(JTA) — PODGORICA, Montenegro — At the entrance to Nikšić, Montenegro’s second-largest city, a vintage fighter jet painted in the colors of the Israeli Air Force perches atop a giant concrete pedestal, as if about to take flight.

The monument, unveiled in 2024, commemorates “Operation Velvetta” — a top-secret plan that ferried 17 Supermarine Spitfire aircraft from Czechoslovakia, via what was then Yugoslavia, to Israel in 1948. The brazen scheme, carried out under the noses of British and Soviet spies, helped ensure the fledgling Jewish state’s military superiority during its War of Independence.

At the monument’s base, a bronze plaque in Serbian, English and Hebrew calls it “a permanent reminder to the unbreakable friendship of Montenegro and Israel.”

Yet lately, that friendship is being tested in ways not seen since Montenegro — smallest of the six republics that once comprised Yugoslavia — declared its independence in 2006.

“Yes, there’s antisemitism here. It’s much better than some other places, but the situation has changed,” said Rabbi Ari Edelkopf, who heads the Religious Jewish Community of Montenegro in Podgorica, the capital. “When I came here, I never believed we’d need 24-hour security. But since Oct. 7, we’ve had Free Gaza marches in all the major cities. My office is following every antisemitic portal here in Montenegro,” he said, referring to websites that report local news. “We’re paying a lawyer to monitor all this.”

Several recent incidents involving Israeli visitors to this Connecticut-sized country of 625,000, have unnerved the local Jewish community, which numbers fewer than 1,000, even as the capital is on the verge of getting a major new Jewish cultural center set for completion this fall.

In the Adriatic beach resort of Budva, a recent violent brawl between local Montenegrins and some 20 Israeli tourists has triggered alarm among both local Jews and Israeli tourists.

It’s still unclear who or what provoked the incident, which took place after midnight July 12 at a beach bar where the Israelis — 12 men and eight women — had been drinking. Edelkopf said he believed the incident had begun with a personal altercation but escalated when the locals realized the tourists they were sparring with were Israeli.

According to an Israeli government alert about the incident, the locals “shouted ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘F*** Israel’” after learning about the origins of the tourists, who the alert said were not wearing indicators of their national or religious identity.

“Then they came back with a few friends and really beat the hell out of them,” said Edelkopf, a Chabad rabbi who’s originally from Los Angeles and who’s lived in Montenegro for nine years.

“They put out cigarettes on their faces, and threw metal chairs and tables at them. It was horrible and very aggressive,” he said. “Most of the Israelis were injured; one of them had a broken jaw.”

The Israeli government assisted in helping the Israeli tourists expedite their flights out of Montenegro, though one member of the group remained in the country while hospitalized, according to Israel’s National Center for Combating Antisemitism, an initiative of the Diaspora ministry. The ministry’s alert said that police failed to intervene.

“I am waiting for the Montenegrin government to take action,” Edelkopf told JTA from his Podgorica synagogue, which was previously a private house. “Until now, they have not offered any official response.”

Despite the recent hostilities, the rabbi said, Montenegro has long welcomed Israeli tourists as well as residents. And Jews have been living here for millennia before Yugoslavia existed.

Ruins dating from the 4th century C.E. indicate a flourishing Jewish community in Kotor, not far from Budva along the Adriatic. In fact, one of the country’s most important religious sites is the presumed tomb of Shabbatai Zvi, located in nearby Ulcinj. The 17th-century Jewish false messiah died shortly after his exile there in 1673 by the Ottoman Empire, which ruled much of the present-day Balkans.

While most Montenegrins are Eastern Orthodox Christians, about 20% are Muslims of either Bosnian or Albanian origin. In 1992, after communism collapsed and Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia broke away from the former Yugoslavia, the remaining two republics — Serbia and Montenegro — created the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

In 2006, Montenegro declared independence following a referendum on the issue, and six years later, then-Prime Minister Igor Lukšić granted Judaism recognition as the country’s fourth official religion, alongside the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church and Islam.

“The Jews are very well accepted here,” said Nikolla Camaj, vice-president of Montenegro’s parliament and one of five ethnic Albanians in the 81-member body. “Officially we have very good relations with Israel, and people support the idea that Israel must be protected. But there’s a problem because in Montenegro we have a lot of Muslims — Albanians and Bosniaks — and they don’t like what’s happening in Palestine.”

In Podgorica, a huge mural painted on an apartment building two blocks from the municipal bus terminal depicts Gazan refugee children, a slice of watermelon symbolizing the Palestinian resistance, and the declaration “Montenegro Stands With Palestine.”

In early July, Israeli tourists visiting Plav — a resort town near Montenegro’s borders with Kosovo and Albania — were harassed by a local couple, who called the visitors “baby killers.”

That doesn’t surprise Edelkopf at all.

“Local people are being fed articles translated from very strong anti-Israel news outlets,” the rabbi said. “The main TV channels and online portals here are filled with lies and garbage against Israel, and the people have started to believe that Israel is committing genocide.”

Even so, Israeli tourists keep coming. In 2025, according to official figures, 110,249 of them visited Montenegro — up from 73,513 the year before — most of them via direct flights from Tel Aviv. A Facebook group for Israelis planning trips to Montenegro has more than 80,000 members, who swap advice and share photos and tips from their trips.

Israel has no embassy in this country; instead, it’s represented by Avivit Bar-Ilan, Israel’s resident ambassador in Serbia, who could not be reached for comment.

Montenegro’s few Jews are split between Edelkopf’s traditional Orthodox Jewish synagogue and the local progressive Jewish congregation led by its president, Nina Ofner Bokan.

A computer science engineer, Ofner Bokan, 41, has represented her community since 2020. Last September, she was reelected unanimously for a five-year term. She’s also senior advisor to the president of the Montenegrin parliament, and a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress.

“We feel very protected here, and we have an amazing relationship with all the other religious communities,” Ofner Bokan said. “Over the years, we’ve made strong connections. … Jews can walk with a kippah or a Star of David without any problem.”

Last October the community held its 12th annual Mahar conference in Budva, which featured speeches by several dignitaries including Deputy Prime Minister Budimir Aleksić.

“Montenegro is recognized as a country that cherishes diversity, fosters dialogue, and stands as a nation where the Holocaust did not occur and where antisemitism has never had — and will never have — any foundation,” Aleksić assured his audience. “We are proud of that fact.”

Ofner Bokan’s Jewish congregation was founded in 2011, and she is its third president. In November 2024, she and other local Jews held a ceremony to mark the groundbreaking of the first purpose-built synagogue in Montenegrin history. Ar Ashem is slowly taking shape on a donated plot of land fronting Radosava Burića Street, she said, and will be finished in February.

With around 150 active members, the congregation’s spiritual leader is Luciano Moše Prelevic, who, like Edelkopf, claims to be Montenegro’s chief rabbi. The two communities have nothing to do with each other — and that hasn’t changed even with a recent influx of Jews from warring Russia and Ukraine.

“Ours is the one that signed the contract in 2012 with the government recognizing the Jewish community,” said Ofner Bokan, whose parents were from the Serbian city of Novi Sad. “But in public, Jews are not going to talk badly about each other. If we do, then what will other people think?”

Edelkopf, who with his wife Chana has eight children, spent 17 years in Russia running the Chabad outpost in Sochi. But he was deported in March 2017 after a Russian court determined that he was a “threat to national security” and came directly to Montenegro.

“We are officially the Religious Jewish Community of Montenegro,” he said, while acknowledging deep divisions among the Jews of this relatively tiny country. “We do have things we need to improve, and we are not proud of that.”

One relative newcomer is Tatiana Nirman, who is originally from St. Petersburg, Russia. Soon after the war with Ukraine broke out in February 2022, she moved to Montenegro and now directs cultural programming for the 150 or so Jews she estimates now live in Budva, the resort town where the brawl took place.

“We’re here in Montenegro because it’s a beautiful, comfortable country, and one of the few places we could come on a Russian passport,” said Nirman, 40, who lives in the coastal town with her husband and two children. She adds that about 80% of her programs on art, music, Jewish history and cooking are in the Russian language.

Also living in Budva is Anna Davidi, 51, an Armenian-born Jew whose ancestors were from Iran. During the Nagorno-Karabakh War of the 1990s, Davidi’s family moved to Ukraine, where she studied music in Khmelnytskyi.

She married a Jewish man from Breslov with whom she had a son and daughter, but later divorced and relocated to Montenegro after realizing there was little to keep her in Ukraine.

“What attracted me was Montenegro’s exceptionally clean and beautiful nature, and the high level of tolerance among its people,” said Davidi, who moved here in 2012. “My brother, his wife and I came to Montenegro simply to explore it as a possible place to live. And almost from the moment we arrived, we fell in love.”

A former fashion designer and restaurant owner with a degree in psychology, Davidi landed a job in real-estate upon moving to Montenegro, and now represents an Israeli company involved in land sales. She said she sees both Montenegro and Israel, where she travels regularly to see her children and grandchildren, as important stops on her Jewish journey.

“When I look back, I see that my long road toward Israel has passed through several countries and generations: my ancestors came from Iran; I was born in Armenia; from there I moved to Ukraine; from there I moved to Montenegro,” Davidi recalled. “I hope that my next destination — perhaps the final station on this long journey — will be Jerusalem.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Montenegro’s tiny Jewish community navigates uncertain territory as hostility toward Israel increases appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — An animal welfare group’s appeal to an Israeli court is delaying plans to surround a high security prison for Palestinians with Nile crocodiles.

The proposed 560-foot moat was first floated by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir in December. If built, it would surround a special wing at Ketziot Prison in southern Israel holding Palestinian security prisoners, including members of Hamas’ Nukhba force who took part in the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel.

“Anyone who murdered, massacred and raped and behaved like an animal deserves to be guarded by an animal just like them,” a statement from Ben-Gvir’s ministry said at the time.

The project moved forward last month after Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman reclassified crocodiles from protected wildlife to “tended wild animals,” allowing security agencies to house them at their facilities. Her nod came despite objections from Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority and her ministry’s legal adviser, who said Silman did not have the required legal authority to make the reclassification..

After Silman’s announcement, Ben-Gvir shared an AI-generated image of himself petting a crocodile on a leash alongside the caption, “Are you thinking of attempting to escape? Think again.”

Let the Animals Live, an animal welfare group, petitioned against Silman’s decision. The Jerusalem District Court on Aug. 2 issued a temporary order barring the crocodiles’ transfer. The state has until Aug. 16 to respond.

The petition argues that using crocodiles as prison guards would cause the animals severe suffering, removing them from an environment not amenable to their thriving, and could endanger both the public and the reptiles. Let the Animals Live also contends that Silman lacked the authority to create what amounts to a new legal category for wildlife through a ministerial declaration rather than legislation.

The Israel Nature and Parks Authority said in a statement that there was no sufficient professional basis for using crocodiles at security facilities and warned that the plan posed significant risks to public safety, the environment and the animals’ welfare, including the possibility that the crocodiles could escape.

Ben-Gvir accused the court of siding with terrorists after the injunction was issued. “Once again the legal system is on the side of the terrorists and against the people of Israel,” he wrote on social media.

His ministry has allocated 21 million shekels, about $7 million, for the project, according to Channel 12 News. The plans include provisions for feeding and caring for the crocodiles, as well as specially designed resting areas.

The proposal was inspired by Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” the remote migrant detention center promoted by the Trump administration. Unlike Ben-Gvir’s plan, animals were not brought to the Florida facility or kept as a man-made security barrier. Officials instead pointed to the alligators, crocodiles and pythons already inhabiting the surrounding Everglades as a deterrent to escape. Florida shut down Alligator Alcatraz in June because of difficulties meeting operational costs. It also faced lawsuits.

Senior Israel Prison Service officials visited the Hamat Gader crocodile farm in January to learn how the animals are kept in captivity.

Yosi Mousanejad, the Hamat Gader site’s manager, told Channel 14 that the delegation came “to study” the animals. They appeared not to know that crocodiles are largely inactive during the winter, he said, a factor that could limit their effectiveness as a year-round security measure.

Mousanejad also told the Kan broadcaster that he had no intention of supplying any of the farm’s roughly 200 crocodiles to the prison system.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Israeli court delays Ben-Gvir’s plans for an Israeli ‘Crocodile Alcatraz’ appeared first on The Forward.

In September 2015, I arrived at the Forward’s Manhattan office for my first day as an intern on the culture desk. I was 22 years old. I wore a blue dress that didn’t really fit, and was awed and slightly terrified by my bevy of talented, perceptive, funny new colleagues.

Now I’m 33. I’ve spent not just my whole career at the Forward, but also, effectively, my whole adult life. I’ve learned to respond to smart, fascinating people with interest, rather than fear. I’ve learned to wear a belt correctly, which wouldn’t have salvaged the blue dress, but might at least have helped. Just shy of 11 years after my first encounter with the savviest, scrappiest Jewish newsroom in the business, I’m moving onto a new chapter. Today is my last day as a member of this one-of-a-kind staff.

I’ve thought a lot, in the last several weeks, about what the point of these years has been. The Forward has given me so much, most of it good. As solid an education in journalism as anyone could hope for. An unfiltered and sometimes painful view of the community of which I am a grateful part. An inbox full of correspondents my loved ones sometimes don’t believe are real. (Consider the case of Gayle Kirshenbaum and Gayle Kirschenbaum, two entirely separate writers who sent me pitches for op-eds within 45 minutes of one another one day this spring.)

I’ve written nearly 1,000 pieces. I’ve edited something like double that amount. I’ve had moments of pride, most recently winning my first New York Press Club Award for a feature on the operatic adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. And I’ve had times of dismay — more of them in the last three years than I care to recount.

Above all, I’ve had friends.

In 2021, I went to my former colleague Aiden Pink‘s wedding. It was the first moment when the world felt almost normal after the COVID pandemic. Several Forward alumni traveled to Minneapolis — at one point a surprising candidate for most common Forward staffer hometown — to celebrate. We had a weekend-long sleepover at Ari Feldman‘s mother’s house. We watched Mamma Mia! We piled into a photobooth to take tipsy pictures at a pizzeria. Jenny Singer and I danced in a fluorescent-lit hallway while guarding the room in which Aiden and his wife, Aniko, were having their first quiet moments together as a married couple. In the last moments of the reception, Molly Boigon performed a flabbergastingly good version of the worm.

When we got back to Ari’s house, the power was out. We lit candles on the dining room table, and had the sort of exhausted, giddy conversation I once associated with a certain kind of night in high school. I am largely against the use of superlatives in writing, as anyone I’ve edited will tell you. But that night was magical.

When I think about my time at the Forward, I think about that weekend in the Twin Cities. I think about the editor who hired me, Adam Langer, who over the years went from boss to pal. I think about PJ Grisar, who was the first person to show up to a party I threw last fall celebrating my 10-year anniversary in New York. I think about my predecessor as opinion editor, Laura Adkins, sending me chicken soup one winter when I averaged more than one cold per month. I think about the glorious era when we used to have weekly in-office parties on Wednesday evenings, during which our onetime art director, Kurt Hoffman, used to break out his ukulele and serenade us all in French.

When new people learned about my job here, they tended to focus first on the parts of it that they correctly thought might be hard. It’s a tough time to be a Jew. I know a lot about all the places where swastikas have shown up recently. Once, someone in the comments of a story poetically referred to me as a “Sharia fascist.”

I’ve been called a kapo more times than I can count. And as I’ve helmed our opinion section over the past two and a half years, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of anguish and ire — much of it well-earned, but some symptomatic of willful blindness or excessive ideological allegiance.

All of that is part of life at the Forward. But I’m always surprised when strangers act like my job must be in some way a burden. Truthfully, working here has always been a joy. Because through bad times in the news — and bad times in the business — I’ve always gotten to work with the most remarkable people.

People who will kick into gear as soon as there’s breaking news, no matter where they are or what they’re doing, then spend an idle lunchtime hour discussing the Muppets to whom we feel most spiritually akin. People who have the sharpest insights on what’s really plaguing the Jewish world; the most surprising perspectives on the movies everyone is talking about; and the greatest appetite for bizarre story ideas, like the time I profiled Sen. Jon Ossoff based exclusively on his time at an elite high school ultimate frisbee team.

I have grown up in this newsroom, and I’ve been shaped by it and the glorious, brilliant, offbeat people to whom it’s introduced me. Seeing the world with the particular gaze the Forward fosters — one that’s skeptical of authority, interested in both tradition and its limitations, highly cultural and wryly funny — has taught me how to think, read and write. It’s taught me how to be the kind of Jew I want to be. I was never a Jewish camp kid; Hillel did nothing for me; the Forward is the only real Jewish community I’ve known.

I can’t yet share details on what’s next for me. (If you’re curious, I’ll share the news on Bluesky once it’s time.) One thing I know for sure is that no matter how fabulous my future colleagues might be, nothing will ever displace the Forward in my heart. It hasn’t just been my workplace. It’s really been my home.

The post The most important thing I’ll take away from 11 years at the Forward appeared first on The Forward.