BERLIN — For the past 14 years, ever since she became the first woman ordained as a rabbi in postwar Germany, Alina Treiger has been serving Jews in the country’s northwest through song.

Now, Treiger has a new title to accompany her singing voice: cantor. She is one of eight new graduates of the Potsdam University-based Abraham Geiger College rabbinical seminary and its cantorial program, which are affiliated with the Liberal, or Reform, movement.

“I am just happy and fulfilled today. It has been a big dream of mine,” said Treiger. The roles of rabbi and cantor not only “complement each other,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, but represent “a connection between reason, intellect and heart.”

Treiger and her seven fellow graduates — two rabbis and six cantors in all — were feted in ceremony last week with choir and harmonium. But the joy came during ominous times for Geiger College, which has been operating in the shadow of scandal, and may soon lose a major source of institutional support.

In 2022, the school’s founder and former director, Reform Rabbi Walter Homolka, was accused of misconduct. He stepped down from all his Jewish leadership positions that year and later sold all of his ownership shares in Geiger College’s rabbinical and cantorial schools, as well as Zacharias Frankel College, a Masorti (Conservative) institution.

But those moves did not end Geiger College’s troubles. On Friday, the official umbrella organization for affiliated German Jewish communities announced that the establishment of new Liberal and Masorti seminaries and cantorial programs under the auspices of the University of Potsdam —  which would effectively replace the three existing institutions, including the school that had celebrated its new graduates just one day earlier. 

“A long phase of turbulence and uncertainty for Liberal and Conservative rabbinical and cantorial training in Germany is to be ended,” the Central Council of Jews in Germany said in a statement. “Since the allegations of abuse of power became known in May 2022, the discussions about these training centers have not abated.”

The move was not a surprise, and prompted backlash from Reform Jewish associations. Previously, the Central Council — which together with the Federal Ministry of the Interior was the main funder of the three institutions — had declared it could not support the institutions’ status quo in the long term. In January 2023, the council called the setup envisioned by the Berlin Jewish Community “unsuitable in any case and just another act in the tragedy staged by Walter Homolka and his followers.”

The World Union for Progressive Judaism and the European Union for Progressive Judaism responded in a statement that they were “deeply concerned and surprised” by the council’s decision to establish new seminaries without involving them.

They accused the council of “embark[ing] on a path that endangers the unity of the Jewish community.”

Berlin Jewish community president Gideon Joffe stated that he had offered to discuss the future of the schools with the Central Council “on an equal footing” and accused the council and other main funders of “preventing the liberal Jewish religious community from being religiously independent.”

Meanwhile, Geiger College will continue its work: “We look forward to the new candidates who will now begin their studies,” Joffe said. Since it opened in 1999, the college has ordained 55 candidates, he said. 

“The future is not up in the air,” Isidoro Abramowicz, director of the Geiger cantorial program, told JTA before the ordination ceremony. “We continue teaching and we continue preparing cantors and rabbis for Europe and for the world. Nobody knows what’s going to happen tomorrow in the world, but we continue.”

Rabbi Lea Mühlstein, chair of European Union for Progressive Judaism, told JTA,“Maybe there will be a short time of two seminaries, and hopefully in the future we will be able to come together again.”

She added, “Sometimes we have to wait to repair the fractures.”

The organizational battle did not dampen the ordination ceremony at Berlin’s Rykestrasse synagogue, which opened exactly 120 years ago and survived World War II nearly intact. The afternoon ceremony drew several hundred guests, including Jewish community leaders, local politicians and clergy, and took place amid heightened security, following an attempted terror attack in Munich that morning. 

“It was like a distant dream that we would have rabbis in Germany, and especially women rabbis,” said Mühlstein, who grew up in Germany. “Being here for this ordination 25 years after the founding really was very, very moving.”

Set back from the street behind a large courtyard, the entrance to the grand synagogue was festooned with balloons for the occasion. Inside, the voices of children echoed from the balcony above the sanctuary, where Rabbi Andreas Nachama, director of Geiger College, and Abramowicz officiated over the ordinations on the bimah below. Each candidate was introduced by one of their instructors, who draped a new tallit over their shoulders.

“Help me to open my mind, to be imaginative, always to seek justice and to be compassionate,” said newly ordained Rabbi Sophie Bismut of Paris, addressing the assembly from the bima with a prayer of thanks. She will join the rabbinic team of the French progressive Jewish network Judaisme en Mouvement, as the first woman rabbi in Marseille and Montpellier.

Judaism is handed down like a beautiful necklace from mother to daughter, said Israel-born Avigail Ben Dor Niv, who has been appointed rabbi of the liberal Migwan congregation in Basel, Switzerland. In Germany, she said she met many people who, like herself, “carry broken, shattered chains, lost chains. Sometimes even a single precious bead: a story, a memory, a memory of people, of a village, of a home they never inhabited.”

Her role, she said, is to “assemble a new, beautiful, colorful chain.”

The graduation marks “a moment of joy,” Abramowicz told JTA before the ceremony. All eight candidates have jobs, “and we are very proud of that.”

Some are just starting out, while others, like Treiger, have been working for years. Milan Andics has been serving as cantor in the Jewish community of Thuringia since last May, and his classmate Dmitry Karpenko has been functioning as cantor of the Union of Communities of Progressive Judaism in Russia since 1999.

Shulamit Lubowska has been cantor of the Liberal Jewish Community in Magdeburg since 2023; Yoed Sorek was cantor of the liberal congregation in Hanover from 2021 to 2024 and is now a freelance cantor. Anette Willing is due to start working as cantor for the Liberal Jewish Community in Kassel.

The ordination ceremony concluded with the graduates reciting the priestly blessing in several languages, from French to German to Ukrainian to Yiddish: May God make his “punim” shine down upon you and give you peace, chanted Yoed Sorek, who frequently performs in Yiddish, known as the “mamaloshen.” 

“I hope my parents are watching from heaven,”  said Treiger, whose mother, Nadia, used to sing in a Jewish choir in Ukraine. Treiger delivered the priestly blessing in Ukrainian, her mother tongue.

Her advice to tomorrow’s students is to “follow your heart’s desire. The rabbinate is a calling,” she told JTA. “Even in difficult times, you have to draw on your strengths.”

Correction: Because of an editing error, this story initially mischaracterized the nature of the allegations against Rabbi Walter Homolka. It has been corrected.

Update: In May 2024 Homolka and Axel Springer, the German media company that was the first to report allegations against him, reached a settlement (as reported by Zeit Online) in litigation brought by Homolka. The settlement’s terms were not made public. Homolka’s attorney said the settlement proved that the main allegations against Homolka had been refuted. An addendum attached to the initial story by the Axel Springer publication Welt said the two parties had agreed that there were “not confirmed criminal or disciplinary allegations” and that, given the rise in antisemitism in Germany, they decided to end their dispute.

Once upon a time, in another century, Benjamin Resnick weaved a fantasy of American Jewish life very different from the story he tells in “Next Stop,” his dystopian debut novel published on Tuesday.

Young Benjamin was a kindergarten student, growing up in Chicago. He dictated a story to his teacher “about how there was this thing called the Jewish bakery and it had the best cookies in the world, and only the Jewish kids could go there to have these cookies.”

The first part was true: As a young boy, Resnick loved the chalky cookies his dad would buy him at the kosher bakery. As for the ban on non-Jewish customers? He made that part up. 

But Resnick’s fiction had a real-world impact, at least in his kindergarten classroom. When he shared his story of the Jewish bakery with his class of Jews and non-Jews, “there was a trend for like a week of all the kids playing Jewish,” Resnick told the New York Jewish Week. “Some of them were, but they all wanted to be.”

“Next Stop” is set in an unnamed American city at a time when such sweet juvenile Judeophilia is clearly a fading memory. Set 20 years after the COVID-19 epidemic, it imagines a future in which Israel is swallowed up in a black hole in what is called “The Event.” Diaspora Jews are once again confined to urban ghettos, and a young Jewish couple seeks to protect their child from both a surveillance state and armed vigilantes who roam the streets.

The novel arrives in bookstores amid a rise in global antisemitism, a war that has turned the word “Zionist” into a slur on the left, and speculation about the Jewish future captured in a recent cover story in The Atlantic, which declared, “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.”

Resnick, 40, the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center, a Conservative congregation in the New York suburbs, suspects the Atlantic headline is correct.

“Something has shifted in the American Jewish consciousness,” Resnick said, referring to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and its aftermath. “I think it will be remembered as a paradigm shift. I don’t think we’re going to go back to before.”

One way to think of “Next Stop” is as a dystopic next-generation sequel to Resnick’s kindergarten fantasy. The novel’s adult protagonists would have been roughly the ages of his own two young children during the pandemic. In that way, the novel, Jewish themes aside, ties into America’s current post-pandemic, pre-apocalypse zeitgeist. 

Resnick began the novel in 2021, when he and his wife, Philissa Cramer, moved from Chicago to New York so he could assume the pulpit. (Editor’s note: Cramer, editor in chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, New York Jewish Week’s partner site, had no role in assigning or editing this article.) Ethan, the first character readers meet, remembers folding paper airplanes with his father during the pandemic — as Resnick and his boys did while they sheltered in a small apartment at the pandemic’s height. 

“We cycled through all of these different fixations, and one was paper airplanes,” he said. “There were times when paper was everywhere.”

Resnick wanted to tell a story “about the cyclical nature of antisemitism, and how being Jewish is really fundamentally precarious” — an extrapolation of the passage from the Passover Haggadah that he quotes in the novel’s first seder scene: “Not only once shall they come to destroy us, no, but in every generation.” 

What would that look like? What would it mean to be a Jewish American when the American Jewish Golden Age becomes a Bronze or even Dark Age? 

To really answer that question, “Israel had to be removed from the board,” Resnick said.  And thus the MacGuffin that drives the plot forward and into the fantastic side of literary fiction: the seemingly supernatural “event.” The fictional cataclysm was a conceit that landed very differently on Oct. 7, 2023, just days after Resnick’s agent submitted the novel to publishers. 

“I think Oct. 7 was a profoundly wounding event,” Resnick said. “Obviously for Israelis, but I think it was a wounding event for Jews everywhere. 

“A lot of people who had the volume turned down on their Jewish identity, as [the late Israeli novelist] A.B. Yehoshua puts it, had the volume suddenly turned way up,” he said. “A lot of people who were not as involved in the Jewish community in traditional ways, or who didn’t think of that as a core aspect of their identity woke up to the fact that, ‘Yeah, the world certainly thinks it’s a part of my identity.’” 

Coincidentally or not, it’s a journey his protagonist Ethan undergoes as the world of “Next Stop” becomes more and more threatening to its Jews. 

Not that Resnick thinks the persecution he imagined in “Next Stop” — Jews banned from restaurants, subways and professions, and from marrying non-Jews — is around the corner. “If I believed that, I wouldn’t be here anymore,” he said. 

At its core, “Next Stop” is not a parade of possible horrors, even as it describes a world of app-based antisemitism, wavering politicians and extrapolations of what it would be like if it happened again and here and now. 

A fan of fantasy and speculative fiction, Resnick knows the genre tropes of zombies and unicorns and rocket ships are just a way to tell stories about people, albeit in different and perhaps impossible circumstances. So while the premise leads to expectations of “an unrelentingly grim, dark book,” Resnick said early readers report “that it really doesn’t feel that way at all. It has a warmth that makes some of the really challenging material palatable and approachable. And I say that a little bit carefully. Because I do think when you’re writing about horrible things, it should feel horrible. 

“At the same time, this book is in many ways a domestic story,” he continued. “It’s a love story and it’s a story about parenting. And in the context of all of that, there are moments of beauty and caring and there are funny parts of the book.” 

For Resnick, the beauty is the point — or at least one of the points.

“Fiction can break through some of the endless doomscrolling and the sense that the world is only horrible,” he said. “Fiction can invite readers into other worlds and other ways of perceiving, not always with the goal of consolation — although there is some consolation in the book — but just encountering a well-told, heartfelt story is itself cathartic and meaningful.” 

And these are times that call out for relief.

“There was a period there when, in our family household, mom and dad were talking about very little other than the war,” he said. “It was very present for me in my rabbinic work. It was very present for Philissa in her journalistic work. It felt suffocating.”

It led him to ask his wife: “Do the kids know that Daddy actually thinks being Jewish is this wonderful thing? Because all we’re talking about is how awful it is.” 

Readers of “Next Stop” will get the sense that Resnick indeed believes a 21st-century Jewish life with traditional Shabbat dinners and seders offers beauty and joy. He notes moments of Jewish ritual life perhaps not captured before by novelists (such as that awkward moment when someone participates in a pre-meal ritual hand-washing for the first time).

Resnick, who trained and worked as a chef before pursuing the rabbinate, was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2014. 

Balancing a pulpit, a young family and a writing career, Resnick has a discipline that grounds him: meeting his writing goal of 500 words every day (“other than Shabbat”). His productivity secret: Until his daily quota is written, “I basically don’t go to bed.” The act of writing gives him “a sort of heightened attention, and heightened intellectual and emotional stimulation, but also calm.” 

Which is not to say that he doesn’t feel his story’s emotions.

“When I’m writing about children, I imagine it for my children, and that can be hard,” he said. “I also like my characters. I don’t tend to write about characters that I find really distasteful, because I don’t want to spend time with them. And sometimes I have villains, but they’re the villains, not the main characters. The main characters are people that are flawed, and feel like real people, but they’re not people that I think are despicable or that are worthy of pain. 

“So I don’t like when bad things happen to them,” he added, “but sometimes they do.”

Larry Yudelson, a former JTA staff writer, is publisher and editorial director of Ben Yehuda Press. 

Join Congregation Beth Elohim and the New York Jewish Week for a conversation with Benjamin Resnick, author of  “Next Stop,” and Dana Goldstein, a national correspondent for The New York Times. Wednesday, Sept. 18,  7 – 9 p.m. at 274 Garfield Place, Brooklyn. Get details here.

As an art director at the United States Postal Service, Antonio Alcalá has designed stamps honoring Woodstock, the Emancipation Proclamation and Ezra Jack Keats’ children’s book classic “A Snowy Day.” But this year’s Hanukkah stamp is the first that honors an important piece of his own heritage.

“My mother escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport. Many of her family members did also survive, including my grandparents,” Alcalá told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

He added, “So when I was a child, we would celebrate multiple holidays, including Hanukkah, and as the youngest of three boys, I was the one who always got to light the first candle.”

The postal service has issued Hanukkah stamps since 1996, more than three decades after it first started issuing Christmas stamps. Previous versions have drawn on traditional Jewish art forms — the 2022 stamp drew on a synagogue stained-glass look — included dreidel imagery and depicted a range of menorahs, real and illustrated.

Alcalá’s stamp also showcases a menorah. But unlike the others that Americans have used to mail Hanukkah cards, his doesn’t feature any candles.

That’s by design. “The flames are shown, but the candles themselves are not present,” Alcalá said. “They’re implied. And to me, that sort of alludes to this sort of aspect of faith that’s both tied to this and also to the larger sort of religious experience.”

The Hanukkah stamp is the only Jewish stamp created by the USPS, which also produces holiday stamps for Christmas, Eid, Kwanzaa and Diwali.

In drafting this year’s stamp (a process that began in 2022), Alcalá began on the computer, and eventually shifted to paper and ink, which he said “conveyed a lot more humanity to it, than sort of more mechanical, perfectly-created geometric illustration.”

His influences included Andy Warhol, the mid-century pop artist, and the illustrations of Ben Shahn, the Jewish artist known for his work in social realism.

“I don’t think it’s anything that I invented, but it was the language that I thought was appropriate,” Alcalá said. “I was really interested in something that was not so sterile-feeling, but also very simple.”

Alcalá also channeled his upbringing in what he said was “a secular Jewish family” in San Diego, California. Designing a Hanukkah stamp, he said, was a “huge thrill” given his background and all his mother went through to continue the family’s Hanukkah traditions.

According to an account written by his brother based on a diary their grandfather kept when fleeing Hamburg in 1941, Alcalá’s German grandparents traveled to the United States on the same ship from Portugal as Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. Other members of the family were murdered by the Nazis, and Alcalá’s mother and her siblings went years without direct contact with their parents.

“It’s one of those things where you wish some of your relatives were still around to see that day. But my brothers are still around, and they’ll get to see it,” Alcalá said about designing the Hanukkah stamp.

“I’m very excited,” he added. “It’s a piece of my family history that I get to see distributed across the country.”

This year’s stamp will be formally issued at an event free to the public at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 19.

The Israel Defense Forces said that indirect and unintentional gunfire from its troops likely killed Turkish-American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, and expressed regret over her death.

Eygi, 26, was killed in the West Bank on Friday during a protest in the Palestinian village of Beita against the nearby Israeli settlement outpost of Evyatar, which is on lands the Palestinian residents claim as their own. A resident of Seattle, she was protesting with the International Solidarity Movement, a group that has long demonstrated in Palestinian areas against Israel.

Dozens of mourners gathered at a funeral procession for Eygi at Rafidia Hospital in the West Bank city of Nablus on Monday afternoon, where she was taken after she was shot.

The White House called for an investigation into her death, and the IDF said on Friday that its troops had fired at another protester who was throwing stones at its soldiers. The IDF said in a statement Tuesday following an initial inquiry into Eygi’s death that that gunfire is most likely what killed her. The statement said it requested to perform an autopsy.

“The inquiry found that it is highly likely that she was hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire which was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the riot,” the statement said. “The incident took place during a violent riot in which dozens of Palestinian suspects burned tires and hurled rocks toward security forces at the Beita Junction.”

The statement added, “The IDF expresses its deepest regret over the death of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi.”

In a statement released on Saturday, Eygi’s family described her as a “fiercely passionate human rights activist” who protested “in solidarity with Palestinian civilians who continue to endure ongoing repression and violence.” The family called for an independent investigation into the circumstances of her death.

“We welcome the White House’s statement of condolences, but given the circumstances of Aysenur’s killing, an Israeli investigation is not adequate,” the statement said. “We call on President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Secretary of State Blinken to order an independent investigation into the unlawful killing of a U.S. citizen and to ensure full accountability for the guilty parties.”

More than 600 Palestinians have been killed and thousands arrested in Israeli military operations against suspected terrorists in the West Bank since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza nearly a year ago, a time during which dozens of Israelis have been killed in terror attacks in the West Bank and Israel, including three who were shot at a border crossing into Jordan on Sunday.

A 40-year-old activist has been indicted on arson charges after burning an Israeli flag during a protest at Columbia University in April.

James Carlson, who is unaffiliated with the Ivy League school in Morningside Heights, took the flag after someone else had stolen it from a Jewish person at the April 20 protest, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. He then set it on fire with a lighter, the office said in a statement.

Carlson, a resident of Brooklyn, was also indicted for a subsequent incident in which he kicked and broke a glass panel in a police holding cell following his arrest at Columbia during an April 30 protest.

He was charged with arson in the fifth degree, a misdemeanor, and several counts of criminal mischief, including one felony, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said. He pleaded not guilty.

“This defendant’s alleged activity went beyond legal and peaceful protest. Committing arson in a crowded protest endangers the safety of others, and this type of behavior will not be tolerated,” Bragg said.

Carlson was a repeat protester on Columbia’s campus last academic year, when people who were unaffiliated with the university took a central role in demonstrations that inspired copycats across the country. In addition to the flag-burning incident, he was charged with trespassing after being part of the group of anti-Israel activists who broke into and occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall in April. The university called in police to clear the building, resulting in dozens of arrests, after which Carlson allegedly broke the glass panel in the holding cell. Most of those arrested were released without charges.

Carlson is not a student, staffer or faculty member at Columbia, Bragg’s office said. The son of the late advertising executive Dick Tarlow, he owns a multi-million dollar townhouse in Park Slope and has a history of arrests dating to 2005, according to the New York Post. He is one of more than a quarter of the people arrested at the Hamilton Hall protest who were not affiliated with Columbia, according to the NYPD.

The role of outsiders in the protest had become a focal point in the aftermath of the police crackdown, and Mayor Eric Adams cited the alleged presence of “outside agitators” as a reason for ordering the NYPD to clear out the building.

The Hamilton Hall incident was the most high-profile clash in a year of protest and tensions surrounding the Israel-Hamas war. The war has continued to impact the campus as a new school year has begun. Last month, three Columbia deans resigned after sending disparaging texts about Jewish students; then Columbia President Minouche Shafik resigned, citing campus turmoil; and weeks later, a task force investigating antisemitism at the school reported “crushing” discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students.

Dozens of local rabbis have signed a letter demanding that the UJA-Federation of New York publicly support a ceasefire deal in the Israel-Hamas war that would free Israeli hostages. 

The letter was sent last week by T’ruah, a liberal rabbinic group that has for months called for a ceasefire and hostage release deal. It was addressed to UJA CEO Eric Goldstein and Linda Mirels, the group’s president. 

“The hostages need your voice and your influence,” said the letter, signed by 63 rabbis and cantors. Referring to Hamas’ recent murder of six Israeli hostages in Gaza, the letter added, “This week, we have seen the tragic consequences of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s recalcitrance in finding a deal.” 

The letter comes as protests in support of a deal, and against Netayahu, have grown in Israel following the hostages’ murder, even as negotiators say the chances of reaching an agreement are slim. It is one of several efforts to get American Jewish groups to support a ceasefire deal, and argues that in taking that position, UJA would be aligned with the majority of Israelis and the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the main group representing hostage families.

“UJA has been at the forefront of saying ‘Bring them home,’ and has been a sponsor of a number of vigils and rallies,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, T’ruah’s CEO. “But they have not said what is actually necessary to bring them home, which is a deal which Prime Minister Netanyahu is continuously torpedoing.”

Hamas terrorists abducted 251 hostages on Oct. 7. During a truce in November, Hamas released more than 100 civilians in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners, which would also happen under a proposed ceasefire now. Other captives, dead and alive, have been recovered by Israeli troops. 

Israeli officials believe around 100 hostages remain in Gaza, dozens of whom are estimated to be dead. Netanyahu has objected to the current terms on the table because they would demand that Israel cede control of the border area between Gaza and Egypt.

UJA said in a statement Monday that since Oct. 7 it “has been tirelessly devoted to supporting hostage families and doing all we can to advocate for the hostages’ release and keeping their plight in the public eye.” It did not comment directly on a potential ceasefire deal. 

“We are close partners with the Hostage Family Forum and have organized dozens of meetings, vigils and interventions that have been critical to engaging government officials, NGOs and others to keep a spotlight on the hostages and the tragic events of 10/7,” UJA told the New York Jewish Week. “In addition, we continue to provide significant funding and other supports to help with the emotional and financial well-being of hostage families. We grieve for the horrific killings of the hostages last week and will not stop our efforts until all the remaining hostages are returned home.”

The Hostages and Family Forum in New York thanked UJA for its support in a Monday statement that did not explicitly mention the letter.

“The UJA has been a huge source of support to us, we couldn’t have done all the work that we have been doing throughout these 11 months without them,” the forum told the New York Jewish Week.

UJA is a large donor to Israeli organizations, and has allocated close to $106 million to Israelis since Oct. 7, according to its website. (It also donates to the New York Jewish Week.) Over the years, its leadership has lobbied Netanyahu’s governments on hot-button issues. 

Last year, Goldstein wrote a letter castigating the government’s proposed judicial overhaul, and earlier, the group was one of many Jewish federations pushing unsuccessfully for a plan to expand a non-Orthodox section of the Western Wall. Jacobs said that regardless of the specific impact of a statement by UJA, it would add to a groundswell of support for a hostage and ceasefire deal. 

“We can’t say what, if any, pressure is going to be effective on him. Certainly he has not yet responded to hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Israelis on the street or to a national strike,” Jacobs said of Netanyahu. “But the more pressure that’s coming from more corners, the more that will potentially help.”

In addition to Jacobs, the Sept. 5 letter was signed by Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, who recently retired from Congregation Beit Simchat Torah; Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, the founder of Lab-Shul; Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Congregation Beth Elohim and Rabbi Josh Weinberg of the Union for Reform Judaism.

Alongside the letter, a small group of Israelis living in New York City has been holding weekly protests outside UJA’s offices to demand the organization support a deal. Jacobs said the letter was in support of Israelis protesting in both Israel and New York.

“Aggression is not going to bring them back,” said Avital Shimshowitz, one of the organizers of the protest group, NYC 4 Kaplan, a reference to the Tel Aviv street where the largest demonstrations have taken place.

Referring to Netanyahu, she said, “It’s the American Jewish community that needs to step up and hold him accountable.”

Jacobs also argued that supporting a hostage and ceasefire deal would demonstrate that support for Israel does not always mean support for continuing the military campaign in Gaza.

“There’s often an idea that being pro-Israel means supporting the war, and wanting to the end the war means that you don’t care about the hostages and you don’t care about Israelis, and it’s completely the opposite,” Jacobs said. “The Israeli people, by and large, want this war to end, want the hostages to come home, and also want this government out, and that’s actually what it means to support Israel.”

The 2024 Paris Paralympics concluded Sunday, bringing to an end a summer full of athletic success for Jewish and Israeli competitors on the international stage.

Weeks after at least 21 Jewish athletes won a total of 18 medals at the Olympics, 15 Jewish and Israeli Paralympians racked up 13 medals of their own.

Israel won 10 medals — four gold, four bronze and two silver — its first double-digit medal count since the 2004 Athens Games. Swimmer Ami Dadaon led the way with four medals of his own, including two golds. Israel’s victories came as the country weathered tragedy and political upheaval at home.

For the United States, track and field star Ezra Frech enjoyed a breakout performance, winning golds on back-to-back days, the first two medals in a career he told NBC he hopes will make him “the greatest Paralympian of all time.”

Read on for all the Jewish and Israeli Paralympic medalists in Paris, listed in order of medal type.

Gold medalists

Ami Dadaon (two gold, one silver, one bronze)

Israeli swimmer Ami Dadaon led all Jewish Paralympians by medaling in four of his five events, bringing his career total to seven. Dadaon, 23, won gold in both the men’s 100-meter freestyle S4 and the men’s 200-meter freestyle S4. He set a new Paralympic record during heats for the 100-meter, an event in which he also owns the world record for his disability classification.

Dadaon, a Haifa native who was born with cerebral palsy, also won silver in the men’s 150-meter individual medley SM4 and bronze in the men’s 50-meter freestyle S4. Dadaon had entered the 50-meter competition with the world record, but it was topped in Paris by the gold medalist, Canada’s Sebastian Massabie. In his fifth event, the men’s 50-meter breaststroke SB3, Dadaon finished in fifth.

Ezra Frech (two gold medals)

U.S. track and field standout Ezra Frech won his first-ever Paralympic medals, both gold, in the men’s 100-meter T63 and the high jump T63. Frech, 19, who was born without a left knee and shinbone and with only one finger on his left hand, captured the 100-meter gold in dramatic fashion, beating the German silver medalist by two hundredths of a second.

The following day, Frech won gold in the high jump. He had previously broken his own world record in the event during the U.S. Paralympic trials in July. His 1.94-meter jump in Paris topped the Indian silver medalist by .06 meters and set a new Paralympic record. With that jump, Frech was .03 meters shy of his world record of 1.97 meters.

After winning two gold medals in Paris, Frech has his sights set even higher for the 2028 Games, which will take place in his hometown of Los Angeles. Frech said he hopes to earn what he calls the “triple crown” — winning gold in the long jump, high jump and 100-meter sprint. Frech finished fifth in the long jump in Paris.

Moran Samuel

Israeli rower Moran Samuel captured her first career Paralympic gold — and third medal overall — in the PR1 women’s single sculls. Samuel, 42, suffered a spinal stroke in 2006, paralyzing her lower body. “It’s a privilege to be here in this bubble at the Paralympic Games, and to finish with a gold medal — and to be able to scream the anthem from deep inside me is a moment I’ll never forget in my life,” Samuel told the Israeli broadcaster Sport5 after her win.

Asaf Yasur

Martial artist Asaf Yasur was the first Israeli athlete to medal in Paris, winning a gold in the men’s 58-kilogram K44 taekwondo competition. He defeated Turkish opponent Ali Can Ozcan by a score of 19-12 in the gold medal match after winning his quarterfinal and semifinal matches 23-6 and 16-6, respectively.

Yasur, 22, is a two-time world champion who made his Paralympic debut this summer. Both of Yasur’s hands were amputated when he was 13 years old after an electrocution accident.

Silver medalists

Israel’s women’s goalball team

Israel’s six-member team won a silver medal in women’s goalball, a handball-style sport for visually impaired athletes. The Israeli team fell to Turkey in the gold medal match after beating Canada in the quarterfinal and China in the semifinal. The team included Lihi Ben David, 28, Gal Hamrani, 31, Elham Mahamid, 34, Noa Malka, 21, Or Mizrahi, 31, and Roni Ohayon, 25.

The silver medal is Israel’s first in goalball as well as its first Paralympic medal in a team sport since 1988. Several members of the goalball team wore yellow ribbons in their hair during the semifinal match, a sign of solidarity with Israeli hostages, according to the Times of Israel.

Bronze medalists

Mark Malyar

Israeli swimmer Mark Malyar won his fourth career Paralympic medal in Paris, a bronze in the men’s 100-meter backstroke S8. Malyar, 24, who was born with cerebral palsy, had won two gold medals and a bronze in Tokyo. Malyar, whose brother Ariel also competed in Paris, finished just 1.84 seconds behind the Spanish gold medalist and just 0.39 seconds behind the Japanese silver medalist.

Shahar Milfelder & Saleh Shahin

Israeli rowers Shahar Milfedler and Saleh Shahin paired up to win their first Paralympic medals in the PR2 mixed double sculls. Milfelder, 26, is a native of Moshav Beit Yitzchak in Israel who was diagnosed with a rare and serious form of bone cancer at 15 and had part of her pelvis removed. After their bronze medal win, she said she was thinking about the families of the six hostages who were confirmed dead only hours earlier.

“We had in mind to give pride to the country,” Milfelder said, according to the Israeli news site Mako. “I cried in the morning from the hard news and now I cry from the good news and send the biggest hug I can to the families of the hostages and to all the citizens of the State of Israel.”

Shahin, 41, is a Druze Israeli who was injured in a 2005 terrorist attack while serving in the Israeli army. He called representing Israel “a great honor… but it’s also a huge responsibility.”

Guy Sasson

Just three months after he won first first career Grand Slam at the 2024 French Open, Israeli wheelchair tennis player Guy Sasson returned to the same stadium to win his first career Paralympic medal, a bronze in the wheelchair tennis quad singles tournament. Sasson, 44, beat Turkey’s Ahmet Kaplan 5-7, 6-4, 6-1 in the bronze medal match.

​​“It was a match full of emotion and full of energy, and I imagine that it will set in soon that I’m an Olympic medalist,” Sasson told the Israeli news site Sport5 after his win. “If I managed to make people watching at home a little happy, especially the families of the fallen and the hostages, if this hope and this joy can give them a small smile on their faces, then I think we’ve done our part.”

Ian Seidenfeld

American table tennis star Ian Seidenfeld won his second career Paralympic medal in Paris, a bronze in the men’s singles MS6 competition. He had won gold in Tokyo.

Seidenfeld, 23, won his round of 16 and quarterfinal matches before losing in the semifinal. The Lakeville, Minn., native, who was born with Pseudoachondroplasia dwarfism, is coached by his father Mitchell Seidenfeld, a three-time Paralympian and four-time medalist.

A federal grand jury indicted an Ohio man last month for a December attack outside of a Washington, D.C. synagogue in which he reportedly yelled “Gas the Jews.”

He was indicted on three counts of “obstructing by force or threat of force a person’s enjoyment of their free exercise of religious beliefs, while using a dangerous weapon,” a statement from the Justice Department said.

The indicted suspect is Brent Wood, 35, who on Dec. 17 drove a U-Haul truck around the security barriers of Kesher Israel, parked on the sidewalk in front of the synagogue, sprayed a “noxious aerosol” and yelled, “Gas the Jews!” at congregants, according to the indictment. (The synagogue is also known as the Georgetown Synagogue.)

Wood was arrested that day, and and was also charged with simple assault in D.C. Superior Court. He has been considered a fugitive since he failed to appear for an arraignment in January. He faces a statutory maximum prison sentence of 20 years for each of the three federal counts.

The FBI’s Washington Field Office is investigating Wood’s case, and Assistant U.S. Attorney John Crabb Jr. is prosecuting.

“Number one, I’m thankful nobody was badly hurt,” Kesher Israel’s rabbi, Hyim Shafner, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “On the other side of that coin is it did bring attention to the rise in antisemitism.”

He also mentioned a later incident in which one of the synagogue’s members was attacked, and lamented that Jewish communities have had to bolster security owing to an increase in antisemitic incidents.

“Since then, a member of our congregation was beaten up, and that was just a few months ago,” he said. “If you had told me 20 years ago that in 20 years you wouldn’t be able to go into a synagogue without police I wouldn’t have believed it. We’ve gotten used to it over time. It’s just shocking that you have to have a police force to go into a synagogue. It violates the very essence of what it means to be an American.”

The December attack came around the same time as a spate of bomb threats aimed at synagogues, and days after shots were fired at a synagogue and preschool in Albany, New York. The indictment comes days after a man was arrested in Quebec for a plot to kill Jews in New York City on Oct. 7, the one-year anniversary of the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.

A Jewish member of Brown University’s governing board has resigned in protest ahead of a vote next month on whether the school will divest its endowment from companies linked to Israel.

Joseph Edelman, a New York hedge fund manager, called the decision to proceed with such a vote “a stunning failure of moral leadership” in his resignation letter, a version of which he published in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday. Edelman said the divestment vote, agreed to as part of a deal with pro-Palestinian student activists, represents an unacceptable concession to forces that call for Israel’s destruction and are responsible for rising antisemitism on campus.

“The university leadership has, for some reason, chosen to reward, rather than punish, the activists for disrupting campus life, breaking school rules, and promoting violence and antisemitism at Brown,” Edelman wrote.

Edelman’s firm did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.

A spokesperson for Brown University said Edelman acted on a “misunderstanding” of how the school had reached its decision to hold a vote this October.

“Far from a direct response to current activism, Brown is following an established process that is nearly a half-century old,” spokesperson Brian Clark told Bloomberg News. “This long-held process is built on the principle that Brown has an obligation to examine and investigate claims challenging its moral responsibility.”

Brown was one of numerous campuses roiled by pro-Palestinian encampment protests during the spring semester earlier this year. At many other universities, the encampments were dismantled by police, but at Brown, where administrators successfully negotiated with student activists, things ended differently: In exchange for a peaceful winding down of the encampment, the university agreed that its governing body, the Brown Corporation, would hold a vote on divestment.

Unlike many other campus activists who called for a total boycott and divestment from Israel, the Brown students proposed a narrower divestment focused on companies with ties to Israeli security forces.

Edelman, whose wealth is estimated by Forbes at $2.5 billion, has donated more than $5 million to the university through his family foundation, according to public tax records. The foundation has also made significant donations to numerous conservative causes, including the Tikvah Fund, a right-wing Jewish think tank.

His rebuke of Brown makes him the latest in a wave of university donors publicly protesting the way administrators have handled campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas war and a climate Jewish students have said is hostile. Other donors have canceled or withheld major contributions. Robert Kraft, for example, suspended his giving to Columbia University and later announced a $1 million donation to Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish institution, to help students transferring to the school.

Protest over the war in Gaza has renewed at schools across the country as the academic year has begun, and Brown has faced threats over is upcoming vote. Last month, attorneys general from 24 states issued a warning to the school that a decision to divest from Israel would trigger legal action and possible financial penalties that could jeopardize the school and its roughly $6 billion endowment.

Universities have for decades resisted efforts by activists aligned with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. Rabbi Josh Bolton, director of the Hillel that serves Brown, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency earlier this year that he expected the board to vote against divestment. 

“Brown is not going to divest from Israel. Brown was never going to divest from Israel,” he said in the spring.

Telegram, the wildly popular messaging platform beloved by the far right and instrumental to both sides in the Israel-Hamas war, has suddenly found itself in the crosshairs of European law enforcement and regulators.

French authorities made a surprise arrest of Telegram’s founder and CEO last week, a major escalation in the growing efforts by governments to hold social media platforms liable for the oftentimes illegal and violent content they host.

And on Friday, following scrutiny of its lax content moderation policies, Telegram made several Hamas channels inaccessible, including the group’s main avenue for communicating with followers.

“The writing’s on the wall,” Samuel Woolley, chair of Disinformation Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re going to see continued legislation clamping down on illicit uses of social media and messaging apps like Telegram.”

What exactly is Telegram? What happens next for its base, which is nearing an estimated 1 billion users? And how will it impact Israel, where the platform has become a leading news source?

Here’s what you need to know about the popular and controversial app.

What is Telegram?

The company calls itself “a messaging app with a focus on speed and security,” with more than 950 million active users. In that sense, it functions much like Whatsapp or Signal, allowing users to send encrypted messages to each other.

But it may be more accurate to think of Telegram as a platform like Facebook or X. Users can join “groups” with up to 200,000 people or “channels” with no cap on membership. These function as feeds where administrators can broadcast messages to subscribers.

Founded by Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov in 2013, it’s the successor to his other hugely popular app, VKontakte or VK, essentially a Russian Facebook. After the Kremlin pressured Durov to fork over user data to Russian security services, Durov sold his stake in the company, fled Russia and developed Telegram.

That origin story is key to understanding Telegram’s way of operating.

“He does everything to be independent of national governments and this is all out of the tradition of resisting the Russian government,” said Kilian Bühling, a researcher who studies digital mobilization at Germany’s Weizenbaum Institute.

Why do extremists love it?

Europe’s surging far-right movements have found a home on Telegram, using the app to radicalize new members and organize real-world demonstrations. The radical Reichsbürger movement, which believes Germany is still under Allied occupation and not a sovereign state, is one such group. They organized a coup attempt, in part through Telegram channels, but were thwarted by German authorities in 2022 when law enforcement discovered a cache of nearly half a million euros and an arsenal of weapons.

There’s a few reasons the app is so conducive to mobilization.

Telegram has a reputation for being free of government intervention. As in Russia, Durov has long thumbed his nose at government and law enforcement requests for user data, unlike other social media platforms. That attitude helped lead to his arrest: Among the 12 crimes French authorities charged him with was “refusal to communicate” information to authorities to carry out investigations.

And that attitude extends to Telegram’s hands-off policy around content moderation. Where most platforms employ teams of people to monitor content and try to remove explicit antisemitism and other hate speech, Telegram’s rules for posting are comparatively meager.

Its “Terms of Use” clock in at just 100 words (97 if you don’t count the words “terms,” “of” and “use”). The app says it bans spam, the promotion of violence and illegal pornographic content.

The app has also built a reputation for privacy, though data protection experts say this is mostly spin. The only encryption that exists on the app is for one-to-one messages. Even then, users need to opt in; encryption not an automatic setting as it is on Signal, Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger. And many cryptographers say Telegram’s encryption is not up to snuff.

“Telegram has been very successful in falsely marketing itself as being a secure application,” said Jan Penfrat, senior policy advisor at European Digital Rights, an association of European nonprofits focused on online privacy issues.

In addition, the app’s functionality serves the aims of the far right, which looks to broadcast messages to wide audiences, amplify alternative media and connect regional movements to national ones, all sans oversight.

Penfrat pointed to the ability to create large groups or popular channels on the app and added, “If you can do this without any moderation, that’s obviously something that can be very appealing for people to spread illegal content.”

What do Jewish watchdogs say about it?

Advocacy groups have implored governments and the platform itself to do more to remove extremist content. In 2021, Hope Not Hate, a counter-extremism organization, penned an open letter to Telegram laying out how it served as a mass conduit for antisemitic rhetoric. In particular, the letter cited a channel hosted by GhostEzra, the alias for a leading antisemitic propagandist who at the time had 330,000 followers on Telegram.

“Our research has found that your platform, more than any other, is being used by terror-promoting far right networks and is home to the most extreme, genocidal and directly violent antisemitic content,” the letter said. “We are calling on Telegram to be consistent and take serious action against the terrorist content still on the platform that is putting Jewish and other minoritised communities at risk.”

Signatories included several British Parliament members as well as heads of a number of Jewish organizations, such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

And this summer, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a civil liberties nonprofit, called on the British government and platforms like Telegram to remove racist anti-migrant content in the wake of far-right riots in the United Kingdom this summer.

The Anti-Defamation League, which has run pressure campaigns against both Facebook and X to persuade them to do more to counter hate speech, has also followed the growth of extremism on Telegram. The group observed an unusually high proportion of antisemitic content on Telegram in 2020, and after Oct. 7, 2023, documented a 433% increase in posts calling for violence against Jews, Israelis or Zionists. Rates of hate speech remain higher than before Oct. 7, said Oren Segal, who heads the ADL’s Center on Extremism.

“Telegram is the platform of choice for antisemites across the ideological spectrum,” he said. “Anybody who is in the business of tracking antisemitism is very familiar with Telegram because of how much is on that platform and how much various antisemitic and extremist groups rely on it.”

But unlike more mainstream social media platforms that the ADL has worked with and also publicly criticized, Telegram is hard to engage on the topic of combating hate speech because the app hasn’t acknowledged how big of a problem it is, Segal said.

“In order to engage  a platform on these issues they have to have some sort of demonstration that they care about these issues and are willing to be responsive,” he said. “In order to fix a problem you have to admit that you have one.”

Yfat Barak-Cheney, the director of technology and human rights at the World Jewish Congress, called Telegram “a gateway for terrorist propaganda on social media platforms” but shared Segal’s frustrations.

“We have made this information available to government leaders and international institutions and have long called for regulative action to be taken,” she said in a statement. “To date, the platform has not heeded any calls for increased monitoring and moderation.”

How has it been used in Israel and the Palestinian territories since Oct. 7?

Telegram, based in Dubai, has long been popular in the Middle East, and its usage has surged in Israel and the region following Oct. 7. That’s partly because both the Israeli military and Hamas have relied on it as a key messaging platform.

As of October 2023, the month of Hamas’ attack and the war’s outbreak, Israel had around 2.5 million active weekly users, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm — amounting to about one in four Israelis.

Statistics on Palestinian usage are harder to come by, but Telegram has served as Hamas’ key platform for communication throughout the war. Members used Telegram to share first-person videos of the Oct. 7 attack, often depicting gruesome scenes, and still rely on the app to spread content to subscribers around the world.

It has also uploaded videos of hostages, including one of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whom the terror group recently murdered along with five other captives.

In the days after Oct. 7, the Telegram channel of Hamas’ military wing nearly quadrupled in size to more than 700,000 followers. Content on its main channel was viewed exponentially more than the same posts on the terror group’s app, according to The New York Times.

The app faced pressure in the days after Oct. 7 to ban Hamas-aligned channels as other platforms, such as Facebook. and X, have done. Durov pushed back initially, saying Hamas was using the app to warn civilians to leave areas before missile strikes. But he eventually relented in a rare instance of content moderation, restricting the channels on Apple and Google devices. But Telegram offered workarounds, and the content is still findable and shareable months later.

That has changed somewhat in recent days, as Telegram appears to have blocked access to Hamas’ main channel following Durov’s arrest and a spate of reporting on its permissive policies.

The Israeli military also uses the app to spread its messaging as well as to send out official updates like siren alerts and press releases to its 135,000-plus subscribers. Leading Israeli journalists such as Amit Segal, political activists such as the right-wing rapper and provocateur known as the Shadow, and government agencies such as the Health Ministry also have popular channels.

Telegram is especially useful in wartime and amid cell service disruptions, since it can operate on WiFi, so “using these kinds of applications for simple messaging when SMS isn’t available is a big benefit to folks,” Woolley said.

But in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack, the Israel Internet Association, which seeks to encourage safety and transparency online, warned Israelis against unfettered use of Telegram.

“In light of the Hamas attack, the war in Gaza and the need for urgent and current information, thousands of Israelis have chosen to join the Telegram app,” read a statement from the group. “But many are unaware of the characteristics and dangers embedded in it. … We recommend prohibiting the installation of the app among youth given that it features hurtful and violent content without appropriate moderation or supervision, and lacks a functional reporting mechanism.”

IDF soldiers have also used the app for illicit purposes. Members of an Israeli Defense Forces Psychological Warfare unit operated a channel called “72 Virgins – Uncensored,” posting gore-filled videos of dead civilians and racist language at the beginning of the war.

The IDF at first denied the accusation but later told Haaretz that the account was operated without authorization.

What happens next?

The future of the app hangs in the balance, as it faces two existential threats.

The first is from the French legal system. Durov was charged with complicity in spreading child pornography, selling narcotics and aiding organized crime. He was released on a 5 million euro bail and ordered to stay in France while he faces a potential trial.

The second is the European Union’s new landmark disinformation and hate speech law, the Digital Services Act, under which the app is expected to face scrutiny.

There’s a hitch, though. The DSA’s hefty enforcement mechanisms only come into effect for so-called “very large online platforms” with more than 45 million EU users. Telegram says it has just 41 million, shielding it from regulators’ authority to fine the company up to 6% of its revenue.

The EU is now investigating whether Telegram fudged those numbers, according to a Financial Times investigation. If they reclassify the app, Telegram could be forced to institute content moderation policies or face harsh financial penalties.

“If founders and technology firms won’t, at the very least, come to the table to have a discussion about what can be done, as seems to be the case with Durov, then they are going to be made an example of,” Woolley said.