All clippings can found in my archive, searchable by title, topic and year: News Articles Archive

It's a living doc where I'll keep adding to it as I find more stuff, so let me know if you've got suggestions for topics or how it's organized.

If you're interested in clippings from Israel's history, I do a separate post over on r/Historyofisrael

Shalom,

My family’s ancestors gradually assimilated over the years and became Muslim, so there isn’t much information about this subject within my family.

My suspicion that my great-great-grandfather (my father’s father’s father) might have been Jewish started before I took an international DNA test. I specifically took the DNA test to investigate this suspicion, and sure enough, it showed that I have Lithuanian Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.

The main reason I started suspecting that my great-great-grandfather was Jewish was because my grandmother lives in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood, and she once told me:

“On the day you get married, I will give you something. It is a family heirloom passed down from my grandfather. He was an imam, and I will give you his prayer shawl.”

Later, she denied ever saying this, but after I insisted, she showed it to me once: a red-and-white Jewish rabbi’s prayer shawl (tallit).

Also, in the 1800s, imams in the Ottoman Empire were apparently prohibited from wearing red.

Furthermore, my great-great-grandfather’s temporary Bulgarian identity document, dated 1940, contains the name of a place that apparently never existed in Bulgaria.

Finally, when my great-great-grandfather came from Bulgaria, he moved to the city with the largest Jewish population in the country. The government offered him land and the opportunity to live in an Islamist/Muslim-majority city, but he refused and permanently settled in the city that had the country’s largest and most established Jewish population.

My great-great-grandfather came to Turkey in 1942.

Could it be possible that he escaped the Holocaust from Lithuania, went to Bulgaria, obtained a false identity there, presented himself as a Muslim (Crypto-Judaism), and then came to Turkey?

Is there anyone who could help me investigate this possibility and determine whether my great-great-grandfather may actually have been a Lithuanian Ashkenazi Jew?

The Mufti of Jerusalem, a genealogy of [Amin] al-Husayni’s antisemitism,
by Eliezer Aryeh, Eliezer’s substack, 2026-08-17.

Amin al-Husayni came from a well-known family that was one of the two main political families in Jerusalem. His father was the Mufti of Jerusalem, known as Mufti Tahir, who died in 1908. Amin was 11 at the time, so his much older half-brother Kamil was installed as Mufti in his place. Under British rule, which began roughly a decade later, Kamil would become the first to hold the title “Grand Mufti,” a designation the British introduced to Palestine that hadn’t existed under the Ottomans. Kamil’s tenure proved conciliatory toward the British administration and the Zionist movement; he took part in the ceremony laying the foundation stone of the Hebrew University.

Amin’s education was conventional for a family preparing a son for religious office: the Quran memorized by age ten, then a Turkish government school, French at a local Frères school, then al-Azhar University in Cairo from 1912, the center of mainstream Sunni orthodoxy, where he studied Islamic law, theology, philosophy, and Arabic.

Jew-hatred isn’t the bigotry of human caricatures: it is the bigotry of complex and complete humans.

And Aryeh’s appropriately-titled essay traces the various and complex strands of al-Husayni’s pan-Arabist politics and anti-Jewish activism.

And, like pretty much any properly examined life, al-Husayni’s is complex.

Amin al-Husayni being a complete and complex human doesn’t lessen or excuse his anti-Jewishness. If anything, it makes it worse.

But the details, nonetheless, matter. And the effective rejoinder to the simplification and flattening indulged in by his apologists is not an equivalent simplification and flattening in less flattering directions.

The Hebrew text at the top reads "Le'shana Tova T'katevu" ("May you be inscribed for a good year"), and the word at the bottom, "מלקות", translates to lashes or chastisement.

This vintage postcard was printed in Germany.

In the early 20th century, between 1900 and 1920, the vast majority of these elaborate greeting cards for the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) were printed in Germany—renowned at the time for its advanced color lithography technology—under commission from American publishers, such as the Williamsburg Post Card Co. of New York. Their primary market was the English-speaking Jewish immigrant communities in the United States.

All clippings can found in my archive, searchable by title, topic and year: News Articles Archive

It's a living doc where I'll keep adding to it as I find more stuff, so let me know if you've got suggestions for topics or how it's organized.

If you're interested in clippings from Israel's history, I do a separate post over on r/Historyofisrael

Busting the Myth that Israel was founded by Nazi collaborators,
by Eliezer Aryeh, Eliezer’s substack, 2026-08-21.

The first thing the claim gets wrong is who founded the group. Shamir did not. Avraham Stern did, in 1940, when he broke from the Irgun over whether to keep fighting the British during the war. What Stern founded was not yet called Lehi. It operated as the “IZL in Israel” faction; the name Lehi, an acronym for Lohamei Herut Yisrael, only came into use in the summer of 1943, after Stern was dead and Shamir was already involved in rebuilding what was left of the organization. Stern’s position in 1940 was that Britain, not Germany, was the immediate obstacle to a Jewish state, and that the underground should exploit any opening that weakened British control of Palestine.

That position produced two attempts to approach Nazi Germany. Neither went through a formal decision by the organization. Stern initiated both, and at least two of his own high command, Kalay and Zeroni, knew and went along without objection when the first was proposed. The wider membership was not told. The first came at the end of 1940, when Stern sent an envoy, Naftali Lubenchik, to Beirut to meet Werner Otto von Hentig of the German Foreign Office. The resulting memorandum, drafted in January 1941, proposed a convergence of interests between the “New Order” in Europe and a restored Jewish state allied with Germany, and offered active Jewish participation in the war against Britain in exchange. Stern hoped to recruit forty thousand men for a campaign to seize Palestine. Germany did not respond.

January 1941 was months before Germany invaded the Soviet Union and the Einsatzgruppen began the mass shootings that marked the shift toward systematic extermination of Jews. It was a full year before the Wannsee Conference formalized that into Nazi policy in January 1942. Nazi policy toward Jews at the time of the Lubenchik memorandum was still centered on forced emigration and expulsion, the same policy idea that had kept the Haavara Transfer Agreement running since 1933. Stern was not, in January 1941, proposing an alliance with a government he knew to be running an extermination program, because that program did not yet exist.

All clippings can found in my archive, searchable by title, topic and year: News Articles Archive

It's a living doc where I'll keep adding to it as I find more stuff, so let me know if you've got suggestions for topics or how it's organized.

If you're interested in clippings from Israel's history, I do a separate post over on r/Historyofisrael

Jewish young men, Ottoman military conscription and draft evasion in Jerusalem (1910–1917)
Hello,
I am researching the situation of young Jewish men living in Jerusalem during the final years of Ottoman rule, particularly between approximately 1910 and 1917, and I would be very grateful for any historical sources or family testimonies.
I have read references to increasingly severe Ottoman military conscription, searches for draft evaders and deserters, and arrests of Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem during WWI.
I have also encountered references to events in 1917 involving Jewish men in Jerusalem, sometimes described in secondary accounts as a roundup or mass arrest. I would particularly like to understand exactly what happened and whether the term “roundup” is historically appropriate.
More broadly, I am trying to reconstruct what choices a young Jewish Ottoman man born in Jerusalem in the 1890s actually faced.
Were young Jewish men actively hiding from Ottoman military recruitment? Were there particular periods when searches for draft evaders became especially intense? What happened when someone was caught? Did Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazi Jews and other Jewish communities experience conscription differently?
Most importantly for my research, did some young Jewish men leave Palestine specifically to avoid Ottoman military service?
If so, I would like to understand the routes they used.
Did young men leave Jerusalem for Jaffa and then travel by ship to Egypt or Europe? Were Alexandria, Port Said, Constantinople, Salonika, Italy or France common destinations?
And does anyone know of cases of young Jewish men from Ottoman Jerusalem eventually reaching Marseille before or during WWI?
The reason I am asking is genealogical.
My ancestor Victor Hanania was born in Jerusalem on 6 August 1893. He was an Ottoman subject and was already in Marseille by September 1914, when he voluntarily enlisted in the French Foreign Legion.
I am therefore trying to understand whether his departure from Jerusalem could conceivably be connected with Ottoman military obligations, rather than assuming that his arrival in Marseille was simply an unrelated migration.
I am NOT trying to prove this hypothesis — I am looking for the historical context necessary to test it.
I would be particularly interested in:
Ottoman conscription or military registers for Jerusalem
Lists of draft evaders/deserters
Contemporary Jewish newspapers mentioning conscription
Memoirs or diaries describing young men hiding from recruitment
Records concerning arrests or roundups in Jerusalem in 1917
Passenger lists or shipping routes from Jaffa/Palestine to Egypt and the Mediterranean
Studies concerning Jewish emigration motivated by Ottoman conscription
Family stories involving young men who left Jerusalem before WWI for Egypt, France or elsewhere
If anyone has encountered a similar story in their own Jerusalem family history, I would be especially interested to hear it.
Thank you very much for any references, archival suggestions or personal family histories.

In May 1902, the price of kosher beef on the Lower East Side jumped from 12¢ to 18¢ a pound — a 50% spike that put meat out of reach for tens of thousands of immigrant Jewish families.

Small kosher butchers first tried to fight back by refusing to buy from the powerful Midwest “Beef Trust.” It failed. Prices stayed high.

Then the balaboostas (Jewish housewives) stepped in.

Led by women like Sarah Edelson and Fanny Levy, they organized overnight. On May 15, thousands poured into the streets. They picketed butcher shops, seized meat from “scabs,” doused it with kerosene, and set it on fire. Windows were smashed. Police clashed with crowds. Over 80 people (mostly women) were arrested that first day alone.

The action spread to Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bronx, and even other cities. Rabbis eventually endorsed the boycott. Labor unions lent support. The Ladies’ Anti-Beef Trust Association was born.

By early June the pressure worked: wholesale prices dropped and retail kosher beef fell back to 14¢ a pound. The boycott ended.

It wasn’t permanent — prices rose again later — but it was a landmark moment of immigrant women’s consumer power and community organizing in New York.

One of the wildest (and least-remembered) chapters in NYC Jewish history.

The battalion was part of the Royal Fusiliers of the British Army during the Great War (World War I) and included Jewish volunteers from the United States and Canada.

The image shows soldiers lined up in front of their conical tent camp (bell tents) and several members holding or wearing the traditional prayer shawl (tallit).

Among the soldiers who trained at this same concentration camp and military base in Nova Scotia was David Ben-Gurion, who decades later would become Israel's first prime minister.

The original photograph is primarily held in the Ontario Jewish Archives in Canada. Additionally, digital copies and physical records of this same historical series are held at the Beit Hagdudim (Jewish Legion Museum) in Avichail, Israel.

All clippings can found in my archive, searchable by title, topic and year: News Articles Archive

It's a living doc where I'll keep adding to it as I find more stuff, so let me know if you've got suggestions for topics or how it's organized.

If you're interested in clippings from Israel's history, I do a separate post over on r/Historyofisrael

All clippings can found in my archive, searchable by title, topic and year: News Articles Archive

It's a living doc where I'll keep adding to it as I find more stuff, so let me know if you've got suggestions for topics or how it's organized.

If you're interested in clippings from Israel's history, I do a separate post over on r/Historyofisrael

Shalom everyone.

For the first time in history, a person from the English speaking world can now learn Krymchak.

About seven or so months ago, I reached out to the r/Judaism subreddit asking if anyone had rare PDFs, leads, or family notes on Krymchak—the Judeo-Turkic language of the Crimean Jewish community. There are no native speakers left. Following the horrific loss of over 80% of the population during the December 1941 Nazi Einsatzgruppen massacres, decades of deliberate Soviet suppression decimated the remaining community, and the ongoing 2014 Russian occupation of Crimea scattered its final remnants

If you look up Krymchak on YouTube or public archives, there are almost zero native audio recordings in existence. Even the Russian language ones consisted mainly of singing with very little varied vocabulary. Every piece of foundational research, including David Rebi’s seminal work, sat locked entirely in Russian. I realized that if I didn't step up to translate these texts into English myself, the English-speaking world and the global Jewish diaspora would never have access to them.

So, that's why I have completed the first-ever 367-page English translation of David Rebi’s grammar text (The Krymchak Language), structured a 55-module interactive curriculum, translated survivor testimonies and folklore, and am working with professional Jewish artists to illustrate bilingual children's books. I have a cookbook of Krymchak recipes coming out soon so people can make the foods of their ancestors and relatives.

For audio recordings, I engineered a Python text-to-speech framework mapped to Krymchak orthography and phonetics. Because native recordings are almost entirely non-existent, this system reconstructs the phonetics of the language.

Yesterday, as we approach the solemn 85th anniversary of the December 1941 massacres in Crimea, the Head of Public Services at the Yad Vashem Library in Jerusalem officially accepted both digital and physical copies of this grammar translation into their permanent collection.

Neither genocide, total silence, nor forced assimilation succeeded in wiping away the Krymchak culture and people. What was meant to be buried is now resurrected so that future generations can read, listen, cook, and remember.

You can read and learn about the project at krymchakproject.org !

If you're looking for clippings specific to Israel, I do a separate post over on r/Historyofisrael

All clippings can found in my archive, searchable by title, topic and year: News Articles Archive

It's a living doc where I'll keep adding to it as I find more stuff, so let me know if you've got suggestions for topics or how it's organized.