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‘Awakening of unity’: Hamas attack, war spark outpouring of support for Israel in haredi communities
(New York Jewish Week) –When 3,000 Orthodox men packed into a New Jersey event hall late last month to mark a milestone in their 7 1/2-year cycle of Talmud study, they added an unusual component to the celebration.
In addition to sermons from prominent rabbis and collective prayer and study, the men watched videos showing uniformed Israel Defense Forces soldiers studying, singing, dancing with haredi Orthodox men and visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
“It was a remarkable evening and an expression of solidarity with the soldiers of the IDF, and with the people in Israel who are feeling besieged and of course those who have been taken hostage,” Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, the executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, the haredi umbrella group that organized the event, told the New York Jewish Week.
What was remarkable was the public celebration of Israel’s soldiers at the event. Haredi movements have a range of approaches to Israel and Zionism. Some believe a Jewish state should be established only with the coming of the Messiah, while others are ambivalent and still others vocally supportive of Israel.
But regardless of their attitude toward the state, haredi leaders in New York City emphasize that their communities have a deep affinity for the land of Israel and its Jewish residents, no matter their politics or religious observance. After Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, they say that feeling has sparked an outpouring of support for Israel and its military at a level not seen in decades and — in at least one instance — active disavowal of an anti-Zionist protest group.
“The outrage and sheer brutality of the October 7th attacks has united the Jewish community in common cause in a way I personally have never seen before,” said Chaskel Bennett, a community leader and the co-founder of the Flatbush Jewish Community Coalition who was a pro-Israel activist prior to Oct. 7. “The Orthodox Jewish community always pulled together in times of crisis, but October 7th has touched a raw emotional nerve that has transformed how Jews identify and connect with their brethren in Israel in an unprecedented way.”
Haredi groups in New York do not typically hold organized street rallies, as some Jewish groups have done in recent weeks, but haredi communities have mobilized in their own ways, including by focusing on the traditional practices of prayer and charity.
“In virtually every synagogue people stay a few minutes later beyond the usual closing time of the prayer service and they recite psalms that are appropriate for the situation,” Zwiebel said.
Religious Jews at the March for Israel on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on November 14, 2023. (Luke Tress)
In the days after Oct. 7, thousands of haredi Jews poured into the streets in Brooklyn’s Borough Park and Crown Heights in spontaneous gatherings to pray and show support for Israelis. In the weeks since, haredi communities in New York have collected supplies for the Israeli military, held vigils for hostages held by Hamas, flown the Israeli flag at events, demonstrated support for secular Jewish college students and organized prayers for the terror group’s victims. Several Hharedi groups, including Agudath Israel, attended a mass demonstration in support of Israel last week, alongside crowds of non-Orthodox Jews.
Haredi websites are raising funds, messages of mourning for fallen troops are spreading across haredi WhatsApp groups and haredi news outlets closely track the fighting in Gaza. In one widely shared clip, a large Israeli flag was hoisted above the crowd at a Hasidic wedding.
“The realization of brotherhood and sisterhood is really displayed in a way that I’ve never seen in my lifetime,” said Avi Greenstein, CEO of the Boro Park Jewish Community Council, a social services organization in the heavily haredi Brooklyn neighborhood, calling the moment an “awakening of unity.”
Even haredi opponents of Zionism have taken steps to disavow anti-Israel activism. A leader of the anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic movement, Rabbi Zalman Leib Teitelbaum, decried the fringe Naturei Karta group for joining anti-Israel demonstrations, accusing the faction of supporting “haters of Israel and murderers.” Satmar rabbis have also pushed back against growing affinity for Israel and the IDF, however.
Religious events have shifted to focus on Israel, including Chabad-Lubavitch’s annual conference of thousands of male emissaries. A rabbi affiliated with Chabad, which often responds to crises by encouraging Jews to perform traditional rituals, is sending ritual fringes traditionally worn by Orthodox Jewish men to the front lines. The movement, which is more outwardly supportive of Israel, has been distributing charity to Israelis in need, and some members of its New York community are IDF veterans who rushed back to their units after the war broke out. At least one soldier from the movement was killed in the Oct. 7 attack.
In another event late last month, neighborhood organizers in Crown Heights, Chabad’s Brooklyn home base, set up an empty Shabbat table with 230 seats to symbolize the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. The event was organized to counter a rally led by hardline pro-Palestinian groups the following day, and drew around 1,200 participants.
The Chabad conference annual gala, in Edison, New Jersey, November 12, 2023. (Luke Tress)
“We prayed, we sang, we cried and we stood in solidarity with both the hostages, the Israeli public and the IDF,” said Rabbi Yaacov Behrman, the president of the Jewish Future Alliance, a community advocacy group. Chabad has also held prayers with families of hostages at the grave of its former leader, the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and at the movement’s headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway.
The IDF is a largely secular institution, and Israel’s haredi men are mostly exempt from the country’s mandatory draft, a policy that has long caused friction in the country’s society and politics. But the outpouring of support for the military in the U.S. mirrors developments inside Israel, where thousands of haredim have enlisted in recent weeks and volunteers have provided meals and prayed with troops. A video showed dozens of haredim dancing in a city square after a female Israeli soldier was rescued from Hamas captivity.
A journalist for a haredi news outlet, Yanki Farber, shared the video on X, writing, “My son asked me right now why I’m crying.”
“Hasidim are dancing in the streets of Ashkelon after the release of a female soldier. I didn’t see anything like this when Gilad Shalit was released,” he wrote, referring to the Israeli soldier freed in a deal with Hamas in 2011. “There is an incredible sense of understanding among all of us that we must not return to being divided.”
The cross-community solidarity in Israel feeds back into the United States, Zwiebel said.
“Attitudes that are developed in Israel proper will have an impact on the broader international Jewish community,” he said. “We’re all in this together and that’s certainly being felt in Israel and yes I think there is some spillover and some sense of greater solidarity here in America.”
The surge in antisemitism in the U.S. has also spurred greater haredi solidarity with non-haredi Jewish communities. In an unusual message late last month, Agudath Israel issued a call to support Jewish college students as antisemitism and anti-Israel activism roiled U.S. campuses. The Chabad movement has a presence on hundreds of U.S. campuses and has also played a central role in supporting students.
“There are Orthodox Jews in the colleges, but if you’re not Orthodox, there are Jews in colleges and we care deeply about them,” Zwiebel said.
Despite the outpouring of support, the conversation about Zionism among haredim has not undergone a sea change, Zwiebel said. But he said antisemitism is leading some families to consider Israel as a future home.
“The hostility that we’re facing here in the United States, or even more so in Europe, is that reminding us that these are not necessarily ideal long-term homes for the Jewish people?” he said. “That kind of conversation is taking place. It’s taking place in homes where parents have sent their children to study in Israel and are wondering, ‘Should we bring them back? Should we let them stay there?’”
Several haredi community members said they hoped that the feeling of solidarity would last after the war ends.
“It took a vicious attack by merciless enemies to somehow bring people together,” Zwiebel said. “If we’re looking for a silver lining in this terrible cloud, I guess that would be it. If only we can keep this going beyond this war.”
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The post ‘Awakening of unity’: Hamas attack, war spark outpouring of support for Israel in haredi communities appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The ‘Right of Return’ Isn’t a Right — It’s a Means to Attack Israel
Palestinians pass by the gate of an UNRWA-run school in Nablus in the West Bank. Photo: Reuters/Abed Omar Qusini.
In the wake of the October 7th massacre and the war Hamas launched from Gaza, one might expect that Western democracies would take a moment to reassess their assumptions about the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict. Instead, countries like Ireland, Spain, Norway, and Canada are rushing to unilaterally “recognize” a Palestinian Arab state — a move they claim is a step toward peace.
But there is a fatal contradiction at the core of this effort, one that goes almost entirely unexamined: the Palestinian demand for a “right of return.” It is this demand — not settlements, not borders, not Jerusalem — that has repeatedly scuttled any possibility of a negotiated peace.
That’s because this so-called “right” is not a call for compromise. It is a weaponized fantasy, one designed to eliminate the world’s only Jewish state through a back-door diplomatic conquest. It is not about coexistence — it is about replacement. And in backing a Palestinian “state” whose leadership still strenuously clings to this demand, Western governments are not promoting peace. They are underwriting the continuation of war by other means.
In the obsessive international discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict, “right of return” has become a sort of incantation. Palestinian officials brand it a moral imperative. NGOs declare it a human right. And diplomats in Brussels and Ottawa parrot it as a required ingredient for peace.
But this “right of return” is not about justice or reconciliation. It is not even about return. It is a carefully constructed euphemism for demographic warfare — a strategy to undo what conventional warfare failed to accomplish between 1947 and 1973.
It’s the idea that the Jewish State — the only one among the 195 nations on Earth — should agree to import millions of hostile foreign nationals, the descendants of refugees from a war started by five Arab armies and multiple Arab militias trying to destroy it. All while the actual Arab nations that initiated the war continue to hold most of these “refugees” in permanent limbo, denied citizenship and rights in their countries for more than 75 years.
This is not a peace plan. It’s the slow-motion implementation of the PLO’s 1964 charter, which never contemplated statehood beside Israel — but rather statehood instead of Israel.
The phrase “right of return” originates in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, passed in 1948 at the tail end of the first Arab war to annihilate Israel. That resolution was non-binding, conditional, and explicitly stated that refugees must “wish to live at peace with their neighbors” to be considered for return.
It was intended for individual refugees, not for their descendants, and certainly not as a vehicle to reverse Israel’s existence.
But for decades, Palestinian leaders have mutated this non-binding suggestion into an inherited, irrevocable, and universal “right” — not just for those displaced by a war the Arab League started in 1948, but for their grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even great-great-grandchildren, most of whom have never seen Israel, never lived in Israel, and whose ancestors often fled at the behest of Arab leaders who promised Israel would soon be destroyed.
Their goal isn’t to return to homes that no longer exist. It is to settle in sovereign Israel, in places like Haifa, Jaffa, and Ashkelon — not Ramallah or Gaza — to end Israel’s Jewish majority and destroy the Jewish state from within.
Those who advocate for this demographic conquest often argue: “But Israel has a Law of Return. Why shouldn’t Palestinians?”
The comparison is not only false — it’s intentionally deceptive.
Israel’s Law of Return enables Jews, members of an indigenous people who were exiled, persecuted, and nearly annihilated over the course of two millennia, to return to their ancestral homeland.
Critically, Israel’s Law of Return does not seek to displace anyone. It does not call for Jews to “return” to Baghdad, Sana’a, or Warsaw. It does not challenge another state’s sovereignty. It merely provides a refuge and a home within Israel’s own borders.
The Palestinian “right of return” is the opposite: a demand that millions of non-citizens — people who are not from the State of Israel — be granted entry, not into a future Palestinian state, but into Israel itself.
The Palestinian “right of return” is often framed as if it conforms to international norms. But no such norm exists. Many countries, including Greece, Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Poland, have “right of return” laws — granting citizenship or immigration priority to descendants of former citizens or ethnic diasporas.
But all these programs apply to descendants returning to the current sovereign state. No Greek descendant has the “right to return” to Smyrna, now called Izmir in Turkey. No Italian has the right to “return” to Istria or Dalmatia, now part of Croatia and Slovenia. And no German refugee from Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) has the right to “return” and alter Russian demographics.
Only in the case of Israel is a concocted “right” weaponized to try and erase a sovereign country altogether.
Modern history is replete with population transfers: Hindus and Muslims displaced during the Partition of India; Greeks and Turks exchanged en masse after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, etc.
The descendants of these refugees do not claim a right to “return.” No international body insists that they should. And no one pretends that peace or even justice requires it.
So why is the world still entertaining the delusion that five generations of Palestinians — most born in Syria, Lebanon, or Jordan or North America or Brazil– must be able to “return” to Tel Aviv?
Palestinian leaders, from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, to Mahmoud Abbas, have always viewed Israel as a temporary aberration, not a neighbor. Abbas has declared repeatedly: “I will never recognize the Jewishness of the State of Israel.”
This fantasy of return is how war that Haj Amin el-Husseini’s violent rejectionism lost in 1948 is kept alive in diplomatic lobbies and UN chambers.
That’s why Palestinian leaders rejected Ehud Barak’s peace offer in 2000 and Ehud Olmert’s in 2008. Both offered a contiguous Palestinian state in nearly all the so-called “West Bank” and Gaza. Both offered shared control of Jerusalem. And both were answered with “no”–because they required Palestinian leaders to give up the “right” to flood Israel with millions of non-citizens.
There is no “right” to undo another nation’s existence. There is no international principle that compels one people to surrender sovereignty so that their state can be destroyed (a state created because of a defensive war that they won).
Until the Palestinian leadership abandons this claimed “right of return” there will be no two-state solution — because the refusal to abandon this made-up “right” means they don’t want two states. It means they want one. And they want the Jewish state to vanish.
Pretending otherwise is not peacemaking. It’s dangerous enabling, designed to ensure the conflict never ends.
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Palestinian Official Blames Israel for All Deaths in the October 7 Massacre
The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
The Palestinian Authority (PA) alternates between justifying Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre and atrocities, and blaming Israel for them.
The latest to blame Israel is Fatah leader Jibril Rajoub who, speaking in English in South Africa, said:
The Israeli government is the only one responsible for what’s going on, for the suffering, whether for the Palestinians or some Israeli civilians who were killed on Oct. 7.
[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Aug. 2, 2025]
His solution is for Israel to release all 15,000 Palestinian terrorist prisoners in exchange for the Israeli hostages kidnapped on Oct. 7.
Rajoub adds the horrific lie that the Palestinian prisoner “hostages,” who include many mass murderers, were “arrested by the Israelis without doing anything.”
He then adds one more horrific lie:
We don’t support killing kids, women, or kidnapping. For sure that this is not part of our policy or our doctrine.
As Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has documented, the PA “policy and doctrine” is in fact to murder women and children, to kidnap, and to glorify the killers.
The PA rewards all terrorists in prison, even mass murderers like Abdallah Barghouti — who is serving 67 life sentences for being involved in the murder of 68 men, women and children. The PA has named five schools after mass murderer Dalal Mughrabi, who led the murder of 12 children and 25 adults after kidnapping them by hijacking a bus.
The PA glorifies all suicide bombers who murdered women and children as “Martyrs,” meaning that they died for Allah. The PA fundamentally supports murdering women and children, and this is their policy.
Regarding kidnapping, Rajoub himself praised the Oct. 7 murders and rapes of women and children and the kidnapping of hundreds of hostages as “epic” and “heroic”:
Rajoub: “What happened on October 7 was an earthquake, an unprecedented incident, and a war of defense full of epics and acts of heroism that the Palestinian people has been waging for 75 years.” [emphasis added]
[Al-Anba, Kuwaiti news website, Nov. 26, 2023]
As PMW repeatedly stresses, the Palestinian Authority is a terrorist entity in every way – except international designation.
The following is a longer excerpt of the statement cited above:
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “What happened on Oct. 7, [2023] was a reaction to the systematic Israeli crimes. Now, sure that we don’t support killing kids, women, kidnapping. For sure that this is not part of our policy or our doctrine. But he who is responsible for that is he who tried to sustain the occupation [i.e., Israel], he who continues his crimes and atrocities against the Palestinian people, and the Israeli government is the only responsible for what’s going on, for the suffering, whether for the Palestinians or some Israeli civilians who were killed on Oct. 7 …
I think that we have 15,000 hostages [sic., terrorist prisoners] arrested by the Israelis without doing anything …
The issue of the prisoners, whether it’s those who are in Hamas or in Israel, should be closed by releasing everybody for everybody.”
[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Aug. 2, 2025]
The author is the founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.
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The Torah Works Because It’s Perfectly Balanced
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
If you’ve ever had the urge to buy something new — a trinket, a bauble, a book, or any kind of decorative object — you’ve probably found yourself channeling the mantra of Japanese “organizing consultant” Marie Kondo: hold each item in your hand and ask if it “sparks joy.” If it doesn’t, the modern rule is simple — don’t buy it, and if you’ve got it: don’t keep it.
As the 21st century rolls on, this form of minimalism has become more than a trend – it’s become a movement. Entire YouTube channels are devoted to “decluttering,” and there’s a peculiar satisfaction in watching people toss out 27 coffee mugs they never use or transform a chaotic closet into a Zen-like display of perfectly folded shirts.
But this obsession with minimalism isn’t new. History is full of people who discovered that less is more. Take the Shakers — an eccentric 18th-century religious sect founded by “Mother” Ann Lee and her followers in England — so austere that they even broke away from the Quakers for being too worldly. They built an entire society based around radical simplicity.
To them, unnecessary ornamentation wasn’t just bad taste, it was spiritually hazardous. Their furniture was stripped-down and functional to the point of purity — elegant straight lines, no frills, nothing but purpose. Remarkably, more than two centuries later, Shaker chairs and tables still look modern, the kind of furniture pieces that wouldn’t look out of place in a sleek New York City loft.
There’s a story told about a Shaker community in New Hampshire: an uninitiated visitor was admiring the bare wooden meeting house and asked why it was so plain. The Shaker elder, almost incredulous, replied, “Because if God wanted it fancy, He’d have made it fancy.”
And it wasn’t just about buildings or furniture. The Shakers’ daily lives were a kind of spiritual decluttering. No decorative clothing. No frivolous conversation. One Shaker diary even records a “brother” being gently corrected for carving an extra flourish into a chair spindle. “Beauty,” the elder told him, “is obedience.” In other words, remove what is unnecessary, and holiness will emerge.
Fast forward to today, and that same principle has found its way to Hollywood — albeit, stripped of any religious context. Professional organizer Janelle Cohen, who has decluttered the homes of celebrities like Jordyn Woods and Jay Shetty, insists that true order isn’t about squeezing more in, but rather it’s about editing it all down until only the essentials remain.
She even has her A-list clients go through every single item seasonally, “editing” their closets so that what’s left is only what they actually use and love. “When Jordyn opens her closet,” Cohen says, “it excites her. It feels manageable.”
One of Cohen’s golden rules is what she calls “prime real estate.” The items you use and cherish most should always be within reach; everything else should either be pushed to the margins — or removed entirely. It’s not about austerity for its own sake. It’s about creating a space where what truly matters is visible, accessible, and central.
Contrast that with the opposite impulse: the baroque churches of 17th-century Europe, gilded to the point of sensory overload. Or Victorian drawing rooms so jammed with doilies and in-your-face taxidermy that you could barely find the furniture. Or today’s “feature-rich” software apps, so overloaded with functions that you practically need a tutorial just to locate the “save” button.
Human history, when you boil it down, is really a tug-of-war between the impulse to add and the discipline to take away. Which is why it’s striking that in Parashat Va’etchanan, Moshe delivers what might be the ultimate minimalist manifesto (Deut. 4:2): “Do not add to this thing, and do not subtract from it.”
We can understand why subtracting from the core aspects of Torah is a bad thing, but why would adding to it be wrong? Rashi offers a sharp answer: adding to the Torah doesn’t elevate it, he says, it distorts it. He gives the example of the Arba Minim on Sukkot.
If you decide that four species are good, so five must be better, you’ve not “enhanced” the mitzvah — you’ve corrupted it. What begins as extra piety becomes a counterfeit commandment.
The Ramban takes it further. He warns that human additions blur the boundaries of what God actually commanded. When people can no longer tell the difference between divine law and human invention, the authenticity of the Torah itself is weakened. In other words, spiritual “clutter” is just as dangerous as spiritual neglect.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explains it beautifully. He says that “adding” is a kind of hidden arrogance: it implies that God’s blueprint is incomplete, that our personal tweaks are needed to perfect it. But, as Rav Hirsch reminds us, the Torah isn’t a rough draft — it’s a finished masterpiece.
Our job isn’t to rewrite the Torah, it’s to live it. Which is why Moshe warns against both subtraction and addition. One hollows out the Torah, the other smothers it under layers of well-meaning excess. Both, in the end, take us further away from the elegant, balanced simplicity of God’s design.
In the tech world, there’s a term called “feature creep.” It’s what happened to the web browser Netscape Navigator in the 1990s. Once the undisputed leader, Netscape kept piling on new features — “just one more” toolbar, “just one more” plug‑in — until it became too slow, too clunky, and practically unusable. Users abandoned Netscape in droves, competitors took over, and the once dominant browser was pushed to the margins… and eventually, into oblivion.
In the restaurant world, chefs dread what’s known as “menu bloat.” Gordon Ramsay has made a career out of exposing it on Kitchen Nightmares. Time and again, he walks into failing restaurants where the menu reads like a novel — dozens of dishes spanning every cuisine imaginable. “You can’t possibly cook all of this food well,” he tells them.
And he’s right. When one struggling Italian restaurant in New York slashed its sprawling menu down to a handful of core dishes, something remarkable happened: the food got better, the kitchen ran smoothly, and the customers came back. As Ramsay put it, “Stop trying to be everything — just be excellent at what matters.”
Moshe is making the same point in this week’s parsha. “Do not add to this thing” isn’t solely a legal warning — it’s also a spiritual safeguard. When we start piling on “extras,” we risk smothering the beauty and dulling the clarity of the Torah beneath well‑intentioned but distracting clutter.
Like Ramsay’s pared‑down menu, the Torah works because it’s perfectly balanced. Nothing is missing, and nothing needs “just one more” ingredient. Our job is not to improve the Torah, but to serve it up the way it was given — simple, precise, and flawless. Because ultimately, minimalism doesn’t mean less — it means no more and no less than what’s right.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.