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Standing on Albania’s Jew Street, I learned firsthand the country’s lifesaving culture of hospitality
BERAT, Albania (JTA) — Stone paths wind through the Ottoman-style houses built into the hillside of Berat, Albania. They lead to an imposing 13th-century castle at the peak — the top priority for most visitors to this 60,000-person town 90 minutes south of the capital, Tirana. I had other plans.
Albanians take pride in their ancient code of “besa,” which translates to “keep the promise” and leads them to prioritize guests and religion in their homes. For Albanian Jews or those who fled there from elsewhere in the Balkan Peninsula as German forces advanced during World War II, it promised safe harbor with Albanian families and even throughout entire towns. Albania is the only country in Europe whose Jewish population grew during the war.
Berat’s Solomoni Museum explains this history and that of earlier Jews in the area. At least, so I hear: Under the stone arches off the plaza, I found only locked doors.
Some people collect souvenir spoons or Starbucks city mugs when they travel, others collect memories. I collect fragments of Jewish identity. Planning this trip to Albania with friends, I insisted on a stop in Berat to see the small museum and wasn’t about to give up.
“I’ll call her,” offered the woman behind the desk at the Ethnographic Museum across the street. “Her” referred to the caretaker, the widow of the Orthodox Christian professor who started the museum — Albania’s only one dedicated to Jewish history — as a passion project funded by his pension. After Simon Vrusho’s death in 2019, the museum closed until a French-Albanian businessman heard the story and donated funds for it to reopen in a larger, permanent location.
But the call ended with bad news: The caretaker was sick, and the museum would remain closed. I grimaced. Seeing my reaction, the Ethnographic Museum docent did what all Albanians do — anything she could to make me feel better, to make sure I enjoyed my stay in her town. In this moment, that meant explaining everything she knew about Jews in Albania.
A view of the exterior of the Solomoni Museum, the country’s only museum about its Jewish history. (Naomi Tomky)
Jews first arrived in the country as Roman captives, almost 2,000 years ago. But the first major wave, especially to Berat, came from Spanish Jews fleeing the Inquisition. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled the area at the time, offered nominal religious freedom.
This month, the country’s prime minister announced plans to open a museum in Tirana dedicated to the stories of Albanian citizens who sheltered Jews during the Holocaust, when the country was occupied by both fascist Italy and later Nazi Germany. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance authority, has recognized at least 75 Albanians as Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jews.
“You can see the street where the Jews lived,” the docent noted. I perked up and jotted down her directions.
Six blocks away, I found a simple black plaque with white lettering, barely the size of my forearm and posted high on a white brick wall. It read, “Rruga Hebrentje.” I stared at it. Two millennia of Jewish history in the country, and one closed museum forced me to take heart in a little sign saying “Jew Street.”
A sign in Berat, Albania, reads Rruga Hebrentje, or Jew Street. (Naomi Tomky)
Jews have company in this razing of history: The brutal post-World War II communist regime of dictator Enver Hoxha shuttered all religious institutions in 1967, declaring Albania the world’s first atheist state. His forces destroyed more than 2,000 mosques, churches and other sacred buildings, arresting priests, clerics and imams, many of whom disappeared forever into labor camps and hidden graves. “Religion is the opium of the people,” Hoxha wrote, quoting Karl Marx.
It felt selfish to pout about the lack of Jewish history when so much religion, so many people and huge swaths of Albanian culture had been so recently and violently erased. I joined my friends to explore Berat’s exceptions to the wanton destruction, starting at the Sultan’s Mosque, which dates to the 15th century and boasts an intricately carved wooden ceiling. We expected to admire just the outside, since our guidebook said the doors opened only around Friday prayer.
But as we stared at the somewhat ordinary façade, a friendly gentleman chatted us up. He spoke Albanian, Greek and a bit of Italian, the last of which proved useful at matching up to our Spanish and French. He told us a little about the mosque and the casual styles of observance by most Albanian Muslims, but we only realized he worked there when he invited us inside, retrieving a key when we responded with excitement.
We marveled at the green, red and gold ceiling, illuminated by a round chandelier. He asked if we wanted to climb up the minaret, warning us about the ascent. Narrower than the width of my hips, the tightly coiled spiral of 94 stairs featured a layer of dust and cobwebs that stuck to our bare feet. But at the top, swallowing my fear of heights, confined spaces and bugs, I reaped the reward: a 360-degree view of the “thousand windows” that give the town its nickname, flanking both banks of the Osumi River, and the double eagle of Albania’s red flag flying proudly above it all from the castle.
A view of the ceiling inside the Sultans Mosque in Berat. (Naomi Tomky)
Back on the ground, we thanked the man profusely and dropped donations in the box outside the mosque door as we prepared to say goodbye. Instead, he led us across the square to another building – the Halveti Tekke, or Teqe. Light flowed through the high stained-glass windows onto the walls of the 700-year-old gathering place belonging to the mystic order of Sufi Muslims called Bektashi. Chains hung from the ornate gold-leaf-decorated ceiling over a space where, according to our new friend, the bektashi, or dervishes, used to perform their whirling rituals.
“You want to go up?” he asked my friend’s eight-year-old daughter. She nodded excitedly, and he tossed her a ring of keys, pointing the way to the balcony. As she climbed the stairs, I noticed a pair of six-pointed stars framing the main doorway, a reminder of my original mission, even if they were likely not Stars of David.
But if I felt sad about missing out on the Jewish museum, I was heartened by what I did receive: a first-hand lesson on Albania’s life-saving culture of hospitality.
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At a national Jewish conference, a speaker said Muslims should ‘get the f— out’ of America. Its organizers won’t condemn him.
Islamophobic remarks made by a speaker during a national Jewish conference in Los Angeles have drawn condemnation from the city’s mayor. But national and local Jewish groups who organized and funded the program have largely remained silent.
Mosab Hassan Yousef, a former Israeli intelligence asset whose father is a Hamas co-founder, made the inflammatory comments Aug. 30 at the Jewish American Summit, an annual event organized by Aish LA, an Orthodox Jewish organization, and co-sponsored by more than a dozen other Jewish groups, including the local federation and the Anti-Defamation League.
Appearing onstage during the program for a live taping of the “Being Jewish” podcast alongside its host, Jonah Platt, Yousef — who converted from Islam to Christianity — went on a rant against his religion of birth.
“I don’t want Muslims in America,” Yousef said. “Get the f— out of the United States. Go back to the s—holes where you came from and reform your own countries.”
He also called Muhammad, the 7th-century founder of Islam, a “pedophile prophet.”
The jibes elicited a mix of laughter and applause from the crowd, according to video posted to social media — and then a wave of backlash after the clip spread on social media.
“Islamophobia has no place in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass wrote Sept. 4 on X. “I am horrified by the appalling rhetoric from Mosab Hassan Yousef at an event in Los Angeles this past weekend. The City of Los Angeles stands firmly with its Muslim community and fully condemns these vile remarks.”
Senator Adam Schiff, LA City Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky and County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath also disavowed the remarks, as did the Council of American-Islamic Relations. So did the liberal group Jewish Partnership for Los Angeles, whose director called on the conference’s sponsor groups “to make clear that they oppose anti-Muslim hate speech and commit to rejecting anyone who demeans and dehumanizes others from their platforms.”
But more than a week after the conference, neither Aish LA’s executive director, Rabbi Aryeh Markman, nor event co-founder Mike Drath, nor the parent Aish organization, an international Jewish outreach group headquartered in Jerusalem, has commented on the remarks. (None responded to inquiries.)
Meanwhile, the Jewish American Summit’s Instagram account has posted several clips from Yousef’s talk, though none of them contain the remarks related above.
Only two of the conference’s roughly 15 sponsors — many of which sent speakers to the event — disavowed Yousef’s remarks in response to the Forward’s inquiries. The Anti-Defamation League’s Los Angeles regional office called them “vile and unacceptable” in a statement.
And the Los Angeles Jewish federation said the rant was “hateful, indefensible, and contrary to everything the Jewish Federation stands for.” Like the ADL, it said it had no part in selecting the speakers. (Neither group has published its statement on its own channels.)
Platt said in an email that he was saving his response for the podcast episode containing their interview, which he said would be released later this month. Yousef did not respond to a request for comment.
Two of the sponsoring groups that did not respond to inquiries, like pro-Israel advocacy groups StopAntisemitism.org and StandWithUs, include fighting antisemitism in their mission.
Billed as a “national gathering for Jewish American strength, unity, and action,” the Jewish American Summit drew more than 1,000 people, according to one outlet in attendance. Its other speakers included U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter and Steve Hilton, the Republican nominee for governor of California; a slew of pro-Israel influencers also appeared, including Zack Sage Fox and Rabbi Yossi Farro.
Yousef initially positioned himself as a moderate who wanted to draw attention to the suffering of Palestinians when he first forayed into writing and public speaking. He became a fixture on the Jewish speaking circuit for his harrowing life story — turning against his father to save Israeli lives — and his unsparing critique of Hamas.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, however, Yousef has adopted an increasingly radical stance on the region. During a 2025 event in Tel Aviv he said that “identifying as a Palestinian is identifying with something much more dangerous than a Nazi.”
In his talk with Platt, he shared his experience growing up as the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef. Clips of his talk posted on the Jewish American Summit Instagram page show him discussing his father’s desire to kill Jews. He also blamed Egypt for refusing to open its border to Palestinian refugees after Oct. 7.
Conference sponsors paid between $5,000 and $100,000 to have their organization’s logos appear on promotional materials, according to the conference website.
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He photographed the defining image of 9/11 – and Jewish history for 50 years
Robert Cumins stood on his ninth-floor balcony in Verona, New Jersey, camera in hand, when he saw a plane heading toward Lower Manhattan. He figured it was just another flight out of Newark. He snapped two quick frames anyway — a plane against a skyline, nothing more — and kept watching.
Then came the fireball.
He had no idea, in that instant, that he had already taken the photograph that would define his career — that he was, in fact, photographing the last seconds of the 65 people aboard United Airlines Flight 175, en route from Boston to Los Angeles. He wouldn’t even remember the plane was in the frame until he saw the developed film an hour later. For that hour, he believed he only photographed the explosion, not the moments before.
Twenty-five years on, Cumins, now 78, still lives in that apartment. He still faces the same skyline — a skyline he has spent 25 years learning not to search for two towers that are no longer part of it.
That photograph made Cumins famous. It is one entry — the most-viewed one, certainly — in a career now entering its sixth decade, a career that has put him, again and again, at the edge of history he did not make.
He straightened Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s bow tie backstage, 10 days before the prime minister was assassinated, then flew to Israel to photograph his funeral. He spent 10 days documenting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. He stood close enough to photograph the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Camp David Accords, the Israel-Jordan peace treaty — three of the defining diplomatic moments of the modern Middle East.
Call him the Forrest Gump of Jewish history.
‘Turn around, kid’
Cumins’ workday on the morning of September 11, 2001, started with a red light.
He was driving down the hill from his apartment, headed out for coffee, when he stopped at the bottom and, out of habit, flipped on the radio. A WCBS helicopter reporter was already mid-report, something about a tower. By the time the light turned green, an anchor had cut in with the words: the World Trade Center.
Cumins turned the car around. He drove back up the hill. The elevator was sitting there, waiting. He rode up to the ninth floor. Before he was all the way inside his apartment, he could already see smoke pouring off the North Tower, 15 miles across the water. He ran for his camera, loading film and changing lenses as he crossed the living room toward the balcony.
He got there at 9:03 a.m. — four and a half minutes after the stoplight turned green. He’s gone over that stretch of time so often he can repeat it without thinking. A slower elevator, and he never gets the shot.
Cumins believes it was his mother, who died about a month before 9/11, who led the way. “Sometimes I say it was a spiritual thing,” he said. “She was watching over me at that red light. ‘Turn around, kid. This is big.’”
A convertible and a Kinko’s
By the time Cumins got his film to the photo lab in New Milford, he had already forgotten about the plane entirely. The fireball, he remembered — that part was impossible to forget. The plane itself, the thing he’d actually pointed his camera at, was gone from his mind completely.
Cumins stood over the technician’s shoulder as the scanner worked backward through the roll of Kodak film — 19 frames total — hunting for the explosion. They found it. Then he asked to see the beginning of the roll.
The first frame showed the plane against the skyline, smoke already rising from the first tower. In the next, a red dot flared just above the plane’s tail. Then came the explosion. The moment took three frames of film. Getting the picture to an editor took the rest of the day.
Cumins called his agent, who reached an editor at People — the magazine wanted the image immediately, as large as he could send it. Cumins had an AOL account with a 16-megabyte limit. Every file he tried to send bounced back, too big.
He hopped in his Audi TT convertible, top up, and sped to a Kinko’s on Route 3 in Clifton, and spent the day with a store clerk, the two of them trying to coax something too large through a connection too small. Confirmation came at 9 p.m., just ahead of deadline. The photo ran on People’s cover as a double-page foldout.
The top of his car stayed closed for weeks after that. “I could not bring myself to put down the roof,” Cumins said, “to enjoy the simple pleasures of light and fresh air during such a dark time.”
Documenting modern Jewish history
Cumins built a career on trust. At 14, he sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy’s press secretary asking to visit Washington. The press secretary said yes. It wouldn’t be the last time a powerful person said yes to him.
It was almost by accident that his persuasiveness led him into Jewish photography at all. In 1970, a colleague asked him to shoot a Jewish Federation breakfast in Miami. His first Jewish communal assignment — a parlor meeting in a private home in Elizabeth, New Jersey — followed a few months later. It was the first of hundreds. Over the next five decades, he photographed scores of events and made roughly 250 trips to Israel, building trust as he went.
In 1988, that trust bought him 10 days inside Yitzhak Shamir’s daily life — meetings and meals, including moments when no one else was in the room. “He was very kind to me,” Cumins recalled. The photographs ran in The New York Times Magazine, in Life and in newspapers across the globe.
In October 1995, Cumins was backstage at a black-tie reception in Washington when he noticed Yitzhak Rabin’s borrowed bow tie had come loose from his collar. Cumins walked over and fixed it. “I had spent a lot of time previously with Rabin,” he said. “Otherwise, I would never have gotten near his neck.”
Ten days later, Rabin was assassinated. Cumins flew to Israel and back in a single day to photograph the funeral — soldiers saluting the casket, an aide reading from the blood-stained speech recovered from Rabin’s jacket. Two weeks before, at that reception in Washington, he’d photographed President Bill Clinton and Leah Rabin laughing together. Now he photographed Clinton consoling her as a widow — two photos, worlds apart, taken by the same man.
Even after 9/11 made him famous, Cumins kept doing what he had always done. He signed on as one of Hillary Clinton’s photographers during her first Senate campaign. After she won, he asked to come along, at his own expense, when she made her first trip to Israel as senator. He wanted total access. He got it, as he generally did.
On that trip in 2002, in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office, Clinton introduced Cumins to those gathered: “Mr. Cumins, he took the great picture of 9/11,” she said. Later that trip, at a dinner in Tel Aviv, Cumins caught a quiet moment between Clinton and Shimon Peres, one of his more striking portraits.
‘Split second of innocence’
Somewhere along the way, the work of chronicling history gave way to the work of storing it.
What’s left of his archive now sits in a couple of private storage units in New Jersey — roughly 600 square feet of file cabinets and boxes, labeled by project, holding a record of Jewish and Middle East history that exists nowhere else. It has cost what Cumins describes as “a fortune” over the years. He’s hoping a philanthropist will buy the collection and gift it to an institution built to care for things longer than any one person can. He hasn’t found one yet.
In the meantime, he’s still in the same ninth-floor apartment in Verona, still facing the same Manhattan skyline. He photographs it constantly — beautiful sunrises and sunsets, weather rolling in over the water — and he says there’s almost always a plane somewhere in the frame, whether he’s trying to catch one or not.
Cumins has a phrase for what he photographed 25 years ago: “the final split second of innocence” this country ever had. Between the first plane and the second, there were 17 minutes in which the country still believed, or wanted to believe, that this might be an accident.
Then reality hit. The U.S. was under attack. Life would never be the same, especially for the man who captured that moment in history.
Some photographs you take. Others, it turns out, take you — and don’t ever quite let go.
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Portuguese artists pull out of Jerry Seinfeld-headlined festival
(JTA) — Several Portuguese artists have dropped out of a comedy festival in Lisbon headlined by Jerry Seinfeld, citing their support for Palestinians and implying opposition to Seinfeld’s support for Israel.
At least six acts over recent days have canceled their appearances at the MEO Commedia a La Carte Fest, a new international comedy festival in the Portuguese capital. The event from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1 has advertised that it will host Seinfeld’s first live appearance in Portugal.
Though none of the artists who withdrew mentioned Seinfeld by name, some hinted at a boycott against his pro-Israel views. The Jewish comedian has become one of Hollywood’s most prominent advocates for Israel since October 2023.
Actress and comedian Inês Aires Pereira announced on Instagram on Saturday that “one of the names” featured at the festival “persistently defends ideas and acts that I consider indefensible,” adding, “We cannot relativize or normalize a genocide.”
The comedy duo Cebola Mol posted a graphic of themselves with a watermelon, widely recognized as a symbol of solidarity with Palestinians. “We will celebrate justice, freedom and joy with you on another occasion,” they said on Instagram.
The festival announced on Friday that performances by the groups Tributo Pop and Conjunto Cuca Monga were also canceled, but did not provide reasons. Two other acts, comedian Pedro Tochas and visual artist Vhils, shared their cancellations on Instagram without further details.
Seinfeld has aligned himself with Israel during its current conflict in Gaza, following decades of largely avoiding commenting on political issues. He visited Israel in December 2023 to meet with the families of hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7 of that year. Since then, he has attracted attention for a series of dismissive remarks toward pro-Palestinian advocates.
During an appearance last year at Duke University, Seinfeld compared pro-Palestinian activists with the Ku Klux Klan, saying, “The Klan is actually a little better here because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like Blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ OK, that’s honest.”
Representatives of Seinfeld and producers of the MEO Commedia a La Carte Fest did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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