Alan Gross Celebrates Hanukkah in Prison
Members of the Cuban Jewish community celebrated Hanukkah this week with Alan Gross, a Jewish American serving a 15-year prison sentence in Cuba.
“He looks stronger. He has gained a few pounds and is doing a lot of exercise,” Adela Dworin, who presides over Cuba’s Jewish community, told Reuters.
During the two-hour Hanukkah visit, Gross and his visitors ate latkes and chocolate gelt, and lit a menorah, according to reports.
Gross, 62, has been jailed since December 2009, when he was arrested for attempting to bring satellite phones and internet-enabled devices to Jewish residents of the Communist island nation.
Cuban President Raul Castro last week announced that 2,900 political prisoners, but not Gross, would be freed.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
