An interesting kerfuffle occurred in Philadelphia between the Palestinian owner of a kosher bagel shop called the ‘New York Bagel Bakery’ and his largely jewish customer base over the Palestinian’s temerity to be critical of Israel.
Ben Sales has published a long account of what occurred in the ‘Times of Israel’:
‘The tale sounded almost too heartwarming to be true: A kosher bagel store, just down the road from a few synagogues, was owned by an Arab American who had grown to be beloved by the local Jewish community.
For decades, that was the story of Nick Sammoudi and the Jews of Philadelphia’s Main Line. As a longtime employee-turned-proprietor of New York Bagel Bakery, Sammoudi, a Jordanian of Palestinian descent, was a familiar face to the Jewish denizens of the suburb of Lower Merion and its surroundings. He was the go-to caterer for Yom Kippur break-fast, Saturday afternoon luncheons and, of course, many a bris. Jewish teens from the community would work in his store.
As relations ruptured between Jews and cultural establishments nationwide after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror onslaught on southern Israel, the friendship between Sammoudi and his Jewish neighbors remained intact — until it all came crashing down.
Now, a group of local Jews are calling to cancel the bagel store’s kosher certification — accusing Sammoudi of celebrating the murder of Israelis and leading a “double life.” A petition to that end has garnered more than 2,000 signatures in a little over a week. Some locals are already boycotting the store they patronized for years.
And after circulating in area forums for months, the controversy is now in the national Jewish eye — spreading through pro-Israel WhatsApp and Facebook groups, where the outrage has extended far beyond the Main Line.
“It feels horrible,” said a local community member who, like several others who spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about Sammoudi, asked to remain anonymous. “It feels like someone I really trusted betrayed my trust. I felt conflicted about telling anyone, because how could I ruin this person who I cared about?”
Sammoudi insists that he does not hate Jews and said he sold the bagel store months before this controversy erupted. He says no synagogue has yet boycotted the store, and he still has allies in the community — including Keystone-K, the Pennsylvania kosher certification agency, which has rebuffed calls to drop the bagel store’s certification.
But there is one thing Sammoudi shares with his critics: a feeling of betrayal. After feeding the Jewish community for more than 20 years, he said, some people he felt close to have stopped taking his calls.
“It’s sad, very sad, disappointing. I lost all these people I consider my friends,” he said in an interview. “For the last 27 years I served them, helped them, did some extra stuff for them. Really, it’s sad.”
Like so many controversies, it all began on Facebook.
On October 6, 2024, the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Hamas invasion, a local community member was scrolling through Facebook and noticed that the algorithm was recommending a profile with an Arabic name. The community member and the Arabic profile had one mutual friend: Nick Sammoudi, the bagel-maker the community member had known since childhood.
The community member clicked on it — and came to believe that this profile also belonged to Sammoudi. It was under the name Nasser Irsen, which Samoudi said is his first and middle name, and at least one photo posted on it in 2017 was identical to one posted on Sammoudi’s own Facebook page. Another from two years earlier showed him posing with the employees of New York Bagel, all wearing matching yellow-and-blue T-shirts.
Since October 7, 2023, many of the posts have had a different focus, showing destruction in Gaza and children there suffering. Some of the posts — in the view of the community member and other local Jews — condemn Israel or celebrate Hamas’s attack.
The day after the Hamas massacre, one post quoted the Quran, from a chapter about the ancient Israelites, who the text says had grown arrogant.
“When the first of the two warnings would come to pass, We would send against you some of Our servants of great might, who would ravage your homes,” the quote said. “This would be a warning fulfilled.”
Above the quote, he wrote, “The truth of God is great.”
Other posts condemned Palestinian leaders who have cooperated with Israelis. One says Israeli soldiers are devoid of moral values. Above the photos of Palestinian leaders with Israelis, he wrote, “Know your enemy.”
Alarmed, the community member met with a small group of people from the local Orthodox community to discuss the posts, and reached out to Keystone-K, which had a representative at the meeting. The agency monitors the store frequently to ensure it complies with kosher dietary practices.
One member of a local Orthodox synagogue who was present at the meeting, Scott Friedman, spent hours reading the Arabic Facebook posts as well as the comments below them, all in automated translation. He then said he sent the posts to a friend of his who worked for the FBI, who in turn sent them to an Arabic speaker for confirmation. He wanted to be certain about what he was seeing before pushing for action.
“I’m not saying you have to sit there and say you love the Jews, but you don’t have to post that they should be killed or kicked out of Israel,” Friedman said. “If that’s what it is, you don’t have to have a kosher bagel store… When you have something this egregious, we don’t have the benefit of saying, ‘Maybe this is OK.’”
The conversations were playing out in the midst of the fall Jewish holiday season. The initial meeting took place days before Yom Kippur, and soon afterward, Rabbi Yonah Gross, a senior official at Keystone-K, met with Sammoudi to discuss the posts.
Gross declined to comment to JTA, but he issued a statement on November 8, following the meeting, that the agency was “aware of information that has recently surfaced regarding the Facebook page of an employee at New York Bagels.” The statement did not name Sammoudi or detail the concerns that prompted the statement.
“The matter has been investigated extensively, and numerous law enforcement agencies, as well as professionals with varying expertise surrounding this issue, have been consulted,” Gross’s statement said. “New York Bagels will continue to be certified kosher (Pas Yisroel) under the supervision of Keystone-K.”
At that point, those concerned by Sammoudi’s posts had decided to air their concerns in Jewish communal forums. One of them compiled a PDF with screenshots of some of the posts in translation and began to circulate it. It was titled, “Nick and Hamas,” and called the posts “troubling and horrifying,” saying they constitute “a sickening glorification of killing Jews.”
Speaking to JTA this week, Sammoudi acknowledged that the Arabic Facebook profile belonged to him, and that he used it to communicate with friends in the Middle East, which he left in 1990. Regarding the posts, he said at different times that most of them were by him, but also that he had been hacked and had not written some of them despite their appearing under his name.
He said he could not exactly recall the October 8, 2023, post.
He also said that he had sold the bagel store, though he would not name the new owner or say how he knew them. He said he still comes in occasionally as an adviser.
“I know where I am, in the bagel shop in the middle of the Jewish community, and I’m not that stupid to put things like this in my Facebook,” he said regarding the posts. “If I want to do that stuff I would lock my page so nobody can go there.”
But in October 2024, around the time of his meeting with Gross, he had already begun to address the accusations publicly — on his English-language Facebook profile.
“No comment at this moment,” he wrote on October 16. “Everything you heard is a lie and slander.”
Later that day, he wrote in a separate post, “Sad moments when this relationship that lasted 26 years ended.” Two weeks later, he followed up, lamenting “unfounded rumors that question our stores [sic] loyalty. We have been here for 26 years and our patriotism is 100% to America and 100% to our jewish friends.”
Less than two weeks later, on November 10, he posted a lengthier explanation, disavowing the posts and saying he did not support the October 7 attack.
“I would like to make it very clear that I do not stand with terrorism or the killing of innocent civilians. I am a part of both communities, it hurts to see innocent lives be taken and held hostage,” he wrote.
“I acknowledge and take accountability for my past facebook posts, however, would like to make it known that not all of the posts circulating are mine, not all of the translation is correct, and I do not stand with every post that is circulating throughout our community,” he added.
Sammoudi repeated those sentiments to JTA, calling himself a critic of the Israeli government, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority alike who desires one state in the territory now encompassing Israel and the Palestinians. He said it isn’t important to him if the state were Israeli or Palestinian.
He likewise said he wanted to keep politics out of his store, which precluded gestures like hanging an Israeli flag or posters of hostages held in Gaza.’ (1)
To summarize all this: basically, in the wake of the successful surprise attack by Hamas against Israel of 7th October 2023 and Israel subsequent invasion – and dare I say ethnic cleansing – of the Gaza. Sammoudi posted some – by the sound of it – relatively mild and bog-standard anti-Zionist criticism of Israel on the jewish-owned social media site Facebook.
Then a bunch of jews in Philadelphia saw Sammoudi’s anti-Israel posts and because Sammoudi was running a kosher-certified bagel shop; they immediately began to campaign to get his hechser (certificate of kosher certification to you and me) revoked, which obviously then became a point of increasingly nasty content between Sammoudi and some members of the jewish community of Philadelphia.
In the end Sammoudi has backed down and reached some kind of unstated compromise with his jewish critics – from the sound of it because a significant section of his customers (who were/are jews) boycotted his bagel shop in consequence of his criticising Israel on Facebook – and is claiming he is no longer connected with the ‘New York Bagel Bakery’ even though he is not clear about who he has allegedly sold the business too (suggesting that he has not in fact sold it).
However, all this demonstrates both the fallacious nature of jewish claims to ‘anti-Semitism’ and how vindictive as well as petty jews can be.
References
(1) https://www.timesofisrael.com/longtime-palestinian-owner-of-philly-kosher-bagel-store-schmeared-over-oct-7-posts/