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‘He Never Gives Up’: How One Israeli’s Miraculous Oct. 7 Survival Inspired Support for Soldiers’ Families
Amichay and Avital Shindler and their children. Photo: Courtesy of OneFamily
On Oct. 7, Amichay Shindler saved his family’s life by absorbing a bomb planted by Hamas terrorists outside the door to their safe room. Ten months and one prosthetic hand later, it is still not clear how he is alive today.
No one understands the challenges of being thrust into raising children and managing a household alone more than Avital Shindler, Amichay’s wife. She faced these difficulties under extraordinary circumstances, having been evacuated from her home in Kerem Shalom kibbutz along with other Israeli communities in the Gaza periphery.
Avital leveraged her own experience to help manage a newly formed support group for the wives of injured Israeli reserve soldiers, including those like her husband who were injured during Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7. Shindler’s group, Haverot Barzel (Friends of Iron), named after the ongoing war in Gaza, joined forces with OneFamily, Israel’s largest organization supporting victims of terror and their families, to host a trip to Magic Kass, an indoor amusement park near Jerusalem, for 160 families of injured reservists and the reservists themselves.
Haverot Barzel holds regular support meetings with various professionals, providing a safe space for the women to share what they’re going through with others in a similar position. “It’s a wonderful feeling to know that you’re with other women who are experiencing what you’re experiencing. You say one word and everyone immediately understands you,” Shindler told The Algemeiner.
The women are overwhelmed with practical, logistical, bureaucratic, and emotional responsibilities, leaving no time for any non-essential activities. “Many of them barely have time for their children as they juggle household duties and, in some cases, shuttle between the hospital where their husband is hospitalized and home. Organizing a fun outing during the summer vacation is simply not possible,” she explained.
Even those whose husbands are well enough to return home face significant physical and emotional challenges. These men are often unable to help around the house as they used to, leading to frustration for both partners and, in many cases, depression.
For Shindler, her husband’s injury is an evolving journey where new steps keep cropping up. “Just when you think it’s over, something new happens. Complications, or more surgeries, it can be anything.”
But Shindler doesn’t wallow. She credits her husband’s fortitude. “He never gives up,” she said.
The Shindler’s home was the only one in the kibbutz, which is a stone’s throw away from Hamas-ruled Gaza, to sustain damage on Oct. 7. Terrorists barged into the home and demanded, in Hebrew, that Amichay open the safe door, saying they were Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers. Shindler refused, shouting, “I know who you are; get out or I’ll kill you.” Amichay clung onto the handle of the door to stop them from entering.
Seconds later, an explosive device detonated. Shindler’s body absorbed a lot of shrapnel, and part of the wall collapsed onto his head. The door to the safe room was breached, but for reasons still unknown, the terrorists chose not to enter and exited the house.
Avital and the couple’s six young children were hunkering down at the other end of the safe room and were not harmed in the blast. Convinced her husband was dead, Avital instructed her children not to look at him and to recite psalms instead. Two members of the kibbutz’s civil defense squad, Amichai Yisrael Witzen and Yedidia Raziel, entered the house and approached Amichay with the intention of transferring him onto a tourniquet, away from the children and into the living room. But incredulously, Amichay opened his mouth and said, “Don’t, I can walk alone.”
But when they reached the living room, another terrorist came, shooting dead both responders. More terrorists and soldiers arrived, until eventually the soldiers gained the upper hand, saving the kibbutz.
Amichay’s life was in mortal danger. He suffered severe burns, multiple shrapnel wounds, and crushing injuries to his hands, jaw, and parts of his face. Bleeding profusely, he was rushed to a field hospital. There, a paramedic recognized him as the brother of Avishai Shindler, who had been killed in a Palestinian terror attack in 2010. This same paramedic had been unable to save Avishai’s life but was now determined not to let history repeat itself. According to Avital, this encounter was no coincidence; she believes it was the hand of God that brought this paramedic to save Amichay.
Amichay was subsequently transferred to Sheba medical center where he spent several weeks in the intensive care unit. It would be another five months before he was released home.
Today, Amichay writes, cuts salad, and is taking out a driver’s license for someone with a prosthetic.
OneFamily, which was established in 2001 in response to the Second Intifada, organized the day at the amusement park, sponsoring and staffing the event. The outing provided a much needed relief for many of the injured as well.
“Some of them find it hard to be with the kids at home. They can’t play with them. But a lot of them, being [combat soldiers], are naturally attracted to adrenaline-inducing activities so being on a rollercoaster with their children was a perfect opportunity to rebuild that connection,” Avital said.
Injured Israeli reservists and their families at Magic Kass as part of a trip organized by Haverot Barzel and OneFamily. Photo: Courtesy of OneFamily
One mother, Shachar Moss, said her family’s experience at the amusement park “moved her to tears.”
“When you go through such a journey, or injury and then rehabilitation, every small thing takes on new meaning,” Moss said. “Every experience that the children are able to have with their father takes on new meaning. It’s felt differently now.”
The post ‘He Never Gives Up’: How One Israeli’s Miraculous Oct. 7 Survival Inspired Support for Soldiers’ Families first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Union Antisemitism Running Rampant on College Campuses, Experts and Student Tell US Congress

Illustrative: Rutgers University students holding an anti-Zionist demonstration on March 19, 2024. Photo: USA Today Network via Reuters Connect
Experts told the US Congress on Tuesday that antisemitism runs rampant in campus labor unions, trapping Jews in exploitative and nonconsensual relationships with union bosses who spend their compulsory membership dues on political activities which promote hatred of their identity and the destruction of the Jewish homeland.
Testifying at a hearing titled “Unmasking Union Antisemitism” held by the House Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, the witnesses described a series of issues facing Jewish graduate students represented against their will by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE) union.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW), which was represented among the expert witnesses, has spoken publicly before about a litany of alleged injustices to which UE officials subject Jewish student-employees in the US’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to Cornell University.
At MIT, the group said in August, “union officers” aided a riotous mob which illegally occupied a section of campus with a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” participating in the demonstration and even denying access to campus buildings. UE members at Stanford University, meanwhile, allegedly denied religious accommodations to Jewish students who requested exemption from union dues over that branch’s supporting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. And Cornell University UE was accused of denying religious exemptions in several cases as well and followed up the rejection with an intrusive “questionnaire” which probed Jewish students for “legally-irrelevant information.”
During an interview with The Algemeiner after the hearing, Glenn Taubman, staff attorney for NRTW, said union antisemitism highlights the issues inherent in compulsory union representation, which he says quells freedom of speech and association. He pointed to the case of Cornell University PhD candidate David Rubinstein, who testified before the subcommittee on Tuesday about his own tribulations and a climate of hatred which evades being redressed because the ringleaders fostering it hold left-wing viewpoints.
“The only reason that David is forced to be represented by UE and is theoretically forced to pay them dues is because federal labor law allows that and in many cases requires it,” Taubman explained. “What I told the committee is that ending the union abuse of graduate students and people like David requires amending federal law so that unions are not the forced representatives of people who don’t want such representation.”
He added, “Unions have a special privilege that no other private organization in America has, and that is the power to impose their representation on people who don’t want it and then mandate that they pay dues because they quote-un-quote represent you. That is the most un-American thing that I can imagine.”
Rubinstein told The Algemeiner that he is a Democrat who supports many of the causes for which unions advocate but that what he described as UE’s support for Hamas leaves him no choice but to seek every avenue for disassociating with it.
“As a Jew, I cannot support an organization which spends its time not advocating for wages and health care but rather for ‘intifada revolution,’” he said. “The union antisemitism is empowered by the Cornell administration’s persistent weakness and consistent reneging on its promises to defend the rights of Jewish students.”
Rubinstein added that Cornell University president Michael Kotlikoff came close to exempting students from paying UE dues but abandoned the policy change after its members threatened to strike and thereby disrupt university operations.
“The threat of being terminated, the demands for money, and the constant harassment that others and I have experienced from UE would have never been possible had it not been for the weakness of Cornell leadership,” he added.
Campus antisemitism has drawn NRTW into an alliance with Jewish faculty and students across the US.
In 2024, it represented a group of six City University of New York (CUNY) professors, five of whom are Jewish, who sued to be “freed” from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) over its passing a resolution during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas which declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity. The group contested New York State’s “Taylor Law,” which it said chained the professors to the union’s “bargaining unit” and denied their right to freedom of speech and association by forcing them to be represented in negotiations by an organization they claim holds antisemitic views.
That same year, NRTW prevailed in a discrimination suit filed to exempt another cohort of Jewish MIT students from paying dues to the Graduate Student Union (GSU). The students had attempted to resist financially supporting GSU’s anti-Zionism, but the union bosses attempted to coerce their compliance, telling them that “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees” to the union.
“All Americans should have a right to protect their money from going to union bosses they don’t support, whether those objections are based on religion, politics, or any other reason,” NRTW said at the time.
Kyle Koeppel Mann, senior staff attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group, and Joseph McCartin, professor and executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, also testified at Tuesday’s hearing.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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German Police Arrest 5 Anti-Israel Activists After Break-In, Vandalism Targeting Elbit Systems

Demonstrators attend the “Lift the Ban” rally organized by Defend Our Juries, challenging the British government’s proscription of “Palestine Action” under anti-terrorism laws, in Parliament Square, in London, Britain, Sept. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
Authorities in Germany on Monday arrested five activists linked to the anti-Israel network Palestine Action after the group broke into an Elbit Systems building in the southern city of Ulm, vandalizing the facility with red paint, smoke bombs, graffiti, and smashed windows before occupying an upper floor in an effort to oppose the Jewish state’s war to dismantle the terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
The officers who responded surrounded the building and apprehended the suspects. The state’s Security and Counterterrorism Center then took over the investigation.
Video posted by Palestine Action showed masked figures hurling paint, breaking through doors, and damaging equipment inside the facility owned by the Israeli defense contractor, which the activist group and recently proscribed terrorist organization has regularly targeted. The vandals claimed they had sought “to dismantle the tools used to commit genocide in Gaza.”
Elbit released a statement condemning the crime.
“Elbit Systems Deutschland GmbH is a German company and has been a reliable partner of the Bundeswehr for many years in protecting democracy and freedom in the Federal Republic of Germany. In this regard, we condemn in the strongest possible terms the illegal acts of destruction and vandalism committed at our site over the weekend,” the defense firm stated. “It is unacceptable that violent groups, presumably under the influence of foreign agitators, are repeatedly attempting to disrupt production processes in Ulm, seeking to endanger employees and to instill fear.”
The company added that “we have been an attractive employer and a driver of technical innovation in the Ulm region for decades, and we trust in the support of the authorities in quickly solving the latest crimes and restoring the status quo. The company is working that production of systems for the German Armed Forces at the Ulm plant will resume shortly.”
Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, labeled the attack on Elbit an act of terrorism.
“In Ulm, the branch of an Israeli company was attacked by masked perpetrators — presumably motivated by left-extremist, Israel-hostile intent,” he wrote on X. “While Hamas supporters smash windows here, terrorists in Jerusalem murder 6 civilians in a brutal attack on a bus. Anyone who attacks Israel — whether with words, deeds, or weapons — simultaneously assaults our shared security and our values. Antisemitism and terror must have no place in Germany. These attacks are terrorist acts — they must be clearly named and harshly punished.”
Prosor was referring to a terrorist attack in Jerusalem on Monday in which Hamas terrorists opened fire on a bus, murdering six Israelis and injuring several more.
The break-in is the latest in a concerted campaign of vandalism and intimidation carried out by Palestine Action across Europe. Founded in the UK in 2020, the group has specialized in spectacular stunts and property destruction aimed at shutting down Elbit facilities and other companies the group regards as complicit in an alleged genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Its activists have smashed factory windows, chained themselves to gates, poured red paint over equipment, and even attacked military planes at a Royal Air Force base.
The UK regards Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. On Sunday, police announced the arrests of almost 900 at a demonstration organized in support of the group. Charges included 857 alleged to support a banned extremist entity and 17 alleged assaults.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Claire Smart said of the event that “the violence we encountered during the operation was coordinated and carried out by a group of people … intent on creating as much disorder as possible.”
James “Fergie” Chambers, an American heir to the Cox Enterprises fortune, pays the legal fees of arrested Palestine Action members. He once wrote online, “I chant death to America every day” and that “No faction of the Palestinian resistance, Hamas or other, has done *anything* wrong.”
Richard Barnard, a co-founder of the UK-designated terrorist group, is scheduled to face trial next year on “one count of inviting support for a proscribed organization, namely Hamas, under section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act and two counts of encouraging ‘criminal damage’ against Israeli weapons factories under s44 of the Serious Crime Act.”
Barnard stated in a June 2024 interview that he had previously broken into US Air Force bases in Germany. In October 2023, he said that “when we hear the resistance, the Al-Aqsa flood [Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel], we must turn that flood into a tsunami of the whole world.”
Huda Ammori, another co-founder of Palestine Action, also expressed her enthusiasm for the mass slaughter of Jews on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Zionists spend 75 years stealing Palestinian land but fails [sic] to take away the Palestinian determination for liberation. Palestine will be free!” Ammori wrote on the day of the attack. “If armed thugs stormed your home, forced you and your family to live in the garage, routinely beat you and starved you. Would you fight back? #FreePalestine.”
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‘End Hate’: Major New Campaign Targets Antisemitism in K-12 Schools

Pro-Hamas activists calling themselves the United Front for Liberation lead march through Valley Plaza Mall. The ‘Ceasefire’ rally began at Wilson Park in Bakersfield, California, on Dec. 16, 2023. Photo: Jacob Lee Green via REUTERS CONNECT
EndJewHatred (EJH), a Jewish civil rights nonprofit group based in New York City, declared war on K-12 antisemitism on Tuesday, launching its new “End Hate in Education” initiative in the US and beginning preparations for a push into the Canadian media market.
“For too long, classrooms have been used as platforms for pushing divisive ideologies that undermine our core values,” EJH founder Brooke Goldstein said in a statement on Tuesday. “Across the United States, K-12 schools and college campuses have become incubators of extremist ideology, including pro-terror and radical Islamist agendas. The End Hate in Education campaign is about reclaiming our schools, defending civil liberties, and ensuring that every child — regardless of background — can learn in an environment grounded in truth, respect, and constitutional values.”
In press materials, EJH outlined six objectives for the campaign — “curriculum transparency,” “rejecting political indoctrination,” “accountability through funding,” “examination of the rule of foreign funding,” “strategic legal action,” and “grassroots mobilization” — all of which serve its larger, ambitious goal of eradicating from public schools not just antisemitism but all forms of “hate and harassment.”
Creeping antisemitism in public education is a growing problem, as The Algemeiner has reported previously. In June, for example, the North American Values Institute (NAVI) raised alarms when the Wissahickon School District (WSD) in Ambler, Pennsylvania presented as fact an anti-Zionist account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its K-12 students by using it as the basis for courses taken by honors students.
The material, provided by virtual learning platform Edgenuity, implied that Israel is a settler-colonial state — a false assertion promoted by neo-Nazis and jihadist terror groups — while referring to the founding of Israel as the “nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe” used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists. Based on documents obtained by The Algemeiner, the material does not seemingly detail the varied reasons for Palestinian Arabs leaving the nascent State of Israel at the time, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. Nor does it appear to explain that some 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, especially in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
Another module reviewed by The Algemeiner contains a question based on a May 15, 1948, statement from The Arab League — a group of countries which adamantly opposed Jewish immigration to the region in the years leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel and refused to condemn antisemitic violence Arabs perpetrated against Jewish refugees — after Israel declared its independence. The passage denies that Jews faced antisemitic indignities when the land was administered by the Ottoman Empire, a notion that is inconsistent with the historical record, and asserts that “Arab inhabitants” are “the lawful owners of the country.”
Following the passage, students are asked to agree with its content as a prerequisite for proceeding to the next module. That means selecting as the correct answer the choice which says “the creation of Israel failed to consider Arab interests.”
Speaking to The Algemeiner during an interview on Tuesday, Gerard Filitti, senior counsel of EJH and The Lawfare Project, a partner organization, said the Wissahickon case highlights the degree to which antisemitism and anti-Israel bias has planted itself in public schools.
“What we’re seeing in colleges and universities is just the tip of the iceberg. The radicalization in schooling, in reality, starts much earlier,” Filitti said. “We’re seeing lesson plans which push the idea that Israel is a genocidal state, or that it is an illegitimate state. We see faculty and administrators who do not support Zionist identity and reject that it can be the basis of discriminatory hate.”
“College campus antisemitism has gotten a lot of attention because we see the effects, the protests, the barricades, and encampments,” he added. “In K-12, it’s not as flagrant. It’s educational material that’s talked about in the classroom and which parents may not be aware of unless they talk with their children about what’s happening in school. So this has essentially been a secret issue because the American people are not aware of what children are learning in schools or how schools have been handling antisemitism in school.”
Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased every year of this decade, according to data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault.
The problem has led to civil rights complaints and lawsuits.
In September 2023, for example, some of America’s most prominent Jewish and civil rights groups sued the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California for concealing from the public its adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic and anti-Zionist themes. Then in February, the school district paused implementation of the program to settle the lawsuit.
One month later, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, StandWithUs, and the ADL filed a civil rights complaint accusing the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino County, California, of doing nothing after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was assaulted, having been beaten with stick, on school grounds and teased with jokes about Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
The problem has taken hold in private schools as well, according to a recent Anti-Defamation Leage (ADL) survey.
Among surveyed school parents, 25.2 percent said their children had experienced or witnessed antisemitic symbols in school since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, the data showed. Perhaps more striking, 45.3 percent of surveyed parents reported that their children had experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, and 31.7 percent said their children had “experienced or witnessed problematic school curricula or classroom content related to Jews or Israel.”
Parents are displeased with schools’ handling of the issue, the ADL said. Focus groups told its experts that schools decline to denounce antisemitism or resort to denying altogether that it is fostering a negative learning environment which causes student discomfort and precipitous declines in academic performance. In a poll, over a third of parents have said their local school’s response “was either somewhat or very inadequate.”
Moreover, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which were purportedly meant to improve race relations, abstain from recognizing antisemitism as a form of hatred meriting a focused response from administrators. The Algemeiner has previously reported that many of those programs also ignore antisemitism because they actively contribute to spreading it. Due to this, schools often lack authority figures who understand antisemitism, its subtle and overt variations, leaving Jewish students with no recourse when they become victims of hate.
“These independent schools are failing to support Jewish families. By tolerating — or in some cases, propagating — antisemitism in their classrooms, too many independent schools in cities across the country are sending a message that Jewish students are not welcome. It’s wrong. It’s hateful. And it must stop,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement at the time. “ADL is partnering with parents to demand change.”
ADL vice president of advocacy, Shira Goodman, added: “School administrators and faculty have a duty to ensure safe, inclusive environments for all. ADL will fully invest in bolstering the families who are demanding that their schools meet this obligation.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.