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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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How New York Jews made pickles a big dill
The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles
By Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder
Chronicle Books, 224 pages, $27
“Pickles are a favorite food in Jewtown,” muckraker Jacob Riis, referring to the Lower East Side, wrote in How the Other Half Lives, his seminal exposé on poverty. “They are filling and keep the children from crying with hunger. Those who have stomachs like ostriches thrive in spite of them and grow strong — plain proof that they are good to eat.”
Other thinkers from the turn of the last century disagreed, one lamenting, of the children of New York who got their meals from pushcarts, “it speaks volumes for their digestive powers that they don’t die at once.” That was Teddy Roosevelt.
But appropriately for a preserved foodstuff, pickles have had a remarkably long cultural shelf life. The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles, a new coffee table book about the ubiquitous cukes, reaches deep into the barrel to chronicle the rise of the pickling industry, giving pride of place to the Jewish immigrants who sealed the business for posterity.
The book is the work of Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder of the Dutch branding company Mattmo, and is a successor to their previous book De Zure Stad (The Sour City) about the pickle history of the Netherlands, pioneered by a different set of Jewish immigrants who were, overwhelmingly, murdered in the Shoah.
The Pickled City is a brighter work, though in the early going its emphasis on Jews, stated early and often, is a bit of a head scratcher. Going back to Mesopotamia for early pickling practices, and outlining the largely gentile-owned pickle businesses in the U.S. (the first American pickle outfit, the William Underwood Company, trademarked devilled ham) the Jews appear to be relative latecomers. It was Dutch settlers in what was then New Amsterdam who kickstarted the process of farming and preserving cucumbers.
An earlier wave of German immigrants brought pickle culture to Manhattan before Eastern European Jews took to their pushcarts. But the Jews brought a piquant innovation to their pickles, brining them not in vinegar, but salt water with dill and garlic: the kosher pickle we all know. That variety soon became a bestseller even among the goyische operations like Heinz, a business that was early to apply for kosher certification.
The Jewish love affair with pickles was itself not novel. The Talmud mentions pickled veg as a symbol of abundance and survival and, per van Ravestein and Mulder, the “transformation through pickling — turning a simple, earthy root into a tangy, vibrant dish — was often seen as a metaphor for renewal and the endurance of the Jewish people through adversity.”
We see the enterprise, in pages of archival photos and maps of the pickle shops of yesteryear alongside long-running institutions like Russ & Daughters and Katz’s.
At times, beyond the handsome packaging of the book, the branding agency origins of the authors stick out: A primer on B&G pickles reports their $2.16 billion in net sales, and calls it a “testament to entrepreneurial spirit and innovation in the food industry.” But there are just as many colorful stories that don’t read like investor reports.
We learn, for instance, that Izzy Guss, of Guss’ pickles, beat out the competition after a neighbor in his tenement offered to hook his cart up to electricity with an extension cord, giving the cart a light and allowing Guss to sell at night. (We’re told the cord was cut when Guss refused to marry the neighbor’s daughter.)
The book also touches on the pickling history of Long Island, with a mention of a Samuel Ballton — Pickle King of Greenlawn, a formerly enslaved man and Union veteran who produced 1.5 million pickles in a single season. The industry in Syosset was dealt a major blow with a blight called the “white pickle” disease, and subsequently pivoted to potatoes.
Even with these New York histories, the book often crosses Delancey into a wider world, making a kumbaya case for pickles as a conduit for cultural exchange.
Japanese pickled plums, Indonesian atjar and Indian chutneys are given space toward the back, but their current imprint in New York, on the same streets that once held tenements and peddlers, is oddly glossed over. (I could have tipped them off to the Astoria bagel shop that serves beef bulgogi and kimchi sandwiches.)
“For Jewish families fleeing persecution, pickling was more than a way to save food — it was a way to preserve identity and heritage,” the authors write.
This is not an exclusively Jewish phenomenon. There are 8 million stories in the pickled city. This book cracks the lid, but only skims the surface.
The post How New York Jews made pickles a big dill appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli-American soldier Moshe Katz, killed in Lebanon rocket strike, laid to rest on Mt. Herzl
(JTA) — Hundreds gathered on Sunday night at Israel’s military cemetery on Mt. Herzl for the funeral of Moshe Yitzchak Hacohen Katz, an American-born Israeli soldier who was killed by a rocket strike on Saturday in southern Lebanon.
Katz, 22, from New Haven, Connecticut, is the fifth Israeli soldier killed in Lebanon since Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy in Lebanon, resumed attacks on Israel following a 2024 ceasefire, after Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iran last month.
“With unspeakable tragedy I regret to inform you that my 22 year old son Moshe Yitzchak a*h a sergeant in the idf, fell in battle in Lebanon,” Katz’s father, Mendy, wrote in a post on Facebook on Saturday. “My oldest Son with a zest for life and jokes. Burial is tomorrow in israel. Maybe we only share good news. My heart is shattered and the wound is real.”
Mendy Katz had been in Israel when the war began and posted on March 7 about witnessing his son’s graduation from basic training with the Israel Defense Forces before returning to the United States via Egypt.
During the funeral on Sunday, Katz, who was posthumously promoted from corporal to sergeant and was affiliated with Chabad, was eulogized by a host of fellow soldiers who referred to him as a “true friend” who “always used to make sure that anyone around him was always taken care of.”
“Moshe was a brave soldier, we have proof of that, but more than that, he was a loyal friend, he was a hard-working son and a loving, caring brother,” Adina, Katz’s sister, said between tears during her eulogy. “Moshe’s body might be gone, but his legacy is not. He was a proud soldier and a proud Jew, and we are the proudest family.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered condolences to Katz’s family in a post on X and wished a speedy recovery to three other soldiers moderately wounded in the attack.
“Moshe z”l immigrated to the land from the United States, enlisted in the Paratroopers Brigade, and fought bravely for the defense of our homeland,” Netanyahu wrote. “On behalf of all Israeli citizens, we embrace Moshe z”l’s family in this difficult hour and wish a swift and complete recovery to our fighters who were wounded in that incident.”
On Sunday, Netanyahu announced that he had instructed the Israeli military to further expand its operations in Lebanon in order to “finally thwart the threat of invasion and to push the anti-tank missile fire away from our border.”
Menachem Geisinsky, a photographer and friend of Katz’s, also eulogized him in a post on Facebook, writing that he “forever will be my hero” for “his bravery in coming all the way from New Haven, Connecticut to fight for what he believed was right and also for being a man who wouldn’t tolerate a frown.”
“So be like Moshe. Be a hero. Make someone’s day. Make someone giggle or smile,” wrote Geisinsky. “Step up, and be the man Moshe was, and forever will be remembered as.”
Katz is survived by his parents, Mendy and Devorah Katz; siblings Adina, Yehuda, Shua and Dubi; and grandparents.
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A second poll of US Jews finds the same result: Most oppose the war in Iran
(JTA) — For the second time in a day, a nonpartisan poll has found that most American Jews oppose the U.S. military campaign against Iran — even as 90% of them say they oppose the Iranian regime.
The new poll, conducted by GBAO Strategies on behalf of the liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street, found that 60% of U.S. Jews say they oppose “the US military action against Iran.”
About the same proportion, 63%, said they believed “the most effective way to address U.S. and Israeli concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and destabilizing regional actions is through diplomacy and sanctions,” not military action.
And the majority of American Jews said they believed the war will not improve Israel’s security, with a third saying they believe the war will weaken Israel’s security.
As with the previous poll released earlier on Monday, the poll found a sharp partisan and denominational split in the results, with Republicans and Orthodox Jews more likely to support the war, which the United States and Israel jointly launched on Feb. 28.
A press release from J Street touted the survey as “the first methodologically sound poll of Jewish American opinion since the conflict began,” positioning the results as an antidote to findings from the Jewish People Policy Institute, which surveys “connected” U.S. Jews and has found that a majority of them support the war, even though the proportion has fallen since the war’s start.
“This data is a wake-up call for anyone claiming to speak for the American Jewish community while beating the drums of war,” J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami said in a statement. “Most American Jews see this war for what it is: A reckless, unforced error by a President who has no clear, achievable goals or an exit strategy. This poll proves that the ‘pro-Israel’ position is the pro-peace position – and that means stopping this war before more lives are lost.”
The survey of 800 Jewish registered voters was conducted March 24 to 26 and has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
The J Street survey also asked respondents about other issues related to Israel. It found that 70% of U.S. Jewish voters said they are more sympathetic to the Israelis than the Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compared to multiple polls finding an even split or slight edge for the Palestinians among Americans overall.
It also found that 70% of American Jews oppose unconditional military and financial assistance to Israel — reflecting a mounting political consensus that is at odds with the priorities of AIPAC, the traditional pro-Israel lobby.
The post A second poll of US Jews finds the same result: Most oppose the war in Iran appeared first on The Forward.