Uncategorized
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.
—
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.
Uncategorized
The great antisemitism rug pull
The declining fortunes of Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire media empire, which announced layoffs last week amid falling viewership across its network of shows on Youtube, is the latest evidence of a sudden erosion in the alliance between Jews and conservatives.
The partnership emerged around Donald Trump’s first election as Jews concerned about ascendant anti-Zionism were desperately casting about for allies. Conservatives realized they could lean into ironclad support for Israel while bashing their political opponents for being antisemitic. Among them: former Rep. Liz Cheney, who famously sought to brand Democrats as the party of antisemitism, infanticide and socialism during her stint in charge of campaign strategy for House Republicans.
It was an appealing line of attack because it seized on something liberals claimed to care about — minority rights — and offered evidence that the left was morally bankrupt. “Is it a mere accident that the loudest proponents of intersectionality also tend to be obsessed with ‘Jewish privilege’ and the alleged depredations of the Jewish state?” Sohrab Ahmari, a right-wing journalist, wrote in 2018.
Cheney, Ahmari and others making similar arguments were extending an olive branch to Jews from a conservative movement that had been plagued by antisemitism coming from its own “alt-right,” offering to welcome Jews into the patchwork of constituencies who they felt had been unfairly targeted by a progressive compulsion to split the world into “oppressors” and the “oppressed.”
This offer came with a bonus: Where progressives were pressuring Jews to move left on Israel, and sometimes applying offensive litmus tests around Zionism, these new partnerships with conservatives would require no such sacrifices or discomfort.
Many influential Jewish leaders were receptive.
David Bernstein, chief of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs during the first Trump administration, authored a book called “Woke Antisemitism,” while both the American Jewish Committee and Anti-Defamation League began raising the alarm about ethnic studies curricula in public schools and diversity initiatives at colleges and universities.
“End DEI,” Bari Weiss wrote in a Tablet essay shortly after Oct. 7.
And by the time that Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar and longtime liberal, left her post as President Joe Biden’s ambassador for countering antisemitism, she had become convinced that conservatives were important allies for Jews concerned about antisemitism.
The second Trump administration carried this partnership to its logical conclusion. Official actions now focus on Jews — at least those who support Israel in traditional ways — alongside Christians, white people and men as groups that need government protection, in the form of executive orders, investigations and federal lawsuits.
Now the obvious risk in embracing a political framework that places “antisemitism” into the same category as “reverse racism” is that liberals who think discrimination against white people is fake may start to believe the same about discrimination toward Jews.
And, over the past three years, Democrats have become far more likely to say that claims of antisemitism are used to delegitimize political opponents and critics of Israel rather than to describe actual discrimination.
Now one could argue that this was something of a fair trade. If Democrats were always going to turn against Israel and abandon concern for antisemitism as a result, it might make sense to throw your lot in with the one political party that still supports Israel and is willing to defend Jews, even if it means losing credibility with old allies.
Yet, to return to The Daily Wire’s struggles, the Republican Party seems to be in the midst of an antisemitism rug pull: Just as major Jewish leaders decided to start working in earnest with the conservative movement and burn bridges with liberals, the MAGA vanguard has decided that Jews may not belong in their coalition after all.
Shapiro, an Orthodox Jewish lawyer who rose to prominence first as a columnist and later as a campus speaker and podcaster before starting The Daily Wire in 2015, has found himself on the losing end of a battle with Tucker Carlson for the future of the conservative movement.
Shapiro has denounced the conspiracism and gutter antisemitism animating figures like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, whose career he helped launch at The Daily Wire before she departed amid a bitter feud.
Carlson has countered by arguing against “cancel culture” and courting the far-right audience Fuentes has built, while articulating a political vision based on Christian nationalism that blames Israel for many of the Trump administration’s failures. “Tucker is obviously setting himself up to be the redeemer figure in the ‘the Jews puppeted/betrayed Trump’ MAGA narrative that is emerging on the right,” David Austin Walsh, a scholar of the far right, argued on social media over the weekend.
He seems to be winning.
The country’s two largest prediction markets place Carlson just behind JD Vance and Marco Rubio as the most likely to become the next Republican presidential nominee. Shapiro has lost 10,000 YouTube subscribers over the past month, according to the analytics platform VidIQ, while Carlson and Owens have gained a combined 110,000.
It’s not clear how large The Daily Wire layoffs were. Owens, a notoriously unreliable source with an axe to grind, claimed they fired 60% of the staff, which a company official called “insane” without offering an alternate figure. But the layoffs are not the first portent of hard times there; they follow the firing of CEO Jeremy Boering last spring, which was accompanied by a previous round of layoffs.
Younger Republicans who power much of the online conservative universe seem to be looking for something more crass than what Shapiro has to offer, at least when it comes to Jews: Nearly 40% of Republican voters believe the Holocaust was “greatly exaggerated,” a figure that grows among those under 50 — 25% of whom personally describe themselves as prejudiced against Jews, according to a Manhattan Institute study.
***
The Trump administration is continuing to use legal measures to crack down on what it describes as antisemitism, yet it’s hard to see how its efforts persist much longer in a movement that is not only skeptical of special protections for minorities but that also harbors a growing distrust of Jews. The MAGA movement has seen faltering support for Israel amid the Iran war that Trump launched with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with a recent poll finding that 57% of Republicans under 50 had an unfavorable view of Israel.
Meanwhile, a growing segment of the populist left seems to have decided that they don’t need to worry about Jews. Ben Lorber, who has long been an astute observer of antisemitism from within the left, recently described his frustration with the willingness of leftists to work with anti-Zionists on the far right even when those conservatives seem to be driven by antisemitism rather than concern for Palestinian rights.
“Many of the louder voices on the left argue, in so many words, that we shouldn’t worry so much about the antisemitic kernel of America First anti-Zionism because we shouldn’t capitulate to ‘Jewish feelings,’” Lorber wrote on Substack. “It’s all extremely cursed.”
It’s tempting to throw one’s hands up at the increasingly lonely position of Jews in American politics and chalk it up to our eternal fate. Some have even cautiously celebrated this newfound political homelessness. “Choosing a side has never worked for Jews because when you get out of the hall to power, you will be identified as the exemplar of that political attitude that can now be destroyed,” Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, said at a recent event.
But it may be too late for Jews to stay neutral.
Jewish leaders had a choice to make as they faced growing animosity toward Zionism among their longtime partners on the left. They could have engaged in the excruciating work of reconciling their otherwise liberal values with their support for an increasingly illiberal Israel, while simultaneously trying to get their progressive allies to develop a more nuanced understanding of antisemitism and do a better job of including Jews in their coalition. Or, they could follow Shapiro’s path: leave their views on Israel untouched and try to convince conservatives, who normally believe that protections for minorities inherently disadvantage the majority, that they should make a special and singular exception for Jews.
There may have been a third option, closer to what Kurtzer suggests, of simply trying to remain above the fray. But Jews — or at least the mainline organizations intended to represent us — did choose a side by trying to build a fragile alliance with conservatives in the mold of Shapiro. Now it seems more and more likely that the result is that no political movement will be interested in standing up to antisemitism just as domestic political instability and violence reach a fever pitch.
The post The great antisemitism rug pull appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Belgium Indicts Jewish Mohels, Sparking Diplomatic Firestorm With US and Israel
Belgian army personnel patrol a street as part of a deployment of soldiers outside Jewish institutions in Antwerp and Brussels following attacks at Jewish sites in Belgium and other European countries, in Antwerp, Belgium, March 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
Belgian authorities have indicted two mohels for allegedly performing illegal circumcisions, amid a government probe into the Jewish ritual — with Jewish and political leaders warning the case is a direct threat to religious freedom.
A mohel is a trained practitioner who performs the ritual circumcision in Jewish tradition known as a bris.
On Wednesday, the Antwerp Public Prosecutor’s Office formally indicted two local mohels for “intentional assault or bodily harm with premeditation against minors, as well as the illegal practice of medicine.”
Prosecutors in the northern Belgian city announced they have concluded their investigation into suspected illegal circumcisions and found sufficient evidence to refer the case to criminal court.
The two men are now set to appear before a closed-door pre-trial chamber on June 18, which will decide whether the case proceeds to trial.
The prosecution comes as the Belgium Jewish community is sounding the alarm over a surge in hostility and targeted violence against Jews across the country. In March, following an explosion at a synagogue in Liege that authorities called an antisemitic act, soldiers were deployed on the streets of leading Belgian cities to bolster security for the Jewish community.
With Jewish leaders warning their way of life is being threatened, the legal proceedings against the mohels have sparked fierce backlash, escalating into a public row involving Belgian authorities and Israeli and US officials.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar condemned the case as an attack on Jewish religious practices, calling on the Belgian government to intervene immediately and seek a swift resolution.
“With this act Belgium joins a short and shameful list, together with Ireland, of countries that use criminal law to prosecute Jews for practicing Judaism,” the top Israeli diplomat wrote in a post on X.
“This is a scarlet letter on Belgian society,” Saar continued.
Belgium have just announced the indictment of the three Mohels who were investigated last year in Antwerp.
With this act Belgium joins a short and shameful list, together with Ireland, of countries that use criminal law to prosecute Jews for practicing Judaism.
This is a…
— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) May 6, 2026
US Ambassador to Belgium Bill White also condemned the legal action, calling it a “shameful stain” on the European country.
“The prosecution of these religious figures (mohels), one of whom is American, is wrong and won’t be tolerated,” White wrote in a post on X.
“The Trump Administration condemns this judicial action and also condemns the political inaction by the Belgian Government to find a solution with the beautiful Jewish communities here in Belgium,” he added.
The US diplomat had previously slammed the Belgian government’s probe against the mohels as a “ridiculous and antisemitic prosecution.”
In response, Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot urged White to “exercise greater restraint” and to view his role in “its proper context.”
“It is inappropriate to publicly criticize a country and tarnish its image simply because you disagree with judicial proceedings,” the top Belgian diplomat said in a post on X.
“To portray this as a country’s effort to undermine the religious freedom of Jews is defamatory. This freedom has never been called into question and never will be in our country. Our Constitution protects it,” he continued.
Prévot also noted he would be willing to travel to Israel to discuss the issue, adding that he remained open to dialogue.
“Enough with these caricatures,” he further said. “In Belgium, the judiciary is independent and makes its decisions — whether one agrees with them or not — free from any political influence.”
Saar responded by saying that Prévot’s comments “completely miss the point,” insisting that the core issue was being misrepresented and must be addressed directly.
“There should never have been such an investigation, had the issue of Brit Milah been regulated like in other European countries that respect Jewish religious freedom,” the Israeli diplomat posted.
“Especially so in a country with one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe,” he said. “Had Belgium had a strategic plan to fight antisemitism and foster Jewish life, you might have known this. Alas, it doesn’t.”
Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said on Wednesday evening that his country “is not an antisemitic state,” dismissing such accusations as “nonsense” and arguing that Belgium has always been able to reconcile its laws with Jewish traditions.
“Circumcision is essential to the Jewish faith and Islam, but so are the quality standards of our legislation. You have to reconcile the two,” he said.
The highly controversial case began a year ago when Belgian police raided the homes of several mohels in Antwerp, seizing their circumcision tools after a local anti-Zionist Jewish rabbi filed a complaint.
Last May, Belgian authorities specifically raided three locations in the Jewish Quarter, searching for knives and other equipment allegedly used in unauthorized or illegal circumcisions.
Among the homes raided by the Belgian police was that of Rabbi Aharon Eckstein, a highly experienced mohel and a prominent leader within the Antwerp Jewish community.
According to a police report, the searches were ordered by a judge following a complaint filed in 2023 by Rabbi Moshe Aryeh Friedman, an anti-Zionist activist previously accused of Holocaust denial, against Eckstein and other mohels within the Jewish community.
Since 2024, prosecutors have been investigating illegal circumcisions in the country amid concerns from local authorities that some Jewish circumcisions were being performed by individuals without proper medical training.
In his complaint, Friedman accused six mohels, whom he identified to the police, of endangering infants by performing the metzitzah b’peh ritual, in which the mohel uses his mouth to suction blood from the circumcision area.
However, Eckstein and other rabbis, along with parents of children circumcised by them, have denied such accusations, insisting that they do not perform this practice.
At the time, Jewish and political leaders accused local authorities of using the raids as part of a broader effort to intimidate religious figures in Belgium.
In Antwerp, Friedman is known for publicly criticizing several customs that are important to ultra-Orthodox Jews, who represent the majority of the city’s 18,000 Jewish residents.
Despite several attempts to ban it across Europe, ritual circumcision remains legal in all European countries – though many, including Belgium, limit the practice to licensed surgeons and often perform it in a synagogue.
Last July, dozens of European Jewish leaders called on the European Union to take action against Belgium, arguing that the Belgian police’s actions “represent a breach of an EU fundamental right, that of freedom of religion” and warning that this “echoes one of the darkest chapters in European history.”
Uncategorized
ADL Reports Overall Drop in US Antisemitic Incidents, Rise in Assaults
A man with an Israeli flag looks on next to police officers working at the site where two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead near the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, US, May 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Antisemitic incidents in the US decreased overall in 2025, but violent attacks targeting American Jews remained at alarmingly high levels, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), whose new report pointed to several lingering areas of concern.
The ADL on Wednesday released its annual “Audit of Antisemitic Incidents” for the last calendar year, tallying 6,274 incidents of antisemitic assault, harassment, and vandalism in 2025, an average of 17 such outrages per day.
While antisemitic assaults increased by just 4 percent, from 196 in 2024 to 203 in 2025, perpetrators increased their use of “deadly” weapons by nearly 40 percent, the ADL said. Incidents of assault involving a deadly weapon increased to 32 in 2025 from 23 in 2024.
The advocacy group noted that the upward shift was reflected in the shocking murders of Jews in antisemitic attacks in the US for the first time since 2019. Two Israeli embassy staffers — a young couple set be engaged — were shot dead in Washington, DC last May, and weeks later a firebombing in Colorado claimed the life of an octogenarian. In both crimes, the alleged killers cited anti-Zionism as their motivating ideology.
Other statistics dropped by digit double digits, according to the ADL. Antisemitic vandalism was down 21 percent in 2025. So too was antisemitic harassment, which decreased 39 percent. However, both categories still combined for a total 6,071 incidents, a figure which eclipses the number of hate crimes the FBI said was committed against African Americans in 2024. For context, the Black community is roughly 7 times larger than the Jewish community.
“Behind every one of these incidents is a real person: a family threatened at their synagogue, a rabbi attacked on the street, a student harassed on campus,” ADL senior vice president Oren Segal said in a statement released with the report. “[The year] 2025 brought some of the most violent antisemitic attacks in recent memory. Even as overall incidents declined, the surge in physical assaults is a stark reminder that a historically high level of antisemitism puts Jewish lives at risk.”
“The safety of Jewish communities depends on our collective willingness to meet this moment with urgency, which is what we’re doing every day at ADL,” he added.
The ADL recorded its steepest decline on campuses, where Jewish university students have reported alarming levels of anti-Jewish bias often disguised as or justified by anti-Israel animus. Such antisemitic incidents fell 66 percent to 583 incidents in 2025, down from 1,694 the previous year. The plunge coincided with the second term of US President Donald Trump, whose administration has launched dozens of federal investigations into campus antisemitism and impounded taxpayer funding from schools found to have failed to address the issue.
Last year saw a wide range of antisemitic incidents covered by The Algemeiner. These included, among many others, a public-school principal inveighing against “Jew money,” an attempted arson at the Hillel International chapter in San Francisco, California, and the movement of some conservative students into the far-right ecosystem of antisemitism — a path cleared by Nicholas Fuentes, Candace Owens, Kanye West, and troops of social media influencers. In New York City, home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel, Jews were targeted in the majority of all hate crimes despite comprising a small fraction of the total population.
The wave of hatred has changed how American Jews perceive their status in the US. According to the results of a previous survey commissioned by the ADL and the Jewish Federations of North America, a striking 57 percent of American Jews believe “that antisemitism is now a normal Jewish experience.”
The survey results revealed other disturbing trends: Jewish victims are internalizing their experiences, as 74 percent did not report what happened to them to “any institution or organization”; Jewish youth are bearing the brunt of antisemitism, having faced communications which aim to exclude Jews or delegitimize their concerns about rising hate; and the cultural climate has instilled a pervasive fear that the non-Jewish community will not act as a moral guardrail against continued violence and threats.
On Wednesday ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt committed his organization to reversing this trend.
“Our 2025 audit, which shows that it was one of the most violent years for American Jews on record, is a reminder of how dramatically the threat landscape has shifted. Numbers that would have shocked us five years ago are now our floor,” Greenblatt said. “People are being murdered because of antisemitism on American soil, and thousands more are threatened. ADL will not stop until that baseline changes.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.