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This organization hired asylum seekers to pack Passover goods for Jews in need
(New York Jewish Week) — At a warehouse in Borough Park, thousands of apples were waiting to be taken off two 18-wheelers, as dozens of volunteers were hard at work putting groceries into bags.
The scene was one part of a massive $1.5 million operation undertaken every year by Masbia, an Orthodox organization that helps provide kosher food for low-income people, to distribute food for Passover to 10,000 families.
But this week, the Passover initiative differed from those of previous years. That’s because most of the people in the warehouse were migrants, the majority of whom were bused to New York from Texas during the past year. Because they are undocumented, they lack work permits, and for many of them, working in Masbia’s warehouse is their first job in the city.
Masbia was one of many organizations to welcome migrants who came from Texas when they arrived at the Port Authority last year, providing them with new shoes to replace pairs that may have broken down during long treks through jungles and other dangerous areas. The group’s executive director, Alex Rappaport, sees employing a group of migrants as another way to help them find their footing in the city.
“Sometimes, you need to turn over every stone to find a way to help people,” Rappaport told the New York Jewish Week.
Passover is the busiest time for Masbia, with hundreds of pallets of food coming in daily to the organization’s three warehouses in Brooklyn and Queens. At Masbia’s Borough Park location, boxes of potatoes and onions lined the sidewalk and stretched down the block. Inside the garage were piles of other Passover goods, stacked two stories high. Volunteers were busy picking produce off the shelves and putting it into bags for delivery drivers who were waiting near the entrance. The operation starts in December, and food distribution begins two weeks before Passover, which starts next Wednesday night.
“These people should have been given work permits,” Rappaport said. “They’re here, ready, willing and able to do beautiful work.”
Masbia CEO Alex Rappaport in front of a truck full of apples in Borough Park, Brooklyn on March 29, 2023. (Jacob Henry)
Rappaport combined the work with a touch of advocacy: Some of the volunteers working alongside the migrants were Jewish high school students, and Rappaport overheard one of them say that “illegal immigrants” were working there. He gathered high schoolers together and began to hold court.
“These people who are working are asylum seekers,” Rappaport told the teens. “They are fully designated as an asylum seeker, meaning to say, they are fully legal, because they have a day in court.”
Rappaport went on to discuss how if a person jaywalks, they are technically breaking the law, but are not referred to as “an illegal.”
“There’s never a person that turns into ‘an illegal,’” Rappaport said. “The term is just a very bad term. A person might not have documents, but these are people coming from the border who are looking for a new future. It’s an opportunity. They asked for asylum.”
The opportunity Masbia is providing comes via a partnership with La Colmena, a nonprofit that helps find jobs for day laborers, domestic workers and low-wage immigrant workers in from Staten Island.
Kimberly Vega, the workforce manager of La Colmena, told the New York Jewish Week that the group saw “an influx of asylum seekers” that began in August and is still ongoing. Vega has a list of 190 workers looking for jobs. Masbia provided work for 15.
“We’re facing this crisis at the moment,” Vega said. “We have the amount of workers, but we don’t have the jobs. They face all these challenges because they don’t have a permit or any documentation, so we’re very thankful for this opportunity that came up through Masbia.”
Vega added that many of the workers are staying in homeless shelters provided by the city in Staten Island. Many of the workers drop their kids off at school in the morning, then come to Brooklyn to work throughout the day. “They got shipped on a bus, arrived here and were transported to a shelter,” Vega said.
According to NPR, it’s estimated that up to 50,000 migrants were moved to New York over the past year by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, called Abbott’s actions “inhumane.”
In a New York Post op-ed published last August, Abbott wrote that Adams was hypocritical for calling New York a sanctuary city, then complained about the new arrivals.
On Twitter, Adams’ press secretary Fabian Levy wrote that the mayor is “welcoming asylum seekers with open arms.”
Vega said the migrants working at the Masbia warehouse were being paid based on a law that has been used to help undocumented workers earn income. According to the State Department of Labor, nonprofits may give volunteers stipends or reimbursements. Therefore, Vega said, even though a migrant worker is only a volunteer, they can still be paid by a nonprofit organization. Masbia and La Colmena would not disclose how much the workers were being paid.
Asylum seekers working at a Masbia warehouse in Brooklyn on March 29, 2023. (Jacob Henry)
Gledys, 30, a migrant working at the warehouse, told the New York Jewish Week that she came to New York from Venezuela after being bussed here from Texas last October.
Gledys, who did not give her full name for fear of her family being harmed, said through a translator that when she was living in Venezuela, “There’s a certain political view that everyone has to have.”
“If you even think differently, you can’t even speak amongst your community, because then they will turn on you,” Gledys said. “My husband was a police officer there, and because of that reason, we had to leave.”
When she arrived in New York, Gledys said she was “hit with the reality that it’s hard to find a job because you need certain permits.”
“I’m working really hard [at Masbia] and hoping this will open my doors,” Gledys said. “They’ll be able to see that I’m a hard worker and [I will] gain experience for more opportunities to open up.”
She added that she was thankful that her children were able to begin attending public school only a few days after she arrived. The city also helped provide daycare for her.
“No other country has done that,” Gledys said. “It’s more than enough. I’m not suffering, and I’m grateful. I’m definitely very hopeful because now I can see a different future for my children, a different future for myself.”
Another worker named Moises, 39, who likewise did not provide his full name due to fear for his family’s safety, said he came to New York from Venezuela via Texas in January after entering immigration custody.
“During those days, we were still cuffed and I was separated from my family,” Moises said. His wife and children eventually made it to New York, and they were reunited.
He said that in Venezuela, inflation was so rampant that he was only making $7 to $10 a week.
“People are really struggling,” Moises said. “There are also a lot of political issues as well. If the community tries to step up and do a protest, you have the military stepping in and shooting directly at civilians. We’re really running away, because we were so scared.”
He said he was worried about how he was going to feed his family, but was also thankful for the help they received when they first arrived, including finding a place to stay in a shelter, and now the job at Masbia.
“I want to feel independent,” Moises said. “With a job like this, I can be more independent. I understand it’s a temporary job, but hopefully in the next couple of months, I can find something that is no longer temporary.”
Rappaport feels that there’s a connection between the migrants’ stories and the holiday they’re helping prepare for because the Jewish people were also strangers in Egypt. “The Bible says, ‘You should love the stranger, the newcomer,’” Rappaport said. “There is that idea of people making a long journey to a promised land. These people went through the jungle.”
He added, “It’s beautiful to connect the Jewish story of Exodus to this story of the challenge of the asylum seekers.
“People take their whole family and go for thousands of miles through very dangerous terrain,” Rapport said. “They must be running from something. It’s not utopia yet, but we’re celebrating some freedom. And they’re still in the middle of their story.”
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The post This organization hired asylum seekers to pack Passover goods for Jews in need appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Bret Stephens, a stalwart Israel defender, calls out ‘Jewish terrorists’ in West Bank
(JTA) — Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist known as one of the paper’s most consistent defenders of Israel, used his Tuesday column to take direct aim at the country’s handling of settler violence in the West Bank — warning that unchecked attacks now pose a threat to Israel’s security and to Zionism itself.
Stephens, who has spent years pushing back on what he sees as double standards applied to Israel, wrote that he decided to speak out against what he called “Jewish terrorists” despite his reluctance to feed the volume of global condemnation facing Israel.
“That’s not only because the terrorism is a menace to Palestinian lives and property, or an affront to Jewish ethics, or a stain on Israel’s reputation — though it’s all those things,” he wrote. “It’s also a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.”
Stephens’s column drew heavily on a public letter sent Sunday to President Trump by Matan Vilnai, a retired IDF deputy chief of staff, on behalf of Commanders for Israel’s Security, an organization representing hundreds of retired senior Israeli officers. The letter cautioned that Israeli security services have been effective against Palestinian terror groups but hamstrung when it comes to curbing Jewish extremists. The letter warned about the consequences of Israeli inaction in curbing attacks on Palestinians.
“Unless arrested swiftly and decisively, escalating violence in the West Bank is poised to ignite the region and carries severe ramifications for both Israeli security and U.S. regional interests,” wrote Vilnai.
Stephens pointed to last week’s rampage by extremist settlers through several Palestinian villages — attacks that reportedly included arson at a home and two mosques and an assault on a stonecutting factory — as evidence the problem has become routine rather than exceptional. He cited Israeli military figures showing nationalistic and settler-related crimes climbed to 867 incidents in 2025, up from 682 the year before.
Stephens also cited Eran Shamir-Borer of the Israel Democracy Institute, a former IDF legal official, who told him the government has specifically declined to place suspected Jewish settlers under administrative detention. The practice, imprisoning individuals without formal charges, is regularly deployed against suspected Palestinian terrorists.
The columnist dismissed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public framing of the violence as the work of roughly 150 “juvenile delinquents,” as he did in an interview with NBC earlier this month. Stephens argued that a government capable of eliminating a Hamas commander deep inside Iran cannot plausibly claim it’s unable to rein in a few hundred vigilantes.
Stephens is known, and widely admired within the pro-Israel community, for his robust defense of Israel, from refuting the charge of “genocide” directed at Israel to condemning what he has called the “hyperbolic and often conspiratorial hatred of the country.” Editor of the conservative Jewish thought journal Sapir, Stephens was also chosen to give the annual “State of World Jewry” address at the 92nd Street Y earlier this year.
“I think it is really important that people like Bret Stephens are speaking up about settler violence, and I think that it also shows how terrible that it’s become,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, in an interview with JTA. “Even people who are pretty, let’s say, hesitant or who almost never criticize Israeli policy are speaking up.”
But she also suggested that the issue goes beyond a failure to enforce the law or hold settlers accountable, and instead reflects the priorities of Netanyahu’s right-wing government.
“This is actually government policy because this is violence that is designed to take more and more of the West Bank,” said Jacobs. “There’s already been not just violence, but expulsions, shoving Palestinians to smaller and smaller areas and, ultimately, annexing the West Bank or at least as much of it as possible.”
Liberal Jewish groups like T’ruah, including Torat Zedek and Bnei Avraham in Israel and the U.S-based groups Smol Emuni, J Street and New Israel Fund, regularly condemn the settler violence and call on Israeli security forces to hold the perpetrators accountable. They also take part in “protective presence” visits to the West Bank in solidarity with Palestinians threatened by Jewish settlers.
The largest Jewish organizations have been less vocal on the topic, although the American Jewish Committee and the Union for Reform Judaism have issued statements condemning settler violence.
Right-leaning groups have either downplayed the extent of the violence or say Jews living in the West Bank have been provoked by neighboring Palestinians. On the same day that Stephens’s column appeared, the media watchdog group HonestReporting ran an article saying that the major news outlets disproportionately focus on settler violence, and run many fewer articles about Palestinian attacks on Jewish civilians. It also cited official Israeli data suggesting that violence by Jewish civilians in the West Bank had declined significantly since March.
Nevertheless, Stephens appeared to be echoing a growing sentiment even on the right that the settler violence is both wrong and a black eye for Israel at a time when its reputation is suffering around the world.
“I don’t think there are many supporters of Israel in the U.S. who are happy with how Israel has handled, or really mishandled, settler violence,” said David E. Bernstein, a professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School and a frequent commentator on Jewish affairs, in an email exchange with JTA. “To me, it’s anti-Zionist to allow settlers to flout the law and public policy, whether by violence or by setting up illegal outposts, because Zionism means accepting the legitimacy of the Israeli state, and radical settlers who don’t are no different than extremist Haredim [Orthodox] in not doing so.”
Last week, Israel’s Channel 13 reported that the government had approved a plan in March to tackle violence by extremist settlers but kept the plan secret due “to political considerations.” The report didn’t say whether the plan has been implemented.
The post Bret Stephens, a stalwart Israel defender, calls out ‘Jewish terrorists’ in West Bank appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu drags Mamdani into his reelection campaign as face of antisemitism
For nearly two years, Zohran Mamdani has made Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a central political target. Now Netanyahu is making Mamdani part of his own reelection campaign.
The 50-second video released Wednesday on Netanyahu’s political social media channels builds on comments the Israeli leader made on Fox News this week, portraying Mamdani as the face of a worldwide surge of antisemitism directed at Israel. It intersperses footage of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and antisemitic incidents with recent clips of Mamdani condemning Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war after the mayor backed off a vow to have the Israeli prime minister arrested during an upcoming visit to New York. It also features Mamdani’s wife, artist Rama Duwaji, who liked social media posts that supported Palestinians immediately after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. (Mamdani said his wife is a private citizen and does not work in his administration.)
The clip ends: “No one will stop me from fighting for the truth of Israel.”
The video comes as Netanyahu faces one of the toughest reelection campaigns of his political career, trailing his rivals ahead of Israel’s Oct. 27 election, which could determine not only his political future, but also his legacy and potentially his freedom as he faces a corruption trial.
The fight with Mamdani has become politically useful for Netanyahu. His main rivals — former Israel Defense Forces chief Gadi Eisenkot and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett — are seen as more moderate leaders who could rebuild strained ties with Democrats and win back support for Israel among Americans.
Joel Rubin, a Democratic commentator and foreign policy expert, said in an interview that turning Mamdani into a symbol of today’s Democratic Party gives Netanyahu a way to challenge one of his rivals’ central arguments that they are better positioned to course-correct the U.S. political shift against Israel. “For Netanyahu, it’s very important to try to portray the Democrats as Mamdani and make the argument that only he can stand up to that,” Rubin said.
Mamdani has positioned himself as a prominent progressive critic of Israel amid the war in Gaza, a position that helped propel his rise and which has become increasingly part of national Democratic Party politics.
Mamdani’s high-profile confrontation with Netanyahu escalated when he announced a review of whether he had the legal power to arrest the Israeli prime minister when he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September. Experts on Israeli politics warned of an unintended consequence: would allowing Netanyahu to cast himself once again as Israel’s defender against international efforts to isolate the Jewish state.
“Many Israelis are sick of him and hope to vote him out,” Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro wrote on X on Saturday. “The only possible outcome of a fruitless attempt to arrest him in NYC would be to give him a political boost at home. That would be an own goal.”
Some political strategists argue that Mamdani and his allies have little reason to mind if Netanyahu remains in power. “I bet they’re rooting for Bibi, in a perverse way,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder and executive vice president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, in an interview with the Forward discussing how Israel is reshaping Democratic politics.
While still serving as a New York state Assembly member, Mamdani zeroed in on the Israeli prime minister as an enemy, leading chants of “Netanyahu, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” during a protest in Oct. 2023.
Throughout his mayoral campaign last year, Mamdani repeatedly injected Netanyahu into New York politics., Mamdani first pledged to arrest Netanyahu shortly after he launched his campaign. According to a report, members of Mamdani’s inner circle were pushing for him to make this arrest declaration. After his election, already knowing the city lacked the authority to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani proceeded with the review. When it concluded he did not have the power to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani used a mayoral address to declare him a war criminal and then encouraged New Yorkers to protest him on his UN visit. Critics say the episode was a calculated political move aimed at energizing the pro-Palestinian and progressive base that helped elect him.
“There is a core principle amongst the left in American politics that having someone to organize against is crucial to growing numbers and persuasion, and for Mamdani, having the foil of Netanyahu is an incredibly valuable tool for motivating support,” said Rubin, who led Jewish outreach for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.
Whether that principle translates into votes for Netanyahu’s coalition in Israel’s Oct. 27 election remains to be seen. At the moment, Mamdani and Netanyahu have become unlikely political assets for each other, each giving the other a powerful opponent to campaign against.
The post Netanyahu drags Mamdani into his reelection campaign as face of antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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As Conservative rabbis, we’re rethinking our communities’ policies toward interfaith families
(JTA) — As Conservative/Masorti rabbis, we see firsthand the joy of couples building a life together in the Jewish community, and the pain of those who feel shut out because one of them is not Jewish.
We think of the community member, though not Jewish, who developed a profound love for davening (prayer) and Torah study, and has supported his children’s and grandchildren’s Jewish education and observance of mitzvot. We think of another community member who faithfully drove her four children to Hebrew school for years and, after her youngest child’s bat mitzvah, chose to convert to Judaism herself.
It is time for our halacha, or Jewish law, to address issues facing intermarried couples and families robustly.
The two of us had the honor of joining colleagues in co-authoring a teshuvah — a rabbinic response to questions of Jewish law — that does just that. The Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has approved a teshuvah that seeks to honor these couples and families and their commitment to Jewish life in our congregations and communities.
Since we are part of a movement that balances a commitment to halacha with the realities of modern life, our work is grounded in traditional Jewish texts, laws and principles while also reflecting the core belief that welcoming others and extending hospitality are essential Jewish values.
Based on halacha and Jewish tradition, the teshuvah affirms the longstanding standard of Conservative/Masorti rabbis that clergy may officiate only at weddings where both partners are Jewish. It emphasizes that while a wedding is a significant moment that often singularly drives these conversations, there are many other important life-cycle moments that rabbis can offer as occasions for Jewish celebration and reaffirmations of commitment to mitzvot.
Through this teshuvah, we formalize a public mishebeirakh (blessing) before or after the wedding day for a couple committed to building an exclusively Jewish home, as well as a hanukkat habayit ceremony to dedicate their home.
We welcome non-Jewish parents on the bimah during their children’s b’nei mitzvah and offer “mazal tov” and other basic gestures of inclusion to intermarried couples, both of which were once considered unacceptable. Our goal in doing so is to inspire the couple and family to grow in Jewish living.
We affirm that synagogues may not hire intermarried individuals as clergy but may hire intermarried individuals for other roles, and that rabbis may officiate at funerals for non-Jewish family members and support a Jewish mourning process when a non-Jewish loved one dies.
It’s been about 40 years since the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which sets halachic policy for our movement internationally, broadly addressed questions around intermarried couples and families. We have learned over time that those intermarried couples who choose to embrace Jewish life are integral to the fabric of Conservative/Masorti communities.
We invite these couples to engage meaningfully in Jewish practice at home and in community, and, if they are having children, to raise them as Jews. Sometimes they may even choose to convert to Judaism at some point.
We do so because, as rabbis, we enjoy the privilege of being invited into people’s lives, and our role is both pastoral and educational. As people figure out their own identities and relationships, our role is to help them integrate Jewish tradition. As couples turn toward each other and seek to integrate Judaism into their lives, we are here to help them chart a course and to bring Torah into the conversation and observance of mitzvot into their lives.
We aim to inspire the couple to grow in Jewish living, observing mitzvot, studying Torah and searching for God in daily life. To do so, we must create gateways so everyone can find a place to learn and find joy and inspiration in our traditions, within the boundaries of halachic standards and principles.
Many of the practices in the teshuvah are already in place in some communities. Some offer solutions that speak most directly to realities in North America, and we call on local rabbis to interpret them in light of the circumstances in their local communities.
In the days of the Mishnah and the Talmud, when faced with new and challenging circumstances, our rabbis found creative and often beautiful solutions to embody the Torah as they understood it. As we follow in their footsteps, we use the wisdom we have inherited to both uphold and transform those values and honor the halachic principles that are central to our rabbinates and communities.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
The post As Conservative rabbis, we’re rethinking our communities’ policies toward interfaith families appeared first on The Forward.
