rabbinical school of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement created by rabbis and scholars who similarly broke with the Conservative movement. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud study by treating Jewish text as a living, mutable conversation across generations, as opposed to a static document. Halivni’s approach to learning was the “corollary to loving the text so much that you just had to understand it to its fullest, whatever tools would enable you to do so,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.
Moris Albahari
A remnant of a Ladino-speaking past
Moris Albahari, shown in a documentary about his story called “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)
Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator force, came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac, the country’s equivalent of Auschwitz. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and David was able to help his son escape from the train. Because Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that is mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages, he was able to speak with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him several more times before the end of the war, but afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews dead or forever dispersed, he spoke the language largely at home. At one point the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a leader within Bosnia’s Jewish community. “It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevok,” said Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members.”
Rachel Brodie
A “master Jewish educator” whose influence was vast
Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish News of Northern California)
Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble yet through her work as an educator had a vast influence on the Jewish community in the Bay Area of California, where she lived, and beyond. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an educational resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She also served as “chief Jewish officer” at the Jewish community Center of San Francisco, a position created just for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley, where she had been a senior educator. “To learn with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and transformed.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her home in Berkeley.
Rabbi Steven Sager
“Leader, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and beyond
Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)
When Rabbi Steven Sager died May 15 at 71 after an extended battle with pancreatic cancer, he was mourned not only by his family and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, but by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry community spanning the globe. “Steve was a beautiful and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I generally do not believe in translation, especially translation of poetry. It seems to me that every language has an inner secret that cannot be transposed into another vessel. Yet, when Steve translated my poems I had a different feeling — I felt he entered an inner layer, one that lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”
Nate Geller
Devoted to building stronger Jewish communities
Nate Geller, at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” sign, which he took home and hung on his mantel. (Courtesy)
Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a struggle with leukemia that he faced with characteristic humility, faith and optimism. His death was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s parent company); to his synagogue community in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had dedicated his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University in 1983. In the hours after his death, chat rooms and email boxes filled up with loving tributes to Nate, remarkable for their consistency: Friends and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his passion for Jewish learning, his commitment to Israel, his willingness not just to hear but to listen when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his family: his wife Lyn Light Geller, herself a gentle and passionate force among “Jewish professionals,” his grown children Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s wife Talia, and their kids, Annaelle and Judah. Said one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is an enormous Nate-shaped void in the world now.”
Hedi Fried
A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden
Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s culture minister and handball player Linnea Claeson during a counterprotest against a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP via Getty Images)
Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, where she became a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke widely about her experiences during the Holocaust, gathering some of the most common exchanges in “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust,” published in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no question too difficult to answer. You were brave, generous, dedicated and extremely wise,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent but not your message. It lives on in everyone who met you, in your texts, books, films and your belief that man is still good — and that it is possible to build a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our entire existence.” Fried, who had three children, died in November at 98.
Rabbi Sy Dresner
The “most arrested rabbi in America”
Rabbi Martin Freedman, right, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,center, are taken to the Tallahassee city building where they were charged with unlawful assembly after they and 10 other “Freedom Riders” were arrested attempting to eat at the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Photos)
Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was sometimes called the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Dresner built a career as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was active in the fight against the Vietnam War and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dresner was born on the Lower East Side in 1929 to an Orthodox family and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a child but went on to become a Reform rabbi after serving in the Korean War and working on a kibbutz in Israel. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he said after an arrest in 1964 outside a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”
Eli Evans
‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’
Eli Evans, seen here in a picture from a trip to Israel in the 1970s, was “equally at home in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)
Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, where his father would become the first Jewish mayor and his mother the founder of Hadassah’s first chapter in the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native home despite spending his adult life in New York City, where he was a prominent grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Street” in both the United States and Israel. He wrote several memoirs about Southern Jews and also included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at multiple foundations according to an activist philosophy that helped launch the Children’s Defense Fund, seeded the South with Black lawyers who became local civil rights leaders and built ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their countries made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish establishment and strengthened American Jewish life, without losing his Southern Jewish soul,” said Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have known him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of complications of COVID-19, after a period of declining health.
Sheryl Grossman
A lifelong advocate for people with disabilities
Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish disability activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Series at Towson University)
Sheryl Grossman stood small, at just 4’3″ and 48 pounds, but in the world of Jewish disability advocacy she loomed large, as both the founder of a Facebook group for people living with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center. She died March 28 at age 46, the result of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked cancer. “I don’t think anyone will ever know just how much work Sheryl did during the pandemic to help Jewish communities support their most vulnerable neighbors who were in the hospital or isolated at home with COVID,” said Shoshana Finkel, a law student who met Grossman when she was an intern at the American Association of People with Disabilities. “She didn’t feel the need to share her accomplishments; that was never what the work was about for her.”
Dara Goldman
A professor of Spanish and Jewish studies in her prime
Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)
Dara Goldman was preparing for graduation at the University of Illinois, where she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and for the American Jewish Historical Society conference, when she died May 13 of a heart attack. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so diverse that she was affiliated with eight units within the University of Illinois; most recently, she was researching Jewish cultural production in Cuba, where she brought resources for the Jewish community during her research trips, and co-edited a volume on 21st-century Jewish writing. “With her characteristic wit, she would often joke that she was a Jewish woman who took a wrong turn at diaspora,” said a remembrance published by the university. “But jokes aside, she could be at the same time a Jewish woman from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and loved very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate within our halls for a long time.”
Yaakov Shalev
A beloved family man whose story was Israel’s
Yaakov Shalev, seated third from right, helped organize Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Shalev)
“When I arrived for a visit with family in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged nearly everyone at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my younger cousins badgered me to remove it. It took my elderly grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everyone down and declare that I am his same beloved grandson, with or without the piercing.
“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we called him, passed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, with his five children at his side. He spent his last few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Fairuz.
“Saba Yaakov helped organize the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 and then enlisted in the Israeli military as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself how to build houses and became a successful contractor in the 1960s. But he soon decided the stress was too much and opened a shop in south Tel Aviv where he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their paintings. He kept the shop running for more than 40 years, going to work every day until he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter
Trude Feldman
A journalist who specialized in Yom Kippur interviews
Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)
The daughter of a rabbinical family, Trude Feldman launched her career covering the 1961 trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she put her training as a Hebrew teacher to use by teaching the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She also taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) But it was in her coverage of American presidents that Feldman truly made her mark, becoming famous for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as an opportunity for redemption. That’s what got her the first interview with Bill Clinton after he copped in 1998 to yes, having sex with that woman. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Night Live” once did so in a sketch — but those close to her understood their value. “The joke, however, was on everyone else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired with her signature persistence, her style more often elicited not puff but profundity, more sincerity than sugar. The unique access she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable results.”
Harlene Winnick Appelman
A revolutionary leader in Jewish education
Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photo provided by the Covenant Foundation.
Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s career in Jewish education took off in 1982 when she became the director of family life education at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish learning, bringing children out of dry frontal settings into a more tactile experience of Judaism. After joining the board of the Covenant Foundation, which funds and promotes Jewish education, in 1994, she became its director in 2005 and held that role until 2021, allowing her to influence a generation of Jewish educators. Many of them mourned her death at 75 on Aug. 18; the cause was cancer. “I am one of an entire congregation of Jewish educational leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made feel special,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in an online remembrance. “I hope that in her memory, I will find ever new ways to help more Jewish rabbis and educators feel seen, heard, capable, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Foundation initiated a new prize, in Jewish family education, in Appelman’s honor.
Tom Tugend
An indefatigable journalist
Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles home, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)
Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his family left their home in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, where he had lived for most of his life. In the intervening decades, he fought in the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces; covered Jewish news for a wide array of publications, including JTA; and enjoyed 66 years of marriage during which he and his wife raised three daughters. “His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” said one of them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many people.”
Judah Samet
A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror
Judah Samet stands next to his portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Forget” project at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photo by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh)
Judah Samet became a national face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting because he survived: He had been running late that day, so was not inside the building when 11 of his fellow congregants were murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s guest to the State of the Union address. The experience was both very different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938, and in some ways similar. As a young child, Samet was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After a stop in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Sept. 27.
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Shifka, a new pita shop on the Bowery, aims to be the Chipotle of Israeli cuisine
Fans of Sami & Susu, the Mediterranean-inspired Lower East Side wine bar and restaurant that opened during the pandemic, will be happy to know that its Jewish owners have opened a lower priced, more casual spinoff just a few blocks away.
Shifka at 324 Bowery offers elevated Israeli-style street food — like pita stuffed with schnitzel, Yemenite hot sauce, pickles, hot pepper and red cabbage, drizzled with creamy Har Bracha tahini.
Shifka is named after the spicy, light green pickled pepper that’s a popular condiment at falafel shops across Israel. “It was supposed to be called The Pita Shop, but you can’t trademark that name — it’s too general,” said Amir Nathan, 39, one of Shifka’s store’s four owners and a co-founder of Sami & Susu. “I said, why don’t we call it after the pepper, like Chipotle. I like names that trigger curiosity. You need to think about the experience that you are about to have.”
Nearly a half-decade in the making — Nathan and his partner, executive chef Jordan Anderson, conducted years of pita sandwich experiments at Sami & Susu — Shifka opened its doors on Oct. 14, just after a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza began.
Throughout the development of Shifka, Nathan said that he and his partners were undeterred about opening another Israeli restaurant during a time of heightened antisemitism in New York. “When I see a crisis, I decide to do something positive,” said Nathan, who was born and raised in Beersheba, in southern Israel. “Opening Sami & Susu during the pandemic was a big one. And since Oct. 7, we emphasize more our Israeli and Jewish identity with the food that we do.”
Last winter, Nathan and Anderson took a “R&D trip” to Israel together. The goal, said Nathan, was to share Israeli cuisine with his partner, who was raised Jewish in New Jersey and had never visited Israel before.
“We went to classic pita shops in Israel but also toured the ASIF Culinary Institute and Arabic restaurants,” Nathan said. “How does a pita shop in Israel operate? How do they organize and order? Let’s be up to date with what is happening in the new generation of restaurants. It was a good introduction. We went to Akko to eat hummus and to a Druze restaurant in the north — all of the staples that together make this cuisine what it is.”
Nathan believes that their wide-ranging trip gave Anderson a better understanding of the flavors of the Middle East.
“Baguette, harissa, preserved lemon, hard-boiled egg — a Tunisian sandwich is what I ate in my school cafeteria in Beersheba,” Nathan said. “When I tried to explain to Jordan the idea behind it — now when he saw it in Machane Yehuda Market he said, ‘Wow, this is where it comes from.’ He saw food from Iraq to Yemen to East Jerusalem. The idea that a mash of those cultures can work together actually clicked.”
They also visited two restaurants that Anderson had read about: HaBasta, near the Carmel Market in Tel Aviv and known for the freshness and seasonality of its dishes, and HaKatan, a seafood restaurant in Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Market.
“These chefs are cooking like me,” Anderson, who has a French culinary background, said of his new inspiration.
“We do a lot of upscale food at Sami & Susu,” the 33-year-old added. “It’s refreshing to do sandwiches and fast casual and spread your mind that way.”
At Sami & Susu, the menu is seasonal and changes eight times a year. The menu at Shifka, by contrast, is streamlined and stable. Customers choose from stuffed pita sandwiches and bowls with an option of rice, freekeh — an ancient Middle Eastern grain imported from Israel — and or salad as its base. As for proteins, options include chicken marinated in yogurt, lamb kebabs drizzled with amba and shrimp served with tzatziki, roasted red peppers and red cabbage.
Of course, you can also order shifka peppers at Shifka; served as a side dish ($2), they are imported from Israel. Other sides include french fries coated in zaatar ($8), as well as muhammara, a walnut and roasted red pepper spread, or matbucha, a roasted tomato and smoked paprika salad ($8 each). Alcoholic beverages and dessert — like creamy, nutty soft-serve ice cream made with Israeli tahini ($8) — are on offer, too.
Nathan said he and his partners considered using kosher meat but ultimately decided it was too costly. “Kosher is part of our heritage and history, but it’s not the only way,” he said. “What we do here is not traditional. I hope that people see it as a voice of our new generation of Jews all over the world.”
He added: “We’re going to do breakfast here at some point, and we will have bacon, egg and cheese bourekas and it’s phenomenal. And a shakshuka in a pita — that’s how we want to eat.”
The exterior of Shifka, an new Israeli pita sandwich shop at 324 Bowery. (Courtesy of Shifka)
More than “just” an Israeli restaurant, Nathan stresses that Shifka’s influences are far flung. “Obviously, I’m from Israel but the influences are from all around,” he said. “We have tzatziki in a pita. We have lamb kebab, a hybrid of Romanian kebab combined with Yemenite spices. It is not just Israeli.”
Nonetheless, Nathan said that Sami & Susu — which garnered a Michelin Bib Gourmand award in 2022, 2023 and 2024 — has been subject to some anti-Israel vandalism during the two-year war between Israel and Gaza.
“We got tagged a couple of times,” he said. “People sprayed on our window.”
And yet, Nathan and Anderson say that the war in Gaza impacted their business in an unexpectedly good way.
“It actually gave us more business I think,” Nathan said. “More Jews are coming to Sami & Susu after Oct. 7. Hipster couples from Fort Greene to Upper West Siders. Maybe they are looking for that kind of food — I call it Mediterranean because it is actually not meant to be just Israeli but food of the Diaspora.”
He added: “Israel, as much as I love it, is not the only heritage we have as Jews. We have a long history before the country existed.”
Since its opening three weeks ago, Shifka has garnered rave reviews. According to the Infatuation, “Shifka makes lunchtime in NOHO so much better,” while Grub Street named Shifka to its list of the city’s best new restaurants.
“Knock on wood, said Nathan. “We are fortunate to have a good beginning on this project.”
And like Chipotle — which is named for a smoked, dried jalapeno pepper and operates 3,700 restaurants around the globe — Nathan and his partners are hoping to scale Shifka one day. Unlike the fast-casual juggernaut, which is primarily owned by institutional investors, Shifka’s partners’ plans are more modest.
“We are looking for small growth, not duplicating it dozens of times. We are planning to expand Shifka and move Sami & Susu to a bigger location,” Nathan said. “We never prevent ourselves from dreaming big and maybe expanding to other cities.”
For now, though, the focus is on the Bowery location. On a recent morning, Shifka’s kitchen was abuzz as staffers busily filled dozens of lunch orders for local businesses. By lunchtime, “the whole place is packed,” Anderson said. “Delicious food, fair prices, creative. No fear about all the hate that is going around the city right now.”
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Hezbollah Rejects Israel-Lebanon Talks, Reaffirms Refusal to Disarm as Tensions Escalate Along Border
Smoke rises after Israeli strikes following Israeli military’s evacuation orders, in Tayr Debba, southern Lebanon, Nov. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ali Hankir
Hezbollah has rejected any talks with Israel and reaffirmed its refusal to disarm, even as the Jewish state ramps up military operations in southern Lebanon amid rising border tensions.
On Thursday, the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group condemned the prospect of negotiations between Lebanon and Israel, while reaffirming its refusal to disarm and claiming it has “a legitimate right to resist [Israeli] occupation.”
In an open letter to Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, Hezbollah called for prioritizing efforts to pressure Israel into complying with the US-brokered ceasefire negotiated by the countries last year rather than “being drawn into political negotiations with the Zionist enemy.”
“Any attempt at political negotiations with Israel does not serve Lebanon’s national interest,” the letter read.
“The weapons that defended Lebanon will not be up for negotiation and will remain an integral part of the country’s national defense strategy,” it continued, with Hezbollah seemingly depicting itself as the protector of Lebanese sovereignty.
US and Israel officials have been pressuring the Lebanese government to enter direct negotiations with the Jewish state, with Egypt offering to mediate as fears of renewed conflict in the region intensify.
Hezbollah’s warning came as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out its latest airstrikes against the terrorist group, describing it as a response to ceasefire violations.
In a press release, the Israeli military confirmed it carried out a strike in southern Lebanon, targeting operatives at a Hezbollah site, which the IDF said was used to “produce equipment used by the organization to restore terror infrastructure.”
Under last year’s ceasefire agreement, the Lebanese government committed to disarm Hezbollah, which for years has wielded significant political and military influence across the country while maintaining significant terrorist infrastructure in southern Lebanon, which borders northern Israel. The deal was reached after Israel decimated much of Hezbollah’s leadership and military capabilities with an air and ground offensive following the Islamist group’s attacks on northern Israeli communities — which Hezbollah claimed were a show of solidarity with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas amid the war in Gaza.
Hezbollah claimed in its letter on Thursday that “the government’s hasty decision regarding the monopoly of arms” enabled Israel to exploit the situation, making disarmament a prerequisite for halting what the group alleges are Israeli violations of the ceasefire.
“Disarmament should be discussed within a national framework and not as a response to a foreign demand or Israeli blackmail,” the letter read.
“We affirm our legitimate right to resist occupation and aggression, and to stand with our army and our people in defending our country’s sovereignty against an enemy that wages war on us, continues its attacks, and seeks to subjugate our state,” it continued.
New reports indicate that Hezbollah has been actively rebuilding its military capabilities, in violation of the ceasefire agreement with the Jewish state.
With support from Iran, the terrorist group has been intensifying efforts to bolster its military power, including the production and repair of weapons, smuggling of arms and cash through seaports and Syrian routes, recruitment and training, and the use of civilian infrastructure as a base and cover for its operations.
In recent weeks, Israel has conducted strikes targeting Hezbollah’s rearmament efforts, particularly south of the Litani River, where the group’s operatives have historically been most active against the Jewish state.
For years, Israel has demanded that Hezbollah be barred from carrying out activities south of the Litani, located roughly 15 miles from the Israeli border.
Earlier this year, Lebanese officials agreed to a US-backed disarmament plan, which called for the terrorist group to be fully disarmed within four months — by November — in exchange for Israel halting airstrikes and withdrawing troops from the five occupied positions in the country’s southern region.
The Lebanese government is now facing mounting pressure from Israeli and US officials to disarm Hezbollah and establish a state monopoly on weapons.
Meanwhile, the Iran-backed terrorist group has repeatedly defied international calls to disarm, even threatening protests and civil unrest if the government tries to enforce control over its weapons.
Since the Lebanese government has so far been unable to successfully implement the US-backed disarmament plan, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz last week accused Aoun of “dragging his feet” on this issue.
“The Lebanese government’s commitment to disarm Hezbollah and remove it from southern Lebanon must be implemented,” Katz said. “Maximum enforcement will continue and even intensify — we will not allow any threat to the residents of the north.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also warned that Israel would exercise its right to self-defense under the ceasefire agreement if Lebanon failed to disarm the terrorist group.
“We expect the Lebanese government to uphold its commitments, namely, to disarm Hezbollah. But it’s clear that we’ll exercise our right to self-defense as stipulated in the ceasefire terms,” the Israeli leader said. “We won’t let Lebanon become a renewed front against us, and we’ll do what’s necessary.”
For his part, Aoun criticized Israel for escalating strikes after he expressed willingness to negotiate, accusing it of hindering prospects for negotiations while also directing the Lebanese army to confront IDF incursions along the southern border.
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Artist Won’t ‘Surrender to Extremism’ After Mural of Hamas Victims Shiri Bibas, Two Sons Defaced Again in Milan
A look at the mural “October 7, The Hostages” before (left) and after (right) it was vandalized for a second time. Photo: Provided
Italian contemporary pop artist and activist AleXsandro Palombo spoke to The Algemeiner on Thursday about the “antisemitic hatred” that fueled the second vandalism of his mural in Milan, Italy, honoring Shiri Bibas and her two young sons – all three of whom were murdered by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip after being taken as hostages from Israel.
Shiri’s face in the mural was recently covered with white paint, as was the Star of David on the Israeli flag that is draped over her two children Kfir and Ariel, who were 4 and nine months old, respectively, when taken hostage on Oct. 7, 2023, along with their mother. The mural shows Shiri, 32, holding her two sons. The three of them were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz when Hamas-led terrorists went on a deadly rampage across southern Israel, and they were later killed in captivity in Gaza.
Palombo titled the mural “October 7, The Hostages.” It is featured in the center of Milan, outside the Qatari consulate, and just a few steps from the famous Via Montenapoleone shopping area. The mural was first vandalized days after it was unveiled in October during an event commemorating the two-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy described the vandalism as “a vile gesture against the memory of the victims.”
“These works are testimonies; they carry memory and truth within them,” Palombo told The Algemeiner on Thursday following the most recent vandalism of his mural dedicated to the Bibas family. “Those who destroy them aren’t just targeting art; they’re trying to erase its meaning, its message, its resistance. It’s a deliberate act meant to extinguish what stands up to hatred, to intimidate anyone who defends freedom of thought and to rewrite history for their own advantage.” He added that stopping his art “would mean surrendering to extremism.”
“The works dedicated to the Bibas family, like all those destroyed by antisemitic hatred, must continue to live,” he said. “Every time art is silenced, the conscience of our civilization is struck. Defending artistic freedom means defending the dignity and memory of the West.”
Yarden Bibas – Shiri’s husband and the father of Ariel and Kfir — was separately kidnapped from Israel by Hamas-led terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023. He survived captivity and is the only living member of his immediate family.
Other murals by Palombo that have been dedicated to the Holocaust, antisemitism, or the deadly terrorist attack in October 2023 have all been vandalized in the past, including murals depicting Auschwitz survivors and another featuring a survivor of the Nova music festival. Even a mural created in support of Iranian women protesters was vandalized. Palombo told The Algemeiner he has received hundreds of death threats because of his artwork, mostly from “extremist online communities and radicalized pro-Palestinian movements.” He believes the vandalism of his work tied to the Holocaust, Israel, or antisemitism “is part of a deliberate strategy that uses antisemitism as a weapon to spread fear and destabilize democracies from within.”
“Today, anti-Jewish hatred is no longer just a social or cultural phenomenon; it has become a tool of hybrid warfare, employed by hostile networks to manipulate public opinion and undermine the very foundations of freedom and civil coexistence,” he added. “To attack art is to attack freedom of expression and erase collective memory. It’s a way to weaken democratic consciousness and pave the way for fanaticism. Every defaced mural is not just an attack on an artwork; it’s an assault on the right to remember.”
The only murals tied to the Holocaust and antisemitism that have not been vandalized are those displayed in Rome after being acquired by the city’s Shoah Museum. Palombo explained that they are located near a police booth and in front of a synagogue, which has a constant armed guard stationed in front.
“It’s a paradox: In a Western democracy, art must be protected like a potential target, as if memory itself had become something to be defended by law enforcement,” he told The Algemeiner.