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What will become of the Dutch farm school that saved my father from the Nazis?
In North Holland, a grand community house rises above neighboring farms. Built in 1936 by students of Werkdorp Wieringermeer (Werkdorp means “work village”; Wieringermeer was the name of the township), the building held the dining room and classrooms of a Jewish farm school. A stunning example of Amsterdam School architecture, the Werkdorp’s brick and cobalt-blue facade dominates the polder, or land claimed from the sea.
Today, the land grows tulips. Nearby, Slootdorp (“Ditch Village”) honors the canals that carry the water away.
In 1939, the school sheltered 300 German-speaking Jewish students, including this reporter’s father, who arrived, his head shaved, on Jan. 4, from Buchenwald.
Why a Jewish farm school? In the 1930s, most young German and Austrian Jews were city dwellers and had no idea how to milk a cow, raise chickens, or plow land. But as the Nazis barred Jews from education and professions, farm laborers were the immigrants most wanted by the handful of countries accepting Jewish refugees.
Some 30 such training schools were established in Germany, modeled on the hachsharah throughout Europe that taught Jewish youth the skills to settle in what was then Palestine. The Werkdorp, the largest in Holland, was non-Zionist. Its objective was to send young farmers to any country that would take them.
Today, volunteers have assembled a grassroots museum that showcases the Werkdorp’s years, 1934 to 1941. Pinned to the walls inside are pictures taken by the Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac, who visited in 1938, and by the Dutch photojournalist Willem van de Poll. They show students haying, plowing, feeding chickens, baking bread.
Also on the walls are images of the nearly 200 Werkdorpers who were not as lucky as my father. The Nazi official Klaus Barbie — who became known as the “Butcher of Lyon” for his harsh treatment of resistance fighters there — rounded up the Werkdorpers in 1941 and sent them east to concentration camps, where they were murdered.
A scroll of those victims’ names hangs near the entrance. In the huge kitchen, you can still see the kosher sinks, one tiled red and white for dishes for meat, the other black and white for dairy. Otherwise, the three floors of the great hall stand largely empty.
Protected from demolition by the Netherlands Agency for Cultural Heritage, the community house and its land have been owned since 2008 by Joep Karel who runs a private real estate company that builds housing. Karel pays for the building’s upkeep and opens it to cultural groups and schools.
But the developer has a grander plan. He wants to create a modern memorial center that tells the story of the Werkdorpers and the polder. To fund his venture, he would erect housing behind the community house, to be rented by migrant workers. In April 2020, the council of Hollands Kroon — the Crown of Holland, as the township is called today — approved such housing for 160 workers.
The organizers of the museum are uncertain: Will the project enhance their efforts, or thwart them?
A hero or a collaborator?
North Holland juts like the thumb of a right mitten into the North Sea. A decade before the community house was inaugurated in January 1937, the land beneath it was seabed. The first students, 11 boys and four girls, arrived in 1934 to live in barracks that had housed the polder’s builders. Their task: to build a school.
The farm school admitted refugees for a two-year course. Its purpose was to help them emigrate, the only way The Hague would allow the school to function. Residents spoke German; there was no need to learn the language of one’s temporary home.
Gertrude van Tijn, a leader of the Dutch Jewish refugees committee — tasked with finding countries that would accept thousands of Germans and Austrians forced to flee the Nazis — handled admissions. Most of the Werkdorp’s budget came from Dutch Jewish donors, with contributions from Jewish groups in Britain and America. Students’ families paid fees if they could.
The school was internationally recognized. James G. McDonald, the American high commissioner for refugees of the League of Nations, attended its opening ceremony. The legal scholar Norman Bentwich praised the village in The Manchester Guardian. Although the school was non-Zionist, Henrietta Szold, a leader of Youth Aliyah, brought 20 German teenagers there in 1936.
Werkdorp Wierengermeer helped at least 500 German and Austrian Jews, ages 15-25, escape the Nazi regime.
It was Van Tijn, a German Jew who’d married a Dutchman, who got my father, George Landecker, out of Buchenwald. He had been arrested in Frankfurt on Kristallnacht, the November 1938 pogrom, and sent east by train to Buchenwald.
In the camp he met his friends and teachers from Gross Breesen, a farm school in eastern Germany, from which he had graduated that May. Breesen was the Werkdorp’s sister farm school. By admitting the Breeseners and my father to the Werkdorp, Van Tijn got Dutch entry permits for all.
For the Gestapo in January 1939, such proof that a prisoner could leave Germany secured freedom.
Van Tijn saved thousands of young people like my father, but she worked with the Nazis to do so. After the war, historians and people seeking to repatriate Dutch Jews called her a collaborator. She moved to the United States and wrote a memoir, in which she criticized other Jewish leaders for their decisions under German rule. According to her biographer Bernard Wasserstein, she never published the memoir because she didn’t want to make money from describing the atrocities she had seen.
When my father arrived in 1939, the Werkdorpers were cultivating 150 acres — there was wheat, oats, rye, barley, and sugar beets for the animals: 60 cows, 40 sheep, and 12 workhorses. The residents raised chickens, grew vegetables, and baked their own bread. The school taught carpentry, welding and plumbing, skills I would see my father use, not always deftly, later as a dairy farmer in New York state. (Dad was a good farmer, but he was less than expert in all the other skills a farmer needs.)
My father got a visa to America and left Rotterdam on the steamship Veendam, arriving in New York on Feb. 5, 1940. Three months later, the Nazis invaded Holland, cutting off all routes of escape.
‘Their names should be spoken’
Over the decades, Wieringer residents have found ways to commemorate the residents who died.
Marieke Roos, then a board member of the Jewish Work Village Foundation, proposed a monument of their names. She raised funds and recruited volunteers. Completed in 2021, the memorial comprises 197 glass blocks embedded in a semicircle at the building’s gateway. They mirror the layout of the dorms, now long gone, which once embraced the rear of the community house. Each block commemorates a student, teacher, or family member deported and murdered. One honors Frits Ino de Vries (1939–43), killed at Auschwitz with his mother and sister, Mia Sara, who was 5.
Corien Hielkema, also from the foundation, teaches local middle schoolers about the Werkdorpers’ fate. Each student creates a poem, painting, or website about a Werkdorper because “their names should be spoken and their stories told,” she told me.
Rent from migrant workers may sound like an unusual way to fund a memorial center. But in Joep Karel’s plan, such housing would be built behind the community house, and would be reminiscent of the dormitories where my father lived. Hollands Kroon’s biggest exports are flowers, cultivated by workers from the eastern EU. The region desperately needs housing for these temporary workers. In 2024, the province gave Karel 115,000 Euros to start the project.
Joël Cahen, who chairs the fundraising for Karel’s Jewish Work Village Cultural Center, says that attracting tourists here won’t be easy — it’s a 45-minute drive from Amsterdam, “along a boring road,” he said. Nevertheless, he said he thinks Karel’s idea will work, though “it will take time.”
Some neighbors objected to housing migrant workers, Cahen said. They feared noise pollution, traffic and drugs. Months of legal delay produced a court decision in Karel’s favor, but by then construction costs had skyrocketed.
Now, Cahen said, Karel needs an investor. The developer did not answer a question about how that search is going, except to say, via Cahen, that he would break ground “as soon as possible.” Roos says she has been hearing “soon” for years.
And if the housing were to be completed and the workers arrived, where would they hang their laundry, store their recycling, hide their trash? It would be hard to hide the chaff of daily living on the site’s four acres. Who would visit such a memorial center, and how would the owner keep it running?
Those are legitimate questions, Cahen said. But “we need people to help us push this thing forward. This is a chance.”
Kees Ribbens, a senior researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, in Amsterdam, told me that the community house has no “comparable examples in the Netherlands.” It is a “special building,” and a memorial center “would certainly be appropriate.”
Most of the agricultural training centers that saved German Jewish youth have been destroyed or reused. The director’s house of a farm school in Ahlem, Germany, is now a museum. But it became the local Gestapo headquarters, so it also tells that story. The Ahlem school buildings are gone. Gross Breesen, now in Poland, is a fancy golf spa.
The Werkdorp is one of a very few farm schools in Europe whose original building is dedicated to its history.
What my father did and didn’t tell me
My father talked a lot about his first farm school, Breesen. Survivors from Breesen, in America and around the world, remained his closest friends.
Yet he mentioned his time in the Netherlands only once. My mother had served a Dutch cheese to some guests. Dad told us how he’d been hitchhiking in Holland with a friend, when a truck carrying Edam cheeses had picked them up. They rode in the truckbed, hungry, surrounded by giant cheese wheels.
It was such a slim memory. I assumed he had lived in Holland for a few weeks. I learned only recently that Werkdorp Wieringermeer had protected him from January 1939 until February 1940.
Now I think my father didn’t want to remember his Dutch year. Because like refugees today, everywhere, he was terrified.
Dad once told an interviewer how he’d read a memoir by a man who was arrested on Kristallnacht and transported by train to Buchenwald. My father realized, “That’s me. I did that too.” He had no memory of actually doing it at all.
The brain is good at shielding us from trauma. His year at Werkdorp Wieringermeer may have been like his train ride after Kristallnacht, a time he needed to forget. He was worrying about his parents and siblings, who would not escape Germany until November. (One brother, his wife, and toddler would not survive the war.) He was anxious about the U.S. visa the Breeseners had applied for as a group (they circumvented the American quota on Germans, another story). He had been forced to watch people hanged at Buchenwald for trying to escape.
Yet my father was an optimist when I knew him, and never dwelled on suffering. And I never thought, “I should ask about his experience in the Holocaust because I will want to write about it one day.”
So the only thing I knew about his experience in the Netherlands was that he’d hitched a ride in a truck full of cheese.
An hour’s drive beyond the Werkdorp from Amsterdam, there’s a memorial to the 102,000 people deported from the transit Kamp Westerbork and murdered during the Second World War. It draws 150,000 visitors annually. Cahen hopes the Werkdorp could attract 10,000.
Like Westerbork, the Werkdorp was a transit point — but with a key difference: Many of its residents were saved.
As the daughter of one of them, I hope the tension over the future of its community house will ease, and that someone will make a grand memorial center flourish there.
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Nigeria has more than 100 synagogues — but no local rabbis. This summer camp wants to change that.
On summer mornings in Abuja, Nigeria, a small fleet of cars fan out across the sprawling capital city carrying unusual cargo: children headed to Jewish day camp.
In a one-story synagogue on a dirt road in Kubwa, a densely populated suburb, children who spend most of the year as the only Jew in their school spill out of cars alongside dozens of their peers. They might spend the day acting out scenes from the Torah, crocheting kippot or competing in color war.
It’s an untraditional location, but almost everything else about Camp Sarah is inspired by Jewish summer camps in the U.S. After all, it was founded by an American.
Debbie Isser, who moved to Nigeria in 2021 for her work with the World Bank, started the camp with members of Abuja’s Jewish community after local mothers told her they wanted their children to have some kind of Jewish education. For Isser, whose own childhood summers at Jewish camp in New Hampshire had been formative, the solution felt obvious.
“I just felt like it was in my genes,” she told the Forward.
Now in its fourth year, Camp Sarah, a two-week-long day camp hosting 80 campers and 20 staff, is trying to give a new generation of Nigerian Jews something their small, dispersed community has struggled to provide: Jewish teachings that will allow them to sustain religious life there.
The hope, of course, is that the children make Jewish friends and learn Torah stories. But organizers also want Camp Sarah to begin producing the religious leaders the community currently lacks — perhaps, one day, even a homegrown rabbi or a shochet, ritual slaughterer, so that kosher Nigerian Jews can finally enjoy meat with their jollof rice.
Fifteen-year-old Shedrack, who is one of two Jewish students at his public school, attended Camp Sarah for the first time last summer. When, during the following school year, his classmates made fun of him for not believing in Jesus, he called his camp friends.
“It’s like being with myself,” he told the Forward. “They understand me. When it’s closing hour from school, I usually call them. We have some chats, ask ourselves some questions and we talk about Torah.”
Nigeria’s Jewish community is itself an unlikely story. Most of its members are Igbo, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, some of whom believe they are descended from one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Igbo identification with Jewish identity intensified during and after the devastating Nigerian Civil War between 1967 and 1970, when the Igbo-led breakaway state of Biafra was defeated, and at least a million people died.
In the decades that followed, a small number of Igbo who had been raised Christian began practicing Judaism, teaching themselves Hebrew, seeking out Jewish texts and eventually establishing synagogues. Today, thousands of Nigerians practice Judaism, though those who have not formally converted are not considered Jewish by many mainstream Jewish institutions.
But maintaining a Jewish community in Nigeria is no easy feat. While Nigeria has over 100 synagogues, the community has no resident rabbi of its own. Jewish books and ritual objects are few and far between, usually arriving from donations abroad.
Moshe Hezekiah Nwafor, 28, a Nigerian Jew who founded the camp alongside Isser, told the Forward that when he celebrated his bar mitzvah, there was only one Torah scroll in the country. Today, he estimates there are about 10. And without a shochet, his community relies heavily on fish and vegetables because there is no way to access kosher meat.
Nwafor and Isser met by chance. While Isser was looking for a synagogue to celebrate the Jewish holidays after she moved to Nigeria, she came across a WhatsApp number for Nwafor’s congregation. Nwafor answered her message and immediately arranged for someone to pick her up and bring her to the synagogue to celebrate Sukkot.
That night, they made kiddush in a sukkah with walls fashioned from banana leaves; afterward came a l’chaim with local schnapps.
“I thought, OK, I’ve really found a Jewish community here,” Isser recalled.
Isser began returning from trips to the United States with suitcases stuffed with donated tallitot (prayer shawls), siddurim (prayer books) and other Jewish books. Eventually, after one Shabbat service, she sat down with elders of the congregation to ask what a more systematic relationship with American Jews might look like.
The clearest request, she said, came from the mothers. Most of their children attended schools where they were the only Jew. Instead of letting their kids sit idle over the summers, the mothers wanted them to receive a Jewish education and know what it feels like to have Jewish friends – in other words: Jewish summer camp.
The request resonated with Isser, a mother too, for whom Jewish camp had been a formative part of childhood. Her parents had met at Camp Ramah, the camp of the Conservative movement, when they were 16. Her mother went on to become a Jewish educator.
At first, Isser considered sending Nigerian children to camps in the U.S. But she and Nwafor, who had worked as a traveling Jewish teacher among Nigerian communities, quickly landed on a more ambitious idea.
“Immediately, we’re like ‘no, no, no,’” Isser recalled. “’We should do camp in Nigeria.’”
They named it Camp Sarah, in honor of Isser’s mother.
The first summer required some improvisation. Organizers borrowed a car to collect children from around Abuja. Isser recalls one trip taking two hours, the car breaking down and, at one point, 15 children squeezing into a sedan.
Rabbi Kerrith Solomon from Adas Israel, a Conservative congregation in Washington, D.C., came with her two children to help run the camp. Looking back, Isser said, “We kind of laugh because it was pretty disorganized.”
Today, anyone who grew up going to camp would recognize much of Camp Sarah, where campers spend their days competing in relay races or Jewish trivia and writing songs to perform for their peers. Four-year-olds act out Torah stories. Older campers study the Jewish life cycle and discuss what it means to become role models in their communities. Counselors from Nigeria, Uganda and the U.S. compare their Jewish traditions over lunchtime.
But some camp traditions require distinctly Nigerian adaptations. Each Friday, the camp bakes challah. With no conventional oven, sand is poured into the bottom of a cooking pot that rests on a charcoal stove, before unbraided challah dough is placed in the pot and covered for hours.
Many of the Jewish songs sung at camp were written in Nigeria and sound nothing like the standard repertoire in America. Sung in harmony, they are accompanied by traditional Nigerian instruments like the konga drum, a shallow gourd covered in beads known as the shekere and a metal hand bell called an ogene.
Camp Sarah’s ambitions also extend beyond Jewish education. Isser said that during her work at the World Bank, she has watched young Nigerians earn university degrees only to struggle to find jobs in their fields. This year, the team introduced leadership training for the counselors, and activities like soap-making, candle-making and crocheting – skills they hope campers and counselors can turn into sources of income. Organizers have even discussed creating a camp store where staff can sell their handmade tallitot and kippot.
The 20 Nigerian counselors who take long overnight buses from Jewish communities across the country to camp each summer have already started bringing what they’ve learned back home, hosting events for their communities during the Jewish holidays.
Debbie Hezekiah Nwafor, a 25-year-old counselor, said that when she first arrived at camp four years ago, she was terrified of public speaking, but her role forced her to propose activities, teach dozens of children and command the attention of the rowdy group. Today, she leads the camp’s division for 14- to 16-year-olds.
“I used to have stage fright; I thought I’m not really bold enough for leadership,” she said. “But whatever idea I’m bringing, camp is implementing it.”
“This is not just a camp to us.” she added. “For real, this is something really big. I would say camp really changed me.”
Camp Sarah has also become a place to experiment in a way that has proven difficult within established Nigerian congregations. According to Nwafor, women have traditionally played smaller leadership roles in local Jewish communities both because of cultural expectations around gender in Nigeria and because of the community’s limited access to Jewish religious instruction.
For communities that have had limited access to rabbis and other sources of contemporary Jewish religious instruction, Nwafor said, biblical texts have sometimes served as a primary guide for how to live Jewishly.
Isser has seen some of those tensions surface in surprisingly fundamental questions. When visiting rabbis have taught at Camp Sarah, she said, mothers have asked whether Jewish law would require them to marry their husband’s brother if their husband died — a practice described in the Torah’s Book of Deuteronomy known as yibbum, or levirate marriage.
But last year, the camp held a service led by women and they did an encore this week. Some of them have even said they would like to become rabbis.
“That’s something you don’t see here, but I’m like, ‘why not?’” Nwafor said. “Just go for it.”
Ruth Munghoho, a Ugandan Jew, flew through Ethiopia to Camp Sarah to teach after studying under Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the first native-born black rabbi in Sub-Saharan Africa. She sees her younger self in her campers.
“I grew up in a Christian community where we had no Jewish friends or neighbors,” she said. It took until young adulthood for her to be able to learn about Judaism. “If I could get this knowledge from childhood,” she said, “I know that I could be more than what I am now.”
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U.S. ambassador calls settlers who sieged Palestinian homes in Qusra ‘terrorists’
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – The West Bank settlement movement’s leadership joined with one of its most prominent defenders, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, in condemning an Israeli settler outpost set up in a Palestinian family’s yard.
Huckabee’s remarks are a signal of the degree to which a group of radicals is rattling Israeli politics and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Israelis affiliated with the West Bank’s Tel Talpiot outpost, which is illegal under Israeli law, set up temporary structures at the entrances to Palestinian homes on the outskirts of the village of Qusra on Sunday.
Earlier this week, cables connecting the homes to the electricity grid and to solar panels were cut, and water pipes were damaged, leaving the Palestinian families unable to leave or bring in food. Israeli activists in the area who monitor settler attacks on Palestinians confirmed the account to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Huckabee wrote on X on Thursday that Israeli forces had gone to Qusra at the U.S. Embassy’s request and described the people who set up the outpost as “Israeli terrorists.” He posted that “the IDF & Israel Police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this.”
The language was a departure for the ambassador, who told Israel’s Channel 14 last September that the United States “respects Israel as a sovereign state and will not tell Israel what to do” regarding sovereignty in the West Bank. Huckabee has also consistently described the territory by its biblical names Judea and Samaria. He routinely takes to social media to dismantle what he says are lies depicting Israelis as unfairly treating Palestinians.
He has condemned settler violence before, but has rarely done so in language as blunt as what he used on Thursday. In July 2025, he visited the Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank after an arson attack at its fifth-century church and called it an “act of terror and crime.”
The actions of Israeli settler extremists have been a major concern to Democrats in the U.S. Congress in recent months, adding fodder to their calls to condition aid to Israel on its behavior. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists the reports are overblown, and that Palestinian violence is much more serious. President Donald Trump, who has often supported Netanyahu, has called on the prime minister to crack down on the violence, seeing it as an impediment to his hopes for a broader Middle East peace. Huckabee’s intervention suggests that the Trump administration is increasingly concerned about ending the violence.
Yisrael Ganz, who chairs the Yesha Council and governs the Binyamin Regional Council, condemned the outpost.
“The events in Qusra are serious and do not reflect our values or our way of conducting ourselves,” Ganz said. “There is no place for individuals to take matters into their own hands and establish an outpost in someone’s backyard, even when dealing with an illegal home or an attempt to seize control of the land. There is no justification whatsoever for violence against uninvolved civilians or security forces.”
He added that some were “exploiting these events as part of a campaign against the Jewish communities,” but that this “must not obscure the simple truth: What happened in Qusra was wrong and is unacceptable to us.”
Huckabee amplified Ganz’s statement later on Thursday, writing on X, “’Settlers’ are not the problem in Judea/Samaria. ‘Unsettlers’ are,” he wrote, describing them as “very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families & to Israel.”
The village is located in Area B, territory that is under the civil jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority and security control of the Israeli military and where Israeli settlement is not permitted. The Israel Defense Forces called such takeovers illegal and reprehensible on Tuesday. Overnight Wednesday, Israeli security forces said they demolished the structures at Qusra and detained one Israeli.
Marmar Odeh, a village representative, told JTA that the Israeli military remained inside Qusra, and footage circulating on social media showed Israeli soldiers stationed inside the homes of evacuated residents.
“I won’t be going anywhere. I am staying in my house and on my land,” Odeh said. “I may not be scared, but the children are all the time.”
In a voice memo recorded on August 12 and obtained by JTA, Aisha Abu Rida, a Qusra resident, spoke from inside one of the besieged homes.
“We are surrounded by settlers, but we are steadfast,” she said. “Despite the water and electricity being cut off, we will remain steadfast … and stay in our homes.”
By Thursday, the structures were gone, but settlers remained on the hillsides above the homes, Odeh said, an account supported by footage he provided to JTA. Soldiers had left most of the homes they had entered, residents said Friday, but were informed the military operation could last until Sunday.
One of the affected homes belongs to Loui Ridi, a Toledo, Ohio, business owner who was born in Qusra and has followed the standoff through security cameras installed at the property. JTA attempted to reach Ridi through several channels and was unsuccessful.
Asked whether the State Department shared Huckabee’s characterization and whether the Embassy had requested the Israeli operation, a State Department spokesperson did not directly reply. “We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank,” the spokesperson said. “We condemn criminal violence by any party in the West Bank. A stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration’s goal to achieve peace in the region.”
In a statement to JTA, the Israeli military said soldiers had been deployed in Qusra since Thursday morning “to protect the residents and maintain security in the area” and that they had been instructed that “the Qusra residents will remain in their homes.”
It added that troops would not operate inside the Palestinian family’s home near the site “where the tent that was evacuated and dismantled had been erected” and said Civil Administration liaison officers were in contact with Qusra’s local leadership and “working to avoid disruption to the daily lives of the residents in the area.”
Footage circulating earlier in the week appeared to show Israeli soldiers praying alongside the settlers at the outpost. The military said that the incident is under review and that soldiers found to have taken part in illegal activity would be disciplined.
The designation of Area B is the source of the ambiguity, according to Hanan Greenwood, head of the spokesperson and public diplomacy unit at the Binyamin Regional Council.
The council’s jurisdiction covers the settlements themselves, Greenwood said, not Area B land, meaning Qusra sits inside the council’s footprint but outside its authority. Its residents fall under Palestinian Authority civil jurisdiction and pay the council no arnona, the Israeli municipal tax.
“Geographically, Qusra is very much in our area,” Greenwood said. “But in real life, it’s not that we could go there, and it’s not that the residents of Qusra pay us.”
He described the result as a governance vacuum. “It’s ours, it isn’t ours,” he said. “It’s a whole mess, and the reason is that there’s no sovereignty.”
Israeli rights groups reject that framing, arguing that the military has the authority to remove outposts and does not use it.
The Israeli rights group B’Tselem said the events reflect a broader pattern.
“What is happening in Qusra is not an isolated incident,” said Yuli Novak, the organization’s executive director. “Settler militias, backed by the Israeli military, are expanding their attacks into Palestinian villages and towns, seizing land, attacking homes and forcing families out. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in plain sight.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Some young Jews are pulling back from Jewish life over Israel discourse, study finds
(JTA) — Nearly four in 10 Jewish young adults say events affecting Jews in recent years have led them to pull back from Jewish spaces or become more selective about where they participate, with disagreements over how Israel and the Palestinians are discussed as a leading reason, according to a new survey.
The survey, which was conducted by Sense Worldwide and commissioned by the Jim Joseph Foundation, found that 39% of respondents have engaged less, engaged more selectively or disengaged entirely from Jewish spaces due to “events affecting Jewish people in the last few years.”
Among those nearly 40% of respondents, 42% of them said that it was because their “views don’t align with how Israel/Palestine is discussed, and I don’t feel there’s room for nuance,” and 40% said they engaged less because they did not want to “experience biased, one-sided messaging.” Forty-eight percent said it was because “conversations often feel hostile, toxic, or unproductive.”
And among all respondents, when asked what would make Jewish experiences more appealing to them, 30% said that they would be attracted to experiences that were more cultural and less religious, and 26% said “spaces where non-Zionist and anti-Zionist views can be expressed without being labelled antisemitic.”
At the same time, the study found that young Jews have hardly abandoned Jewish life. Three-quarters of Jewish young adults in the United States say they regularly do something Jewish, though most are finding their connections outside of synagogues and traditional Jewish institutions, according to the study.
A small group of participants, 4%, also offered an explanation of the lasting impact that Jewish experiences had had on them. The study found that the clearest negative theme among those respondents was disillusionment around Israel and Zionism and the way it was presented in Jewish education or community spaces.
“A negative legacy I have been reflecting on is what I now understand to be a biased education/perspective on Israel,” one respondent wrote.
The study surveyed 2,071 Jewish adults aged 22 to 40 from December 2025 through April 2026. Respondents were sampled from panels created by NORC and GenLabs, and the margin of error was +/- 3.4%.
The survey found that 75% of Jewish young adults say they regularly do something Jewish in their lives, with 45% saying their only form of participation was informally, often at home with family or friends.
Just 30% said they regularly participate formally in Jewish life, including through institutions or organizations.
That divide was also reflected in where respondents said they most often feel a sense of Jewish connection. Fifty-five percent cited family and 44% cited Jewish friends, compared with 19% who cited Jewish community organizations or groups.
Sixteen percent said they found connection through social or political causes connected to Jewish identity, and 13% said they felt most connected through experiences related to Israel.
“The research gives us a much fuller and accurate understanding of where, how, and why Jewish young adults seek out and experience Jewish life,” said Stacie Cherner, the director of research and learning at the Jim Joseph Foundation, in a statement. “Now, importantly, we can begin to translate these insights to action.”
Another study of Jewish engagement across generations by the Jewish Federations of North America in March found that 40% of Jewish American adults describe themselves as engaged with their local Jewish community, while 60% were unengaged.
When asked how often they take part in “anything that feels Jewish,” 20% of respondents said very often or often, while 24% said sometimes, 33% said rarely and 22% said never, the new survey found. Those without earlier Jewish experiences were much less likely to participate at all.
Among those who rarely or never participate in Jewish life, 52% said it was because they “don’t feel a strong connection to Jewish life,” while 38% said it “feels too religious” and 36% said it “doesn’t feel relevant to my life right now,” the survey found.
Among the 11% who have engaged more with Jewish spaces in recent years, the most common reason was wanting to feel a stronger sense of solidarity with the Jewish community, cited by 71%.
And of that 11%, 61% said they wanted to “be around people who understand what I’m feeling,” and 54% said Jewish spaces felt safer or more supportive than other spaces. Eight percent said they sought spaces where non-Zionist and anti-Zionist views can be expressed without being labelled antisemitic.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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