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Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them.
CATANIA, Italy (JTA) — Rabbi Gilberto Ventura believes his synagogue has the most beautiful view in the world. Located in the tower of a century-old castle on the slopes of Mt. Etna in the eastern Sicilian city of Catania, the synagogue is wedged between a snow-capped volcano and the sun-kissed Mediterranean sea.
The 49-year-old Brazil-born rabbi also thinks his congregation is one of the most unique in the world. It’s made up mainly of Bnei Anusim — descendants of Jews forced to hide their religious practice and convert to Catholicism after the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Before that infamous decree, Sicily was home to tens of thousands of Jews.
The synagogue, which was first inaugurated last fall, is the result of decades of grassroots efforts by those descendants in Catania to find each other and forge a sense of community that had been lacking for centuries.
Hiring a full-time rabbi was the last piece of the puzzle, and Ventura, who has a long history of working with communities of Bnei Anusim in Brazil, was a natural candidate. He arrived in Catania in January.
“I really believe that the future Judaism in the world, especially in some places like Italy and, of course, Brazil, is connected to the Bnei Anusim, and the need to embrace the Bnei Anusim,” Ventura said.
But in an ongoing point of frustration, the formal organization representing Italian Jewry, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), does not recognize them as Jews.
“In the case of Catania, this strange Jewish community hasn’t passed all the steps the law requires,” said Giulio Di Segni, the vice president of UCEI.
He was referring to the fact that the community did not seek UCEI’s permission before establishing themselves under the name “Jewish community of Catania.” Per Italian law, UCEI has a monopoly on acknowledging and establishing Jewish communal life in Italy — including authority over who can use the term “Jewish community of” in formal ways.
“UCEI can’t accept this because it is too easy,” he added. “We are not against their synagogue or their way of prayer, but they cannot use the name ‘Jewish community of Catania.’”
The rooftop of the Castello Leucatia, where the community meets, has a large menorah and a view of the Mediterranean. (David I. Klein)
Catania’s Jewish community members told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a variety of stories about their Jewish backgrounds. Some came from families that always outwardly identified as Jewish. Others identified the source of family traditions practiced by parents and grandparents who — as descendants of Jews who faced persecution for practicing Judaism — still felt the need to hide aspects of their Jewishness from the public eye.
In the midst of questions about their ancestry, the majority of the Jewish community members have undergone Orthodox conversions. But that hasn’t led to their acceptance.
Benito Triolo, president of the Catania Jewish community, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he first came to Judaism at the age of 40, thanks to the insight of a Jewish friend in Palermo, Sicily’s capital and most populous city. Working together, they established a Charter of Sicilian Jewry, which aimed to identify and highlight the Jewish heritage of neighborhoods across the island.
While working on that project, Triolo came closer to his own Jewish heritage, and after years of study, he completed an Orthodox conversion through a rabbi in Miami 25 years ago.
Another community member, who was born Alessandro Scuderi but today goes by the name of Yoram Nathan, first felt drawn to Judaism as a child watching news of the Six-Day War in 1967. At first, he was laughed at by other members of his family — except his grandmother, who happened to have a tradition of lighting eight candles in early winter and baking flat unleavened bread around Easter time.
Decades of study later, Scuderi also completed a formal conversion to Judaism before an Orthodox rabbinic court, or beit din.
Others had more straightforward backgrounds.
“I was born in a Jewish family,” said David Scibilia, the community’s secretary. “Frankly speaking, we were not hiding or deep in the shadows in this part of the country.”
Scibilia said that his father explained to him that he was a Jew as early as the age of four. Within their own home, they observed holidays and kept Shabbat — no easy task since Italian schools at the time of his childhood in the 1970s had class on Saturdays. He did not eat meat until he was an adult and was able to acquire kosher meat.
He said that his family had maintained their Jewish identity since the days of the Inquisition and married amongst a small group of other similar families.
“I was a Jew, but not part of any community,” Scibilia said. “Just my family was my community.”
An aerial view of the city of Catania shows the Mt. Etna volcano in the background, Jan. 28, 28, 2022. (Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images)
Scibilia explained that once he had a child of his own, he realized he did not want her to have the same lonely Jewish experience. But when he reached out to UCEI, he said he found the proverbial door to organized Jewish life shut. Earning membership in Jewish community organizations across Western Europe involves a strict vetting process, and many groups require applicants to prove their mothers’ Jewishness according to varying standards.
Scibilia’s experience was echoed by Jews outside of the community in Catania and across Italy’s south who talked to JTA — a feeling of neglect or rejection by UCEI for those who fall outside of the norms of Italian Judaism.
UCEI currently recognizes 19 Jewish communities across northern Italy and just one in the south, in Naples, which has jurisdiction over the rest of the southern half of the peninsula and the island of Sicily. The organization recognizes around 28,000 Jews in total across the country.
Scibilia noted that despite his Jewish upbringing, he has multiple certificates of conversion from Orthodox rabbis. The first came from a beit din of American rabbis from who traveled to Syracuse, Sicily, to assess Scibilia and others like him in Sicily. His second comes from the conversion court of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, which is known for its exacting Orthodox standards.
Both were rejected by Italy’s own Orthodox rabbinate, and he was forced to stand before another rabbinic court in Italy.
“I have at this moment — don’t start to laugh — three documents that prove that I am a Jew, two Ketubah [marriage contracts] for my wedding, and so on, again and again and again,” Scibilia said.
Others’ experiences in the region have been even more fraught, he said.
“The problem in Italy, that if you try to study with any rabbi here, you can study for 20 years, maybe you can die even before you reach the end of the tunnel,” he said. “From my point of view, they are playing with the spirituality of these people.”
In a statement last year, UCEI called the the Catanians “a phantom ‘Jewish community’” and accused them of “misleading the local institutions and deluding believers and sympathizers into adhering to traditional religious rites, never actually recognized or authorized by the Italian rabbinical authority.”
“Between UCEI and the Italian republic is an agreement signed in ‘87,” Di Segni said. “This law means everything about Jewish communities in Italy is through the Union Jewish community in Italy (UCEI).”
Noemi Di Segni, shown in Rome in 2017, is president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy. (Stefano Montesi/Corbis via Getty Images)
Triolo said he isn’t too concerned about UCEI’s recognition.
“Ours is a process of refounding old communities that existed as early as 200 and up to 1492,” Triolo said. “Our recognition is already in our history. At that time the UCEI did not exist. We were there and we simply returned!”
No one knows when Jews first arrived in Sicily, but the Talmud tells a story that claims Rabbi Akiva, a well-known early rabbinic sage, visited the island in the early second century and told of a small Jewish community in Syracuse. Some historians believe the Roman writer Caecilius Calactinus — who was born in a town near Messina in the first century B.C.E — to have been of Jewish origin.
All agree that over the course of history, Sicily’s Jews watched as the island was traded between Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans and half a dozen other empires. The narrative has also long been that Jewish life there ended five centuries ago, under Spanish rule.
The Spanish empire’s Jews suffered the same fate as Jews from the Iberian peninsula, who would become known to the world as Sephardim when they were expelled in 1492.
The descendents of Spain — and Sicily — spread throughout the world, establishing communities in North Africa, throughout the Ottoman empire, in the Netherlands and ultimately the British Isles and North America, as it was believed that Judaism faded away in their homelands.
Catania’s Jews disagree, arguing that many Jews practiced their religion over the centuries, in secret.
Triolo and others in the community formally inaugurated their synagogue in October. It was furnished with Torah scrolls donated by the Ohev Sholom synagogue in Washington, D.C.
The synagogue is situated in the tower of the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. The building was granted to the community by the city’s municipality.
“So they had the people, they had a synagogue, but they needed somebody to teach,” Ventura said.
The community meets in the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. (David I. Klein)
Ventura, who is Orthodox, may be the island’s first permanent working rabbi in over 500 years, but it’s not his first time working with Bnei Anusim.
Back in his native Brazil, Ventura was the leader of the Synagogue Without Borders, an organization through which he served 15 communities in Brazil’s north that were made up of descendants of Jews who came with the first Portuguese colonists to South America and who ultimately had to hide their identity as the Inquisition spread to the New World.
His work there put him in conflict with Brazil’s Jewish establishment, too. But Ventura is unfazed.
In Brazil, he founded synagogues and summer camps and built mikvahs and yeshivas across the country’s north. Since 2015, he has facilitated the conversion of hundreds of Bnei Anusim, bringing them back into the fold of mainstream Orthodox Judaism.
“I am a teacher since I was 21 years old,” he said. “Now I am 49, along with my wife. It’s one of the things we love to do, and know how to do. To teach Jewish philosophy, to teach Torah, to teach Tanakh, to teach the story of the Jews in Brazil, and now we are starting to teach the story of the Jews in Italy, the story of the Inquisition etcetera.”
In Castello Leucatia, he leads Shabbat services with the energy of a gospel preacher, pausing between prayers to explain a verse, teach a new tune, welcome latecomers, or simply to allow the congregation to talk.
Catania community members are shown at a recent gathering. (David I. Klein)
“This is what’s most important,” he remarked during one such lull on a recent Friday night. “That they get to talk and be a community.”
Ventura had organized a Shabbat event for other Jews across Italy — from Naples to Turin — who shared his belief that the future of Judaism was in communities like the one in Catania.
“Our point of view of Judaism is that we have to be a part of society, we don’t have to insulate ourselves, we believe that Judaism has a lot to contribute to society,” Ventura said. “In Brazil, we have a lot of connections with people from the periphery, in the favela and other communities, immigrants, Indians, etcetera. So that is something we want to establish here, to teach the people a Judaism that brings good things to the wider society.”
Ventura isn’t the only one working with such communities in southern Italy. Across the Strait of Messina, Jewish life has also been on the rise in Calabria — the toe of Italy’s boot — thanks to an American-born rabbi named Barbara Aiello.
Aiello, though raised in Pittsburgh, is of Calabrian descent. She returned to the land of her ancestors in the early 2000s and began working with the Bnei Anusim there, ultimately establishing a synagogue called Ner Tamid del Sud, meaning “eternal light of the south.”
“Until now, nobody took care of Judaism in the south of Italy,” Scibilia said while looking out at the Mediterranean from the terrace of Castello Leucatia.
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The post Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Looking for snow in August: My lifelong obsession with the Irish
According to the 11th-century set of Irish texts known as Lebor Gabála Érenn, or The Book of the Invasions of Ireland, there once lived a man called Fénius Farsaid — “Irishman the Pharisee.”
If the weirdness of this name is not hitting home for you, it’s a bit like if I told you my name was “Jewess the Druid.” “Fénius,” a predecessor of the modern word “Fenian,” connotes an Irish person. “Farsaid” is the medieval Irish word for “Pharisee.” Though the term is now mostly reserved for insulting hypocrites in an obscure way, in biblical times it referred to a strict Jewish sect active in ancient Judea.
How did this early example of Irish-Jewish crossover earn his name? Lebor Gabála Érenn reports that he was one of the 72 chieftains who built the Tower of Babel. When it crumbled and God cursed humankind with multilingualism, he set up camp in the Tower’s remains and ordered his scholars to go out and study the babble of the world’s newborn languages. On his own, he explored Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabets (hence the “Farsaid”). As a capstone project, Fénius blended together the best elements of all the world’s languages to make the perfect tongue: Irish (hence the “Fénius”).
Fast forward almost one thousand years after Lebor Gabála Érenn was written, and you get me, Fénius Farsaid in reverse: he was an Irishman interested in the Jews; I am a Jewish woman fascinated by the Irish. There are many ways to measure a life, but mine might as well be thought of as a 22-year-long montage of fanatical Irish-themed memories: as a child, reading Maeve Binchy’s Chestnut Street and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes; as a tween, writing a racy work of historical fiction called Ballyhill inspired by the Irish Rebellion of 1798; as a teen, shaking my computer in rage when 23 & Me reported I was 0% Irish; as a young woman, discovering Seamus Heaney, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Maggie O’Farrell; and as whoever I am now, writing this confessional essay.
I do not know when or how this obsession took root, though some evidence suggests that I have a genetic predisposition towards loving the Irish. The story goes that my great-great grandfather Barnett Shapiro did not know his birthday. But on his way from Poland to America, he passed through London, where he mixed with Irish immigrants in the East End. He found them so delightful that when he arrived at Ellis Island and was asked his birthday, he, a Jewish man whose first language was Yiddish, proudly declared he was born on St. Paddy’s Day, 1888.
This recessive shamrock gene skipped a generation and reappeared in my Grandpa Barry, or “Gramps.” When I was 12 or so, he presented me with a copy of Snow in August, a novel by the Irish-American journalist and novelist Pete Hamill, a man as tender as he was hard-boiled. According to the book’s back cover, I could expect a tale of an unlikely, Brooklyn-bred friendship between a young Irish-American lad named Michael Devlin and an Orthodox rabbi named Judah Hirsch. I admit I was skeptical. Gramps had already busted his credibility several times by hounding me to read his personal favorites like Young Visitor to Mars, Hardy Boys and back-issues of Flash Gordon. But against my better judgment, I read the book. And then I read it again.
It’s hard to say why this book etched itself into me so deeply. Maybe as a fifth-generation Brooklyn Shapiro, I was hard-wired to like it. But what I remember best about the book is not the plot or any particular line, but how I felt while reading it. Snow in August made me feel that magical realism was not exclusive to jungle climates like Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, or Italo Calvino’s invisible cities. There were labyrinths of wonder built right under Brooklyn, like a subway system for the spirit. Pete Hamill taught me how to hear the rumble. In his Brooklyn, it was possible for a golem to rise up against your tormentors, for the dead to return for a final dance, for snow to fall in the middle of August.
Maybe you’ll be relieved to hear that in the 10 intervening years since I first read this book, I’ve tempered my admiration of the Celts by finding some Irish literature that enrages me. In my freshman year of college, I read James Joyce’s Ulysses and wanted to clobber him with it. At the recommendation of my playful Bronxonian druid of an English teacher, Ted Cleary, I read Flann O’Brien’s experimental novel At Swim-Two-Birds and was wracked by alternating warp-spasms of amusement and fury. (As Oscar Wilde, another great Irishman-of-letters, would say, “When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.”)
But most recent and vivid among my Irish memories is the pilgrimage I made to peaty Erin this past March. I had been in Oxford for a term abroad, and when the “vac” (British for “vacation”) struck, my friends Cindy, Gemma and I set out for the stretch of western Irish coastline known as the “Wild Atlantic Way.” We walked the misty Cliffs of Moher, where we were attacked by angry winds. We took refuge in pubs and soaked up pints of Guinness, plates of beef stew and hours of foot-tapping fiddling sessions that gave enthusiastic tourists and taciturn locals a reason to engage with each other. We rode a see-sawing ferry to the Aran Islands and back, and learned that time works differently when you’re on the brink of barfing.
When I think of that week in Ireland, I remember the horizon at sundown. Behind the dark green hills, the clouds looked like silhouettes of other hills somewhere far away. The wind plunged down my collar and shimmied up my pant legs. I could see no end to the ocean, only the thin line where sky and water met in some unreachable place. I feared the vastness of the world, and loved it at the same time.
In a way, that wild Atlantic scene was repeating what many Irish writers had been trying to tell me for years: Life is immense, often surprising, and occasionally tragic. Still, why not hope? The words of Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Gravel Walks” provide a lodestar for living: “Walk on air against your better judgment.”
Poetic spirits in the Jewish world have come to uncannily similar conclusions. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once described himself as “an optimist against my better judgment,” a parallel with Heaney that might have delighted Fénius Farsaid. Even a central premise of Judaism — that the messianic age when “nation will not lift up sword against nation” will arrive someday — would be impossible without a commitment to walking on air against your better judgment until that day comes.
Nobody is born knowing how to walk, let alone knowing how to walk on air. But in his poem “The Cure at Troy,” Seamus Heaney describes how to take those first steps —
“So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.”
Believe that snow could come next August.
The post Looking for snow in August: My lifelong obsession with the Irish appeared first on The Forward.
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When does Shabbat end? This astrophysicist thinks we’ve been getting it wrong
Aster Taylor observes Shabbat on their own time — literally.
For the past year, Taylor, a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at the University of Michigan, has been keeping Shabbat according to a schedule they devised using astronomical data.
So this Saturday, when Chabad of Ann Arbor says Shabbat will end at 9:09 p.m., Taylor will observe for nearly 11 more minutes. Where does Taylor, 25, get the chutzpah to challenge longstanding Jewish tradition?
“We live in the modern world. We have computers, we have catalogs of all the stars, and especially in the 80s, the construction of more significant telescopes,” Taylor told the Forward. “We have a pretty good understanding of how the sky affects our vision. So we can now just calculate this, right?”
They might have a point. In true “two-Jews-three-opinions” fashion, there’s actually no universally accepted time that Shabbat ends. But most people can agree on this: Shabbat ends at nightfall, defined by the Talmud as when three medium-sized stars in close proximity to one another are visible to the naked eye.
But what defines a medium-sized star and how close is close enough? Whose eyesight should be trusted? Those answers are not clear, leaving it up to rabbis to impart practical guidance.
Since without astronomical expertise, determining which stars make the grade is pretty difficult for the “average Joseph,” rabbis rely on proxy criteria. Today, many Orthodox communities use a standard credited to the venerable Rabbi Yechiel Michel Tucazinsky, who in 1929 determined three stars are visible when the sun sets 8.5 degrees below the horizon. Others follow the teachings of the 12th-century Rabbeinu Tam, who places nightfall 72 minutes after sunset.
But those approximations didn’t satisfy Taylor, an aspiring professor currently writing their dissertation about giant planet formation. Taylor craved a more scientific approach.
So for a few nights over several months, Taylor went to a local park, sat at a picnic table and every two minutes measured the sky’s brightness with a light meter.
Taylor settled on a brightness standard for a medium star — between magnitude 2 and 3 — and determined that three stars of that brightness need to be within 10 degrees of one another, close enough that an observer could see all three stars without moving their eyes.
Taylor then built a computer model to determine when three stars that meet those conditions become visible, taking into account various atmospheric conditions. That model became a web app that calculates Shabbat times for any given location and elevation.
The results were striking. Based on Taylor’s calculations, Shabbat should often end around 10 minutes later than the time given by the conventional approximation — no small discrepancy for those who faithfully observe the Sabbath.
Taylor’s computations are intriguing Jewish scholars. Masorti: The New Journal of Conservative Judaism has agreed to publish Taylor’s research paper on the topic this winter.
The Forward also shared Taylor’s findings with two rabbis: Yaakov Hoffman of the modern Orthodox Bridge Shul in Washington Heights, who wrote a scholarly article about Shabbat’s end, and Jack Shlachter — who in addition to being a retired rabbi in Los Alamos, New Mexico, just so happens to have a Ph.D in physics.
Both were impressed. “There’s always room for science to enhance these practices,” Shlachter said. “This author is doing things in a very admirable fashion — trying to be fully aware of tradition, but also incorporating more modern, sophisticated techniques.”
Hoffman said it was “very impressive” that Taylor “was trying to research these things from a contemporary astronomical perspective, and to really put so much effort and passion into accurate determination of the time.”
If Taylor “wants to add a few minutes to Shabbat,” he added, “that doesn’t bother me.”
What if Shabbat never ends?
As any city dweller knows, the stars don’t exactly come out in force at night.
Once Taylor factored light pollution into their calculations, it produced a somewhat uncomfortable result. In New York City, Taylor said, light pollution is so intense that three medium stars in close proximity will never be visible this year. In Jerusalem, only a few months of the year offer enough clear visibility to see Taylor’s criteria.
“The conditions that end Shabbat are never met,” Taylor said, “which is obviously a problem.”
Taken literally, that would mean endless Shabbat. In his paper, Taylor wrote that such a scenario would “require most observant Jews to quit their jobs, refrain from cooking, and spend their time studying Torah.” That would be both “unrealistic” and “lessen the sanctity” of the Sabbath, Taylor wrote.
Fortunately, there is a rabbinic workaround that dates back long before the age of light pollution.
The 16th-century Rabbi Yosef Karo wrote that on a cloudy day, one should wait to end Shabbat until “the doubt leaves his heart.” In other words, wait long enough after sunset to be certain that the stars theoretically would have been visible on a clear night.
Taylor agrees that the same principle for clouds can be applied to light pollution. But they argue that it’s still worth knowing just how much the modern night sky has changed.
Light pollution isn’t the only factor messing with the Jewish clock. President Trump is urging the Senate to pass a bill that would make daylight savings time permanent — a measure which many Orthodox Jews oppose because a later winter sunrise would mean a later morning prayer service, making many Orthodox Jews late for work.
But it also would also push Shabbat an hour later, which could mean a less frantic rush to get home before sunset on wintertime Friday afternoons.
Those potential changes raise a broader question. As modern life becomes increasingly divorced from the natural rhythms of the Earth, to what extent should Jewish practice evolve?
Taylor, who attends a Conservative synagogue, said they’re in favor of maintaining Jewish tradition when possible — but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be improved.
“We should be using a calculation like this in communities in the future,” Taylor said. “It’s a strict upgrade to the way we’ve been doing things in the past, and so I’m hopeful that we’ll start using this more widely.”
Paradoxically, in Taylor’s case, they believe modern technology enabled them to get closer to the literal meaning of the traditional text. It was the ancient rabbis, lacking that science, who had to settle for the next best thing.
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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
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