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US rabbinical students, in Israel for the year, weigh whether to stay and how to help
(JTA) — Wade Melnick understood that something was truly amiss when he saw a car driving through the haredi Orthodox Israeli town where he was spending Shabbat.
A rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, a Conservative rabbinical school, Melnick and his wife had traveled from Jerusalem to Elad, an Orthodox town about 45 minutes northwest, to celebrate the Simchat Torah and Shemini Atzeret holiday. Their host returned from synagogue alarmed that some of the Orthodox men there were carrying phones and checking their messages — an act prohibited on the holiday except when needed to save a life.
Then the car drove down the town’s streets — another practice prohibited on Shabbat and Jewish festivals. It carried a local leader who broadcast a message instructing everyone to stay indoors. Soon afterward, sirens started blaring. At one point, the ground shook when a rocket landed a few kilometers away.
It wasn’t until after the sun set that Melnick, his wife and their host understood the scope of the crisis: Hamas had invaded Israel, killing hundreds, wounding thousands and taking a then-unknown number of people hostage, including women and children. A massive military mobilization was underway.
“We were scared,” Melnick recalled on Sunday. “It was scary — and we’re thinking about making plans to come home.”
Melnick is one of dozens of American rabbinical students in Israel for the school year, which is only just getting underway. Some, like Melnick, are looking to leave, or to send their family members home to safety. Others are stranded abroad, unsure of where they will learn this semester. And still others say they are undeterred and intend to carry on with their classes — pledging to volunteer to support the Israeli crisis response and war effort in addition to their study.
Noa Rubin, another student at JTS, which is located in New York City, spent the summer in a chaplaincy training program at a Bronx hospital. So when she heard that Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem was looking for people with mental health care training to work with people traumatized by the attack, she offered herself up.
“I’m not a professional professional,” she said. “But I thought I had some of the skills, and I’m trying to do whatever I can. It keeps me productive to feel as helpful as I can be.”
So far, Rubin hasn’t gotten any requests for counseling. Instead, with the start of classes delayed until Oct. 22, she’s turned her attention to raising funds to buy supplies and protective gear for soldiers who are heading into what could be a long and brutal war. She said she doesn’t plan to leave Israel.
“Unless my classes are exclusively online or Israel told me it was a good idea to leave, my intention is to stick around here,” she said. “I think it’s an important show of solidarity.”
Shayna Dollinger, a second-year student at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, a Reform seminary, is not able to decide whether or not to attend classes in Jerusalem. She was on vacation in Vienna when Hamas attacked, and her flight back to Israel was canceled.
So she flew to Munich and then to Porto, Portugal, where she spent the night before boarding a bus to Vigo, Spain, a coastal city where she had friends. She’s currently booked to return to California on Thursday but said she would finalize her plans on Wednesday when HUC updates students about planning for classes.
Two other students are stranded abroad, Dollinger said, while 20 are still in Israel — though messages on a class WhatsApp group suggested that not all would remain there. “A third would like to leave and are actively trying to leave,” she said. “The rest either think it’s safer to shelter in place or they want to stay to be part of the effort.”
Dollinger said she had been impressed by HUC’s planning for emergencies. The school had created a group chat for use in emergencies only — it had been used once before, after a shooting attack in Tel Aviv in August — and quickly asked the students to check in there.
“The communication has been amazing from the minute it started,” she said, adding that she thought the school was being “very accommodating” of students like her who expected to attend courses via Zoom instead of in person.
Jacob Kaplan-Lipkin, a student at JTS, said he had been surprised by how unprepared he felt for the crisis. When the sirens went off on Saturday morning, his first thought was that there was a fire alarm, or that Israel was testing an alert system the way the U.S. government did last week. And when he realized that it wasn’t a drill, he wasn’t sure what to do.
“Our building had a shelter, but no one had really taken seriously the possibility that we would need to use it anytime soon,” he said of his Jerusalem apartment building. “We didn’t really know where it was. We ran down the stairs, and we saw that there was a shelter but it was locked and no one could get in. … So we huddled in the corridor. It was my first time meeting many of my neighbors.”
Some residents of the building in the Baka neighborhood used their phones on Shabbat and holidays, and revealed the grim details of the attack as they became available. One resident was an older woman who said she was having flashbacks to the start of the Yom Kippur War, exactly 50 years earlier, Kaplan-Lipkin recalled. Then, as now, Israel was struck by surprise during a holiday.
“Everyone was absolutely stunned and said they didn’t think this was possible,” he said. “We were hearing from all these residents that this was brand new to them. It was an extraordinary contrast from the night before when we had been dancing in the streets with the Torah.”
On Sunday, Kaplan-Lipkin said, he joined classmates in dropping off toiletries and other supplies for soldiers and people displaced from the border towns that had been attacked.
“I felt viscerally the discomfort of sitting around while I was watching people leave in uniform,” he said. “I wish I had the ability to do much more, but there is an overwhelming feeling of doing what we can and of wanting to stick together.”
As a Hebrew College student who is also pursuing a Jewish day school teaching certificate through Jerusalem’s Pardes Institute, Willemina Davidson is in the unusual position of being in their second year in Israel. They said they had opened their apartment to classmates who didn’t have safe rooms in their own homes and was looking for other ways to be helpful — all while their friends and family in the Midwest keep a watchful eye on them.
“My family and friends in the U.S. are just concerned for me and for other people they know,” Davidson said. “They also know that I am less likely to stay still, so they’re hoping I will be smart about this.”
Like many U.S. rabbinical students, Davidson has become involved in efforts to build bridges with Palestinians in the West Bank. They said they expected that even though the attack represented a major challenge, they would still seek to protect Palestinian farmers whose land and harvests sometimes come under attack from Jewish settlers.
“Many of us still plan on helping with the olive harvest. I think an extra level of precaution will need to be taken,” Davidson said. “It’s a volatile time, but people will continue to do their solidarity work and help each other.”
For Melnick and his wife, Devorah Mehlman, it’s hard to contemplate adding to the aid effort given the uncertainty about their own futures. They’d like to leave the country, but flights are hard to come by. And even if they can get on one, it’s not clear where they could go — they rented out their New York City apartment for the school year. They could stay with parents in Georgia, but it wasn’t clear on Sunday whether they could attend classes on Zoom moving forward.
“I’m not someone who was very afraid to come. I was really looking forward to coming and staying here,” Melnick said. “But no year in Israel is worth this much heartache.”
He added, “It sounds like it’s going to get worse before it gets better. And we just don’t want to be here for it.”
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Majority of French People Oppose Macron’s Push to Recognize a Palestinian State, New Survey Finds
French President Emmanuel Macron delivers the keynote address at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue security summit in Singapore, May 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Edgar Su
Nearly 80 percent of French citizens oppose President Emmanuel Macron’s push to recognize a Palestinian state, according to a new study that underscores widespread public resistance to the controversial diplomatic initiative.
Last week, Macron announced the postponement of a United Nations conference aimed at advancing international recognition of a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with no new date set.
The UN summit — originally scheduled for June 16–18 — was delayed after Israel launched a sweeping preemptive strike on Iran, targeting military installations and nuclear facilities in what officials said was an effort to neutralize an imminent nuclear threat.
Last month, Macron said that recognizing “Palestine” was “not only a moral duty but a political necessity.” The comments followed him saying in April that France was making plans to recognize a Palestinian state at a UN conference it would co-host with Saudi Arabia. Israeli and French Jewish leaders sharply criticized the announcement, describing the decision as a reward for terrorism and a “boost” for Hamas.
The French people largely seem to agree now is not the right time for such a move. A survey conducted by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) on behalf of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main representative body of French Jews, found that 78 percent of respondents opposed a “hasty, immediate, and unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state.”
Sondage Crif x Ifop : “Le regard des Français sur la reconnaissance par la France de l’État palestinien”
Une large majorité de Français (78 %) s’oppose à une reconnaissance immédiate et sans condition de l’État palestinien. Parmi eux, près de la moitié (47 %) estiment qu’une… pic.twitter.com/AX9gP6eMLe
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) June 17, 2025
France’s initiative comes after Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia officially recognized a Palestinian state last year, claiming that such a move would contribute to fostering a two-state solution and promote lasting peace in the region.
According to IFOP’s recent survey, however, nearly half of French people (47 percent) believe that recognition of a Palestinian state should only be considered after the release of the remaining hostages captured by Hamas during the Palestinian terrorist group’s invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, while 31 percent oppose any short-term recognition regardless of future developments.
The survey also reveals deep concerns about the consequences of such a premature recognition, with 51 percent of respondents fearing a resurgence of antisemitism in France and 50 percent believing it could strengthen Hamas’s position in the Middle East.
France has experienced an ongoing record surge in antisemitic incidents, including violent assaults, following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, amid the ensuing war in Gaza.
According to local media reports, France’s recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN conference was expected to be contingent on several conditions, including a truce in Gaza, the release of hostages held by Hamas, reforms within the Palestinian Authority (PA) — which is expected to take control from Hamas after the war — economic recovery, and the end of Hamas’s terrorist rule in the war-torn enclave.
The PA has not only been widely accused of corruption and condemned by the international community for its “pay-for-slay” program, which rewards terrorists and their families for attacks against Israelis, but also lacks public support among Palestinians, with only 40 percent supporting its return to govern the Gaza Strip after the war.
Out of the 27 total European Union member states, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Sweden have also recognized a Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, Germany, Portugal, and the UK have all stated that the time is not right for recognizing a Palestinian state.
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Jewish Leaders Plan ‘Emergency Mission’ to Washington, DC to Push US Gov’t for Antisemitism Protections
Thousands of participants and spectators are gathering along Fifth Avenue to express support for Israel during the 59th Annual Israel Day Parade in New York City, on June 2, 2024. Photo: Melissa Bender via Reuters Connect
Amid a record wave of antisemitic attacks and heightened geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, leaders from nearly 100 Jewish communities and over 30 national organizations across the US will descend on Washington, DC next week for an “emergency mission” aimed at pressing the federal government to bolster protections for Jewish Americans and increase support for Israel.
The meeting will be organized by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The two-day gathering scheduled for June 25–26 will convene representatives from groups representing approximately 7.5 million American Jews. Participants plan to meet with members of Congress and the Trump administration to demand “strong and aggressive action” to thwart a surge in antisemitic violence and rhetoric, according to a press release.
“We are facing an unprecedented situation in American Jewish history where every Jewish institution and event is a potential target for antisemitic violence,” said Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America. “This is domestic terrorism, plain and simple, and defeating this campaign of terror is the responsibility of government.”
The meeting comes on the heels of a string of attacks on Jewish and pro-Israeli targets in places such as Washington, DC, and Boulder, Colorado, and amid growing fears over Iran’s role in backing groups hostile to Israel. Organizers link the current wave of antisemitism to the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in which over 1200 people were killed and 251 hostages were abducted.
In the 20 months since the Oct. 7 massacre, the United States has seen a dramatic surge in antisemitic incidents. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), antisemitism in the US surged to break “all previous annual records” last year, with 9,354 antisemitic incidents recorded. These outrages included violent assaults, vandalism of Jewish schools and synagogues, harassment on college campuses, and threats against Jewish community centers.
Some Jewish institutions have reported being forced to hire private security or temporarily close their doors due to safety concerns. At universities nationwide, Jewish students and faculty have described feeling unsafe amid anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protests where some demonstrators have used antisemitic slogans or glorified violence.
“American Jews are not bystanders to global terror and domestic extremism. We are deliberate targets,” said William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents. “The federal government has a mandate to act.”
The delegation plans to advocate for a six-point policy agenda that includes expanding the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program to $1 billion annually, providing financial support for security personnel at Jewish institutions, boosting FBI resources to combat extremism, and strengthening enforcement of hate crime laws. It will also push for more robust federal aid to local law enforcement and new regulations addressing online hate speech and incitement.
In addition to urging legislation, leaders say they intend to thank lawmakers who have consistently supported Jewish communities and the state of Israel, especially in light of the recent barrage of rockets launched at Israeli cities from Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups.
“The fight for Jewish security is not just domestic — it is global,” Daroff added. “The stakes have never been higher.”
The mission underscores growing concerns among Jewish Americans who say the dual threats of domestic extremism and rising international hostility toward Israel are converging in dangerous ways — and require a coordinated federal response.
The post Jewish Leaders Plan ‘Emergency Mission’ to Washington, DC to Push US Gov’t for Antisemitism Protections first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Columbia University Releases Campus Antisemitism Climate Survey
Pro-Hamas protesters at Columbia University on April 19, 2024. Photo: Melissa Bender via Reuters Connect
Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism has released a “campus climate” survey which found that Jewish students remain exceedingly uncomfortable attending the institution.
According to the survey, 53 percent of Jewish students said they have been subjected to discrimination because of being Jewish, while another 53 percent reported that their friendships are “strained” because of how overwhelmingly anti-Zionist the student culture is. Meanwhile, 29 percent of Jewish students said they have “lost close friends,” and 59 percent, nearly two-thirds, of Jewish students sensed that they would be better off by electing to “conform their political beliefs” to those of their classmates.
Nearly 62 percent of Jewish students reported “a low feeling of acceptance at Columbia on the basis of their religious identity, and 50 percent said that the pro-Hamas encampments which capped off the 2023-2024 academic year had an “impact” on their daily routines.
Jewish students at Columbia were more likely than their peers to report these negative feelings and experiences, followed by Muslim students.
“As a proud alumna who has spent decades championing this institution, I found the results of this survey difficult to read,” acting Columbia University president Claire Shipman said in a statement. “They put the challenges we face in stark relief. The increase in horrific antisemitic violence in the US and across the globe in recent weeks and months serves as a constant, brutal reminder of the dangers of anti-Jewish bigotry, underscores the urgency with which all concerned citizens need to act in addressing it head-on, and the fact that antisemitism can and should be addressed as a unique form of hatred.”
Shipman added that university officials are “aware of the extent of the immense challenges faced by our Jewish students” and have enacted new policies which strengthen the process for reporting bias and prevent unauthorized demonstrations which upend the campus.
“I am confident we can change this painful dynamic. I know this because we share a commitment to protect all members of our community. We owe it to our students — and to each other,” she said.
Columbia University recently settled a lawsuit brought by a Jewish student at the School of Social Work (CSSW) who accused faculty of unrelenting antisemitic bullying and harassment.
According to court documents, Mackenzie “Macky” Forrest was abused by the faculty, one of whom callously denied her accommodations for sabbath observance and then held out the possibility of her attending class virtually during pro-Hamas protests, which according to several reports and first-hand accounts, made the campus unsafe for Jewish students. Her Jewishness and requests for arrangements which would allow her to complete her assignments created what the Lawfare Project described as a “pretext” for targeting Forrest and conspiring to expel her from the program, a plan that involved fabricating stories with the aim of smearing her as insubordinate.
Spurious accusations were allegedly made by one professor, Andre Ivanoff, who was the first to tell Forrest that her sabbath observance was a “problem.” Ivanoff implied that she had failed to meet standards of “behavioral performance” while administrators spread rumors that she had declined to take on key assignments, according to court documents. This snowballed into a threat: Forrest was allegedly told that she could either take an “F” in a field placement course or drop out, the only action that would prevent sullying her transcript with her failing grade.
Forrest left but has now settled the lawsuit she filed to get justice in terms that Columbia University has buried under a confidentiality agreement.
Columbia was one of the most hostile campuses for Jews employed by or enrolled in an institution of higher education. After Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the university produced several indelible examples of campus antisemitism, including a student who proclaimed that Zionist Jews deserve to be murdered and are lucky he is not doing so himself and administrative officials who, outraged at the notion that Jews organized to resist anti-Zionism, participated in a group chat in which each member took turns sharing antisemitic tropes that described Jews as privileged and grafting.
Amid these incidents, the university struggled to contain the anti-Zionist group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which in late January committed an act of infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts. Additionally, a presentation was given in which complete instructions for the exact kind of attack which struck Columbia were shared with students.
The university is reportedly restructuring itself to comply with conditions for restoring $400 million in federal funding canceled by US Education Secretary Linda McMahon in March to punish the school’s alleged failure to quell “antisemitic violence and harassment.”
In March, the university issued a memo announcing that it acceded to key demands put forth by the Trump administration as prerequisites for releasing the funds — including a review of undergraduate admissions practices that allegedly discriminate against qualified Jewish applicants, the enforcement of an “anti-mask” policy that protesters have violated to avoid being identified by law enforcement, and enhancements to the university’s security protocols that would facilitate the restoration of order when the campus is disturbed by pro-Hamas radicals and other agitators.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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