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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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Evan Gershkovich’s prison memoir begins with a Soviet Jewish exodus
A few days after Russian security agents arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on a trip in March 2023, his lawyers showed him a slip of paper with messages from home. He was being held alone, in what Russian prisons call “quarantine:” two weeks without a cellmate before joining the general population. His eyes went straight to the note from his mother.
Soon he would start getting kosher food, Ella Milman wrote, and then added: “If you come home with sidelocks, I’ll understand.”
It was a joke, and a very Jewish one. Gershkovich grew up in a secular family of Soviet émigrés, where being Jewish had more to do with family history and dark humor than with religious practice. His mother was ribbing him that a few weeks of kosher prison food might send him home looking like a yeshiva boy.
Sitting across from the investigator building his espionage case, Gershkovich grinned. His mother, he realized, still had her sense of humor, and that was exactly what he needed.
The kosher food wasn’t a joke. That night, with Passover days away, a local rabbi sent him stacks of matzo.
The scene appears in This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story, Gershkovich’s memoir of his arrest, his 16 months behind bars and his release in the most elaborate U.S.-Russia prisoner swap since the Cold War. The book was published Tuesday.
Most of the coverage is about the prison. But Jewish history runs through the book from its first pages. Gershkovich’s great-grandfather was arrested during Stalin’s purges and vanished. His mother was laughed out of a journalism school application once the clerk saw her passport. And when he moved to Moscow as a young reporter, a Russian coworker needled him with an old stereotype about Jews and money.
The family that left
Gershkovich was born in New Jersey in 1991, two months before the Soviet Union fell apart. His parents had come over in 1979. Thousands of Soviet Jews were leaving at the time, helped by a U.S. law that linked trade with Moscow to whether its citizens were allowed to emigrate.
His mother flew out of Leningrad with her mother and ended up in Detroit. His father’s family came from Odessa and settled in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood people call Little Odessa. In those years, his father later joked, Soviet Jews who ran into each other on the street skipped the hellos and just asked where the other was going.
For his father’s side, the decision was easy. Gershkovich’s great-grandfather was arrested in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s purges, and never seen again. His grandfather Mark spent years moving from city to city, afraid of being targeted next, and later dreaded the day his own son would be drafted into the Soviet army.
A Jew on paper
Gershkovich’s mother, Ella, was born in 1957, a few years after the “doctors’ plot,” a Stalin-era campaign that accused Jewish physicians of conspiring to kill Soviet leaders. One of the doctors caught up in it had been a neighbor in her family’s communal apartment.
Her father had wanted to name her Etya, after his late sister. Worried that an obviously Jewish name would draw attention, her mother pushed for Ella instead. It didn’t matter. The family name Milman gave her away, and Soviet passports listed each citizen’s ethnicity. Hers said “Jew.”
Ella dreamed of becoming a writer. When she applied to the journalism department at Leningrad State University, the woman taking her application glanced at her passport and laughed. She studied shipbuilding instead, listened to the Rolling Stones, and heard rumors that the Kremlin planned to deport Jews to Birobidzhan, a remote Soviet region near the Chinese border that had apparently been set up as a Jewish homeland.
When she finally emigrated to America at 22, she sewed a pair of gold earrings from her late father into her skirt’s waistband to get them past customs. Once the plane took off, she couldn’t stop laughing and crying.
A generation later, her son became the journalist she wasn’t allowed to be, and then a prisoner of the state that had turned her away.
Ella and her husand settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where Gershkovich and his sister spent Saturday mornings with a Russian tutor, and holidays meant trips to the Russian groceries and Uzbek grills of Brighton Beach. Gershkovich came to think of himself as Jewish-Russian-American. Russia’s war in Ukraine later forced him to ask why that label had never included Ukraine, given that his father’s family came from Odessa.
The empty chair
In 2017, Gershkovich moved to Moscow to report for The Moscow Times. On one of his first days, he asked a colleague when staff got paid. She laughed and told him his Odessan roots were showing, a jab about Jews and money that served as his introduction to Russian workplace culture.
On a later trip to Odessa, he visited a Jewish museum that displayed a 1953 Soviet propaganda article from the doctors’ plot era. It claimed that the Joint, the New York-based Jewish relief organization, was a front for American intelligence. Gershkovich recalls thinking that Moscow was getting paranoid again, while hoping things hadn’t gotten that bad. A few years later, Russia accused him of spying for the United States.
Gershkovich’s arrest came a week before Passover. That spring, many American Jews left an empty seat for him at their Seders, and activists later sent him letters for Rosh Hashanah. Both gestures deliberately echoed the movement to free Soviet Jewry, the same campaign that had helped free his parents. Natan Sharansky, the most famous Soviet Jewish dissident, who was himself released in a 1986 prisoner swap, advocated publicly for his release.
In July 2024, two weeks after a Russian court sentenced Gershkovich to 16 years in a maximum-security prison, he was freed in a prisoner exchange in Ankara, Turkey. Jewish groups celebrated, and the Orthodox Union posted the traditional blessing thanking God for freeing captives.
His great-grandfather was taken in 1937 and never came home. Eighty-seven years later, his great-grandson did.
The post Evan Gershkovich’s prison memoir begins with a Soviet Jewish exodus appeared first on The Forward.
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More Michigan Jews sign a petition pressuring El-Sayed on Israel. Will it matter?
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR – The activists on the Zoom supporting Abdul El-Sayed knew they faced an uphill climb when it came to persuading their fellow Jewish Democrats to overcome their concerns about the Michigan Senate candidate and vote for their party’s nominee despite his strong disapproval of Israel.
Two progressive Jews, former Biden administration appointee Sam Bagenstos and Detroit Jews for Justice co-founder Hayley Sakwa, made the Jewish case for the candidate to a sometimes skeptical, sometimes combative crowd of around 30 people on Sunday night.
Sakwa and Bagenstos urged voters to prioritize the chance to put a check on the larger Trump agenda – including heavy immigration crackdowns and the rightward tilt of the federal judiciary – given that the Michigan seat could help determine who controls the legislative chamber.
But their appeal wasn’t enough for several of the people on the call, who less than two days later would sign on to the “Nonnegotiables” petition. Spearheaded by a group of Michigan Jewish clergy, the open letter calls for El-Sayed to moderate his views on Israel and affirm more vocal support for Jews in politics as a condition for earning their votes.
The 17 new names to the petition, shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ahead of their release on Tuesday morning, include state Rep. Noah Arbit, the founder of the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus.
Arbit recently gave a speech denouncing antisemitism on the floor of the Michigan House and has been critical of El-Sayed publicly: After progressive Jews recently hosted the candidate for a Rosh Hashanah dinner at their house, the representative accused them of “tokenism.” (Arbit declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.)
Other new names on the list include an elected University of Michigan regent and prominent local attorney, as well as several board members of the Jewish Democratic caucus, which itself is not endorsing a candidate in the race.
Concerns raised on the Sunday night Zoom call included El-Sayed’s opposition to Iron Dome funding for Israel and his earlier campaigning with anti-Israel streamer Hasan Piker, whom he has since distanced himself from. Some said they were worried he could open a door to a more hostile Democratic Party for Jews.
“With Abdul it sort of feels like letting a fox into the henhouse,” one said.
“I refuse to be anyone’s dhimmi,” another wrote in the chat, referring to a term for non-Muslims living under Islamic rule.
Yet any pressure Jewish Democratic critics of El-Sayed hope to place on the candidate are partly balanced out by the work of those such as Sakwa, who along with other Jewish liberals has to date secured 900 signatures pledging to vote for El-Sayed. A competing letter of Jewish voters pledging to back his Republican challenger, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, has picked up 524.
At the same time, the broader Democratic Party has ramped up its efforts to get elected officials in line behind the nominee. The El-Sayed campaign has yet to respond publicly to the “Nonnegotiables,” and with little more than a month to go before Election Day, it might not need to.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned with El-Sayed last week in Detroit, and the liberal-leaning editorial board of the Detroit Free Press, the state’s largest daily newspaper, endorsed the former county health director over the weekend.
The Free Press wrote that its own endorsement was against an “extremist” — referring to Rogers and President Donald Trump — in language that one bloc of Jewish voters also used to refer to their own decision to vote for Rogers over El-Sayed.
In addition, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish and has fiercely criticized El-Sayed for his past comments about Jews and Israel, endorsed and appeared with the candidate on a local liberal podcast hosted by a Jewish woman to project unity.
“There is no choice,” Nessel said.
But the conversation demonstrated that tensions still remain even with many Jewish Democrats who have thrown in their lot with El-Sayed.
“Is there space for a Jewish Zionist like myself?” she asked him. “Is there space for us in the big tent of the Democratic Party?”
“I believe in a big tent,” he answered. “I am committed to having a tent where we march in lock step on the 95% of issues that we agree on.”
But the attorney general, who cited the risk of antisemitic threats as the reason she skipped the party convention earlier this year, wasn’t done.
“The question many of us have is: Are you seeking our votes?” Nessel asked El-Sayed. “Do they matter to you?”
“Yes,” the candidate responded. “If you trust that I’ll lead well for the community, even if there’s an issue on which we deeply disagree, then I hope I can earn your vote.” Later, El-Sayed said, “I look forward to working” on the Jewish American Security Act, a bipartisan bill to institute new Jewish security measures, including in synagogues and on college campuses.
“We’ve had an uptick in antisemitism, and it is critical to protect Jewish Americans,” El-Sayed said.
As with Nessel, El-Sayed’s candidacy is pushing other Jewish Democrats to perform a difficult two-step: pushing for the party platform and against Trump, without getting too close to the candidate himself.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America, whose CEO, Halie Soifer, is a Michigan native, is also not endorsing in the race. Yet Soifer told JTA, “Jewish voters will support Democrats in large numbers in the midterms, including in Michigan.” She predicted that Rogers wouldn’t earn more than one-quarter of the Jewish vote.
“Jewish voters recognize that a vote for any Republican in 2026 is a vote for Donald Trump,” Soifer told JTA over text. “We know Jewish voters are a critical component of a winning Democratic coalition.”
Decky Alexander, who chairs the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus, pointed to consistently high Democratic voting records for Jews in arguing that Jews still matter to the party’s coalition. She also favorably noted the Democratic National Committee’s recent announcement that it would establish a “Jewish American Council,” to convene in 2027.
“We can’t be distilled down to one vote or one idea,” Alexander told JTA.
One part of the state’s Jewish Democratic bloc unlikely to support El-Sayed: members of Temple Israel, the country’s largest Reform congregation. Speaking to the national publication The Free Press last week, several members, including a preschool teacher who was in the building when it was attacked in March, said El-Sayed’s apology for his earlier remarks about the temple was insufficient and that they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him.
“No thinking Jew could vote for Abdul El-Sayed,” a former temple president told The Free Press.
None of the synagogue’s clergy signed the “Nonnegotiables” letter, or any other Jewish letter circulating about El-Sayed. But one of the temple’s rabbis told congregants in a Kol Nidre sermon that they had a say in drafting it, stating, “Our full participation in American political life is also non-negotiable.”
“No one should have to pass a test about Israel to be welcomed into a coalition on a campus or in a political party,” Rabbi Josh Bennett told his congregation, which had convened in the Temple Israel building for the High Holidays for the first time since the March attack. Rabbi Jen Lader, also of Temple Israel, recently testified before Congress to advocate for the Jewish American Security Act.
As Rogers has looked to win over dissatisfied Jews to his campaign, he has also moved toward El-Sayed on at least one issue tangentially related to Israel: opposition to the war in Iran. Initially a supporter of the war, Rogers in recent days has said he thinks it should “end quickly.”
El-Sayed, meanwhile, has raised eyebrows of his own in recent days. He dithered on denouncing the Iranian regime when urged to by an Iranian Christian college student, and appeared at a Dearborn fundraiser with Osama Siblani, a local Arab-American activist and newspaper publisher who once stated at a rally, “We are not going to be intimidated by staying silent when they say Hamas is a terrorist organization.”
The “Nonnegotiables” petition was launched earlier this month by a group of more than a dozen Michigan Jewish clergy after a series of apologies by El-Sayed to Jewish audiences for past comments he had made about the Temple Israel attack. The candidate needs to do more to earn the community’s confidence, the campaign’s organizers have told JTA.
“A large number of Jews haven’t decided how they will vote,” David Kramer, the caucus’s vice chair and one of the new signers, told JTA about the letter’s potential influence. “I speak to these people every day. Regardless of how they vote, Michigan Jews want and deserve to feel safe and have a seat at the table.”
As the Zoom call wrapped, some of the assembled Jews said they would vote for El-Sayed, even if reluctantly. Alexander of the state’s Jewish Democratic Caucus, who signed the letter supporting him, told the crowd the candidate has nothing to hide, even if they don’t like what he says.
“He’s basically stated what he believes,” she said. “And you have to decide if that’s the word for you.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Irish national soccer team won’t shake hands with Israel after win
(JTA) — It only took 25 minutes of play for the Irish national soccer team to build a 3-0 lead over Israel in the countries’ UEFA Nations League B match on Sunday. But there were decades of bad blood that preceded Ireland’s shutout victory in a game dominated more by the geopolitics of the Gaza war than about sports. One soccer writer described it as “arguably one of the most contentious football matches of this century.”
At the match, held in a mostly empty stadium in the neutral site of Debrecen, Hungary, the Irish players wore black armbands and bowed their heads in protest during the Israeli national anthem. There were no pre- or postgame handshakes, and one Irish player declined to participate altogether, citing his “personal belief that the killing of innocent people is wrong.”
Ireland’s soccer federation did not reserve tickets for its fans, and the country’s public broadcaster scaled back its coverage of the game. The teams are set to meet again on Oct. 4 in Serbia, this time with Ireland as the “home” team.
Ireland and Israel have a long history of icy relations. Ireland became the first member of the European Union to call for an independent Palestinian country in 1980, and was among the first of the Western European countries to recognize an official Palestinian state in 2024. Israel closed its embassy in Dublin in response. Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin has rejected claims that his country’s sharp criticism of Israel bleeds into antisemitism.
In the months leading up to Sunday’s match, Ireland’s football governing body faced intense pressure to boycott the match. At a meeting in July, the Football Association of Ireland voted 75-32, with three abstentions, in favor of proceeding with the match, “while acknowledging the strength of feeling regarding support for Palestine.” The motion also noted that a boycott would come with UEFA sanctions, both financial and competitive: In League B matches, mid-tier nations seek to advance to the top division and boost their chances of qualifying for the quadrennial World Cup tournament. The Irish team itself also held a last-minute vote over whether to participate.
Earlier this month, more than 160 Irish athletes and sports figures signed an open letter calling on the national team to pull out of the match. The signatories included former Irish national team head coach Brian Kerr — who had led Ireland to a 2-2 draw against Israel in a 2005 match in Dublin that also took place amid protests.
Former Irish national team star Kevin Kilbane also authored a column in The Irish Times, writing, “Ireland should not play Israel. Not in Dublin, not in Hungary, not in Serbia. Not when Israel is committing genocide.” Israel denies the charge of genocide.
There were also a number of public barbs exchanged between leaders of the two countries and their football associations.
At a press conference last week, Irish coach Heimir Hallgrímsson replied to questions about the match by saying, “We are not playing with genocide, we are playing against genocide. We are playing against Israel; we are not playing with Israel.”
Israel’s football association responded to that comment with a post on X, writing, “We have contributed to the world and humanity in countless fields, earning an impressive number of Nobel Prizes along the way. Unfortunately, we have not yet found a cure for stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy displayed by the @IrelandFootball team coach. We’re not playing with ignorance, hypocrisy and stupidity. We’re playing against the coach who embodies them.”
That drew a rebuke from Martin, who told reporters, “They are unacceptable remarks and should be withdrawn.”
And on Sunday, the morning of the match, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar posted a lengthy tweet referencing the 1939 Irish squad that gave a Nazi salute before a game against the German national team.
“Almost 90 years have passed. Ireland’s unique talent for finding itself on the wrong side of history remains intact,” Sa’ar wrote. “Back then, they gave the Nazi salute. This time, they stand on the side of Palestinian terrorism. Above the black armbands the Irish players will wear tonight flies the black flag of jihadism.”
After the match, Israeli captain Manor Solomon said the Irish players who bowed their heads during the Israeli anthem “don’t interest me.”
“We have a country 10 times better than theirs, stronger, an amazing country with amazing people,” said Solomon, who plays in the English Championship league. “We are proud to wear the team shirt and to be Israelis. We are proud of our state and of our soldiers. [The Irish] can play all their tricks. We are Israelis and love the country. And that will always be the case.”
The post Irish national soccer team won’t shake hands with Israel after win appeared first on The Forward.
