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Sukkot turns New York City into a playground for local Jews
(New York Jewish Week) — On Monday, the Behfar family of Midwood hosted friends in their backyard, went out for ice cream and met up with friends again, this time for a barbecue and cocktails. On Tuesday, the family of six ventured to Staten Island, where they visited an arcade, a Lego store, a shooting range and a nearby Trader Joe’s.
The rest of the week will bring visits to a theme park and a New Jersey mall.
It’s an ambitious staycation itinerary for any family, and for the Behfars, it’s imbued with religious significance. The fall festival of Sukkot, which began on Friday evening, contains five intermediate days, called “Chol HaMoed” in Hebrew, during which Jewish religious prohibitions on work during the holiday are relaxed but when many Orthodox day schools are on vacation.
For the Behfar family and many others across the five boroughs and beyond, that means a week of family time in honor of the holiday. To make it manageable, parents Karen and Aharon Behfar have set at least one ground rule for their four sons. “The rule is everyone has to go together,” Karen Behfar said. “You can’t have, let’s say, my two older boys saying, ‘I don’t want to go to that trip.’”
This year, the five days of Chol HaMoed began Monday and end Friday — time many Orthodox families spend treking around New York City, frequenting everything from well-trodden cultural institutions like the American Museum of Natural History to amusement parks and other attractions farther afield.
And the city and its environs change for them. To accommodate the increased numbers of Orthodox vacationers, the city’s ferry schedule changes, a mall in New Jersey offers private, gender-segregated swimming, and concerts of religious Jewish music are staged in Coney Island, Crown Heights and Newark.
“As a father, my wife and I need to spend time [on] Chol Hamoed figuring out what to do with the kids,” Abraham Bree, a marketing executive and father of six, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“My 13-year-old wants more fun, exciting adventure stuff. My [twin] two-year-olds don’t want to go on roller coasters,” he added. “Obviously you wouldn’t want to go on a Chol Hamoed trip where the oldest kid is moping because it’s a bunch of Chuck E. Cheese things.”
A young couple cycles through Central Park on the first day of Chol Hamoed Sukkot 2023. (Jackie Hajdenberg)
The holiday’s religious restrictions make that planning process even harder. Jewish law mandates that all meals be eaten in a sukkah, the temporary huts built for the weeklong holiday that recall the ancient Israelites’ sojourn in the desert and emphasize the need for divine protection. Orthodox families also prefer attractions where certified-kosher food is on offer. (Passover also has four intermediate days in New York that generally coincide with spring break at the city’s public schools, and when strict religious restrictions also apply.)
Those requirements have spawned several online guides directing people to attractions that offer sukkahs and kosher eateries. Many of those places are Jewish-themed, but some, like American Dream Mall in New Jersey, is built for a broader audience but caters to Orthodox Jews — with kosher offerings in the food court and more than one sukkah. The mall also features days when its huge water park is open exclusively to men or women — a policy that accords with Orthodox Judaism’s restrictions on immodest dress.
“Some families are very, very planned out,” Karen Behfar said. “And sometimes we just like to go in the car and drive and find different places.”
To help families structure their week, Bree created an artificial intelligence-powered website called CanWeGoNow.com, which generates suggestions for family-friendly activities by zip code. The website is named after the refrain he heard from his children upon returning from synagogue each morning during the holiday’s intermediate days. He said 20,000 people had already used the website this week, as opposed to hundreds on a typical week.
But the first model of the website presented a problem for its Orthodox Jewish clientele — it suggested families visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral, near Rockefeller Center.
“Now, if you’re Jewish and it’s Chol Hamoed, it shouldn’t be suggesting churches,” he said. “We had to put in parameters that would eliminate any places of other religions, we had to put in parameters that would eliminate anything more, adult-themed, shall we say — because, again, trying to be family-friendly in the spirit of the holiday.”
One popular destination for Orthodox staycationers is Governor’s Island, which is evident from the city’s ferry schedule, which has added routes to the island from destinations in Brooklyn. The ferry’s website homepage advertised a special schedule this week “to accommodate higher ridership during the Sukkot holiday.”
Often, families will choose to entertain at home, hosting people in their sukkah or visiting their friends’. Aharon Behfar, who serves as the rabbi of a Sephardic synagogue, teaches Torah classes in his family’s sukkah, and will hire musicians to entertain the guests.
“We realized it’s enjoyable just to find things to do just really around the house and just enjoy each other as opposed to going outside,” said Karen Behfar. “That realization was awesome for me, for the kids.”
And as Chol HaMoed began, others were still figuring their itineraries out. Alisa and David Lasky and their three children, from North Woodmere, Long Island, spent the first day of Chol Hamoed rowing boats in Central Park.
“We crashed a lot,” Alisa Lasky said Monday. None of them had ever rowed in the park before, and the family was glad the weather was good. She said they had a lot of fun.
“We might go to Six Flags tomorrow,” Lasky said. “Not everyone agrees. We might do ax throwing, or Top Golf.”
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The post Sukkot turns New York City into a playground for local Jews appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Jewish Leaders Discuss Campus Antisemitism, Trump Deportation Policy at US Senate
Illustrative: Pro-Hamas students rally at the encampment for Gaza set up at George Washington University students. Washington, DC, April 25, 2024. Photo: Allison Bailey via Reuters Connect
Jewish civil rights advocates, faith leaders, and academics appeared as witnesses for a US Senate committee hearing on Thursday to discuss the ongoing campus antisemitism crisis and the Trump administration’s recent crackdown on anti-Zionist activity, a subject that has sparked a hotly contested debate on civil liberties and the limits of academic freedom.
Held by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the hearing came on the heels of a policy offensive in which the Trump administration has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to Ivy League schools accused of ignoring antisemitic discrimination, created a federal inter-agency task force on antisemitism, and ordered the deportation of anti-Zionist students and faculty who are accused of providing material support to Hamas and participating in other seditious activities.
“Educational institutions are not public streets or sidewalks, and students need not be permitted to engage in expressive activity wherever, whenever, and however they wish — for example, including by wearing masks to conceal their identities — especially when such allowances ultimately contribute to the creation of hostile educational environments,” Carly Gammill, legal policy director at StandWithUs, told the committee, making the case for regulating utterances of campus speech and assembly which undermine Jewish students’ civil rights to a college education free from discrimination.
Other speakers included Rabbi Levi Shemtov of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), Rabbi David Saperstein of Religious Action Center of Reform, and Kenneth S. Stern, director of Bard College’s Center for the Study of Hate.
“Antisemitism is not just an age-old prejudice, it is a contemporary crisis manifesting on campuses across the nation,” Shemtov said. “As my father once taught me, it is not enough for people, especially for public figures, to not be antisemitic, we must be anti-antisemitic. We must demand the same of our universities and governmental institutions.”
Representing a civil libertarian viewpoint, Stern argued against codifying the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism into law and imposing punitive measures on college students and faculty accused of promoting antisemitism.
“Students, including Jewish students, have a right not to be victims of true threats, harassment, intimidation, bullying, discrimination, let alone assault. However, they should expect to hear ideas that cut them to their core,” Stern told the committee. “If we bludgeon the campus into submission, we risk destroying an institution that has made America the envy of the world.”
He continued, “I am more worried now that the campus tensions over [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] threaten higher education, as each side tries to silence the other. Pro-Palestinian activists sometimes use a heckler’s veto to promote academic boycotts and sometimes exclude Zionists from social spaces, which is almost always McCarthy-like and sometimes clearly antisemitic. But I’m more worried about the use of the law to silence pro-Palestinian speech.”
Stern also criticized US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) high-profile arrest and detainment of Mahmoud Khalil — a Columbia University alumnus who was an architect of the Hamilton Hall building takeover and other disturbances in the New York City area this semester — as “McCarthyism,” prompting a rebuke from HELP committee member Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO).
“As you very well know, United States law says that a noncitizen is inadmissible for entry into this country if they, and I quote, ‘endorse or espouse terrorist activity or persuade others to do the same.’ That same law provides you can be removed for the same reasons,” Hawley responded. “That is what Mr. Khalil has been accused of. He has further been accused of, by the United States government, lying on his visa application. That on its own would be sufficient to remove him from this country.”
Hawley added that Khalil is named as a defendant in a new lawsuit which accuses him of “terrorizing and assaulting Jewish students, unlawfully taking over and damaging public university property, and assaulting Columbia University employees.” He then asked Stern, “You’re telling me that it’s McCarthyism to remove this individual?”
Republican lawmakers have called for holding higher education accountable since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel set off an explosion of antisemitic sentiment on college campuses, causing a succession of conflagrations which still are still burning hot at schools such as Columbia University.
In December, the Republican-led US House Committee on Education and the Workforce issued a report which said that nothing short of a revolution of the current habits and ideas which constitute the current higher education regime can prevent similar episodes of unrest from occurring in the future. Colleges, it continued, need equal enforcement of civil rights laws to protect Jewish students from discrimination and “viewpoint diversity” to prevent the establishment of ideological echo chambers.
The report also said that “academic rigor,” undermined by years of dissolving educational standards for political purposes, would guard against the reduction of complex social issues into the sloganeering of “scholar activism,” in which faculty turn the classroom into a soapbox and reward students who mimic them.
Earlier this month, US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) proposed two new bills which would impose legal sanctions on purveyors of pro-terror ideologies on university campuses and the higher education institutions that harbor them.
The “No Student Loans for Campus Criminals Act” would prevent any campus protestor convicted of a crime from receiving federal student loans or student loan relief, and the “Woke Endowment Security Tax Act (WEST)” would levy a 6 percent excise tax on the endowments of 11 American universities, using the proceeds to pay down the national debt and secure the southern border shared with Mexico. According to Cotton’s office, the bill would generate $16.6 billion in revenue.
“The American people should not be on the hook for the tuition of Little Gaza inhabitants,” Cotton wrote on social media. “Second, our elite universities need to know the cost of pushing anti-American and pro-terrorist agendas.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iran’s Quds Force Chief Praises Hamas’s Oct. 7 Attack, Vows Continued Support for ‘Resistance Front’
Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force, Esmail Qaani speaks in Tehran, Dec. 20, 2022. Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect
The head of Iran’s elite military force responsible for overseeing Iranian proxies and terrorist operations abroad praised the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel in new remarks, reaffirming Tehran’s “unwavering support for the resistance front” in a speech marking “Quds Day.”
Iranian Brigadier General Esmail Qaani, who leads the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an internationally designated terrorist organization, on Wednesday commended the Oct. 7 onslaught as “a combination of battlefield and popular resistance,” Iranian state media reported.
During his speech, the Quds Force commander said Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel, in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages while perpetrating mass atrocities including rape, “introduced a new phenomenon of unity among resistance fronts,” demonstrating the “strength and solidarity of resistance forces.”
Qaani also reiterated Iran’s “unwavering support for the resistance front,” stressing that it will “continue until the ultimate goal of liberating Al-Quds [the Arabic name for Jerusalem] is achieved.”
On Wednesday, leaders from the so-called “Axis of Resistance” — an Iran-led network of anti-Israel, anti-West militias across the Middle East — delivered pre-recorded speeches in preparation for Quds Day on Friday, broadcast alongside images of three figures killed in the past year: former Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, former Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh and former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.
Sponsored by the Iranian regime, the annual Quds Day commemorations event is held in Tehran and several other cities, where Iran and its allies organize marches in support of the Palestinians and call for Israel’s annihilation.
In his remarks, Qaani emphasized that Iran remains committed to supporting the “Palestinian cause” through both direct backing for “resistance forces” and military operations such as “The True Promise” — the regime’s name for its ballistic-missile attack against Israel in October last year.
Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas, providing the Palestinian terrorist group with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.
Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya also delivered a speech praising “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” the terrorist group’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre, as an “unprecedented phase in the history of Palestine,” saying it “reshaped the fight for Palestinian liberation.”
During his speech, the terrorist group leader asserted that the attack demonstrated their ability to take the initiative and launch attacks, “exposing the Zionist entity’s security and military failures.”
“Despite months of relentless killing, terrorism, and destruction, backed by Washington’s full support, the occupation has failed to break the will of the Palestinian people,” al-Hayya said. “The ongoing struggle has forged a new regional power dynamic, uniting fighters from Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran in a common front against the occupation.”
In another pre-recorded speech, Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem accused the United States of attempting to “dismantle the Palestinian cause” through Israel.
The leader of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, said Israel has “occupied Palestine for over 75 years” but failed to erase the “Palestinian identity.”
“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was carried out to change the equation,” Qassem said. “The light of the Palestinian cause shines as a beacon of truth in the world, not to be extinguished.”
“The Zionist regime is grappling with an existential crisis and cannot secure its presence through occupation,” he continued.
Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi also delivered a speech saying that Israel’s “continued aggression, supported by the United States, is aimed at dismantling the Palestinian cause.”
“The Israeli enemy’s actions, mass killings, destruction of infrastructure, starvation, and thirst clearly reveal their attempt to forcibly displace the Palestinian people,” al-Houthi said.
He called on Arab nations to take a “bold, historic stand” to prevent the “displacement of the Palestinians and resist normalization with Israel.”
“If the Israeli enemy succeeds in displacing the Palestinian people, the next target will be Palestine’s neighboring countries and the wider Arab world,” the Iran-backed terrorist group leader said.
“Despite the US attacks, Yemen will not back down and will continue its operations in support of the Palestinian people.”
The post Iran’s Quds Force Chief Praises Hamas’s Oct. 7 Attack, Vows Continued Support for ‘Resistance Front’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Anti-Israel Gen Z Social Media Personality Launches US Congressional Campaign
Kat Abughazaleh launches US congressional campaign. Photo: Screenshot
Kat Abughazaleh, a popular social media influencer with over 220,000 TikTok followers and an extensive track-record of anti-Israel rhetoric, has launched a campaign to be elected to the US Congress.
Abughazaleh, the daughter of a Palestinian immigrant and Texas native, announced that she would be launching a campaign to become the representative for the 9th Congressional District in Illinois. Jan Schakowsky, a Jewish American and strident supporter of the US-Israel alliance, currently represents the district.
In a video posted to X/Twitter on Monday, Abughazaleh blasted the Democratic Party for failing to provide “real leadership” and for continuing to “work from an outdated playbook.” She repudiated the Democrats for supposedly “shrinking away” from conflict with the Republican Party and “cowering to [US President Donald] Trump” and the “authoritarians” within his administration. The progressive social media personality vowed to fight for “human rights and financial freedom” for all Americans.
Though Abughazaleh did not specifically mention the ongoing war in Gaza during her campaign launch video, a keffiyeh—a traditional Arab headdress that has been repurposed to signal support for the Palestinian cause and opposition to Israel — was spotted in the background.
In a fundraising text message following the official launch of her campaign, Abughazaleh further repudiated the close relationship between the United States and Israel, writing that “Democratic leadership should do something to stand up for Palestinians.” She also condemned her primary opponent for voting to “send billions to Israel.”
On Instagram, Abughazaleh posted a painting depicting a woman wearing a keffiyeh wrapped around her head, captioned: “Collective liberation includes palestinian liberation. freedom for all means freedom for palestinians [sic].” She has also posted another photo of herself standing next to street art reading “Free Palestine” and wrote a caption saying “from the river to the sea” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
In the 17 months following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, Abughazaleh has launched numerous tirades condemning the Jewish state. She has slammed Israel’s war efforts in Gaza on X/Twitter, condemning Jerusalem for supposedly practicing “far-right militant ethnonationalism.” She has praised journalists in Gaza for “documenting their own genocide.”
In 2022, Abughazaleh rebuked Israel as a “genocidal apartheid regime” and accused the Jewish state of practicing “ethnic cleansing” against Palestinians. That same year, she also wrote that “pretending Israel is anything but an apartheid state is a lie people tell themselves to ease their own conscience” and that Israel “has no qualms with killing Palestinian children.”
In her online posts, the social media personality has generally not mentioned actions taken by the Israeli military to try and avoid civilian casualties, or Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
Abughazaleh previously worked as a staffer for the progressive watchdog group Media Matters.
Schakowsky has not said whether she plans to run for reelection in her district next year.
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