MIDWOOD, Brooklyn — Itamar Ben-Gvir’s trip to the United States took him to the headquarters of the Chabad movement in Brooklyn on Thursday evening, where the far-right Israeli security minister toured the building’s library and synagogue and posed with rabbis in front of a Torah ark.
The visit to 770 Eastern Parkway was a prelude to another iconic destination: cholent night at Essen New York Deli in Midwood.
Every Thursday, Essen serves up the traditional Ashkenazi Shabbat stew that has become a fixture of late-night life in some Orthodox communities. And this week, according to a viral WhatsApp message, Ben-Gvir would be joining in.
The message promoted “a Cholent & chill matzav,” the Hebrew word for situation, that would include “a meeting and greeting & photos with the guest of honor.” All were welcome, the message said: “Open to the public, come and bring your friends, no charge!”
The tone was very different than at Ben-Gvir’s other local appearances. A Manhattan talk organized by Shabtai, a Jewish secret society based at Yale University, shielded its location until just hours before it began, then doled the details out only to registered guests, presumably in an attempt to head off protests by Israelis, Jews and others who say Ben-Gvir’s extremism places him outside the acceptable bounds of discourse.
And multiple synagogues that announced they would be hosting him publicly canceled the plans after pushback — including one near 770 that was raising money for Chabad in Hebron, the West Bank city that is a flashpoint of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ben-Gvir lives in an adjacent settlement, Kiryat Arba.
Even at 770, local news reports emphasized that his visit was not officially organized by Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters, anchored in the building.Pro-Palestinian protesters, organized in part by the extremist group Within Our Lifetime, rallied outside.
But at Essen, the doors were wide open — if not designated just for Ben-Gvir. The maître d’ clarified that customers would need to pay for their meal, that Ben-Gvir would be dining there “as a guest” and that the event was not hosted by the restaurant.
Ben-Gvir’s appearance, the WhatsApp invitation said, would come “around 10:00 and 11:00 PM.” As the evening progressed, with takeout customers dashing in and out, the clientele evolved from young families out for dinner, to friends catching up, to couples on dates and, then, to cholent night devotees.
Not everyone said they were there for Ben-Gvir, who until recent years was considered too extreme even for Israel’s right-wing politicians because of his association with the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane and previous admiration of Baruch Goldstein, a Kahanist who murdered 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994.
“Me, personally, I couldn’t care less about politics,” said Zeev, an Essen patron who declined to share his last name. “That’s just my opinion. I don’t care about Trump, Biden, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin — none of it matters to me. I’m waking up every day, I’m living, I’m breathing, living a pretty good life. Nothing else matters. Bring home the hostages. That’s all I gotta say.”
Zeev had come to Essen with a group of friends. The group, formalized in a WhatsApp chat called “Essen Thursday Night,” has been coming to the restaurant every week since they were seniors in high school. They are now all in their early 20s.
Essen New York Deli is a popular cholent spot on Thursday nights in Midwood, Brooklyn. (Jackie Hajdenberg)
“We all just come here to just eat cholent,” said Joseph, another member of the group. “It’s basically like a regular deli, like Katz’s Deli and all these delis around that are barely even kosher, but like, Essen’s the spot for all of us that we all come to every Thursday night.”
By 10 p.m. there was still no sign of the Israeli national security minister, and the lines were getting longer. People were texting and calling their friends and neighbors to come see what was happening, and it became a neighborhood scene.
“I came for the hangout because I thought there were going to be other people here and I’d be able to meet some people,” said Jonathan, a Borough Park resident who arrived with his friends and declined to give his last name. It took about an hour for the trio, who met at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a Reform congregation on the Upper West Side, to finally get seated.
Jonathan praised Trump but demurred when asked his thoughts about Ben-Gvir. “I haven’t given it a second thought,” he said.
An hour later, the streets were packed with young men still hoping to get a glimpse of the Israeli politician, who is a hero to those on the hardline right who believe Israel should prioritize defeating Hamas over all else and advance Jewish resettlement in the Gaza Strip. (Those positions are held by only a minority of Israelis, according to polls. President Donald Trump, who won Midwood and other heavily Orthodox communities in the United States in last year’s election, has called for Palestinians in Gaza to be resettled elsewhere en masse and for the United States to take over the enclave.)
Rumors spread that Ben-Gvir might not be coming at all.
And then, at 11:28 p.m., a black motorcade pulled up. Hordes of teenage boys and young men, many of them in black hats, tzitzit, scooters, or some combination of the three, swarmed the vehicle and the minister’s entourage as they spilled out and he headed into the restaurant’s back room. The protests that dogged Ben-Gvir in Manhattan and New Haven were replaced by excited yells and applause.
“You’re my hero!” one man called over the clamor. “We love you!”
Restaurant staff locked the exterior door momentarily, preventing the crowds outside from pressing into the restaurant. Some climbed atop the Avenue J and Coney Island Avenue bus stop bench for a better look inside.
Crowds pressed against the window of Essen New York Deli in an attempt to catch a glimpse of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, April 24, 2025. (Jackie Hajdenberg)
Yerucham Klein, 27, a kosher food and travel blogger from Los Angeles, arrived just in time to see the last bit of action, arriving after a friend texted him. “I’m here because I’m bored,” he said.
But for a few people, Ben-Gvir’s presence meant something. Yitzchak, 19, and Aaron, 20, friends from the Five Towns, an Orthodox religious enclave on neighboring Long Island, said they believed the minister was right to admire Kahane.
“Meir Kahane was saying already, I don’t know how many years ago, we all know what’s going to happen: that Jews and Arabs simply can’t really — it sounds very nice to say, [but] it doesn’t really seem like we could live together in a lot of ways,” Yitzchak said. “So he was already saying that back then. He said there’s going to be terrorist attacks every week. And everything he said, Kahane said, is what’s happening now.”
He added, “He [Kahane] said this is going to happen, and he’s [Ben-Gvir] kind of continuing that mesorah,” Yitzchak added, using a word denoting tradition or heritage.
“I’m not so involved with Israeli politics. I very much agree with his policy on how, of course, you want to get all the hostages out, but on the other hand, we have to, we have to get rid of, we have to get rid of Hamas.”
Inside, Ben-Gvir shared a meal with dozens of local men, including “community leaders and askunim,” a Yiddish word roughly referring to movers and shakers, according to BoroPark24, an Orthodox news outlet. The outlet said Ben-Gvir had earlier stopped by a hotel two miles away in Borough Park, another Orthodox neighborhood with a vibrant minority of restive far-right activists, and was expected to spend Shabbat in the Five Towns.
There, one synagogue where he had been advertised as speaking canceled the plan abruptly on Thursday, which Ben-Gvir’s office said was because the planned moderator had suffered a death in his immediate family. But at least one other community, the Irving Place Minyan in Woodmere, still had him on the agenda.
Back at his hotel, Ben-Gvir turned to social media. At around 4 a.m. local time, he posted a victorious message about his crackdown on Israeli prisons. If he had thoughts about the cholent, he didn’t say.
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