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When Rabin was assassinated, Israel changed before my eyes
The minibus was crammed with Jordanians making their way from the south of the country to Amman. I couldn’t help but wonder why everyone looked so grim. We had departed at dawn, and throughout the three-hour drive, the radio had been dominated by somber discussion. I hadn’t studied any Arabic yet so I couldn’t make out the conversation beyond a smattering of place names: Tel Aviv, Washington, Amman, Al Quds — the Arabic name for Jerusalem.
No one in the minibus said a word, and I didn’t want to break the silence. So I listened to the radio, keeping my ears open for more proper nouns. Peres. Clinton. Hussein. Rabin.
It wasn’t until I walked into the lobby of my hotel in Amman and saw a TV screen showing a photo of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, along with the text “1922-1995,” that I realized something terrible had happened.
My mind raced through worst-case scenarios — a political assassination by a Palestinian group, a countdown to war, retaliation and counter-retaliation, an inexorable spiral of violence. But when I asked the man behind the check-in counter what had happened, he sounded almost relieved.
“Another Jew” did it, he said, before adding, “So there probably won’t be a war this week.”
I was fresh out of college and had never traveled to the region before. My then-girlfriend (now wife) and I had decided to backpack around Egypt, Jordan and Israel, as the overall political situation had seemed positive — at least when viewed from a distance back home in the United States. The previous year, Rabin, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat had shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accords. Efforts to achieve a two-state solution were moving forward, albeit at a measured pace. It seemed the ideal time to go on a bit of an adventure, and perhaps to feel the hope in the air.
All of those hopes became a blur as we stood in the hotel lobby, trying to figure out what to do next. “There probably won’t be a war this week,” I thought: Instead, an entire country would be sitting shiva, not to mention planning a state funeral for the following day. We made arrangements to go to Jerusalem the next morning.
The road from Amman to Jerusalem by way of the West Bank was nearly deserted. No one spoke a word the entire time, lost in thought, pondering the what-ifs and what-nexts. I expected Israel to be many things, but silent was not one of them.
We arrived ahead of schedule, well before the start of the funeral. As we checked into our new hotel, I asked if it would still be possible to attend the funeral procession, which would begin a few hours later.
“You’re too late,” the clerk told me. “The entire country is already lined up along the route. You might as well watch it on TV at this point.”
I couldn’t just sit there, though. So we left the hotel and began to make our way to the Western Wall.
I’d always imagined my first encounter with Jerusalem’s Old Town would be awash with activity, filled with encounters with street vendors, pilgrims and tourists. Instead the area was nearly deserted. Many shops remained shuttered, save a handful that kept their doors open because they happened to have a TV inside. We stood for a while in one such shop, its owner fidgeting with prayer beads as a small crowd of Palestinian men watched the televised funeral procession in silence.
As we reached the Western Wall, almost no one was present: a smattering of soldiers, a handful of tourists, a davening Haredi man. I ripped two pages from my guidebook and scrawled a pair of prayers on them to tuck between the stones of the wall — one for my grandfather, who had passed away a few years earlier, and one for Rabin. I wish I could remember what I wrote.
After I approached the wall, sirens marking the start of the two minutes of silence began to wail from every direction. The world stopped for two minutes. I stared at the ancient stones, mere inches from my face. Everyone was silent, except for the Haredi man, who continued to quietly pray.
By the time we made it to Tel Aviv several days later, the illusion of normality had returned. People walked along the beach and crowded the outdoor cafes, bundled up in sweaters amid an unseasonal chill in the air, until a downpour sent people scattering. As the weather cleared, I decided to visit Kikar Malchei Yisrael, the square where Rabin had just been murdered.
I had expected the crowds of mourners. But it was the thousands of yahrzeit candles that broke my heart. In some places they were laid out in neat rows, surrounded by drenched flowers; volunteers were drying out each candle and attempting to re-light them.
People had formed some batches of the candles into Stars of David, doves and peace signs. Around them stood children, families, soldiers, most of them quietly grieving. A pair of students sat cross-legged on the wet pavement, engaged in a passionate debate. I couldn’t understand what they said, but the heightened tone of their exchange carried the weight of their worries about the future.
At some point I began reciting Kaddish to myself. People began photographing me, which struck me as odd, until I recalled that I had been doing exactly the same thing to others just a few minutes earlier. I then collected some candles and reassembled them in the form of chai, the Hebrew word for “life.”
I lingered for a while before departing, but returned later that afternoon. The two students were still there.
In the 30 years since that awful week, I’ve thought about them periodically. At the time, they seemed painfully aware their lives had been irrevocably altered by what had transpired, that their hopes and dreams had died alongside Rabin himself.
They must be approaching 50 years old. Have the intervening years been kind to them? Have they prospered, or wasted the decades embittered by the consequences of that seminal moment of their lives, and the life of their country? Have they served in wars, protested against them, or both?
Assuming they are even still alive, do they think about that day each year and feel their heart break all over again like mine does?
And will they, too, light a yahrzeit candle tonight in Rabin’s memory, and for the lost promise of what could have been?
The post When Rabin was assassinated, Israel changed before my eyes appeared first on The Forward.
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Itay Chen, last remaining American hostage in Gaza, returned to Israel
Israel announced Tuesday it had received the remains of IDF soldier Itay Chen, the youngest and last of six American citizens held hostage in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war.
Staff Sgt. Chen, 19, was serving in a tank unit Oct. 7 when he was killed at the Nahal Oz military base. Hamas militants then took his body to Gaza, along with Matan Angrest and the remains of Capt. Daniel Perez and Sgt. Tomer Leibovitz. Chen was one of 53 IDF soldiers killed and 10 captured at Nahal Oz that day, and one of two American-Israeli soldiers killed that day.
Angrest was returned in an exchange as part of last month’s ceasefire agreement. The remains of the other American-Israeli soldier, Omer Neutra, were returned to Israel earlier this week.
For months after Oct. 7, Chen’s family held out hope he had been taken alive to Gaza, and his parents, Ruby and Hagit Chen, were among the most outspoken members of the hostage families — and became prominent critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the war dragged on.
Ruby walked out of Netanyahu’s Sept. 2025 speech to the U.N. after the prime minister, listing the hostages by name, only recited the ones still alive.
“Is he subtly admitting that he is no longer focused on bringing everyone home?” Ruby Chen wrote later in a blog post. “Is he saying that each individual hostage is no longer important?”
Itay Chen was born in New York and grew up in Netanya.
The post Itay Chen, last remaining American hostage in Gaza, returned to Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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From the bimah to ‘Squid Game’: A rabbi finds Torah in unexpected places
(JTA) — Jamie Field was still a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in New York City when she watched the first season of “Squid Game: The Challenge” and saw a call to action flash across the screen: “Could this be you? Apply now.”
It was 2023, and Field, who had long gravitated toward other reality television shows like “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race,” said she saw something deeply Jewish in them.
“The really beautiful thing about these shows is that when you’re in such a pressure cooker, for me, it’s not about the challenges, although those are fun to watch, but it’s about watching people be people and make mistakes and grow and foster connections between one another, and I’ve found so much Torah in these moments,” Field said in an interview. “I know it’s very rabbi to say.”
Two years later, Field is bringing that approach to the Netflix show’s second season, which premiered Tuesday. She was chosen to be one of over 456 contestants from around the world competing in a series of physical and mental challenges for a $4.56 million prize.
While Jewish contestants have competed on a number of reality TV shows, ordained rabbis have been rarer. Field said she went into the experience feeling a weighty responsibility around portraying Jewish clergy even as she was shackled to a team of players and competed in a relay race of mini games like stacking a house of cards and swinging a ball on a string into a cup.
“I never expected to be the very best of the challenges,” she said. “I’ve always said, I have a heart of gold, but I’m not very dexterous, and so for me, it was about trying my best and giving it my all, and also trying to be true to myself and bringing my values and wisdom and sense of community and representing the rabbinate as best I could into the show.”
Field grew up in Los Angeles and where her family attended Temple Ahavat Shalom, a Reform congregation in the San Fernando Valley.
After graduating from Boston University in 2017, she worked for the Washington Hebrew Congregation, a Reform synagogue in Washington D.C., before enrolling at HUC in 2019, spending her first year in Jerusalem.
After being ordained in 2024, Field began working as the director of education at Beth El Temple Center, a Reform synagogue in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Just four months later, she received a call back from “Squid Game: The Challenge’ asking her if she was still interested. She was soon on her way to London for an extended break for filming.
A year later, in a post on Instagram announcing her appearance on the show, Field said her experience reminded her of what she has learned from Jewish tradition.
“I often share that the Torah is a sacred story of people being people — of being hurt, of making mistakes, of building connections, of adventure, and of finding the divine in it all,” she said. “I felt this so deeply during my experience on Squid Game.”
Among her co-competitors was a NFL cheerleader, a former bomb technician and an Anglican priest with whom Field said she connected on set.
“I had a really good conversation about religion and what it means to sort of be a faith leader on the show with the priest,” said Field. “I actually found that I had conversations about faith with almost everyone I talked to because, you know, people bring things up when you tell them you’re a rabbi.”
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Arizona man sentenced to 4 years in prison for antisemitic threats to Jewish NYC hotel owner
(JTA) — An Arizona man who sent hundreds of threatening messages to a Jewish-owned hotel in New York City was sentenced to 49 months in prison on Thursday in federal court.
Donovan Hall, 35, of Mesa, Arizona, pleaded guilty to making interstate threats and interstate stalking of the Jewish owners of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel in Manhattan. He was also sentenced to three years of supervised release.
The Blue Moon Hotel is “dedicated to Jewish community in every way that we can be,” Randy Settenbrino said in an interview last year from his hotel, which includes rooms named for icons of the Jewish Lower East Side, a kosher cafe and a mural depicting 2,000 years of Jewish history.
At the time, Settenbrino and his employees had just begun to get what prosecutors said were nearly 1,000 threatening messages from Hall. Sent between August and November 2024, the messages threatened to “torture, mutilate, rape, and murder them and their families,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
In October, Hall texted photographs of two firearms and a machete to one of his victims, writing, “I’ve got something for you and your inbred children” and “for the Zionist cowards,” according to his federal indictment.
“Donovan Hall targeted Jewish victims with a sustained campaign of intimidation, terror, and harassment,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in a statement. “The approximately 1,000 threats he sent to these New Yorkers were alarming and brazen.”
Hall’s messages coincided with a boycott campaign against the hotel launched after Settenbrino’s son, an Israeli soldier, was identified as having posted videos of shooting at destroyed buildings and detonating bombs in homes and a mosque in Gaza.
Hall, who has been held at New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center since his arrest last year, apologized for his actions in a sentencing submission to the court, writing that he “wanted to champion for a cause and hunt down the bullies, not realizing that it was me the whole time.”
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after Hall’s sentencing, Settenbrino said “baby killer” had been spray painted on the windows of his hotel, and flyers were posted around Manhattan calling for its boycott and referring to his son, Bram, as a “war criminal.”
“We’re sitting at a pivotal time in New York City, where we’re feeling the encroachment of hate and antisemitism in the West, like our brethren are feeling it in Europe, and so it’s very scary for everyone concerned,” said Settenbrino. “It’s very important that there are strong sentences handed out to this, not just for us, but for klal yisrael [the Jewish people] in general.”
The post Arizona man sentenced to 4 years in prison for antisemitic threats to Jewish NYC hotel owner appeared first on The Forward.