Where should Jews go on holiday? New website highlights where Jewish tourists may feel safe or unsafe

When Shay Yaish quit his technology job, he did not have a business idea waiting for him. He had, as he put it, “nothing” lined up beyond the hope that inspiration would come.

It arrived while he was sitting on the sofa with his wife, trying to decide where to take a vacation.

“We saw all of the antisemitism around,” Yaish told Emily Frances during an appearance on i24NEWS’ Jewish World Weekly. “From that came the idea: Hey, I can’t find all the information in one place. So let’s make a website!”

That idea became Safe for Jews, a website designed to help Jewish and Israeli travelers assess the relative risks of visiting destinations around the world. The platform brings together community reports, news coverage and Israeli government travel advisories, presenting the information through country profiles and safety classifications.

Its launch comes as Jewish communities across the Diaspora continue to face elevated levels of antisemitism, including harassment, vandalism and physical attacks. The J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism reported more than 23,000 incidents across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia and Argentina in 2025. The number of incidents across those seven countries was 136% higher than in 2022, while violent incidents rose by 97%.

From personal concern to public resource

Yaish, a developer who began coding as a teenager, created the site after recognizing how difficult it was to find reliable, up-to-date information about antisemitism in different destinations.

The platform is not intended to offer a simple answer to whether an entire country is safe or unsafe. Instead, it attempts to combine several types of information and weigh them according to its own methodology.

“It’s community-driven,” Yaish said. “It’s based on community reports, incidents, and also the news data. And you also have the Israeli government advisory warnings. So all of this data comes into one system.”

The need for such a resource is particularly evident in the United States. The Anti-Defamation League recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the country in 2025, an average of 17 incidents each day. The total was down 33% from the record 9,354 incidents recorded in 2024, but it still represented the third-highest annual figure since the ADL began tracking the data in 1979.

Physical violence remained a serious concern. The ADL recorded 203 physical assaults in 2025, including 32 involving a deadly weapon. Anti-Jewish hate crimes reported to the FBI totaled 1,528, accounting for 63% of all reported religion-based hate crimes in the United States.

The figures reflect an important distinction in the data. Overall incidents declined in 2025, but they remained far above the levels seen before October 7, 2023. Across the J7 countries, every Jewish community continued to report antisemitism at levels dramatically higher than before the Hamas attack and the war in Gaza.

According to the website, Czechia, Albania and Singapore are among the tourist destinations currently considered safest for Jewish travelers. Other destinations receive classifications such as “caution” (including Ireland, Greece and France), “warning” (Germany, Italy and Canada) or “dangerous” (Turkey, Egypt and Malaysia) and are based on reported antisemitic incidents, official advisories and other information.

The rankings are not a substitute for official travel advice. Safe for Jews warns visitors to conduct their own research and use their judgment before making travel decisions.

When Israeli travelers become targets

For Israeli travelers, the risks can be connected not only to Jewish identity, but also to the country they come from. In some places, being identified as Israeli can trigger hostility, confrontations or threats.

That was the experience of i24NEWS reporter Yonatan Raveh and cameraman Nadav Abbas in Belfast earlier this month. The crew was filming a documentary about antisemitism when a man allegedly overheard them telling two people they were from Israel. According to Raveh, the man shouted an anti-Israel slur, followed the crew and attempted to grab their equipment before throwing a large glass beer mug at Abbas. The mug struck Abbas in the head and cut him.

The crew had been conducting street interviews near a bar complex. Raveh said that security intervened only after the attack and that Abbas returned to Israel for medical treatment rather than waiting for police in Northern Ireland. He also described previous verbal altercations and threats involving the crew in Belfast, Madrid and New York.

The incident illustrates why travelers may need information that goes beyond conventional crime statistics. A destination can be generally popular with tourists while presenting different risks for Jewish visitors, Israelis, people visibly wearing Jewish symbols or travelers who speak Hebrew in public.

Yaish said the decision to identify as Israeli is often personal and depends on the destination.

“I have friends who might feel comfortable saying they are Israeli when they are in Cyprus,” he told Frances. “But if they are in, say, Spain, they try to hide their identities. It depends on the country and their comfort level.”

Building a travel community

For now, Yaish said, the priority is to build the site’s user community and encourage people to submit reports based on their own experiences.

“After we’re getting more and more traffic and more incident reports, people will rely on the system,” he told Frances.

He envisions expanding the platform beyond maps and country assessments. Future plans could include Jewish-friendly hotels, kosher restaurants, local Jewish communities and “gatekeepers” who can help visitors navigate unfamiliar destinations.

“You will have discounts. You will have safe hotels, communities you can find around, gatekeepers that will guide you,” Yaish said. “Hey, this is a safer location you can travel to.”

That model could give travelers a more practical picture of what it means to visit a particular place. A national ranking may provide a broad overview, while local reports can offer details about neighborhoods, public events, Jewish institutions, transportation routes and recent incidents.

The information is also likely to change quickly. Antisemitic incidents can spike around political developments, demonstrations, religious holidays or events connected to the Israel-Hamas war. A location classified as relatively safe one month may require greater caution later.

A tool, not a guarantee

Yaish acknowledged that the site is still being built and that its information must be treated carefully. The platform draws on automated systems and publicly available reporting, meaning its assessments can be incomplete or change quickly.

Its purpose is to provide context, not to guarantee a traveler’s safety.

“One of the main things I’m doing is taking a lot of the information that you have online on news sources,” Yaish explained. “You also have the community-driven insights that come into the system, which are people reporting on incidents that they have actually had. And you have the Israeli government. I’m taking all of that into one place.”

He said the system then applies its own logic to help users compare destinations.

“I’m running some logic that allows you to weigh out which place is better for me,” Yaish said. “Is it safer or is it more dangerous for me to go there?”

For Jewish travelers, that question has become increasingly difficult to separate from the wider news cycle. In 2025, the J7 report said that 20 people were killed in antisemitic attacks in the seven countries it tracks, making it the deadliest year for antisemitic violence against the Diaspora in more than three decades.

Safe for Jews is Yaish’s attempt to turn that concern into usable information. The project began with a personal search for a vacation destination. It has since developed into a broader effort to help Jewish and Israeli travelers make decisions in a world where safety can vary not only from country to country, but from city to city and sometimes from one street to the next.

And the vacation that sparked the project? Yaish eventually took it.

“I did, I did. A month later.”