With the holiest days in Judaism approaching and nearly one year after the Hamas attack on Israel, Bay Area synagogues are on high alert.
Last year, Rabbi Mark Bloom’s biggest worry was finding enough chairs for the High Holidays. This year, it’s making sure every door is locked twice.
“This past year has undoubtedly been the most challenging I’ve ever had to face as a rabbi,” he told CBS News Bay Area.
With the anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attack coinciding with Judaism’s holiest days, anxiety at Oakland’s Temple Beth Abraham is at an all-time high.
“I wake up at night thinking about it still. I think about what if I was taken hostage. I have nightmares about it. I think it’s changed the relationships I have with people,” said congregant Elan Masliyah.
For the anniversary, Bloom is increasing security, adding extra guards with additional support from the city’s police department.
“The key thing that October 7th changed was the realm of the possible started to seem like the realm of the probable,” said Rafael Brinner, a counterterrorism analyst for the Bay Area Jewish Federation which oversees security for Jewish institutions in Northern California.
Brinner believes Iran’s recent attack on Israel has added a new layer of unpredictability to an already precarious situation.
“We’re living under the sense of, ‘When is something going to happen next?’ and the key thing for us to do is prepare so that we’re not thinking of it every minute of the day, but we’ve done our preparation,” he told CBS News Bay Area.
For Bloom, it’s about reminding people that even amidst all the sorrow and fear there’s at least one silver lining.
“It really has brought our community together,” he said.
Southern Israel — Ahead of the Jewish New Year holiday, Rosh Hashanah, Efrat Machikawa helped prepare food for dinner at her home in southern Israel. Her family eats Tunisian food to mark the occasion, and her mother made a number of delicacies, including spinach glazed in honey.
But Machikawa told CBS News that this year’s holiday — one of the most significant in Judaism — wouldn’t be the celebration it usually is, because one of her family members is still being held hostage in war-torn Gaza.
“We know it’s a holiday, but it’s nothing to celebrate. Nothing,” she said. “They should have been here.”
CBS News last visited Machikawa at her home in southern Israel almost a year ago, just days after Hamas launched its Oct. 7 attacks. Six members of her family had just been killed or taken hostage from their homes in Kibbutz Nir Oz — among the 1,200 people massacred and the 251 kidnapped that day.
Chanon Cohen and his daughter Efrat Machikawa are seen days after a number of their relatives were killed or taken hostage by Hamas terrorists during the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks.
Duarte Dias/CBS News
“It’s very hard to describe this past year, because it really doesn’t feel as if a year has been… I say, it’s one long day,” Machikawa said.
One of her relatives was killed and four were eventually released by Hamas, including her aunt Margalit, who had serious health issues when she was abducted.
Finally freed from captivity, it was hard for Margalit to accept what had happened on Oct. 7.
Margalit Moses, a released Israeli hostage, walks with an Israeli soldier shortly after her return to Israel, Nov. 24, 2023.
IDF via AP
“It wasn’t easy for her to realize what really happened to her house, to her community, to her friends, to people she loved, to the other kibbutzim, to the whole country,” Machikawa said.
Since we last met her, she’s been working tirelessly to get her uncle Gadi Moses, the last member of the family still held in Gaza, back home.
She’s been among the families and friends of hostages pushing Israel’s government hard to accept a deal with Hamas for a cease-fire in Gaza in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages. Machikawa has traveled the world, appealing to foreign leaders to mount pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Efrat Machikawa, whose uncle Gadi Moses is in Hamas captivity in the Gaza Strip, is seen at the Gaza border, in Kibbutz Nirim, southern Israel, in a Jan. 11, 2024 file photo.
Maya Alleruzzo/AP
“Everyone that is connected to the negotiation table and the army — the security and the army — are amazing, amazing people. But if I talk about my government… I don’t think they did what a government, what my idea of government, would do,” Machikawa said. “The feeling that it’s on us, on the families, to maintain the national and international interest in releasing these 101 hostages is quite hard to take.”
Israeli officials believe 64 of the hostages are still alive.
Machikawa said that, despite the difficulties, she will continue working to bring her uncle, and the other hostages, back home.
“There must be a hope. I am hopeful,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able not to be hopeful. I don’t have the capacity not to be hopeful.”
IT is the first far-right party to win German state elections since the Nazis – and the success of Alternative for Germany is down to younger supporters.
Paramedic Severin Kohler says that it is now trendy among Generation Z TikTokers to back the organisation known as AfD, which is led in the state of Thuringia by a man who has been labelled a “fascist”.
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AfD fans Severin Kohler and Carolin LichtenheldCredit: Paul Edwards
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AfD MP Torben Braga — who, curiously for a German anti-immigration party, was born in Brazil and is of Brazilian and Welsh ancestryCredit: Paul Edwards
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Professor Reinhard Schramm, who lost 20 close family to the Nazi extermination camps, has had death threats and bullets sent to him in the postCredit: Paul Edwards
Severin, 28, a leader of the party’s youth wing Junge Alternative, told me: “It’s a matter of a rebellion against their parents. Being from the right is punk now.”
Almost 40 per cent of 18 to 24-year-old voters backed the AfD in Thuringia, central Germany, last week. In neighbouring Saxony, 31 per cent did the same.
Yet the local branches of the party in the two states have been classified as “right-wing extremist” by the nation’s domestic intelligence agency.
On the Instagram page of Carolin Lichtenheld, who leads Thuringia’s Junge Alternative, the 21-year-old trainee pharmacist is shown brndishing a megaphone at a rally, with the caption: “Ready to fight for the preservation of our homeland and for our future. We are the youth who are ready to resist a woke society.”
The image is hashtagged with the word “reconquista” — a reference to the recapture by Christian kings of Spain and Portugal from the Muslim Moors.
Felix Steiner, from German far-right monitoring group Mobile Consulting, agrees that young voters are attracted to the AfD.
The activist told The Sun: “Almost no other party is so active on social media platforms, especially TikTok. The message is, ‘Young people, come to us. We are the next movement’.”
Youth campaigner Severin wears a T-shirt bearing the name Bjorn Hocke — the AfD’s leader in Thuringia who has twice been convicted this year of using Nazi slogans.
Former history teacher Hocke harnessed the power of TikTok to target the youth vote during the election.
Incredible story of Nazi hunter and holocaust refugee
In one post he leads a cavalcade of motorcyclists riding models made by Simson — a brand associated with national pride by the far right — in the old Communist East Germany.
Yet critics say that behind Hocke’s glossy social media campaigning is a man who is a political “danger”.
In 2019 a court in Thuringia ruled it was not libellous to call Hocke a “fascist” as the opinion had a “verifiable, factual basis”.
Thin-lipped and greying, Hocke once described Berlin’sHolocaust Memorial as a “monument of shame” and demanded a “180-degree turn” in Germany’s culture of remembrance.
The father-of-four once spoke of the Germans “longing for a historical figure” who would “heal the wounds of the people”.
Ulrike Grosse-Rothig, leader of Thuringia’s left-wing Die Linke party, told The Sun: “Hocke is a die-hard fascist. He’s a danger for German society, its voters and to democracy.”
Former AfD Thuringia MP Oskar Helmerich has called Hocke “a dangerous man”.
Little wonder Thuringia’s small Jewish community has been fearful.
Professor Reinhard Schramm, who lost 20 close family to the Nazi extermination camps, has had death threats and bullets sent to him in the post from unknown sources.
Speaking at a synagogue in Thuringia’s largest city Erfurt, the 80-year-old Holocaust survivor told me: “The Jewish community is insecure and some are afraid. They are quite allergically against the AfD. This is not a normal party.”
Of Hocke’s demand for a “180- degree turn” in Germany’s culture of remembrance, the grandfather-of-three says: “So does this mean that I am not supposed to speak about my grandmother who was gassed to death in a German gas chamber?”
‘Some are afraid’
Severin insists the AfD is “against political violence”, adding: “We don’t have anything in common with people sending bullets to synagogues.”
The AfD won Thuringia — a largely rural state in central Germany — with just under 33 per cent of the vote.
It’s the latest European convulsion of the far right which has seen rampaging thugs attempt to torch migrant hotels in Britain and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally topping parliamentary elections in France.
In Germany — as elsewhere — the touchstone issue has been immigration.
Days before the Thuringia vote, a Syrian asylum seeker went on a knife rampage, killing three in the west German city of Solingen.
It emerged that the man — linked to Islamic State — had previously had his claim for asylum turned down but he had not been deported because the authorities could not find him.
Germany’s lame duck premier Olaf Scholz promised to speed up deportations and other mainstream parties followed suit with tough talk on immigration, including the conservative Christian Democratic Union.
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Andreas Buhl, a Thuringian MP for Merkel’s CDU, concedes that the former Chancellor’s open border policy was wrongCredit: Paul Edwards
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A CDU poster calling to stop illegal migrationCredit: Paul Edwards
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An anti-multicultural bannerCredit: Paul Edwards
Yesterday, it was reported that Germany’s interior minister Nancy Faeser has told the EU that controls will be brought in on all the country’s land borders, to deal with the “continuing burden” of migration and “Islamist terrorism”.
Britain, where populists Reform won four million votes at the General Election, will be watching whether moves towards the AfD’s turf will win back voters.
As well as a hardline stance on immigration, the AfD is also against what it says are over-zealous green policies, and it wants to halt weapons supplies to Ukraine.
At the Thuringian parliament in Erfurt, I met key Hocke lieutenant Torben Braga — who, curiously for a German anti-immigration party, was born in Brazil and is of Brazilian and Welsh ancestry.
The 33-year-old Thuringia MP says: “Bjorn Hocke doesn’t have a single fascist vein in his body.”
‘Political firewall’
Of his boss’s infamous “shame” reference to the Berlin Holocaust memorial, Braga says he meant it was “a shameful part of our history”.
Braga believes the security services are monitoring him and suggests “provocateurs” from those agencies were behind the “two or three cases” of people doing the Hitler salute at a recent rally in Erfurt.
Picturesque Erfurt is, at first glance, perhaps an unlikely setting for a far-right upsurge. Half-timbered town houses crowd flower-bedecked medieval squares where tourists enjoy beers on its many restaurant terraces.
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A far-right mob gather at a demonstration in Solingen last monthCredit: EPA
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Far-right AfD supporters wave German flags, including one adorned with an Iron CrossCredit: Getty
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The AfD party’s slick TikTok videosCredit: tiktok/@afd
This summer the England squad had their Euro 2024 training base a short drive away and Three Lions star Jude Bellingham was spotted having coffee in the city of 215,000.
Yet Thuringia has seen too much history in the 20th century.
After the Americans liberated Thuringia, it fell under Soviet control.
From 1949 to 1990 it was part of the Communist state of East Germany.
Post-German reunification, Thuringia and other eastern states struggled economically, with many youngsters heading to western Germany.
Immigration became a key political battleground after conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to a million refugees in 2015 and 2016.
Last year around 334,000 people claimed asylum in Germany — more than France and Spain combined. In the UK the figure was just under 85,000 people.
The AfD — formed in 2013 as a Eurosceptic party — has seen its fortunes rise as it hammered home its anti-immigration stance.
No other party is so active on social media platforms, especially TikTok.The AfD post pictures of demonstrations. The message is: ‘Young people come to us. We are the next movement’
It called for a ban on burqas, minarets, and call to prayer using the slogan, “Islam is not a part of Germany” in 2016.
In Thuringia, Hocke led a radical AfD faction called The Wing, deemed beyond the pale even by many in his own party.
Andreas Buhl, a Thuringian MP for Merkel’s CDU, concedes that the former Chancellor’s open border policy was wrong.
He told me: “In hindsight, it should have been clearer that you can also push people back at the border who have already entered another European country.”
He pledged, as other mainstream parties have, not to work with the AfD, creating a political firewall likely to block it from taking power.
It raises the spectre that those who voted for it may come to believe that democracy is failing them.
But anti-far-right activist Felix Steiner says only around half of AfD supporters are wedded to their hardline doctrines, with the rest supporting them as a protest vote.
He added: “The AfD result could be halved if voters were satisfied with other parties’ policies.”
The fight for the political soul of Germany’s Generation Z goes on.
It’s a battle of ideas that may be won or lost on the feeds of TikTok and Instagram.
The dad-of-six had owned five pharmacies which closed down when his marriage broke up.
He was subject to a domestic violence protection court order in 2016 to protect his wife, the Preston inquest heard
Coroner James Adeley recorded that he had “detained hostages and died after being shot by federal agents”.
Associates in Blackburn said he became increasingly religious and had quarrelled with his wider family in the months before his death.
He had spent much of the year before the attack in Pakistan.
It emerged after the kidnap drama that Akram had previously been the subject of a low-level investigation by MI5 but the case was closed after a month.
He travelled to New York on December 29 2021, and then on to Dallas, where he purchased a black market handgun.
MINNEAPOLIS — A pro-Palestinian encampment cleared on Thursday morning after organizers reached an agreement with the administration, but Jewish students say they still have many concerns.
Joined by community leaders, Jewish students spoke at a press conference about the past week, and their meeting with university administrators on Thursday morning.
“I appreciate that the disruption is gone. I do not appreciate that they are getting rewards for it,” said Alex Stewart, Hillel student president. “We were hopeful that they would use that free speech to put out a statement condemning the language that’s being used on campus.”
In addition to condemning antisemitic language used by some protestors, Jewish leaders say they are upset people who violated campus rules, aren’t being charged with crimes. They are also upset that protestors are being allowed to address the Board of Regents later this month.
“That was also one of the requests of the Jewish students here who did not break the rules. They were not given any such guarantee. Why? That’s a great question to ask the administration,” said Ethan Roberts with the Jewish Community Relations Council.
Jewish leaders say they’re troubled by the language used in the email sent from interim president Ettinger to protestors that essentially marked the end of the encampment. In particular the use of the Arabic word “thawabit”, a term used to characterize the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people.WCCO researched the word through sources locally and with our partners at CBS News and found no evidence linking it to violence or radicalism.
Jewish students say they want to know what’s next for them, and how will they be made to feel safe on campus moving forward. They’re pushing for more education so all students feel welcome.
“Something that was thoroughly discussed was an education program and educating other students about the thin line between the freedom of speech and hate speech,” said sophomore Halle Wasserman.
Jewish students did say they feel hopeful that positive changes will happen on campus, and they are hoping administrators will support the Hillel campus climate initiative, which focuses on training and addressing issues regarding hate.
John Lauritsen is an Emmy award-winning reporter from Montevideo, Minn. He joined WCCO-TV in late-July of 2007. Two days after he started, the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed.
We make ready for Holy Week, a time to walk with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, on the Way of the Cross. It is a time for our most sincere reflection of who we are as a people of God and how we are living our sacramental Covenant through, with, and in Him. It is a time to consider whether our thoughts, words and deeds are truly of God so that we, individually and as a people gathered, are a light for the nations.
Do our words open the eyes of our children to God? Do we enfold those who have heartbreak and brokenness with God’s tender mercy and prayer? Do we lead those whose joy has abandoned their own breath and bring them back to smile again, to be filled with God’s light? Do we live 24/7/365 through His victory of justice?
Jesus never leaves us. He remains with us through the Eucharist to guide us always as the Way of the Cross is not a moment in time but a time of life. He died for us that we might have everlasting life and by that, He calls us to be His dwelling place that there would be no difference between heaven and earth. By becoming flesh, He calls our humanity to divinity. How close are we to living as a Eucharist?
On Monday, March 25, I will be joined by the priests serving in the Diocese of Orlando and you, the community of faith, for the celebration of the Chrism Mass. The Chrism Mass, celebrated at the Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe at 11 a.m., is an invitation for the Church to acknowledge the essential of our daily living, Jesus the Eucharist. It is a beautiful presentation of the oils of anointing which are used throughout the liturgical year to bring forth the Sacraments of Initiation, Anointing of the Sick, and Holy Orders. We announce the Oil of Catechumens, Oil of the Sick, and Oil of Holy Chrism to God and ask Him to bless them that we might continue to imbue His dwelling place with the splendor of holiness by all the people. Each prayer of blessing includes an explanation of the power and effect of each oil. The newly blessed oils are apportioned and distributed to each Catholic church in the Diocese of Orlando and are brought forth during the Mass of the Lord’s Supper (Holy Thursday), intimating our oneness with one another through, with and in God.
During the Chrism Mass, I invite all the priest concelebrants to reaffirm their ministry by renewing the promises made at Ordination. We were anointed with the oil of Holy Chrism, the oil of gladness, the Holy Spirit, to serve God’s people as priests of His Son. Together we pray to God, the author of the Sacraments and bestower of life, that we bring to completion the growth of His Church until she reaches the measure of fullness He proclaims through all ages. We pray that Christ visit his priests in their prayer, in their Bishop, in their brother priests and in their people. We ask that He upset our routine, disrupt our lives and disquiet us and lead us to employ all our talents and abilities to ensure that our people may have life and life in abundance (cf. Jn 10:10).
During the Chrism Mass, we celebrate our jubilarians, Redemptorist Father Aldrin Nunes on his 25th anniversary, Father William Zamborsky, on his 50th anniversary, Msgr. William Ennis on his 60th anniversary, and Msgr. David Page on his 65th anniversary. We thank the Holy Cross Fathers Joseph Long and Laurence Olzsewski for their service in our diocese as they celebrate 65 and 60 years respectively, and extern priests Father Hilario Rivera-Gonzalez and Father Joseph Maniangat celebrating 50 and 60 years respectively.
May we be set as a covenant of the people asking the Lord to bless us now and forever. Amen.
Whether an avid reader or not, gift recipients will love getting one of these beautiful books under the tree or menorah this holiday season.
The Guinness Book of World Records is always a fun and interesting read, and the 2024 book is no exception. Discover a universe of talent, curiosities, and jaw-dropping facts from around the world.
The Hockey Skates, written by Karl Subban, is a sweet and encouraging read for all ages. Inspired by Karl Subban’s son, NHL star PK Subban, this is a story about maintaining perseverance and optimism through a series of comical misfortunes, all of which are brought to life by Maggie Zeng’s charming illustrations.
Cake Vs Pie is not only a fun story but it’s full of fun, whimsical illustrations too. Join Cake and Pie in this fun-loving, laugh-out-loud picture book about the ultimate friendship rivalry and overcoming jealousy to realize being together is the Sweetest Thing. There can only be one favorite dessert… Will it be Cake, the friend who rises to every occasion? Or will Pie’s surprisingly sweet center be the most irresistible? There’s only one way to settle this battle, once and for all: FOOD FIGHT!
Eight Nights of Lights: A Celebration of Hanukkah lets you count down each night with this gorgeous and fun holiday storybook. Celebrate the eight nights of Hanukkah with this interactive, one-of-a-kind menorah and storybook set. Each night, open a candle-shaped book and follow a young Jewish girl and her family as they decorate their home, say blessings, enjoy traditional foods and games, and gather to hear about the brave Maccabees and their victory that brought light to all Jews. Flip the book over to “light” the candle and place it back in the menorah to commemorate each night of the Festival of Lights. It’s the perfect Hanukkah gift for the entire family to enjoy.
A far-right Polish lawmaker on Tuesday used a fire extinguisher to put out the candles in a Hanukkah menorah placed in the parliament lobby, a stunt that saw him ordered out of the assembly by the speaker of the lower chamber.
“This should have never happened,” Szymon Holownia told reporters after expelling the lawmaker, Grzegorz Braun, to leave the plenary, adding that he would call for an investigation into the incident.
The ceremony for lighting the nine-branched candelabrum was held in the Polish parliament to celebrate the Jewish Festival of Lights, and was attended by rabbis and a Jewish music band.
Grzegorz Braun, a far-right Polish lawmaker, second from the left, is seen after using a fire extinguisher to put out Hanukkah candles at the parliament in Warsaw, Poland Dec. 12, 2023.
Slawomir Kaminski/Agencja Wyborcza.pl/REUTERS
Poland’s TVN24 showed video of Braun using a red fire extinguisher to douse the candles, filling the area with smoke and fog from the device. The parliamentary proceedings were suspended.
“This should have never happened,” Holownia told reporters after he ordered Braun to leave the session, adding that he would call for an investigation into the lawmaker’s actions.
Poland’s newly elected Prime Minister Donald Tusk called it a disgrace and said such a thing should never be repeated. Tusk, a pro-European Union centrist, was elected on Monday, marking a reversal for Poland after years of conservative leadership. Tusk gave his inaugural speech to parliament Tuesday before Braun acted out.
Braun, a pro-Russian member of the Confederation party, has previously claimed that there’s a plot to turn Poland into a “Jewish state.”
“It can’t happen again, it’s a disgrace,” Tusk said as he waited for the parliament to approve his new pro-EU government, a vote that was delayed amid the chaos triggered by the incident, which was condemned by all parties except for Braun’s Confederation.
“SHAME. A Polish Parliament member just did this. Few minutes after we celebrated Hanukkah there,” Israel’s ambassador to Poland Yacov Livne said on social media, posting a video of the stunt.
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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul put state police and the New York National Guard on high alert Thursday, and ordered the agencies to increase patrols at Jewish sites after a man armed with a shotgun fired two rounds into the air outside an Albany synagogue. Meg Oliver reports.
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With reported instances of antisemitism on the rise in the U.S. in the wake of renewed violence in the Middle East, several Hannukah celebrations have either been canceled or tempered.
According to watchdog StopAntisemitism, since Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants staged a surprise attack on Israel on October 7, it has experienced a 1,500 percent increase in reported incidents. In the first month following the attack, another organization, the Anti-Defamation League, said reports of antisemitism had risen 316 percent year-on-year.
When questioned about its response to these cancelations, the White House faced a backlash for also noting a rise in Islamophobia that has occurred at the same time. Its own Hannukah party is set to take place on Monday, The Washington Post reported.
Disney World, in Florida, and Disneyland, in California, meanwhile have maintained their plans to commemorate the festival—which begins on Thursday night.
People ride an escalator past a hanukkiah installation at the World Trade Center Oculus on December 6, 2023, in New York City. Several public Hanukkah celebrations have been canceled this year. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Hannukah is not a strictly religious festival, but has become a major part of Jewish culture. It is the only Jewish festival that marks a military victory: when the Maccabees successfully recovered Jerusalem from the then Seleucid emperor Antiochus in the second century BC.
After the Second Temple was sacked by the Seleucids, the story goes, the Maccabees only had enough lamp oil for one night, but it lasted for eight days—which are represented by the eight candles on a hanukkiah lit over the course of eight days.
But while many Jews see Hanukkah as representing light and hope, some have viewed its usual mirth as inappropriate in the context of the war between Israel and Hamas.
The 2nd Sundays Art and Music Festival, Virginia
A hanukkiah lighting had been scheduled to take place at the 2nd Sundays Art and Music Festival in Williamsburg, Virginia, on December 10, but it has since been canceled. Shirley Vermillion, the festival’s founder, told the Daily Press that the event “seemed very inappropriate” given the conflict.
“The concern is of folks feeling like we are siding with a group over the other[…]not a direction we ever decide to head,” she said.
The United Jewish Community of the Virginia Peninsula issued a statement criticizing the decision, and claimed festival organizers had offered to reinstate the event if it were held under a banner calling for a ceasefire.
Virginia’s Gov. Glenn Youngkin urged the organizers to reconsider the decision, writing on Monday: “Singling out the Jewish community by canceling this Hanukkah celebration is absurd.”
Latkes and Vodka, Washington D.C.
According to the Religious News Service, an annual bash in Washington D.C. called Latkes and Vodka was also canceled this year by its host, Steve Rabinowitz, a media consultant and former press aide in the Bill Clinton White House.
In an email on Tuesday, he reportedly said: “I just don’t feel right hosting a party this year, given October 7 and in the middle of an actual war.”
Zony Mash Beer Project, Louisiana
The Zony Mash Beer Project, a brewery and events space in New Orleans, Louisiana, which was due to hold a Hanukkah celebration on the first night of the festival, abruptly announced it was canceling the event on Wednesday.
In a statement, it attributed the decision to “external tensions,l” without specifying what those were.
“Our intent has always been to host a lighthearted and conflict-free celebration, providing a space for diverse communities to come together and enjoy the spirit of Hanukkah,” the beer project wrote. “Unfortunately, challenges beyond our control have compromised our ability to ensure a joyful and safe environment.”
Adam Mayer, a Jewish activist who runs a pop-up called Latke Daddy, who has publicly criticized Israel’s intervention in Gaza, said in his own statement that he had been disinvited “respectfully” after other members of the Jewish community expressed unhappiness with his position.
Hannukah House, Texas
A Jewish-owned house in Houston, Texas which has for the past few years with a blue and white light display, encouraging others to visit it, said it would be toning down the display this year over the war between Israel and Hamas.
In a statement on November 26, the owners said: “In light of current events, the Hannukah House is still aglow, with only white lights in the hope of peace.”
Brad Hirschfield
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, an author and president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, will still be celebrating Hanukkah at home, but will not be hosting an open house this year as he traditionally does.
“I don’t entirely know how you can celebrate a festival of victory fully and completely when we are a people at war,” he told the Religious News Service. “That’s a challenge.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Threats against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities in the U.S. are on the rise since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Antisemitic incidents saw a staggering 388% increase, according to numbers released Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League, while the Council on American Islamic Relations reported nearly 800 anti-Muslim incidents since Oct. 7, the highest in nearly eight years. Jeff Pegues has more.
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Jews in communities far from Israel gathered at synagogues this weekend for their first Shabbat services since Hamas militants attacked Israel, igniting an ongoing war. Rabbis led prayers of peace and shared grief with their congregations. At many synagogues security was tight.
The deadly Hamas attack is not just another geopolitical event for Jewish people, explained one U.S. rabbi. It is drudging up generations of visceral trauma, especially in Pittsburgh – the city scarred by the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
“More Jews were killed last Shabbat … than on any other day since the Holocaust,” said Rabbi Daniel Fellman of Temple Sinai, during the first service following the violence in Israel. “It isn’t that Hamas wants the destruction of Israel. It’s that Hamas wants the destruction of you and me.”
“The world deserves better, the Palestinian people deserve better and we need to do better.”
Rabbi Daniel Fellman leads Shabbat service Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at Temple Sinai in Pittsburgh. The congregation prayed for the safety of the state of Israel, for peace, and said a memorial prayer for those killed and missing after Hamas’ attack.
Jessie Wardarski / AP
Despite that anguish, Fellman’s congregation – and others across the world – heeded the words of an Israeli soldier who had urged worshippers “to go sing and dance, go make sure that every person in the world hears us singing this prayer this Shabbat.”
Fellman preached on the biblical story of the first murder – that of Abel by his brother Cain – and urged an understanding that all people are siblings, including Jews, Christians and Muslims.
“They are all our brothers and sisters, and when one of us hurts, we all hurt. If we can’t see that we share this earth, that we share God’s love, … then we are doomed to live the curse of Cain and Abel again and again.”
For Rabbi Seth Adelson of Congregation Beth Shalom in Pittsburgh, receiving the news about the attack last Saturday morning as he headed to worship brought back traumatic memories of Oct. 27, 2018. That Sabbath morning was shattered by news that a gunman attacked the nearby Tree of Life synagogue and killed 11 people from three congregations meeting there.
The difference, he said in an interview, was “we just could not comprehend the idea of a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.” By comparison, last week’s Hamas attack was “tragic and horrifying and gut-wrenching, but it was believable.”
Anne Faigen, right, says a silent prayer for her friends in Israel while at a Shabbat service at Temple Sinai in Pittsburgh on Oct. 13, 2023.
Jessie Wardarski / AP
After the Pittsburgh synagogue attack, “we felt the whole community embraced us,” Adelson said. “One of the things that many of us are feeling right now is that we are not feeling that embrace. We are really a community in pain and we don’t feel support.”
But they are carrying on with the rhythms of ritual life, Adelson said. Saturday’s service at Beth Shalom includes a bar mitzvah, a young man’s coming-of-age initiation.
“Sometimes we celebrate, even as we know we must grieve,” he said.
“A very challenging moment for the Jewish people”
Police in Germany’s capital, Berlin, visibly increased security in front of synagogues as worshippers flocked to Shabbat prayer services.
The heightened safety measures come in reaction to global tensions triggered by Hamas’ attack, and Israel’s subsequent bombing of Gaza, as well as calls on social media to violently protest in front of Jewish institutions in Germany.
At Berlin’s Chabad community in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf neighborhood, the street leading to the synagogue and adjacent community center was blocked to traffic. Police and private security service patrolled on the sidewalk as congregants arrived at the house of worship.
Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal prepares Torah scrolls at the synagogue of the Chabad community on October 13, 2023, in Berlin, Germany, prior to the first Shabbat service after the Hamas attacks on Israel.
Markus Schreiber / AP
Some men wore their yarmulkes hidden under baseball hats, while others didn’t wear any skullcaps until they entered the synagogue.
Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal, head of the local Chabad community, told The Associated Press on Friday evening that “this is a very challenging moment for the Jewish people.”
“At the same time we will stand together with resilience and complete trust in God for a positive future,” Teichtal added. “There is nothing more than the terrorists want than to demoralize us — they’ve achieved the opposite.”
His remarks came as hundreds of Berliners assembled in front of another temple, the Fraenkelufer Synagogue, on the eve of Shabbat to protect it and the prayer service held inside from possible attacks.
They held up signs with pictures of Israelis who are being held as hostages by Hamas in Gaza, lit candles, and waved Israeli flags. Some posters read “Jewish life matters” and “Never again is now.”
An Indonesian rabbi at the only synagogue in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation called for peace Saturday and an end to the fighting in the Israel-Hamas war.
“We call and pray for peace,” Modechai Ben Avraham said, “Because when peace is restored to our lives, we can carry out any activity and worship peacefully.”
The rabbi, who led prayers at Shaar Hashamayim synagogue in Tondano city on Sulawesi island, said the conflict has not caused anxiety or a sense of fear and isolation for the synagogue and its worshippers “because people know our community only focuses on carrying out religious services.”
Shaar Hashamayim is currently the only synagogue in Indonesia; it has served a local Jewish community of some 50 people in Tondano since 2019. Judaism is not recognized as one of the country’s six major religions, but its practices are allowed under the Indonesian constitution.
There are an estimated 550 Indonesian Jews, mostly live in North Sulawesi, a province home to more than 2.6 million people, who are mainly Christian in the mostly Muslim archipelago nation.
Indonesian Jews pray at Shaar Hashamayim Synagogue on October 14, 2023, in Tondano, North Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Tatan Syuflana / AP
As his parents hunkered down in their safe room in northern Israel, Juval Porat tried to remain focused on preparing a mix of joyful and comforting hymns for the first Shabbat services at his Miami Beach, Fla., synagogue since Hamas’ attack.
“For the life of me, I’m not going to cry,” the cantor said before Friday evening services in the stained-glass-filled Temple Beth Sholom. “I need to be strong, so that other people can cry.”
Tears did flow as Porat and the rabbis led the 300 congregants in praying for peace, for safety for the people of Israel and the soldiers defending it, and especially for the hostages.
“It’s the first time I cried,” said Michael Conway, who wore a white kippah decorated with blue doves as symbols of peace.
The prayers in Hebrew and English were “a chance to release the pent-up emotion of the week, and to be with a lot of people who knew how I feel,” he added.
In her sermon, Senior Rabbi Gayle Pomerantz named those emotions — fear, anger, shock that Israel and the Jewish people are facing “an existential moment.”
“We want to pummel Hamas with our own hands,” she told the congregation sitting in silence after she shared testimonials from survivors of a now-devastated kibbutz where, as a student, she had celebrated many Shabbats.
“But hate will never repair what is broken,” she said, urging the faithful instead to show solidarity and to support Israel’s relief efforts.
Rabbi Robert Davis struck the same note as he lit a candle to commemorate the hostages and those killed by Hamas — “the infants and children and teens, the soldiers, the concert-goers, and people waiting for the bus.”
“There aren’t enough candles,” Davis said. “Let us be the lights.”
Tens of thousands of Muslims demonstrated Friday across the Middle East in support of the Palestinians and against the intensifying Israeli bombardment of Gaza, underscoring the risk of a wider regional conflict as Israel prepares for a possible ground invasion.
From the typically sedate streets of downtown Amman in Jordan, to Yemen’s war-scarred capital of Sanaa, crowds of Muslim worshippers poured into the streets after weekly Friday prayers, angered by devastating Israeli airstrikes on Gaza that began after the militant group Hamas launched an unprecedented surprise attack on Israel last Saturday.
At the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, Israeli police were permitting only certain older men, women and children to enter the sprawling hilltop compound for prayers, trying to limit the potential for violence. Only 5,000 worshippers made it into the site, the Islamic endowment that manages the mosque said. On a typical Friday, some 50,000 perform the prayers.
An Associated Press reporter watched police allow just a Palestinian teenage girl and her mother into the compound out of 20 worshippers who tried to get in, some of them even over the age of 50. Young Palestinian men who were refused entry gathered at the steps near Lion’s Gate, eyes downcast, until police shouted at them and shepherded them outside the Old City ramparts altogether.
“We can’t live, we can’t breathe, they are killing everything that is good within us,” said Ahmad Barbour, a 57-year-old cleaner, red-faced and seething after police blocked him from entering for prayers.
“Everything that is forbidden to us is allowed to them,” he added, referring to the Israelis.
The mosque sits in a hilltop compound sacred to both Jews and Muslims, and conflicting claims over it have spilled into violence before. Al-Aqsa Mosque is the third-holiest site in Islam and stands in a spot known to Jews as the Temple Mount, which is the holiest site in Judaism.
Hundreds of young Palestinian worshippers who had been turned away from the Old City threw down small prayer rugs on the street in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz and prayed in the open. When some of the men started shouting, Israeli police charged into the crowd with batons and fired rounds of tear gas at the worshippers, wounding at least six people, said the Palestinian Red Crescent.
Thousands demonstrated in Amman in neighboring Jordan, some crying out: “We are going to Jerusalem as millions of martyrs!”
“What do they want from Palestine? Do they expect them to leave?” asked protester Omar Abu-Sundos. “For what remains of Palestine to leave? They won’t leave.”
Jordanians march from Grand Husseini Mosque to Al-Nahl Square after Friday prayer in Amman, Jordan on Oct. 13, 2023.
Laith Al-jnaidi/Anadolu via Getty Images
In Beirut, thousands of supporters of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group waved Lebanese, Palestinian and Hezbollah flags, chanting slogans in support of Gaza and calling for “death to Israel.” The Iranian-backed militant group in neighboring Lebanon has launched sporadic attacks since the Hamas assault, but largely stayed on the sidelines of the war.
However, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general warned that it would be “on the lookout” for the United States and British naval vessels heading to the Mediterranean Sea. U.S. officials, including President Biden, have repeatedly warned Iran and the regional militias Tehran backs to stay out of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
“Your battleships do not interest us, nor do your statements frighten us,” Naim Kassim said at a rally in a southern suburb of Beirut. “When the time is right to take action, we will do so.”
In Baghdad, tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Tahrir Square — the protest hub of Iraq’s capital — for rallies called by the influential Shiite cleric and political leader Muqtada al-Sadr.
Thousands of followers of influential Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr take part in a rally at Tahrir Square in a show of support for Palestinians against retaliatory Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2023.
Ameer Al-Mohammedawi/picture alliance via Getty Images
“We, as Iraqis, know the pain of having an occupier on our land,” said protester Alaa al-Arabyia, referring to the U.S. occupation of Iraq following its 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein. “Palestinian women have husbands, loved ones and sons fighting the occupation. We stand with them in their struggle.”
Across Iran, a supporter of Hamas and Israel’s regional archenemy, demonstrators also streamed into the streets after prayers. In Tehran, they burned Israeli and American flags, chanting: “Death to Israel,” “Death to America,” “Israel will be doomed” and “Palestine will be the conqueror.”
“The Palestinian people are fed up, now your idea is to destroy Gaza, the houses of the people,” Iran’s hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi said in a speech in the country’s southern Fars province. “The people of the world and Palestine will cause trouble for you.”
Iranian girls hold Palestinian flags as they attend a pro-Palestinian rally before the Friday prayer in Tehran, Iran, Oct. 13, 2023.
AP
In the Syrian capital of Damascus, protesters — including Palestinians from the Yarmouk refugee camp formed after the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation — also rallied.
“I tell the people not to leave their homes otherwise they will be like our grandparents who left Palestine and came to Syria but never returned,” Ahmad Saeed, a 23-year-old Palestinian living in Syria, said, referring to the 1948 war.
In Yemen’s Sanaa, held by the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels still at war with a Saudi-led coalition, demonstrators crowded the streets waving Yemeni and Palestinian flags. The rebels’ slogan long has been: “God is the greatest; death to America; death to Israel; curse of the Jews; victory to Islam.”
“We are ready to participate actively and send hundreds of thousands of mujahedeen … .to defend Palestine, the Palestinian people and the holy sites,” the Houthi government said in a statement Friday.
After Friday prayers, Egyptian demonstrators ringed the historic Al-Azhar Mosque in downtown Cairo, the Sunni Muslim world’s foremost religious institution, chanting that Israel remained their enemy “generation after generation.” They repeated the traditionally nationalistic slogan, “We give our souls and blood to Al-Aqsa.”
Muslims shout out slogans as they protest Israel’s retaliation against Gaza after Hamas’ attack on Israel at Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, Egypt on Oct. 13, 2023.
Mohamed Elshahed/Anadolu via Getty Images
In Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad, some worshippers trampled on American and Israeli flags.
“International media and international courts turn a blind eye to the injustices with the Palestinians. But they only notice the actions that the Palestinians take to defend themselves,” said Faheem Ahmed, a worshipper in Karachi. “They call it terrorism.”
JERUSALEM — Tens of thousands of Muslims demonstrated Friday across the Middle East in support of the Palestinians and against Israeli airstrikes pounding Gaza, underscoring the risk of a wider regional conflict erupting as Israel prepares for a possible ground invasion in the coastal strip.
From Amman, Jordan, to Yemen’s capital of Sanaa, Muslims poured out onto the streets after weekly Friday prayers. At Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Israeli police had been permitting only older men, women and children to the sprawling hilltop compound for prayers, trying to prevent the potential for violence as tens of thousands attend on a typical Friday.
An Associated Press reporter watched police allow just a Palestinian teenage girl and her mother into the compound out of 20 worshippers who tried to get in, some of them even over the age of 50. Young Palestinian men who were refused entry gathered at the steps near Lion’s Gate, their eyes downcast, until police shouted at them and shepherded them out of the Old City altogether.
“We can’t live, we can’t breathe, they are killing everything that is good within us,” said Ahmad Barbour, a 57-year-old cleaner in a clean white thobe, seething after police blocked him from entering for prayers.
“Everything that is forbidden to us is allowed to them,” he added, referring to Israelis.
The mosque sits in a hilltop compound sacred to both Jews and Muslims, and conflicting claims over it have spilled into violence before. Al-Aqsa is the third-holiest site in Islam and stands in a spot known to Jews as the Temple Mount, which is the holiest site in Judaism.
Police later fired tear gas in the Old City and east Jerusalem. The Palestinian Red Crescent said its medics treated six wounded people, with at least one beaten up by officers, the organization said.
In Baghdad, tens of thousands gathered in Tahrir Square in the center of Iraq’s capital for protests called by the influential Shiite cleric and political leader Muqtada al-Sadr.
“May this demonstration … terrify the great evil, America, which supports Zionist terrorism against our loved ones in Palestine,” al-Sadr said in an online statement.
Across Iran, a supporter of Hamas and Israel’s regional archenemy, demonstrators protested. In Tehran, the country’s capital, they burned Israeli and Ameircan flags, chanting: “Death to Israel,” “Death to America,” “Israel will be doomed,” and “Palestine will be the conqueror.”
“The Palestinian people are fed up, now your idea is to destroy Gaza, the houses of the people,” Iran’s hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi said in a speech in the country’s southern Fars province. “The people of the world and Palestine will cause trouble for you.”
In Yemen’s Sanaa, held by the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels still at war with a Saudi-led coalition, live television footage showed demonstrators crowding streets and waving Yemeni and Palestinian flags. The rebels’ slogan long has been: “God is the greatest; death to America; death to Israel; curse of the Jews; victory to Islam.”
After prayers in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, some worshippers stepped on American and Israeli flags, in a sign of disrespect. Protests there broke up peacefully, though other larger ones were expected later in the day.
“Stop bombing Palestine!” shouted one of the demonstrators, Ahmed Raza. “Stop killing innocent Palestinians!”
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Associated Press writers Abdulrahman Zeyad in Baghdad, Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed to this report.
NEW YORK — The Jewish diaspora awoke to horror Saturday in what was supposed to be among the most festive times on the Jewish holiday calendar.
The attacks by the militant group Hamas came after the end of Sukkot, a weeklong celebration to commemorate the harvest season and the time Jews lived in the desert after being freed from slavery in Egypt.
It also came as Jews in the United States were gearing up to celebrate the holiday of Simchat Torah, which marks the beginning of a new annual cycle of the reading of the scrolls and is celebrated in Israel a day earlier.
At synagogues around the globe, the attacks brought a somber tone.
Rabbi Felicia L. Sol opened the morning at B’nai Jeshurun in New York City by telling congregants of the devastating toll from an Hamas attack that came from the air, from the sea and from the land.
At a time that was supposed to be filled with joy, so many were instead entering “the holiday knowing that we can’t possibly celebrate in the same way that we would if obviously this hadn’t happened,” she said.
The day, she said, would go on “with less melody” as congregants joined her in “praying that things will be resolved, that those who are wounded will heal and for all the pain that already exists that we’ll find our way through.”
The incursion during Simchat Torah in Israel revived painful memories of the 1973 Mideast war practically 50 years to the day, in which Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism and a time of atonement and forgiveness.
“I think that’s often been the case in these wars, that Israel often gets attacked on a holiday or Sabbath.” said Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress. “And, so I don’t think that’s an accident.”
The attack drew condemnation from Jewish communities and organizations spanning from Miami to Vancouver. The Jewish population in the United States was estimated at 7.5 million in 2021 by the Pew Research Center, with significant communities in the New York and Los Angeles areas.
The holiday of Sukkot begins five days after Yom Kippur and is named after the huts, or sukkah, that represent the shelters that freed Jews used in their 40 years in the wilderness. Sometimes the temporary shelters are adorned with fruits, lights and other festively colored decorations.
During the Simchat Torah holiday, people gather to dance with the scrolls marking the end of an annual reading cycle and the beginning of the next.
Maxim Jacobs, 48, said the mood was mournful during Saturday morning services at his synagogue in New Jersey, with worshippers worried about family in Israel.
But he expected a festive evening celebration for Simchat Torah. He said the rabbi told congregants other than traveling to Israel to help defend the country, being joyous is how people can carry on.
“We need to get closer together, have joy, tell the terrorists they won’t get us down,” Jacobs said. “We will go on as Jews.”
At Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, New York, worshippers opened their service Saturday both welcoming the arrival of the holiday and mourning the attack.
“We are holding joy and sorrow at the same time as we often do in Judaism,” Associate Cantor Danielle Rodnizki said.
DIMONA, Israel — For two years, Toveet Israel and dozens of other residents of the Village of Peace have lived in fear.
Dimona, a city on the edge of the nation of Israel’s Negev Desert, has been her home for 24 years. Her eight children were born here and know no other country. Now, she and 130 other undocumented members of the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem face deportation.
Receiving the order to leave two years ago was a “moment of disbelief” for Israel, 53. “I feel like the government has been merciless to me and my children,” she said.
The Hebrew Israelites, as the spiritual community’s members are commonly known, first made their way to Israel from the United States in the 1960s. While members do not consider themselves Jewish, they claim an ancestral connection to Israel.
Around 3,000 Hebrew Israelites live in remote, hardscrabble towns in southern Israel. The Village of Peace, a cluster of low-slung buildings surrounded by vegetable patches and immaculate gardens in Dimona, is the community’s epicenter.
Over decades, the Hebrew Israelites have made gradual inroads into Israeli society. After years of bureaucratic wrangling, about 500 members hold Israeli citizenship, and most of the rest have permanent residency.
But about 130 have no formal status and now face deportation. Some don’t have foreign passports and say they have spent their entire adult lives in Israel and have nowhere to go.
The community’s long fight to secure its status shines a light on Israel’s strict immigration policy, which grants people it considers Jewish automatic citizenship but limits entry to others who don’t fall under its definition.
The African Hebrew Israelites are one of a constellation of Black religious groups in the U.S. that emerged in the late 19th and 20th centuries and encompass a wide spectrum of Christian and Jewish-inspired beliefs.
Some fringe Black Hebrew groups in the U.S. hold extremist or antisemitic views, according to the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The community in Dimona does not espouse such beliefs.
André Brooks-Key, an African and African American studies professor at Claflin University in South Carolina, said these various religious communities share a belief that certain African peoples are descendants of the biblical Israelites and that the transatlantic slave trade was prophesied in the Bible.
“Regardless of how they understand Jesus or how they dress or any of these other aspects, that underlying theological point is what binds them together,” Brooks-Key said.
The Hebrew Israelites believe they are descendants of the biblical tribes of Israel who, after the Roman conquest in 70 A.D., fled down the Nile and west into the African interior and were ultimately taken as slaves to North America centuries later.
They observe an interpretation of biblical laws formulated by their late founder that includes strict veganism, abstention from tobacco and hard alcohol, fasting on the Sabbath, polygamy, and a ban on wearing synthetic fabrics.
Ben Ammi Ben-Israel, the group’s Chicago-born spiritual leader, said he had a vision in 1966 from the angel Gabriel that Black descendants of the Israelites should “return to the Promised Land and establish the Kingdom of God,” according to the community’s website.
After a brief stint in Liberia, Ben-Israel and several dozen families of followers arrived in Israel in 1968.
Ben-Israel died in 2014 at age 75 and is revered as a messianic figure, Ahmadiel Ben Yehudah, a community elder and spokesperson.
“We’re Judeans by our tribal affiliation,” he said. “There’s a long tradition and continuity of cultural connections that root us here in this land. We didn’t just fall out of the sky.”
Shortly after their arrival, the Hebrew Israelites’ legal problems began. Israel initially granted them citizenship, but subsequently revoked it after changes in its Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to Jews.
They remained illegal aliens, some of them stateless after renouncing their American citizenship, until the early 1990s, when they began receiving temporary Israeli residency.
A turning point came in 2002, after a Palestinian gunman killed six people at a bat mitzvah party, including a 32-year-old Hebrew Israelite singer who had been performing. In response, Israel started granting the community members permanent residency.
In 2015, about 130 of them without documentation submitted requests for residency rights, claiming that authorities had reneged on earlier promises to legalize their status.
The Interior Ministry rejected the requests in 2021 and issued deportation orders to 49 people. Four left the country, while the remaining 45 appealed. The rest remain in legal limbo.
The ministry’s Population and Immigration Authority said the individuals subject to deportation had never appeared on lists submitted by Hebrew Israelite leaders and that some had entered Israel recently.
“It’s not clear why their first requests (for residency) were only submitted in 2015,” the authority said, or why the community didn’t submit requests on behalf of those individuals.
The community’s deepened integration into Israeli society over the years has made the idea of deportation especially painful. Dozens of young Hebrew Israelites serve in the Israeli military, and many work for Teva Deli, a vegan food manufacturer.
The community runs a school where its students learn Hebrew and Black history as part of their educations. The majority of Village of Peace residents, particularly members of the younger generation that grew up in Israel, speak Hebrew fluently.
On June 1, the community celebrated New World Passover, a holiday marking the exodus from the United States of the Hebrew Israelites who came to Israel in the 1960s.
Families dressed in vibrant patterned outfits gathered in a public park adjacent to the Village of Peace for live music and a vegan soul food cookout.
Afterward, the community assembled around a stage for a dance performance and a march celebrating Hebrew Israelite soldiers serving in the Israeli military to chants of “We are soldiers of our God.”
Months have dragged on without a decision from the Israeli authorities, leaving the undocumented Hebrew Israelites suspended between their homes in the Holy Land and what they see as exile.
Ben Israel, 55, who grew up in Bermuda and moved to Israel from the U.S. in 1991, is slated to be deported with four of his five children.
“I won’t walk out of here,” he said. “We come to serve the god of Israel, the god of our forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We are Hebrew Israelites. So why not arm-in-arm?”
NEW YORK — A Democratic watchdog group has called for a U.S. House committee to rescind an invitation to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after the Democratic presidential candidate was filmed falsely suggesting COVID-19 could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
Kyle Herrig, executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project, sent a letter to Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, asking him to disinvite Kennedy from a hearing scheduled for Thursday after the candidate’s comments at a New York City dinner last week prompted widespread accusations of antisemitism and racism.
In the filmed remarks first published by The New York Post, Kennedy said “there is an argument” that COVID-19 “is ethnically targeted” and that it “attacks certain races disproportionately.”
“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he added. “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted at that or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential of impact for that.”
After the video was made public, Kennedy posted on Twitter that his words were twisted and denied ever suggesting that COVID-19 was deliberately engineered to spare Jewish people. He asserted without evidence that there are bioweapons being developed to target certain ethnicities, and called for the Post’s article to be retracted.
Researchers and doctors pushed back on the assertion, including Michael Mina, a medical doctor and immunologist.
“Beyond the absurdity, biological know-how simply isn’t there to make a virus that targets only certain ethnicities,” Mina wrote on Twitter.
Democrats and anti-hate groups quickly condemned Kennedy’s comments in the video.
“These are deeply troubling comments and I want to make clear that they do not represent the views of the Democratic Party,” read a Saturday tweet from Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee.
“Last week, RFK Jr. made reprehensible anti-semitic and anti-Asian comments aimed at perpetuating harmful and debunked racist tropes,” US Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement on Sunday. “Such dangerous racism and hate have no place in America, demonstrate him to be unfit for public office, and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.”
The Anti-Defamation League also responded to the comments with a statement saying Kennedy’s claim is “deeply offensive and feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”
And another anti-hate watchdog, Stop Antisemitism, tweeted, “We have no words for this man’s lunacy.”
On Monday, Kerry Kennedy issued a statement saying, “I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting,” adding that the remarks don’t represent “what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights stands for.” She is president of the human rights organization.
Kennedy is set to address the GOP-led House subcommittee during a hearing Thursday to examine “the federal government’s role in censoring Americans.”
He has long railed against social media companies and the government, accusing them of colluding to censor his speech during the COVID-19 pandemic when he was suspended from multiple platforms for spreading vaccine misinformation.
Herrig’s letter to Jordan called Kennedy “a total whack job whose views and conspiracy theories would be completely ignored but for his last name.”
It asked the chairman to disinvite the candidate from Thursday’s hearing because of “video evidence of his horrific antisemitic and xenophobic views which are simply beyond the pale.”
The subcommittee didn’t immediately answer an inquiry about how it would respond, but House Speaker Kevin McCarthy threw cold water Monday on the idea of disinviting the presidential candidate from testifying before Congress.
“I disagree with everything he said,” McCarthy said. “The hearing that we have this week is about censorship. I don’t think censoring somebody is actually the answer here. I think if you’re going to look at censorship in America, your first action to censor probably plays into some of the problems we have.”
Kennedy has a history of comparing vaccines – widely credited with saving millions of lives – with the genocide of the Holocaust during Nazi Germany, comments for which he has sometimes apologized.
His first apology for such a comparison came in 2015, after he used the word “holocaust” to describe children whom he believes were hurt by vaccines.
But he continued to make such remarks, ramping up during the COVID-19 pandemic. An AP investigation detailed how Kennedy has frequently invoked the specter of Nazis and the Holocaust in his work to sow doubts about vaccines and agitate against public health efforts to bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control, such as requiring masks or vaccine mandates.
In December 2021, he put out a video that showed infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci with a mustache reminiscent of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. In an October 2021 speech to the Ron Paul Institute, he obliquely compared public health measures put in place by governments around the world to Nazi propaganda meant to scare people into abandoning critical thinking.
In January 2022, at a Washington rally organized by his anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy complained that people’s rights were being violated by public health measures that had been taken to reduce the number of people sickened and killed by COVID-19.
“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” he said.
The comment was condemned by the head of the Anti-Defamation League as “deeply inaccurate, deeply offensive and deeply troubling.” Yad Vashem of the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem said it “denigrates the memory of its victims and survivors,” as well as others.
After initially sticking by his remarks, Kennedy ultimately apologized, tweeting, “I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors.”
Then, days after he launched his presidential campaign this April, he wrote on Twitter that “the onslaught of relentless media indignation finally compelled me to apologize for a statement I never made in order to protect my family.”
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Associated Press writers Farnoush Amiri in Washington and Michelle R. Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.
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NEW YORK — Eighteen private Jewish schools run by New York City’s politically powerful Hasidic community deprived thousands of students the required secular education in English, math, science and social studies that they need to function successfully outside their religious enclaves, according to findings from an eight-year investigation by New York City school officials.
The eight-year investigation — which critics say was long delayed because of politics — concluded that many of the religious schools, or yeshivas, were not providing “substantially equivalent instruction” in core subjects as do public schools — as mandated by state law.
In a letter to at least one school, NYC schools Chancellor David Banks expressed concern that students were not being instructed in key subjects “sufficient to prepare them for their futures.”
A review of more than two dozen yeshivas, which receive hundreds of millions public funding, determined that only seven of those schools were in compliance with state rules.
The probe was sparked by complaints by a former student who said he was not provided with the schooling necessary to navigate the outside world.
That prompted a group called Young Advocates for a Fair Education to call for the city’s Department of Education to launch an investigation. City officials began its inquiry in 2015.
But the investigation was conducted in fits and starts, as Hasidic leaders used political muscle to push back against any intrusions into their community, which is concentrated in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg.
Hasidic Jews comprise one movement of the Orthodox Judaism. And while the roughly 200,000 Hasidic Jews in New York City represent just a fraction of the city’s Jewish population, they have amassed considerable influence within the city’s power structure because of the community’s penchant for voting as a bloc.
“We hope that the completion of this investigation compels the city and Mayor Eric Adams to act on behalf of thousands of students who are being deprived of their right to a sound basic education,” said the group’s executive director, Beatrice Weber.
But Weber suggested some of the schools deemed compliant were not reviewed adequately and that students in those schools “will continue to be deprived of a basic education.”
Richard Bamberger, a spokesman for Parents for Educational And Religious Liberty in Schools, said parents send their children to yeshivas because of the moral and religious approach taken by the schools.
“They will continue to do so, regardless of how many government lawyers try to insist that yeshiva education is best measured by checklists they devise rather than the lives yeshiva graduates lead,” he told the New York Daily News.
City school officials said the bulk of schools it visited were cooperative, while a small number of schools were less so.
“For any school found to not be substantially equivalent,” NYC schools spokesperson Nathaniel Styer said in a statement, “the DOE stands ready to support the school to becoming substantially equivalent.”
The schools that failed to provide the necessary instruction must draft a remediation plan and have as long as two years to put it in place.
“Our goal is to educate children, not punish adults,” Styer said.
Because Saturday is a day of Sabbath for many Jews, spokespeople for various groups could not be reached.
The findings come amid a push to strengthen oversight of the state’s 1,800 private and religious schools, following a New York Times investigation published last fall that exposed how students at Hasidic schools were denied basic education in crucial subjects.
But the new state rules were pared back by a judge earlier this year after a lawsuit was brought by ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools. The judge ruled that parents cannot be required to pull their children from private schools that fail to meet state-designated standards.
MINA, Saudi Arabia — Hundreds of thousands of Muslim pilgrims on Wednesday braved intense heat to perform the symbolic stoning of the devil during the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.
With morning temperatures rising past 42 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Farenheit), huge crowds of pilgrims walked or took buses to the vast Jamarat complex just outside the holy city of Mecca, where large pedestrian bridges lead past three wide pillars representing the devil.
Using pebbles collected the night before at a campsite known as Muzdalifa, the pilgrims stone the pillars. It’s a reenactment of the story of the Prophet Ibrahim — known as Abraham in Christian and Jewish traditions — who is said to have hurled stones at Satan to resist temptation.
The ceremony was marred by tragedy on a number of occasions in the 1990s and 2000s, when hundreds died in stampedes during the stoning ritual. Saudi authorities have since built an expanded network of massive pedestrian bridges and redesigned the site to make it safer for pilgrims.
This year, the biggest danger might be the heat.
Temperatures soared past 45 degrees Celsius (113 F) on Tuesday, as Muslims marked the spiritual high point of the pilgrimage by spending the day praying at Mount Arafat, where there was no breeze and almost no shade.
Pilgrims huddled under umbrellas, dousing themselves with bottled water. Cellphones were almost too hot to hold and shut down after just a few minutes of use.
Saudi authorities have deployed tens of thousands of health workers for the pilgrimage and volunteers were handing out water. More than 6,700 pilgrims have been treated for heat exhaustion or heat stroke since the start of the pilgrimage, said Dr. Muhammad Al-Abdel Ali, a Health Ministry spokesman.
The annual Hajj pilgrimage is one of the five pillars of Islam, and all Muslims are required to undertake it at least once in their lives if they are physically and financially able. For the pilgrims it is an unrivalled religious experience that wipes away sins, bringing them closer to God and face-to-face with fellow Muslims from all corners of the earth.
The last three days of the Hajj coincide with Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of the Sacrifice, a joyful occasion in which Muslims around the world sacrifice sheep or cattle and distribute some of the meat to the poor. The holiday commemorates Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael on God’s command. In Christian and Jewish traditions, Abraham is willing to sacrifice his other son, Isaac.
The holiday, which is held according to Islam’s lunar calendar, depending on the sighting of the moon, began Wednesday in several Middle Eastern countries and will begin Thursday in some Asian countries.
The Saudi royal family has invested billions of dollars in infrastructure to maintain Islam’s holiest sites and to hold the annual pilgrimage, which is a major source of its legitimacy. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, traveled to Mecca on Tuesday to oversee the pilgrimage, according to state-run media.
This is the first Hajj to be held without COVID-19 restrictions since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. Authorities had expected some 2 million pilgrims, but official figures released late Tuesday showed that around 1.8 million were taking part in the pilgrimage. That’s considerably fewer than the nearly 2.5 million who came in 2019. Worldwide economic woes may have been a factor.
