After a year that divided many Jews, a Simchat Torah tradition of togetherness resumes in Brooklyn

When more than a dozen Jewish groups convened last year in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza for an annual celebration of Simchat Torah, tensions that would define the coming year were already emerging.

The date was Oct. 7, 2023, and Hamas had invaded Israel earlier that day. A full death toll wasn’t yet clear, except that it would be at least in the hundreds. Israel was weeks away from invading Gaza, the Palestinian territory that Hamas controls, though it had begun airstrikes there. Because of strictures on technology, some traditionally observant Jews in the United States were still just learning what had happened.

Simchat Torah Across Brooklyn, a communal event that has taken over Grand Army Plaza for a dance party with Torahs every year since 2011, went on as planned. But the group’s lead organizers, Congregation Beth Elohim, posted on social media that the event would be transformed by the crisis. 

“Tonight will be different,” CBE, a Reform synagogue in Park Slope, said in a statement at the time. “Our joy will become a vigil and our prayers will turn to solidarity with our Israeli family.”

A handful of people criticized the messaging on social media, saying they could not in good conscience join a vigil to support Israel. And near Grand Army Plaza, some Jewish pro-Palestinian would-be attendees organized a separate event nearby.

“That really broke my heart to see our community so broken at that moment, when in previous years, we had all been able to come together,” CBE’s cantor, Josh Breitzer, recalled last month.

A year later, tensions over Israel have divided some Jewish families, synagogues and progressive institutions such as the Park Slope Food Coop, located just blocks away from Grand Army Plaza. But rather than pull back from working together, the groups involved in Simchat Torah across Brooklyn plan to reunite for their annual celebration — one that will be tinged with sadness, but not, Breitzer said, laced with political division.

“My hope is that, if we do our job right in putting Torah at the center, it will feel this year like a space that is safe enough and inclusive enough to welcome you, no matter where you fall on the Jewish political or religious spectrum,” he said.

Simchat Torah Across Brooklyn’s 21 sponsors are traditional synagogues, independent prayer groups known as minyans and groups involved in New York Jewish life. At least one, the minyan Brooklyn Shabbat Kodesh, identifies explicitly as anti-Zionist. Others, including Shlichut Brooklyn and UJA-Federation of New York, represent mainstream Zionist organizations. 

Only a handful of participating groups responded to a request for comment, but some of them have sought to thread a needle that can feel vanishingly small. 

Kolot Chayeinu, a Park Slope congregation, for example, officially espouses an “Open Tent” approach in which Jews with any outlook on Israel are invited to share in the community. The congregation called for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, when the position was espoused largely by non- or anti-Zionist groups. This year, following the retirement of its longtime rabbi, the synagogue hired multiple rabbinical students, including one that is avowedly anti-Zionist and another who is a member of Rabbis for Ceasefire, a group that formed shortly after Oct. 7. The synagogue is holding its own Simchat Torah event before the communal one.

Planning for this year’s event started earlier than usual, in late July, in a nod to the potential pitfalls in collaborating across a wide ideological spectrum, Breitzer said, and a series of conversations took place about the event’s goals and content.

The result, he said, was a form of consensus despite the differences.

“We all agreed that no matter sort of where we felt politically, or how personally we were coping and dealing with this, we come back to Torah at the center — that has survived to protect our people for thousands of years in so many ways, and will protect us again, still, if we do our part,” Breitzer said.

As in many other Jewish communities, the Brooklyn event will somewhat temper its festive atmosphere to memorialize last year while preserving the spirit of the holiday — the only one to include the Hebrew word for “joy” in its name.

Different rabbis and communal leaders are expected to offer “meditations and insights” to guide people to the joy of the Hakafot, amid conflicting feelings about celebrating during the war and on the Hebrew anniversary of the attack. 

Sarah Sokolic, the co-founder and executive director of Lab/Shul, a non-denominational “everybody-friendly, God-optional” congregation that participates in the event, said her congregation’s political positions run the gamut.

“We have community members that span the spectrum of Zionist, anti-Zionist, and every nuance in between, and holding nuance and holding space for both and of this situation is something that we’ve really leaned into,” Sokolic said. “There’s nothing easy about this situation for our community, as a very diverse community, as it relates to Israel and Palestine.”

Naomi Less, co-founder of Lab/Shul, said the service would start out more subdued than usual before it hopefully builds to the buoyancy that attendees will recognize from past years. 

“Joy is an act of resistance, and so if you can have joy, even in the most trauma, even the most pain, let it come, allow for it,” she said. “All the communities that are coming together represent a lot of different angles in the Jewish community. This ritual is not a protest ritual. This ritual is, I hope, a healing ritual.”

Organizers made a playlist in advance of the event that features traditional Jewish music as well as newer songs widely sung in communal settings — including “Olam Chesed Yibaneh,” a mainstay in progressive events that its author, Rabbi Menachem Creditor, asked to be removed from anti-Zionist and pro-ceasefire events this year. It also includes a version of “Am Yisrael Chai,” a rallying cry for supporters of Israel, performed by Creditor’s wife, Neshama Carlebach, the daughter of the melody’s composer, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. 

“I personally hope that by the time we get to the final Hakafa, that we will be in a place that feels a lot like it did in previous years, with respect to joy and abandon, just completely leaning into the simcha of the occasion,” he said, referring to celebrating on the anniversary of the Hamas attack. “I acknowledge it’s going to take some work to get there. This is one of the weightiest occasions that I can anticipate ever being a part of.”

Less said she hoped she would bring with her a takeaway about the power of coming together.

“My hope coming out of this event would be that I remember that there is joy in being Jewish,” she said. “I remember that there is joy in holding on to learning and grab[bing] ahold of Torah and community, and that my community is really wide and really diverse, and that we can actually be together even with those differences.”