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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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Norway Police Apprehend 3 Suspects in US Embassy Bombing
Police vehicles outside the US embassy, after a loud bang was reported at the site, in Oslo, Norway, March 8, 2026. Photo: Javad Parsa/NTB/via REUTERS
Norwegian police said on Wednesday they had apprehended three brothers suspected of carrying out Sunday’s bombing at the US embassy in Oslo, in an attack investigators have branded an act of terrorism.
The powerful early-morning blast from an improvised explosive device (IED) damaged the entrance to the embassy‘s consular section but caused no injuries, Norwegian authorities have said.
The three suspects, all in their 20s, are Norwegian citizens with a family background from Iraq, police said.
“They are suspected of a terror bombing,” Police Attorney Christian Hatlo told reporters.
“We believe they detonated a powerful bomb at the U.S. embassy with the intention of taking lives or causing significant damage,” Hatlo said, adding that none of the suspects had so far been interrogated.
One of the men was believed to have planted the bomb while the two others were believed to have taken part in the plot, Hatlo said.
The brothers, who were not named, had not previously been subject to police investigations, he added.
A lawyer representing one of the three men said he had only briefly met with his client and that it was too early to say how the suspect would plead.
Lawyers representing the two others did not immediately respond to requests for comment when contacted by Reuters.
“Although it is early in the investigation, it is important that the police have achieved what they characterize as a breakthrough in the case,” Norway‘s Minister of Justice and Public Security Astri Aas-Hansen said in a statement.
Images of one of the suspects released by police on Monday showed a hooded person, whose face was not visible, wearing dark clothes and carrying a bag or rucksack.
Investigators on Monday said one hypothesis was that the incident was “an act of terrorism” linked to the war in the Middle East, but that other possible motives were also being explored.
Police are now investigating whether the bombing was done on behalf of a foreign state, Hatlo said, reiterating that they were also looking into other possible motives.
Europe has been on alert for possible attacks as the US and Israel conduct air strikes on Iran and Iran strikes Israel and US targets in the Middle East.
On Monday, a synagogue in the Belgian city of Liege was damaged by a blast that authorities called an antisemitic attack. It was not clear who was behind it.
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Belgium’s Jewish Community Sounds Alarm on Rising Antisemitism After Liège Synagogue Attack
Police secure the site of a synagogue damaged by an explosion early on Monday, in Liege, Belgium, March 9, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
Just days after a synagogue in Liège, Belgium was struck in an apparent antisemitic bombing, the local Jewish community is sounding the alarm over a surge in hostility and targeted violence against Jews across the country.
In an interview with the local news outlet La Première on Tuesday, the president of the Committee of Jewish Organizations in Belgium (CCOJB), Yves Oschinsky, called on government authorities to deploy soldiers to protect Jewish sites and institutions if police protection proves insufficient.
Following the attack on a synagogue in Liège, a city in the country’s eastern region, early Monday morning, Oschinsky warned that the Jewish community faces a far greater threat than authorities publicly acknowledge, emphasizing that Jewish institutions remain at heightened risk.
He also slammed the government for failing to appoint a national coordinator to fight antisemitism, while urging political parties and officials to take urgent, concrete action to protect the Jewish community.
Like most countries across the Western world, Belgium has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to the Belgian Interfederal Center for Equal Opportunities and the Fight against Racism and Discrimination (Unia), which tracks antisemitism nationwide, 192 reports of antisemitism and Holocaust denial were filed in 2025, following a record 270 cases in 2024 — marking two consecutive years well previous years.
Before the Oct. 7 atrocities, only 31 antisemitic cases had been reported in Belgium in 2022.
On Tuesday, the Brussels-based Jonathas Institute released a new report warning that antisemitic prejudices remain widespread and deeply entrenched in Belgium.
“The results are clear: the study highlights that the population of Brussels continues to hold many antisemitic stereotypes ‘inherited from the past’ of a religious or political nature,” the institute said in a statement.
The newly released report found that 40 percent of respondents in Brussels agreed with the claim that Jews control the financial and banking sectors, while one in four blamed Jews for various economic crises.
According to the study, these stereotypes are “sometimes expressed as obvious truths” without overt hostility, a pattern the report warns makes them especially prone to being trivialized, particularly online.
More than one in five Belgians believe Jews are “not Belgians like the others,” while 21 percent label Jews an “unassimilable race.”
“The attack on the synagogue in Liège confirms that it is no longer just antisemitic speech that has been unleashed, but antisemitic acts as well. This aggressive antisemitism continues to rise,” the institute said.
The survey also found that 70 percent of respondents believe Jews form a “close-knit or closed community.”
In relation to the war in Gaza, 39 percent of Belgians claim that “Jews are doing to Palestinians what the Nazis did to them.” This view is particularly common among 18- to 35-year-olds, who are more likely to compare Israel’s actions to those of the Nazis.
Within far-right circles, 69 percent believe Jews exploit the Holocaust, while 72 percent say Jews use antisemitism for their own interests.
Based on these findings, the Jonathas Institute urged authorities and policymakers to strengthen historical education, improve digital literacy, and remain vigilant against narratives that normalize or justify hostility toward Jews, warning that such discourse can ultimately spark real-world violence.
The institute also calls for formalizing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, aiming to better distinguish “legitimate criticism of Israel” from “forms of anti-Zionism that revive antisemitic patterns.”
IHRA — an intergovernmental organization comprising dozens of countries including the US and Israel — adopted the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2016. Since then, the definition has been widely accepted by Jewish groups and lawmakers across the political spectrum, and it is now used by hundreds of governing institutions, including the US State Department, European Union, and United Nations.
According to the definition, antisemitism “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It provides 11 specific, contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere. Beyond classic antisemitic behavior associated with the likes of the medieval period and Nazi Germany, the examples include denial of the Holocaust and newer forms of antisemitism targeting Israel such as demonizing the Jewish state, denying its right to exist, and holding it to standards not expected of any other democratic state.
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Iran, Russia Push Disinformation to Spread Antisemitism, Undermine the West
Iranian protesters carry a portrait of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a Yemeni flag as they burn an Israeli flag during an anti-US and anti-British protest in front of the British embassy in downtown Tehran, Iran, Jan. 12, 2024. Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect
Iran and Russia have both used propaganda and disinformation to promote antisemitic narratives as part of an effort to undermine the West, according to analysts who this week exposed some of their methods and the damage they have caused.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center on Tuesday hosted an online briefing with experts who laid out how the Islamic regime in Iran deploys a variety of propaganda as weapons. One day earlier, the Gino Germani Institute for Social Sciences and Strategic Studies published an in-depth report detailing the history of Russia’s disinformation expertise.
“There is the kinetic battlefield, of course, but there’s also the information battlefield, the war for hearts and minds. Modern wars are fought not only with missiles, but with memes, not only with military force, but with persuasion,” said Vlad Khaykin, executive vice president of social impact and partnerships at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, opening the briefing.
“The Iranian regime and the networks aligned with it across Russia, China, and various proxy movements have spent decades building a global propaganda architecture designed for moments exactly like this,” Khaykin warned.
Rachel Kantz Feder, a senior researcher at the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University, and Jacki Alexander, CEO and president for media watchdog Honest Reporting, offered their analyses of the subversive media techniques utilized by Tehran to advance the regime’s ideological objectives.
Speaking from Israel amid the current war with Iran, Kantz Feder prefaced her response by saying, “I hope I won’t have to run off for a siren,” referencing the warning that Israeli residents of incoming rocket fire receive telling them to seek shelter. In the briefing’s final 20 minutes, Kantz Feder had to do just that, apologizing and leaving to take cover from Iranian drone and missile fire.
Before the session’s interruption, Kantz Feder defined information warfare as “the strategic use of information and communications to influence perceptions and decision-making systems.” She said this can include “disinformation, cyber attacks, and good old-fashioned propagandistic efforts. And it is so central, I think, to Iran’s strategy right now because it’s so effective. And I think that the Iranian regime is seeing real yields from it, certainly in the realm of influencing certain media ecosystems.”
“We find that actually Iran started to forge ties with American figures from the far right and far left as well already by the end of the 1990s,” Kantz Feder noted, explaining that online dynamics today have roots going back decades.
One example she cited of this cultural diplomacy was the critical success of Iranian filmmakers in the 1990s, which the regime leveraged by holding international film festivals to try and influence Hollywood.
According to Alexander, the same online influencers who promoted falsehoods of Israel intentionally targeting civilians and committing a genocide in Gaza have now pivoted to comparable rhetoric about the current conflict with Iran.
“And these networks all work together to amplify each other. Each of their posts will get millions of views,” Alexander said. “And then ultimately that seeps into the podcast network. Tucker Carlson will pick it up. Candace Owens will pick it up.”
Owens and Carlson have emerged as two of the most prominent anti-Israel commentators in the US, often using their platforms to promote antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The Honest Reporting chief also revealed Iran’s targeting of those who eschew the ideological extremes.
“You start having situations like mainstream Western American news unironically using things like Fars News Agency, Iranian state TV, as a legitimate source without letting their viewers know that this is actually Iranian state propaganda,” she explained.
Khaykin asked Kantz Feder to explain the role of antisemitism in both the Islamic regime’s ideology and its propaganda techniques. She described a recent development that “officially, Iran has tried to make a distinction between Zionism and Jews in its revolutionary ideology. This is actually something that in the past few years we’re seeing less of. This is new.”
“The distinction between Zionists as an enemy and Jews as the enemy of Iran is starting to erode as the regime looks for new ways to legitimize its rule and conjure up images of Iran’s enemies and what they’re facing,” she continued. “In terms of the influence operations directed abroad, this is essential.”
The Jew-hate acts as a glue, enabling what Kantz Feder described historically as how “Iran starts to position itself as a hub for transnational extremist far-right networks. And then so, of course, we saw that come to fruition with the Holocaust conferences.”
In 2006, Holocaust deniers gathered for a two-day event titled “Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision,” which organizers characterized as based in science. Attendees included former KKK leader David Duke, Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, and members of Jews United Against Israel. Duke said at the time that “it’s a shame that Iran, a country we often call oppressive, has to give this opportunity for free speech.” He also described Israel as “a terrorist state” and “the No. 1 terrorist state in the world.”
According to Kantz Feder, antisemitism, “whether it be the Holocaust denial or other forms of it,” is the “entry point and it binds together a lot of these different ideas, movements and ideological orientations.”
Agreeing with Kantz Feder’s emphasis on Iran’s role in promoting Holocaust denial, Alexander said that “what they’re doing is they’re poisoning the information, the information sources, the wells where people are getting their information.”
Alexander explained the downstream impacts of what she called antisemitic “poisoning of information,” noting that “61 percent of adults worldwide are getting information increasingly from AI, and 36 percent of those are using it weekly … And there has been a movement for about 15 years to poison the source that AI then goes to for information that most prominently is Wikipedia, though not entirely.”
Describing Iran’s Wikipedia infiltration efforts, Alexander said that Iran is “now paying a new group of editors on Wikipedia to start changing even further information that is there so that when you go to AI to ask it a question, you’re going to get a garbage answer. And it will be things like Holocaust denial or erasing Jewish sovereignty and history from the state of Israel going back 3,000 years ago.”
Alexander described how a prominent Russian disinformation narrative since the 1970s had begun to recirculate online. “You know what narrative has started trending again? ‘Zionism is racism,’” she said. “We’ve gone back 50 years, and it’s because Russia has a deep connection to this.”
In November 1975, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism — the national movement of the Jewish people to reestablish a state in their ancient homeland — with “racism,” reflecting long-standing antisemitic stereotypes and anti-Israel agendas pushed by the Soviet Union. The measure was ultimately overturned in 1991
For understanding the connection, Massimiliano Di Pasquale, an associate researcher at the Gino Germani institute and director of the Ukraine Observatory, wrote “Antisemitism and Russian Active Measures From the Tsars to Putin,” a 141-page report three years in the making.
Translated from Italian, the Gino Germani Institute described how the study “traces the direct link between the tsarist and Soviet eras and the regime of Vladimir Putin in the specific evolution of instrumental antisemitism and demonstrates how the Kremlin continues today, in its cognitive war and in its active measures, to use false historians and conspiracy theories, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to feed hatred, distort perceptions and destabilize Western democratic values and systems.”
According to the Institute, “Di Pasquale shows how Russian antisemitic narratives come to justify military aggression in Ukraine, or how, after the Oct. 7 attack, Moscow instrumentalized the Israel-Hamas conflict to pursue three main objectives: strategic distraction, erosion of Western cohesion, double-standard accusations.”
Di Pasquale’s report details the history of Soviet Russia’s disinformation turn against the Jewish state, noting the 1967-1982 period under Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which “was characterized by a period of heated antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism. It was during this period that Moscow helped sow the seeds of the current anti-American and anti-Israeli hatred in the Arab and Muslim world — hatred that resurfaced in full vehemence after Oct. 7, 2023 — both through a series of sophisticated and covert KGB operations and through a massive international propaganda campaign that began in 1967 and continued until 1988.”
Di Pasquale writes that in the 16 years (1967-1982) during which Yuri Andropov, future general secretary of the party, headed the KGB, “Zionism was second only to the United States in terms of the Kremlin’s active measures.”
According to the report, the five antisemitic propaganda narratives Andropov chose to unleash around 1967 were “Jews (Zionists) are responsible for antisemitism; Zionist organizations worldwide are involved in espionage activities; Zionism is a Trojan horse for imperialism and racism in the Third World; Jews collaborated with the Nazis during World War II; and reversal of the Holocaust, i.e., Israelis as Nazis.”
The report cites Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, highest ranking defector from the Soviet bloc and former spymaster to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who called Andropov “the father of a new era of disinformation that revived antisemitism and spawned international terrorism against the United States and Israel.”