How a popular kosher bagel shop became the target of antisemitism allegations in Lower Merion

Growing up in Jordan with Palestinian parents, Nick Sammoudi never ate bagels, let alone made them. But for 25 years at New York Bagels in Overbrook Park, Sammoudi rose at 4 a.m. to boil and bake what many considered to be the best bagels in Philadelphia. Like any serious devotee, he imported the smoked fish from Brooklyn.

Sammoudi also made sure the shop met the exacting standards of kosher certification: He paid an annual fee to be supervised by Keystone-K, the Community Kashrus of Greater Philadelphia, and closed the business on Saturdays. He gave a key to Rabbi Yonah Gross, Keystone-K’s administrator, so that the rabbi could turn on the ovens himself, a means of achieving an even stricter kosher standard for the shop.

The rabbi kept the key — and maintained his routine inspections — even after Sammoudi sold New York Bagels last July.

Being kosher, Gross said, is about following a strict set of Jewish dietary laws, intended to exclude certain foods and prevent the mixing of meat and milk. New York Bagels followed those rules, so Keystone-K renewed its kosher certification in January, as it has done every year for decades.

But some Jewish residents in nearby Lower Merion saw kosher status as about something more. When Facebook posts by Sammoudi about the war in Gaza surfaced online in the fall, some Jewish customers said the revelation was not only a betrayal of their friendships, it was a signal that the shop was not kosher, after all. To them, kosher status is akin to a Jewish stamp of approval, which they no longer believed New York Bagels deserved.

Some residents fought to have the certification removed earlier this year — and when that didn’t happen, they turned against the rabbis of Keystone-K.

Outrage and hurt made its way to nearby synagogues, where congregants circulated digital dossiers and rabbis grappled with teachings about forgiveness and humility. Sammoudi, who dedicated half his life to catering the shivas and brises of the local Jewish community, felt abandoned. The shop’s new, 22-year-old owner despaired. And the whole episode prompted a reckoning over belonging and betrayal that went far beyond the strip mall bagel shop.

Even now, no one disputes that the bagels are excellent. That, plus Sammoudi’s signature tuna salad and whitefish, helped make the shop a Lower Merion institution, prompting a line out the door every Sunday. (Though technically located in Philadelphia, the shop is situated at the intersection of Haverford Ave and City Ave, right at the border of Penn Wynne.)

Sammoudi, who is 61 with a salt-and-pepper beard, was the beating heart of the operation. When he first arrived in the U.S. in 1990, Sammoudi worked at a gas station in North Jersey and then for a Jewish friend who owned a bagel shop there.

He started working at New York Bagels in 1999, and eventually bought the business from the Orthodox Jewish family who owned it.

Sammoudi joked that he was married to the bagel shop. He was always there, greeting longtime customers by name and attending Shabbat dinners and Seders in their homes. He had a different background than many of them, and as a rule, he kept work and politics separate.

After 25 years, Sammoudi was ready to retire.

In July, he decided to sell to Rayyan Kayyali, a 22-year-old who reminded Sammoudi of himself. An American with Middle Eastern roots, Kayyali has two younger brothers, one of whom is studying business at Drexel. Together, the three would run the shop.

“[He] gets up, stays in the bagel shop sometimes 12-15 hours, working, organizing, and his other brothers do the same,” Sammoudi said of Kayyali. “You can’t find better than that.”

Kayyali and Sammoudi initially told customers that they were family. The white lie was intended to reassure customers that the business — and the bagels — weren’t going to change under new ownership, Kayyali said. What could be the harm?

In the fall of 2024, a few months after Sammoudi sold the shop, a local Jewish resident stumbled across his Arabic Facebook page. Sammoudi had two personal profiles: On his English page, Sammoudi posted photos of a new bagel oven and a trip to New Orleans. But on his Arabic Facebook page, he posted his reactions to the war in Gaza.

Sammoudi had watched in anguish from Philadelphia as Israel killed tens of thousands of Palestinians following the deadly Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. His Arabic Facebook page reflected his horror.

“[My posts were] telling my friends, I’m against what’s going on in Gaza. I’m against what’s going on with Oct. 7,” Sammoudi said. “This is not the way we should live.”

Word spread among Lower Merion’s tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community about the page. Soon a small group began investigating it together, said Scott Friedman, who was part of what he called the “working group.”

Friedman and others pored over nine years of Sammoudi’s Arabic Facebook posts, as well as the profiles of many people who interacted with the page. No one in the group can read Arabic, so they used automated online translation.

Friedman shared the page with a friend who works in federal law enforcement, hoping that person would review it with a native Arabic speaker, he said.

Then a member of the group produced a six-page digital dossier, which The Inquirer reviewed. It cited unnamed law enforcement and “intelligence groups” making serious allegations about Sammoudi. The dossier called him a “die hard extremist,” said his posts revealed a “sickening glorification of killing Jews,” and concluded that he secretly supported Hamas. (The only source named in the dossier was the Clarion Project, which the Southern Poverty Law Center used to call an “anti-Muslim hate group.”)

As evidence, the dossier included screenshots of some of Sammoudi’s Arabic posts, translated into English using Facebook Translate. One showed an English conversation between Sammoudi and his landlord in which Sammoudi dismissed his landlord’s suggestion that he hang an Israeli flag in the window of the bagel shop. A number showed posts critical of the Israeli army or government.

Most alarming to some members of the working group was a post by Sammoudi from Oct. 8, 2023, which they translated with the help of Quran.com: “We sent against you servants of ours given to terrible warfare … They entered the very innermost parts of your homes … This was the promise (completely) fulfilled.”

The dossier quickly spread through local inboxes and Facebook and WhatsApp groups. Outraged, some people stopped coming to the bagel shop — even though Sammoudi was no longer the owner.

The working group, though, didn’t trust that. Hadn’t he said he sold to his nephew? Wasn’t he often still there when customers dropped in? (The Inquirer confirmed the July sale with the building’s longtime landlord, Jeff Goldstone, and the new owner, Kayyali.)

Ever since Sammoudi’s Arabic Facebook page was first discovered, members of the working group were on alert for potential betrayal. They were thinking about Oct. 7: in the weeks after the attacks, there were widespread fears that Palestinian day laborers en masse gave Hamas vital information to attack their Jewish employers.

Eventually, Israel’s Shin Bet security service found that was not true. Still, for some in Lower Merion, the takeaway from Oct. 7 was that even long-term relationships between Jews and non-Jews cannot always be trusted. The fact that Sammoudi had served the Jewish community for decades was not reassuring to them.

Some locals also wanted to see Keystone-K revoke, or at least not renew, New York Bagels’ kosher certification.

Kashrut, or Jewish dietary law, involves a complicated web of ancient laws and modern protocols, overseen by trained Orthodox inspectors. Beyond all the rules, there is also a foundational trust — that a person will do all that is required, every moment, to keep a kitchen kosher.

“Even with whatever inspections and videos and cameras we do, there still needs to be a base level of trust,” Gross said.

When it came to New York Bagels, some Jewish community members felt that trust was irrevocably broken.

The rabbi tried to quell the emerging tempest in November by posting a brief letter to Facebook on Keystone-K letterhead. He wrote that the matter had been investigated and that the bagel shop would continue to be certified kosher.

“As a rule, Kashrus orgs do their best to avoid any entanglements of politics and personal feelings,” Gross said.

He feared a slippery slope: What beliefs would be acceptable and which wouldn’t? Kosher law is notoriously complex and sometimes thorny, and it definitely could not be determined by social media consensus.

As the dossier spread in the fall, Sammoudi removed many of his Arabic Facebook posts and wrote an apology on his English page. He said the accusations that he hated Jewish people or somehow supported Hamas were baseless.

“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 condemn what happened on the tragic day of Oct. 7 while also mourning the innocent lives in Gaza.”

In a direct message to Friedman about his Oct. 8 post, Sammoudi wrote, “I was wrong about this verse and its interpretation, I didn’t mean the Jewish people. I sincerely apologize for this post.” Sammoudi told The Inquirer he doesn’t remember making that post in the first place.

Other Jewish observers in the community saw the anger at Sammoudi as a sign of mistrust gone cancerous, of a community turning on someone who had gone out of his way to make food for them.

Rabbi David Levin, who lives in Merion and runs the nonprofit Jewish Relationships Initiative, recently visited New York Bagels to express his support.

“Being critical of Israel is different than being antisemitic,” Levin said. “I’m anguished at the suffering going on in Gaza, as well.”

For a few months, the situation was calm. Then in February, Sylvan Garfunkel asked to meet with the rabbis of Keystone-K.

Garfunkel, a member of the Lower Merion Jewish community, was not part of the original working group. But he was shocked that the rabbis had not revoked the kosher certification for New York Bagels. His meetings with the rabbis didn’t change his concerns; instead he felt the whole issue had been “quickly swept under the rug” by people he respected.

So Garfunkel crafted an online petition, addressed to the Rabbis of Keystone-K.

The renewal of the bagel shop’s kosher certification was “a profound betrayal of our community’s safety and trust,” he wrote. The petition demanded the revocation of the bagel shop’s kosher certification and clear communication from the rabbis about what had transpired.

“They’re the community Kashrus of Greater Philadelphia. Well, we’re the community,” Garfunkel said.

Once again, news and outrage about the bagel shop sped across the internet. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote about the petition, which garnered 2,500 signatures as it traveled. On Facebook, some commenters threatened Gross, accusing him of betrayal and speculating that perhaps he had taken a bribe.

“The leadership of OUR kosher certification programs should be investigated,” one commenter wrote.

Gross remained unmoved. He doubted the online commenters, some of whom he knew well, would ever say such things to him in person.

“It’s one of these things that people do online,” Gross said, “and it’s an unfortunate aspect of modern-day life.”

Other local rabbis, who have continued to support both Sammoudi and New York Bagels, watched with alarm as the vitriol aimed at the former bagel shop owner seemed to take on a life of its own.

Rabbi Ethan Witkovsky, the senior rabbi of the conservative synagogue Temple Beth Hillel-Beth El, delivered a sermon on humility and forgiveness last month, focused in part on the bagel shop. He told his congregants that from his perspective, Sammoudi had apologized and was “a person who is trying to do the right thing.”

“It feels like the world is sliding into a dark place: a dark place of raw power, of lack of commitment to one another,” Witkovsky said in the sermon. “I am fairly certain that the way out of this dark slide is for us to build something together. And that building something is going to involve working with other people, as it almost always does.”

For now, the turmoil has settled. Sammoudi is planning to travel to Jordan on an extended trip in the next few months, leaving New York Bagels’ new owner to run the shop alone.

“I lost most of my friends because of a bad rumor,” he said.

On a recent morning, Kayyali and his brothers were making and serving bagels. The store’s no-frills menu remains the same. It took Kayyali seven months to master the famous tuna salad.

“It is hard work, but it’s good work,” Kayyali said. “The bagel shop has a good chance to help us.”

New York Bagels’ kosher certification, valid through December and stamped by Rabbi Gross, is displayed on the shop’s glass case, next to the cash register and atop a stack of paper bags. As customers trickled in, a Keystone-K rabbi slipped behind the counter to conduct a routine inspection.