Uncategorized
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.
—
The post Standing on Albania’s Jew Street, I learned firsthand the country’s lifesaving culture of hospitality appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Jewish Advocacy Groups Sue California Over K-12 Antisemitism
Students from Encinal High School and St. Joseph Notre Dame High School in Alameda, California, participating in anti-Israel demonstration on Jan 26. 2024: Photo: Michael Ho Wai Lee / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
A coalition of leading Jewish advocacy organizations is suing the state of California for allegedly failing to address “systemic” antisemitic discrimination in K-12 public schools.
Led by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and StandWithUs, the legal action stems from consecutive years of antisemitic abused perpetrated against Jewish students, parents, and teachers by anti-Zionists at every level of the school system. Court documents shared with The Algemeiner earlier this week revealed new, harrowing accusations of Jews being called “k—kes,” Jewish students being threatened with gang assaults, and K-12 students chanting “F—k the Jews” during anti-Israel demonstrations promoted by faculty.
In one highly disturbing incident described in the legal complaint, fifth graders from the Oakland Unified School District were filmed by the teacher saying “Another major thing that I’ve learned is that the Jews, the people who took over, basically just stole the Palestinians’ land” and “one thing that’s really surprising to me, and that appeals to me is that the US is helping the Jews.” In another incident, the Oakland Education Association confected a curriculum in which the intifada — two prolonged periods of terrorism in which Palestinians murdered Israeli civilians — was taught to third graders as a nursery rhyme.
“The California education system is teaching the state’s children that Jewish Americans and Israelis are racists, white supremacists, oppressors, and baby-killers who should be shunned,” Brandeis Center chairman and former US assistant secretary of education for civil rights Kenneth Marcus said in a statement on Thursday. “The result is not surprising: Jewish children and children perceived as Jewish are bullied and excluded by their peers and harassed by their teachers, who silence, mock, and even segregate them if they speak out. School officials have done little or nothing at all to help these children.”
Litigation related to antisemitic incidents in California K-12 schools surged following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, which triggered a barrage of antisemitic hate crimes throughout the US and the world. The list of outrages includes a student group chanting “Kill the Jews” during an anti-Israel protest and partisan activists smuggling far-left, anti-Zionist content into classrooms without clearing the content with parents and other stakeholders.
Elsewhere in California, K-12 antisemitism has caused severe psychological trauma to Jewish students as young as eight years old and fostered a hostile learning environment, according to complaints
In the Berkeley United School District (BUSD), teachers have allegedly used their classrooms to promote antisemitic stereotypes about Israel, weaponizing disciplines such as art and history to convince unsuspecting minors that Israel is a “settler-colonial” apartheid state committing a genocide of Palestinians. While this took place, high level BUSD officials were accused of ignoring complaints about discrimination and tacitly approving hateful conduct even as it spread throughout the student body.
At Berkeley High School, for example, a history teacher forced students to explain why Israel is an apartheid state and screened an anti-Zionist documentary, according to a lawsuit filed last year by the Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The teacher allegedly squelched dissent, telling a Jewish student who raised concerns about the content of her lessons that only anti-Zionist narratives matter in her classroom and that any other which argues that Israel isn’t an apartheid state is “laughable.” Elsewhere in the school, an art teacher, whose name is redacted from the complaint for matters of privacy, displayed anti-Israel artworks in his classroom, one of which showed a fist punching through a Star of David.
In September 2023, the Brandeis Center, along with the ADL and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), sued the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California for concealing from the public its adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic and anti-Zionist themes. Then last February, the school district paused implementation of the program to settle the lawsuit. One month later, the Brandeis Center, StandWithUs, and the ADL filed a civil rights complaint accusing the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino County, California, of doing nothing after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was assaulted, having been beaten with stick, on school grounds and teased with jokes about Adolf Hitler.
“Jews consistently are being targeted with hostility because of who they are, including in California and particularly in K-12 public schools. This lawsuit seeks to remedy that,” StandWithUs chief executive officer Roz Rothstein said in Thursday’s press release. “It is imperative that California K-12 schools not be co-opted by those seeking to indoctrinate students into antisemitic hate. However, Jewish students and parents indicate that this is precisely what is happening in California. Shockingly, those tasked with enforcing non-discrimination laws in our schools have failed to intervene effectively to put a stop to this growing problem.”
She added, “This lawsuit was necessitated by that systemic failure and seeks to ensure, going forward, that California’s Jewish students are protected and have access to an education free from discrimination.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Uncategorized
Jewish Olympic Gold Medalist Jack Hughes Honored by New Jersey Devils as NHL Season Resumes
Jan 23, 2026; Vancouver, British Columbia, CAN; New Jersey Devils forward Jack Hughes (86) handles the puck against the Vancouver Canucks in the first period at Rogers Arena. Mandatory Photo: Bob Frid-Imagn Images via Reuters
Jewish Olympic hockey player Jack Hughes was honored by his team the New Jersey Devils on Wednesday night before their loss to the Buffalo Sabres in Newark.
Ahead of the game, the Devils showed on the Jumbotron a video of Hughes, 24, scoring the overtime goal that secured the United States its 2-1 victory and gold medal over Canada on Sunday in the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics. Hughes lost a few teeth during the game when he took a high stick to the mouth from Canada’s Sam Bennett during the third period. The win marked the first time a US men’s hockey team had won gold at the Olympics since a 1980 victory against the former Soviet Union.
“I’m so proud and so happy that the men’s and women’s USA hockey teams brought gold medals back to America,” Hughes told the crowd in a pre-game speech on Wednesday given from the ice, while he held back tears. “And I’m so proud to represent the New Jersey Devils organization and to represent the great state of New Jersey. From the bottom of my heart, all of my [Team] USA teammates, we want to thank you for all the love and support. We feel it. Thank you.”
The Devils center — whose mother is Jewish while his father is Catholic — arrived in New Jersey late Tuesday night after US President Donald Trump recognized him and his Olympic teammates in the State of the Union address. Hughes played Wednesday night as Buffalo won for the seventh time in 10 games, 2-1, on goals from US Olympian Tage Thompson and Peyton Krebs. The NHL restarted its season on Wednesday after taking a break due to the Olympic Games in Milan.
On Thursday, before the New Jersey Devils took on the Pittsburgh Penguins at PPG Paints Arena, Hughes received a standing ovation as the Penguins honored athletes who represented their countries at the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Earlier in the week, the popular Hobby’s Delicatessen & Restaurant located blocks away from Newark’s Prudential Center, which is home to the New Jersey Devils, named a sandwich after Hughes. The owners said “Jack’s Golden Goal Sandwich,” which features roast beef and “golden sauteed onions” on a soft roll, is “so tender, you don’t need teeth.”
Trump announced during Tuesday night’s State of the Union that Connor Hellebuyck, the goaltender for the US men’s Olympic hockey team that won gold, will be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Hellebuyck made 41 saves in the Olympic game against Canada on Sunday and also assisted on the overtime goal by Hughes that led to the team’s gold medal win.
Uncategorized
Zachary Levi Hosts New Fox Nation Docu-Drama Series About King David
A scene from “David: King of Israel.” Photo: YouTube screenshot
Actor Zachary Levi hosts a Fox Nation original series that premiered on Thursday about the life and legacy of the Bible’s King David.
The four-part docu-drama “David: King of Israel” begins with the episode “The Shepherd,” which tells the story of David as a young shepherd in Bethlehem who kills a lion and a bear to protect his flock.
Episode two, “King of Israel,” premieres on March 5 and explores the aftermath of David’s fight with the giant Goliath, which is described in the Book of Samuel. The third episode will premiere on March 12, and the finale airs March 19. The series features reenactments about King David’s life and expert commentary intertwined with Levi’s narration.
Born in 907 BCE, David was chosen by God and anointed by the Prophet Samuel to one day be Israel’s new king. He reigned as the king of Israel for 40 years and is one of the most important figures in Jewish history. Christians also regard him as the ancestor of Jesus.
“Highlighting faith, redemption, and extraordinary purpose, we’re honored to bring this story to Fox Nation with Zachary at the helm,” said Fox Nation President Lauren Petterson about the four-part series.
“Aside from the account of Christ, the story of David is the most powerful in all of scripture,” added Levi. “In fact, one might argue that it’s even more powerful in some ways, given that David was fully human, and therefore flawed, like us, making his journey more relatable to our own. It’s a story I’ve wanted to be a part of telling ever since I was a child, so it was such a blessing being a part of this production.”
Levi, the “Shazam!” star, who is not Jewish, told “Fox & Friends” on Thursday he grew up in a Christian home and “reading my Bible and David was the story that always stood out to me as the most epic, the most amazing.”
“It can be difficult to relate to Jesus. David is us. David is a person who is called a man after God’s own heart,” he added. The actor, who has a SAG Award for his role in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” also said the four-part series is “like Lord of the Rings in the Bible.”
“You got giants and witches and all kinds of, you know, it’s cool and there’s massive battles, nation upon nation and good versus evil and all the spiritual elements of everything,” said Levi. “It’s a really fascinating story, even if you’re not within the Judeo-Christian lineage.”