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This Jewish couple ended their three-country wedding tour with a colorful Oaxacan ceremony
(JTA) — For the third of their three weddings, Hallie Applebaum and Elan Raffel set up a chuppah in Oaxaca, the Mexican city where they first confessed their love for each other.
Oaxaca is a vibrant hub of Mexican folk art and incredible food, but Jewish life? Not so much. Nonetheless the couple chose there to wed in an egalitarian Jewish ceremony led by the groom’s sister, Libby Smoler, on Feb 26. And when seven family members and friends gave their own interpretations of the seven traditional blessings, one of Applebaum’s sisters wished them a lifetime of adventures and delicious meals.
The wedding came just over three years after the pair met — online, from their parents’ houses early in the pandemic.
Applebaum’s parents weren’t subtle about wading into her dating life after she moved home to Portland, Maine, in early 2020, the only one of their four children to do so. Her father showed her a video about dating apps and her mother asked her for a demonstration.
Applebaum, 35, downloaded Hinge. The next thing she knew, her mother was hooked. “She’s swiping and swiping, and saying, ‘This is fabulous,’” Applebaum recalled, adding with a joke, “I told her, ‘You have to have some standards.’”
In Los Angeles, where Applebaum had been living, she had been focused first on her job as a producer of external communications for the educational technology division of the World Bank, and her all-consuming side project as the founder of Future of Women, which hosts breakfast events around the world and hosts a podcast for women leaders.
But in her childhood home, with no timeline for when life would resume, she decided to dive into dating, drawing on her extensive experiences living and traveling abroad to experiment with what would generate the most promising results.
“I put my location as different places, like Mexico City or London, for the fun of it,” she said. “When we were so isolated, to have contact with people in these places was nice. But, then, I put myself in a more realistic location.”
That location was New York City, where she soon encountered Raffel, an attorney in the tech industry.
Elan Raffel breaks the glass during his wedding ceremony with Hallie Applebaum, in Oaxaca, Mexico, Feb. 26, 2023. (Mónica Godefroy)
The pair matched and soon learned that they had a lot in common. Like Applebaum, Raffel had moved back in with his parents at the start of the pandemic — in his case Pikesville, a heavily Jewish suburb of Baltimore. Both had attended Jewish day schools growing up; both had spent time living abroad (Applebaum in Guatemala, Ecuador and while pursuing a master’s degree at the London School of Economics and Raffel in his mother’s native Israel); and both enjoyed fine food and off-the-beaten-path adventures.
After months of phone calls and probing conversations — some fueled by “The 36 Questions that Lead to Love” as appeared in The New York Times — they decided that Raffel would join Applebaum for a camping trip in Maine’s Acadia National Park.
“We had an out,” Raffel recalled. “If either of us had a terrible experience, we could back out.”
That wasn’t needed. Instead, they extended their time together — after kicking it off with an unplanned first meeting for Raffel with Applebaum’s parents when she forgot a cooler of food at their house.
“We joke that our first date was two weeks long,” said Raffel.
Soon after, Applebaum met Raffel’s family for Rosh Hashanah dinner. Then, Raffel rented a home in Los Angeles after Applebaum returned there.
With remote work the norm, and a few months dating now behind them, they began considering living and working elsewhere. They decided on Mexico, spending one month in Merida and one month in Oaxaca.
With its vibrant food scene and colorful arts and culture, the couple both fell in love with Oaxaca, and with each other. It was there that they first said, “I love you.”
Hallie Applebaum and Elan Raffel pose with dancers who joined their public wedding procession in Oaxaca. (Mónica Godefroy)
They returned to Mexico in the summer of 2022 while their new condo in Santa Monica was undergoing renovations; it was there that they became engaged. They now regularly host Shabbat dinners in their L.A. home through the nonprofit OneTable.
The first of their three wedding ceremonies took place on Sept. 30, 2022, when they were legally married at the Los Angeles County Courthouse.
The next event took place in Israel, where Raffel’s mother had long hoped that one of her three children would marry. He was her last hope, so the couple said yes to what they thought would be a small wedding there planned by her.
But Shuli Raffel’s plans grew larger and larger, until finally, Applebaum’s parents decided to come and her London-based sister, too. Rabbi Shira Levine of Kibbutz Hanaton, rooted in the Conservative movement of Judaism, officiated a religious ceremony on Oct. 14 at Bistro de Carmel in Zichron Ya’akov with 90 guests present.
Hallie Applebaum and Elan Raffel held one wedding ceremony in Israel, where Raffel’s mother is from. (Taylor Applebaum)
Levine had guided the couple via video calls in writing their own text for the Jewish wedding contract, the ketubah.
“We spoke to the rabbi about our relationship, our household, and how do we make this concrete and what traditional things do we want to modify and make more egalitarian,” Applebaum said, adding, “Since I do a lot of work in women’s empowerment, it was important to me to have a woman rabbi.”
Then, over Thanksgiving weekend, the couple held an Israeli brunch in Philadelphia, attended by their grandmothers — Applebaum’s is 102 — who would not be traveling to Mexico. From there, they flew directly to Oaxaca for a menu tasting, where, because Applebaum is vegetarian, it fell to Raffel to try all the fish and meat options they might offer their guests.
The couple returned to Oaxaca for the main affair — a multi-day event that included a day-long tour to a facility where mezcal, a Oaxacan spirit, is made; visits to craftspeople; and two nights of dinners.
On Feb. 26, they had their third and final wedding in front of 72 guests at Cardenal Oaxaca, an events venue. Spicy pineapple mezcal cocktails kicked off the celebration, and a festive meal that won accolades even from foodie guests followed the ceremony.
At their Oaxaca wedding, Hallie Applebaum and Elan Raffel served guests a native corn milk epazote sponge cake with lime cream. (Hallie Applebaum)
“It was amazing,” said Ori Zohar, a guest who is also the co-founder of spice company Burlap & Barrel. “The wedding meal was a procession of Mexican and Oaxacan specialties with an international twist. Beets were grilled and paired with pumpkin seeds and pickled mustard seeds. Duck enchiladas came slathered in a black mole sauce and aged cheese. The main dishes were shared plates, so each guest got to try a little of everything before going back and polishing off the rest of their favorite.”
In one highlight of the day, the couple partook in a local custom where tall likenesses of the couple are made out of paper maché and carried, and people toast the bride and groom. It was, Applebaum said, a perfect way to show off a beloved place to their friends and family.
“Our guests went from this beautiful ceremony that his sister put together,” she said, “to being immersed in this celebration in the streets.”
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The post This Jewish couple ended their three-country wedding tour with a colorful Oaxacan ceremony appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Argentina’s Jewish gauchos museum vows to stay open amid leadership feud
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES – A museum dedicated to the history of Argentinian Jewish ranchers, farmers and the cowboys known as gauchos remains open and operating despite months of tension between its former director and the local government, the head of the Entre Ríos Jewish community confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
The Villa Domínguez Jewish Museum about the Jewish Colonies drew international attention late last year after visitors reported water damage affecting walls, documents and historical objects. The concerns arose months after the resignation of Osvaldo Quiroga, the local historian who had led the museum for nearly 40 years and was widely associated with its preservation.
In an interview, community head Marina Garber acknowledged the tensions that led to Quiroga’s resignation in January 2025, and that since then a successor has not been named.
“We are resolving the situation with an agreement in which the building belongs to the municipality, while the Jewish community is in charge of safeguarding the objects. The museum is still operating,” Garber told JTA, and the partnership between the local municipality and Jewish community would continue.
Villa Domínguez is a rural town of around 2,000 inhabitants located 225 miles north of Buenos Aires, where international tourism centered on the country’s earliest Jewish agricultural colonies brings considerable visibility to the area.
The fate of the museum matters far beyond Villa Domínguez’s nine remaining Jews. The Jewish agricultural colonies of Entre Ríos are a defining chapter in Argentine Jewish history, tracing how immigrants from Eastern Europe built new lives as farmers and gauchos. Its future is a test of whether a legacy that belongs to Argentine Jewry as a whole can be safeguarded.
Although its director was a municipal employee, the museum itself belongs to the Jewish community. This hybrid arrangement, with no clear responsibilities divided between the two, created tensions when the images of damage were spread online. Suggestions that the Jewish museum had fallen into a state of neglect circulated online as far as Europe.
According to some sources, tensions appear to stem from a combination of the government’s limited attention to the site and the apparent resentment by some government officials that Quiroga had received inordinate media attention.
The Jewish colonies of Entre Ríos, established in the late 1890s by Jewish immigrants mostly from Eastern Europe, represent one of the largest waves of Jewish agricultural settlement in the Americas.
The Jewish Colonies Museum was founded in October 1985 to safeguard the region’s documentary and material heritage. Since 1996, it has been housed in the town’s former pharmacy building.
The museum attracts Argentine and international visitors interested in the stories of the Jewish gauchos — the immigrants who blended their Jewish and Eastern European roots with Argentine ranching culture. Heritage tours, family-history trips, academic researchers and Jewish community groups contribute to a steady flow of visitors exploring the landscapes where the Jewish gauchos built their rural lives, a journey that began more than a century ago.
For the descendants of the gauchos — many now scattered across Argentina, Israel and beyond — the institution serves as a touchstone for genealogical research and family history. Its stability is also of concern to Jewish communal organizations and Argentine officials who have promoted the Jewish colonies circuit as a pillar of religious and cultural tourism in the province.
The first ship carrying Jewish immigrants from Europe to Argentina, the SS Weser, arrived in 1889 after sailing from Hamburg to Buenos Aires. Its arrival inspired Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a German Jewish financier and philanthropist, to recognize the potential of agricultural migration and, in 1891, to create the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) to institutionalize, fund and organize the colonies.
A tourist trail linking the various Jewish settlements has been operating for more than 20 years, made up of four communities: Basavilbaso, Villa Domínguez, Villa Clara and Villaguay. Two- and three-day tours of the area’s main Jewish sites include visits to synagogues, cemeteries, cooperatives, and local museums. Villa Clara — or simply Clara — is a small town founded in 1892 and named after Hirsch’s wife. Its Jewish museum is located inside an old railway station. Another settlement, Lucienville, is named after the couple’s son, Lucien.
The last agricultural colony founded in Entre Ríos by the JCA is Colonia Avigdor, visited regularly by students of Fundación Judaica, a major Buenos Aires network of schools and synagogues, which brings groups there for educational programs, supports local schools, and works on community development.
The national government includes the tourist trail as part of a religious tourism program, and the Buenos Aires Jewish center AMIA has a site dedicated to the colonies’ history in Entre Rios, including Villa Domínguez.
The national government and some local municipalities also include the Jewish colonies among their cultural offerings.
According to Pablo Soskin, the representative in Entre Ríos of the Argentine Jewish political umbrella organization DAIA, the museum’s director stepped down on Jan. 24, but municipal officials initially declined to accept his resignation. He subsequently took an extended leave to use up a large balance of accrued vacation days, with the municipality’s approval. When that time ran out, he was reassigned within the museum to a different, non-directorial role. The director position has remained vacant since then.
“We maintain a close relationship with the government, which has expressed its commitment to making the museum and the Jewish circuit part of the province’s tourist attractions for locals and foreigners,” Soskin told JTA. “We will continue to coordinate community, public, and private mechanisms to ensure the preservation of our heritage sites.
“This is key to understanding the contributions that the Jewish community has made to Argentina,” he added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Argentina’s Jewish gauchos museum vows to stay open amid leadership feud appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli police arrest suspects in Washington Post journalist attack
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israel Police arrested 10 people on Monday on suspicion of involvement in violent acts over the weekend against journalists, foreign diplomats and Palestinians in the West Bank during the annual olive harvest.
The arrests came after international condemnation of the attacks, including by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who is generally supportive of the current Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted it is just a handful of individuals and not representative of Israelis who live in the West Bank settlements.
“Following reports of acts of violence over the weekend, including the suspected assault of a foreign journalist and the suspected assault of foreign diplomats, the Judea and Samaria District and the Israel Security Agency (ISA) carried out a pre-dawn arrest operation as part of the ongoing investigation,” the police said in a statement, referring to the West Bank by its biblical name.
The statement said the suspects were arrested during a special pre-dawn operation conducted by the district’s Central Investigations Unit and transferred to police stations in the area for questioning.
“Following questioning, and subject to the findings of the investigation, they will be brought before a court for a hearing,” the police statement said.
The arrests come after Heidi Levine, a veteran photojournalist for The Washington Post, was attacked on Friday while photographing Palestinians harvesting their olive trees in the West Bank, an annual event that often sees violent clashes between Palestinian farmers and Israeli settlers who have increasingly moved into the same areas.
Video footage from the scene shows a group of masked settlers surrounding and attacking Levine before ripping off her camera and other personal gear. Palestinians can also be seen throwing stones at the settlers before another journalist arrives to help Levine leave the area.
The photographer was taken to a Palestinian hospital near Ramallah and later transferred to Beilinson Hospital near Tel Aviv, which reported that she was in moderate condition with lacerations across her body, a broken rib and four broken vertebrae. She also underwent surgery on her finger, the hospital said.
On Saturday, European diplomats from France, Belgium and Poland came under assault by masked settlers who forced their convoy off the road in the area of Taybeh, near Ramallah. Bernard Baudoux, a leftist mayor of Aulnoye-Aymeries, a town in northern France, was beaten, according to witnesses who spoke to international media.
Data collected by Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din and published on Sunday showed some 538 alleged incidents of settler and soldier violence over the 20-day period from Sept. 27 to Oct. 16, across 181 Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Some 269 of the incidents were directly related to the olive harvest, the organization said.
Israeli right-wing legal-aid organization Honenu confirmed the arrests on Monday and said its criminal law department would be providing the suspects with “initial legal assistance.”
“At this stage, it is unclear what the detainees are suspected of,” the organization said in a statement.
The Israel Police said that “items linking the suspects to the alleged offenses were seized, and several vehicles were confiscated.”
“The law in Judea and Samaria applies to everyone, regardless of identity or affiliation. The Israel Police is committed to professional, equal, and impartial law enforcement, based on evidence and in accordance with the law,” Israel Police Commissioner Daniel Levy said in the statement.
The issue of settler violence in the West Bank falls into a gray area of law enforcement between the Israel Police and the Israeli military, the latter of which is responsible for civilian matters in parts of the territory that are not legally under Israeli sovereignty. Israel’s police force is under the authority of the National Security Ministry headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right nationalist who has not made clamping down on settler violence a priority.
Levy said that the ambiguity over which agency is responsible for what must be addressed.
“At the same time, a distinction must be made between responsibility for preventing incidents in the field and responsibility for investigating and enforcing the law after they occur,” Levy said.
“We will continue to coordinate with all security agencies to strengthen security and the rule of law and ensure that anyone found to have violated the law is brought to justice,” he added.
Huckabee on Saturday called for a full investigation into the attack against Levine and for the perpetrators to be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law.”
“Attacking a female photographer is a despicable act of terror carried out by masked cowards. Dishonorable act of senseless violence,” he wrote on X.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog also condemned the “shocking violence” and said he had called Levine to apologize.
“I expressed my deepest sorrow to Heidi and apologized for what she went through. The despicable behavior of the perpetrators of this attack does not represent the citizens or the values of the State of Israel,” he said in a statement.
Netanyahu, who is in the midst of a closely contested election campaign to retain power, condemned violence generally, but also stated that the circumstances of the attack “remain unclear.”
“We will not allow disputed incidents to be exploited to demonize the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria,” he said in a statement, using the biblical names for the West Bank.
Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter, however, stated on CNN on Friday “unambiguously and unequivocally, that gratuitous violence perpetrated by anyone, be they Jews or Arabs, is completely unacceptable.”
He added, “If we have not yet reached a passing grade to bring Jewish vigilantes to justice, then we’ve got to do a better job. But I’m convinced that we are going to do it. I’ve been in government meetings. I’ve heard the prime minister speak emphatically about putting a stop to this.”
In a statement Monday following the arrests, Defense Minister Israel Katz said that it was time for the Israeli police to handle such crimes.
“The IDF should not and cannot be engaged in civilian law enforcement. Its role is to fight Palestinian terrorism and defend the country’s borders and the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and along the seam line,” he said, adding that he was preparing, in coordination with the prime minister, “a comprehensive plan to regulate civilian law enforcement activities in Judea and Samaria.”
“The plan distinguishes between the IDF’s authority in the field and the transfer of responsibility for carrying out civilian law enforcement in practice to the Israel Police’s Judea and Samaria District,” Katz said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israeli police arrest suspects in Washington Post journalist attack appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli party leader Benny Gantz drops out of race
(JTA) — Benny Gantz said on Monday he is dropping out of the race with just eight days to go until Israelis head to the polls to elect a new parliament.
Gantz, who is a former defense minister and IDF chief of staff, had once been the leading contender to unseat Netanyahu. But in recent months, his party has been polling below the electoral threshold.
In a statement to the press, he said, “I will not run in the upcoming elections – I will continue to fight for unity. This is the only solution that will prevent another disaster and protect Israel against all challenges at home and abroad.”
Gantz argued last month in an op-ed for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that unity among Zionist parties was critical in part to stop the erosion of support for Israel in the international arena.
His Blue and White Party was considered to be one of the parties that could join either the right-wing bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the opposition bloc headed by Gadi Eisenkot of the Yashar Party. In the last election, Gantz and Eisenkot were in the same party.
Gantz’s departure is expected to improve the vote count of bigger parties and could give a boost to the Eisenkot bloc.
This is a developing story.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israeli party leader Benny Gantz drops out of race appeared first on The Forward.
