Uncategorized
The most Jewish room in Fremont, Ohio, is in a county history museum
Beneath a mahogany staircase inside the Sandusky County Historical Society hangs a memorial plaque in a place both fitting and strange.
The sanctuary is gone. The Torah scrolls have long since been moved elsewhere. Military exhibits and county memorabilia fill the rooms. But the plaque remains, listing the dead of Temple Beth Israel, a congregation that closed more than four decades ago.
Across Ohio, when small-town synagogues closed, their history did not vanish all at once. Instead, it was scattered to neighboring congregations, local museums, regional archives and descendants who saved whatever they could. A siddur. A stained-glass window. A Star of David rescued before a building was demolished.
The story of Beth Israel’s plaque almost ended when someone proposed melting it down.
“That couldn’t be discarded,” said Dennis Newman, who grew up at the synagogue.
So he and his nephew drove to Sandusky, Ohio, to retrieve it from another closing congregation.
“It was really heavy,” he said.
Now it is back in Fremont, in the same building where Jewish families once gathered for Shabbat, Hebrew lessons, and holiday services, though most visitors do not know that when they walk in.
The building on Birchard Avenue still stands, a red-brick house set slightly back from the street. Inside, rooms that once held a wedding, Sunday school classes, and other scenes from synagogue life now house exhibits on Sandusky County’s past, including industrial history and local life. A Civil War battle flag serves as one centerpiece. The Jewish past is there too, a small exhibit Newman helped to create.
“Most people are surprised,” said Roy Wilhelm, a local volunteer with the historical society.
A congregation’s afterlife
Fremont is not unique. Throughout Ohio and the Midwest, other small-town congregations have closed, raising the same question: what becomes of the objects, records and stories they leave behind?
Toby Brief, executive director of the Columbus Jewish Historical Society, said her organization has increasingly become a repository for that afterlife. “The definition of Central Ohio has grown,” she said. In practice, she added, the society often functions as “much more of a regional archive between Cleveland and Cincinnati.”
That work, she said, is active rather than passive. “We find materials, we identify them.” Sometimes that means typed oral histories or photographs. Sometimes it means relationships with local historical societies. Sometimes it means preserving just one object from a vanished Jewish community. “We are always telling others not to forget to collect the artifacts,” Brief said.
One of those objects came from New Philadelphia, Ohio.
Like Beth Israel, the Tuscarawas County Jewish Center emerged in the 1930s, part of the same era when many small-town Jewish communities across Ohio were growing. The center was dedicated in 1937, two years after Beth Israel first gathered above a clothing store in Fremont. From its earliest days, the center also reached beyond its own members. At the dedication, the Rev. Frank Cody of First Presbyterian Church spoke. In 1938, when Joseph Wagner was installed as the center’s first rabbi, banquet guests included New Philadelphia’s mayor, Arthur Williams, along with the town’s chief of police and two Christian ministers.
But the ending in New Philadelphia was different. By 1967, the Jewish center had become inactive. The following year, the building was sold and razed to create a parking lot for employees of the local newspaper.
Almost nothing physical survived — just a Star of David rescued by a congregant before the building came down. Today it is preserved by the Columbus Jewish Historical Society.
“It is so simple,” Brief said. But “that star represents a synagogue, a Jewish center, it represents families.”
A home of their own
In Fremont, more remained. One artifact is the memorial plaque. But the building itself is an artifact, too.
For decades, Beth Israel sustained Jewish life in a town where Jews were always a small minority. At its peak in the late 1940s and 1950s, Fremont’s Jewish community numbered about 50 families. It was never large, but it had the elements of a full communal life: weekly services, a Sunday school, a Sisterhood, student rabbis traveling in from Cincinnati and New York, and ties to nearby towns like Tiffin, Fostoria, and Norwalk.
Before the congregation had a permanent home, it gathered in the mid-1930s in a rented room above a store on Front Street. On the day of its 1935 dedication, about 300 people crowded into the upstairs space. They sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hatikvah,” and the women of the newly formed auxiliary served a buffet luncheon.
A few years later, in 1942, the congregation purchased a former residence on Birchard Avenue and dedicated it as Temple Beth Israel. More than 200 people attended, including Amer Wrigley, the mayor of Fremont. Beth Israel now had a home of its own.
For the next two decades, Jewish life in Fremont settled into a modest but steady rhythm. The sanctuary seated about 65 people comfortably and filled for major holidays. Children attended Sunday school. The Sisterhood organized holiday events, charitable drives, and community programs. Church youth groups visited to learn about Judaism, and in 1948 Beth Israel hosted an interfaith Shabbat service that drew about 100 people. Local newspapers praised the congregation’s willingness to “cooperate with the other churches of the city and help make Fremont a leader in the pathways of better understanding.”
Jewish life extended beyond the synagogue, too. Families were tied to local businesses, including Joseph’s Department Store, and worked in medicine, jewelry, and scrap metal. The community was not large, but it was woven into the town.
Newman, who grew up in Fremont, remembers both the closeness and the isolation of that world. “I never knew another Jewish kid in Fremont,” he said. “Judaism was a lonely thing.”
“We were not deeply religious,” he said, “but deeply Jewish.”
By the 1960s, the patterns that had sustained small-town Jewish life in Fremont were thinning. Younger people moved away. Services, once weekly, became less frequent. Around 1967, Beth Israel discontinued its Sunday school, and the remaining children were sent to Sandusky or Toledo for Jewish education.
Still, the congregation persisted longer than some might have expected. In 1966, Beth Israel marked its diamond anniversary with a dinner at the Fremont Country Club attended by the mayor, a Catholic monsignor, and a Protestant minister — one more sign that even in decline, the synagogue understood itself as part of Fremont’s wider civic and religious life.
By the late 1970s, though, only about 15 families remained. Services continued once a month and on the High Holidays. In 1980, the trustees decided to close the congregation.
What remains
But closure did not mean immediate disappearance.
Some members joined Oheb Shalom in Sandusky. Torah scrolls and other ritual items were transferred to other synagogues, where they could still be used. A portion of the proceeds from Beth Israel’s sale established a scholarship at Fremont Ross High School for “average students” planning to attend college — an expression of communal values that continued for decades before fading from local records in the 2010s. Small gatherings and holiday observances in Fremont continued in private homes into the 1990s.
Looking back on Oheb Shalom’s closing in 2023, Newman described it less as an end than a transition: “This is not goodbye, just goodbye to the building.”
What remains is often harder to see and more fragile: names on a yahrzeit plaque, ritual items forgotten in a closet, a story carried from one generation to the next.
Brief knows stories from across Ohio. Many people, she said, are surprised by how widespread Jewish life once was in the state’s smaller towns and by how little visible evidence of it remains. Sometimes there was a formal congregation. Sometimes only “one or two families.” But there was still “a presence.” In some places, that presence stretches back earlier than most people assume, into the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s.
“They wanted to be with other Jews,” Brief said. “They wanted a sense of Jewish life.”
In Fremont, memory survives in other ways too. David Detwiler, who grew up in town decades after Beth Israel’s peak, is not Jewish, but he remembers where the synagogue stood. He remembers the Jewish section of Oakwood Cemetery near his elementary school, and the peculiarity, in retrospect, of childhood games unfolding beside graves.
“Looking back, it was odd to have kids playing next to the dead,” he said.
He knew only one Jew growing up, an educator and school administrator who handed him his high school diploma. But a Jewish presence still lingered in the town’s memory and institutions, even after the congregation was gone. His own church, First Presbyterian, stood a block north of the synagogue and closed in 2025.
“You don’t really remember what happened,” he said. “You remember how it made you feel.”
Fremont’s Jewish memory also survives in stories about businesses and local relationships. Christine Burns, whose family owns Burns Iron and Metal, said her grandfather bought a scrapyard from Marcus Michles, a Jewish entrepreneur whose brother, Joseph, was among the leading figures in Temple Beth Israel, including serving as its president. He did so by borrowing money from Jewish community members and later became friends with many of them.
Joe Cheek, who worked for Michles in the 1970s, remembered him as demanding but fair. “He did not expect you to do anything he would not do himself,” Cheek said.
These memories are not always precise. Names fade. Timelines blur. Details collapse into one another.
But they have not vanished.
Back on Birchard Avenue, the former synagogue is open only seasonally, from May through October, for limited hours. Visitors can walk through the building, pausing at exhibits and reading placards about Sandusky County’s past. Few realize what the house once held.
There is no longer a sanctuary in any recognizable sense. No weekly services. No children’s classes. No steady ritual rhythm drawing people through the doors.
And yet the names remain.
The plaque is back in Fremont now, in the lobby of the old synagogue, beneath the staircase. It does not restore the congregation, or make the building a synagogue again. But it keeps the dead from becoming anonymous and the community from disappearing without a trace.
That is how continuity is carried: by a historical society, by a regional archive, or by a man who sees the names from his childhood and decides they cannot be let go.
The post The most Jewish room in Fremont, Ohio, is in a county history museum appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Assailant attacks congregant, guard at NYC Shabbat services
(JTA) —A man who attacked a congregant and a security guard at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue on Friday night is now in custody, according to the New York Police Department.
The individual disrupted Shabbat services before allegedly assaulting the two individuals.
“As synagogue security was escorting him out, he struck a member of the congregation, damaged synagogue property, and then spit at and headbutted a member of the security team,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch stated in a post on X.
Tisch, who grew up attending the iconic Reform synagogue, said that an NYPD sergeant who was working on a paid detail on site “immediately stepped in and took the individual into custody.”
“I have spoken with the rabbi of the synagogue, and I’m relieved that no one was seriously injured,” she said, confirming that those who were hurt are now doing well.
While noting that the investigation is still ongoing, Tisch confirmed that there are no other known threats at the moment, and that additional NYPD resources were deployed to Central Synagogue.
For the police commissioner, however, the event was also personal, as she described the synagogue of her childhood as “a place of comfort and peace,” both “in joy and in sorrow.”
“What happened there tonight is deeply painful,” Tisch added. “A place of worship should never be a crime scene.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote on X that he was “horrified by the assault at Central Synagogue during services today.”
“I can only imagine the pain and fear an attack like this, during Shabbat services, causes for the congregation and for Jewish New Yorkers across our city,” Mamdani stated.
The mayor emphasized that every New Yorker should be able to practice their religion without fearing violence, describing the event as a “despicable act” that “has no place in our city.”
“Our administration will do everything in our power to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe,” Mamdani added.
Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council, commended the NYPD for its “swift response that brought the individual into custody,” adding that she was “disturbed” by the incident.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James described the assault as “appalling and unacceptable” in a social media statement. She stressed that “no one should feel threatened in their place of worship.”
“I am relieved that everyone is okay and recovering, and my heart is with the Central Synagogue community this evening,” James added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Assailant attacks congregant, guard at NYC Shabbat services appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Nigeria has more than 100 synagogues — but no local rabbis. This summer camp wants to change that.
On summer mornings in Abuja, Nigeria, a small fleet of cars fan out across the sprawling capital city carrying unusual cargo: children headed to Jewish day camp.
In a one-story synagogue on a dirt road in Kubwa, a densely populated suburb, children who spend most of the year as the only Jew in their school spill out of cars alongside dozens of their peers. They might spend the day acting out scenes from the Torah, crocheting kippot or competing in color war.
It’s an untraditional location, but almost everything else about Camp Sarah is inspired by Jewish summer camps in the U.S. After all, it was founded by an American.
Debbie Isser, who moved to Nigeria in 2021 for her work with the World Bank, started the camp with members of Abuja’s Jewish community after local mothers told her they wanted their children to have some kind of Jewish education. For Isser, whose own childhood summers at Jewish camp in New Hampshire had been formative, the solution felt obvious.
“I just felt like it was in my genes,” she told the Forward.
Now in its fourth year, Camp Sarah, a two-week-long day camp hosting 80 campers and 20 staff, is trying to give a new generation of Nigerian Jews something their small, dispersed community has struggled to provide: Jewish teachings that will allow them to sustain religious life there.
The hope, of course, is that the children make Jewish friends and learn Torah stories. But organizers also want Camp Sarah to begin producing the religious leaders the community currently lacks — perhaps, one day, even a homegrown rabbi or a shochet, ritual slaughterer, so that kosher Nigerian Jews can finally enjoy meat with their jollof rice.
Fifteen-year-old Shedrack, who is one of two Jewish students at his public school, attended Camp Sarah for the first time last summer. When, during the following school year, his classmates made fun of him for not believing in Jesus, he called his camp friends.
“It’s like being with myself,” he told the Forward. “They understand me. When it’s closing hour from school, I usually call them. We have some chats, ask ourselves some questions and we talk about Torah.”
Nigeria’s Jewish community is itself an unlikely story. Most of its members are Igbo, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, some of whom believe they are descended from one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Igbo identification with Jewish identity intensified during and after the devastating Nigerian Civil War between 1967 and 1970, when the Igbo-led breakaway state of Biafra was defeated, and at least a million people died.
In the decades that followed, a small number of Igbo who had been raised Christian began practicing Judaism, teaching themselves Hebrew, seeking out Jewish texts and eventually establishing synagogues. Today, thousands of Nigerians practice Judaism, though those who have not formally converted are not considered Jewish by many mainstream Jewish institutions.
But maintaining a Jewish community in Nigeria is no easy feat. While Nigeria has over 100 synagogues, the community has no resident rabbi of its own. Jewish books and ritual objects are few and far between, usually arriving from donations abroad.
Moshe Hezekiah Nwafor, 28, a Nigerian Jew who founded the camp alongside Isser, told the Forward that when he celebrated his bar mitzvah, there was only one Torah scroll in the country. Today, he estimates there are about 10. And without a shochet, his community relies heavily on fish and vegetables because there is no way to access kosher meat.
Nwafor and Isser met by chance. While Isser was looking for a synagogue to celebrate the Jewish holidays after she moved to Nigeria, she came across a WhatsApp number for Nwafor’s congregation. Nwafor answered her message and immediately arranged for someone to pick her up and bring her to the synagogue to celebrate Sukkot.
That night, they made kiddush in a sukkah with walls fashioned from banana leaves; afterward came a l’chaim with local schnapps.
“I thought, OK, I’ve really found a Jewish community here,” Isser recalled.
Isser began returning from trips to the United States with suitcases stuffed with donated tallitot (prayer shawls), siddurim (prayer books) and other Jewish books. Eventually, after one Shabbat service, she sat down with elders of the congregation to ask what a more systematic relationship with American Jews might look like.
The clearest request, she said, came from the mothers. Most of their children attended schools where they were the only Jew. Instead of letting their kids sit idle over the summers, the mothers wanted them to receive a Jewish education and know what it feels like to have Jewish friends – in other words: Jewish summer camp.
The request resonated with Isser, a mother too, for whom Jewish camp had been a formative part of childhood. Her parents had met at Camp Ramah, the camp of the Conservative movement, when they were 16. Her mother went on to become a Jewish educator.
At first, Isser considered sending Nigerian children to camps in the U.S. But she and Nwafor, who had worked as a traveling Jewish teacher among Nigerian communities, quickly landed on a more ambitious idea.
“Immediately, we’re like ‘no, no, no,’” Isser recalled. “’We should do camp in Nigeria.’”
They named it Camp Sarah, in honor of Isser’s mother.
The first summer required some improvisation. Organizers borrowed a car to collect children from around Abuja. Isser recalls one trip taking two hours, the car breaking down and, at one point, 15 children squeezing into a sedan.
Rabbi Kerrith Solomon from Adas Israel, a Conservative congregation in Washington, D.C., came with her two children to help run the camp. Looking back, Isser said, “We kind of laugh because it was pretty disorganized.”
Today, anyone who grew up going to camp would recognize much of Camp Sarah, where campers spend their days competing in relay races or Jewish trivia and writing songs to perform for their peers. Four-year-olds act out Torah stories. Older campers study the Jewish life cycle and discuss what it means to become role models in their communities. Counselors from Nigeria, Uganda and the U.S. compare their Jewish traditions over lunchtime.
But some camp traditions require distinctly Nigerian adaptations. Each Friday, the camp bakes challah. With no conventional oven, sand is poured into the bottom of a cooking pot that rests on a charcoal stove, before unbraided challah dough is placed in the pot and covered for hours.
Many of the Jewish songs sung at camp were written in Nigeria and sound nothing like the standard repertoire in America. Sung in harmony, they are accompanied by traditional Nigerian instruments like the konga drum, a shallow gourd covered in beads known as the shekere and a metal hand bell called an ogene.
Camp Sarah’s ambitions also extend beyond Jewish education. Isser said that during her work at the World Bank, she has watched young Nigerians earn university degrees only to struggle to find jobs in their fields. This year, the team introduced leadership training for the counselors, and activities like soap-making, candle-making and crocheting – skills they hope campers and counselors can turn into sources of income. Organizers have even discussed creating a camp store where staff can sell their handmade tallitot and kippot.
The 20 Nigerian counselors who take long overnight buses from Jewish communities across the country to camp each summer have already started bringing what they’ve learned back home, hosting events for their communities during the Jewish holidays.
Debbie Hezekiah Nwafor, a 25-year-old counselor, said that when she first arrived at camp four years ago, she was terrified of public speaking, but her role forced her to propose activities, teach dozens of children and command the attention of the rowdy group. Today, she leads the camp’s division for 14- to 16-year-olds.
“I used to have stage fright; I thought I’m not really bold enough for leadership,” she said. “But whatever idea I’m bringing, camp is implementing it.”
“This is not just a camp to us.” she added. “For real, this is something really big. I would say camp really changed me.”
Camp Sarah has also become a place to experiment in a way that has proven difficult within established Nigerian congregations. According to Nwafor, women have traditionally played smaller leadership roles in local Jewish communities both because of cultural expectations around gender in Nigeria and because of the community’s limited access to Jewish religious instruction.
For communities that have had limited access to rabbis and other sources of contemporary Jewish religious instruction, Nwafor said, biblical texts have sometimes served as a primary guide for how to live Jewishly.
Isser has seen some of those tensions surface in surprisingly fundamental questions. When visiting rabbis have taught at Camp Sarah, she said, mothers have asked whether Jewish law would require them to marry their husband’s brother if their husband died — a practice described in the Torah’s Book of Deuteronomy known as yibbum, or levirate marriage.
But last year, the camp held a service led by women and they did an encore this week. Some of them have even said they would like to become rabbis.
“That’s something you don’t see here, but I’m like, ‘why not?’” Nwafor said. “Just go for it.”
Ruth Munghoho, a Ugandan Jew, flew through Ethiopia to Camp Sarah to teach after studying under Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the first native-born black rabbi in Sub-Saharan Africa. She sees her younger self in her campers.
“I grew up in a Christian community where we had no Jewish friends or neighbors,” she said. It took until young adulthood for her to be able to learn about Judaism. “If I could get this knowledge from childhood,” she said, “I know that I could be more than what I am now.”
The post Nigeria has more than 100 synagogues — but no local rabbis. This summer camp wants to change that. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
U.S. ambassador calls settlers who sieged Palestinian homes in Qusra ‘terrorists’
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – The West Bank settlement movement’s leadership joined with one of its most prominent defenders, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, in condemning an Israeli settler outpost set up in a Palestinian family’s yard.
Huckabee’s remarks are a signal of the degree to which a group of radicals is rattling Israeli politics and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Israelis affiliated with the West Bank’s Tel Talpiot outpost, which is illegal under Israeli law, set up temporary structures at the entrances to Palestinian homes on the outskirts of the village of Qusra on Sunday.
Earlier this week, cables connecting the homes to the electricity grid and to solar panels were cut, and water pipes were damaged, leaving the Palestinian families unable to leave or bring in food. Israeli activists in the area who monitor settler attacks on Palestinians confirmed the account to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Huckabee wrote on X on Thursday that Israeli forces had gone to Qusra at the U.S. Embassy’s request and described the people who set up the outpost as “Israeli terrorists.” He posted that “the IDF & Israel Police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this.”
The language was a departure for the ambassador, who told Israel’s Channel 14 last September that the United States “respects Israel as a sovereign state and will not tell Israel what to do” regarding sovereignty in the West Bank. Huckabee has also consistently described the territory by its biblical names Judea and Samaria. He routinely takes to social media to dismantle what he says are lies depicting Israelis as unfairly treating Palestinians.
He has condemned settler violence before, but has rarely done so in language as blunt as what he used on Thursday. In July 2025, he visited the Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank after an arson attack at its fifth-century church and called it an “act of terror and crime.”
The actions of Israeli settler extremists have been a major concern to Democrats in the U.S. Congress in recent months, adding fodder to their calls to condition aid to Israel on its behavior. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists the reports are overblown, and that Palestinian violence is much more serious. President Donald Trump, who has often supported Netanyahu, has called on the prime minister to crack down on the violence, seeing it as an impediment to his hopes for a broader Middle East peace. Huckabee’s intervention suggests that the Trump administration is increasingly concerned about ending the violence.
Yisrael Ganz, who chairs the Yesha Council and governs the Binyamin Regional Council, condemned the outpost.
“The events in Qusra are serious and do not reflect our values or our way of conducting ourselves,” Ganz said. “There is no place for individuals to take matters into their own hands and establish an outpost in someone’s backyard, even when dealing with an illegal home or an attempt to seize control of the land. There is no justification whatsoever for violence against uninvolved civilians or security forces.”
He added that some were “exploiting these events as part of a campaign against the Jewish communities,” but that this “must not obscure the simple truth: What happened in Qusra was wrong and is unacceptable to us.”
Huckabee amplified Ganz’s statement later on Thursday, writing on X, “’Settlers’ are not the problem in Judea/Samaria. ‘Unsettlers’ are,” he wrote, describing them as “very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families & to Israel.”
The village is located in Area B, territory that is under the civil jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority and security control of the Israeli military and where Israeli settlement is not permitted. The Israel Defense Forces called such takeovers illegal and reprehensible on Tuesday. Overnight Wednesday, Israeli security forces said they demolished the structures at Qusra and detained one Israeli.
Marmar Odeh, a village representative, told JTA that the Israeli military remained inside Qusra, and footage circulating on social media showed Israeli soldiers stationed inside the homes of evacuated residents.
“I won’t be going anywhere. I am staying in my house and on my land,” Odeh said. “I may not be scared, but the children are all the time.”
In a voice memo recorded on August 12 and obtained by JTA, Aisha Abu Rida, a Qusra resident, spoke from inside one of the besieged homes.
“We are surrounded by settlers, but we are steadfast,” she said. “Despite the water and electricity being cut off, we will remain steadfast … and stay in our homes.”
By Thursday, the structures were gone, but settlers remained on the hillsides above the homes, Odeh said, an account supported by footage he provided to JTA. Soldiers had left most of the homes they had entered, residents said Friday, but were informed the military operation could last until Sunday.
One of the affected homes belongs to Loui Ridi, a Toledo, Ohio, business owner who was born in Qusra and has followed the standoff through security cameras installed at the property. JTA attempted to reach Ridi through several channels and was unsuccessful.
Asked whether the State Department shared Huckabee’s characterization and whether the Embassy had requested the Israeli operation, a State Department spokesperson did not directly reply. “We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank,” the spokesperson said. “We condemn criminal violence by any party in the West Bank. A stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration’s goal to achieve peace in the region.”
In a statement to JTA, the Israeli military said soldiers had been deployed in Qusra since Thursday morning “to protect the residents and maintain security in the area” and that they had been instructed that “the Qusra residents will remain in their homes.”
It added that troops would not operate inside the Palestinian family’s home near the site “where the tent that was evacuated and dismantled had been erected” and said Civil Administration liaison officers were in contact with Qusra’s local leadership and “working to avoid disruption to the daily lives of the residents in the area.”
Footage circulating earlier in the week appeared to show Israeli soldiers praying alongside the settlers at the outpost. The military said that the incident is under review and that soldiers found to have taken part in illegal activity would be disciplined.
The designation of Area B is the source of the ambiguity, according to Hanan Greenwood, head of the spokesperson and public diplomacy unit at the Binyamin Regional Council.
The council’s jurisdiction covers the settlements themselves, Greenwood said, not Area B land, meaning Qusra sits inside the council’s footprint but outside its authority. Its residents fall under Palestinian Authority civil jurisdiction and pay the council no arnona, the Israeli municipal tax.
“Geographically, Qusra is very much in our area,” Greenwood said. “But in real life, it’s not that we could go there, and it’s not that the residents of Qusra pay us.”
He described the result as a governance vacuum. “It’s ours, it isn’t ours,” he said. “It’s a whole mess, and the reason is that there’s no sovereignty.”
Israeli rights groups reject that framing, arguing that the military has the authority to remove outposts and does not use it.
The Israeli rights group B’Tselem said the events reflect a broader pattern.
“What is happening in Qusra is not an isolated incident,” said Yuli Novak, the organization’s executive director. “Settler militias, backed by the Israeli military, are expanding their attacks into Palestinian villages and towns, seizing land, attacking homes and forcing families out. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in plain sight.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post U.S. ambassador calls settlers who sieged Palestinian homes in Qusra ‘terrorists’ appeared first on The Forward.
