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Extraordinary lives: 18 notable New York Jews who died in 2022
(New York Jewish Week) — Recalling the lives of what obituary writer Marilyn Johnson has called the “important dead” is one of the honors and pleasures of reading — and writing — daily journalism. Jewish tradition teaches that every life is of infinite value, but many people make their marks in ways that inspire readers to pause and ponder on the sheer variety of human endeavor.
In the case of the New York Jewish Week, we’ve been honored to remember those who died in 2022 and whose lives represent the diversity of Jewish experience and what it means to be a New Yorker. Below, we recall 18 Jewish New Yorkers whose contributions to religion, the arts, communal life, popular entertainment, public affairs or just their loving families were either the subject of an obituary that we had written, or who came to our attention thanks to their friends and relatives. May their memories be for a blessing.
David Henoch
Recent high school graduate who died doing what he loved.
Henoch and his parents, sisters, brothers-in-law and niece the day of his graduation from SAR High School in the Bronx, June 13, 2022. (Courtesy Henoch family)
The tight-knit Modern Orthodox community in the Bronx, where David Henoch grew up and attended the SAR Jewish day schools, remembered him as a curious, sensitive and empathetic leader among his peers, with a deep sense of humor and excitement for many different areas of life. Friends and family described “Divi” as an avid adventurer whose favorite activities — many of which he loved to do with his father Avi — included snowboarding, sailing and basketball. He was a certified scuba diver who died at 18 July 10 in a diving accident in Florida, a month after his graduation from SAR High School. He was buried in Israel, where he had planned to spend a year studying before going to college. “Divi always challenged me to improve. He was open to anyone and everyone’s ways no matter how mild or extreme,” a friend, neighbor and classmate recalled, adding, “He was as fearless as it gets and never once was he afraid to be himself.”
Michael Lang
A promoter behind the 1969 Woodstock festival.
Woodstock Music Festival co-producer Michael Lang attends a celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock at the at Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC in New York CIty, Aug. 13, 2009. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
Michael Lang, the Jewish co-creator of 1969’s legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair, died on Jan. 8 in Manhattan. He was 77. A concert promoter who was just 24 at the time, he was one of several Jewish collaborators who made the generation-defining festival, billed as “Three Days of Peace and Music,” happen. Other key players included music executive and promoter Artie Kornfeld — another Brooklyn-born Jew — and businessman Joel Rosenman, a Jewish native of Long Island. Lang was born in 1944 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Lang credited his Jewish parents, who were small-business owners, with teaching him the skills he needed to pull off an event of such scale. His father, he said, “gave me a strategy for getting out of tough situations: take charge and keep moving. Step back just enough to think clearly, and trust your instincts.”
Edward Schoenfeld
A Brooklyn-born maven of Chinese cuisine.
Ed Schoenfeld speaks at a Food Network event in New York City, Oct. 18, 2014. (Michael N. Todaro/Getty Images for NYCWFF)
Like a lot of Jews growing up in Brooklyn, Edward Schoenfeld learned to love Chinese food. He made it a career, opening a series of famed restaurants that introduced New Yorkers to the wide variety of Chinese cuisine. In 1973, he got his first restaurant job as assistant to restaurateur David Keh when he opened Uncle Tai’s, one of the first Hunan restaurants in New York. He went on to a career developing and running restaurants over some four decades. Among his well-regarded Chinese restaurants were Auntie Yuan and Pig Heaven, both on the Upper East Side, as well as Red Farm, a farm-to-table restaurant in Greenwich Village, which opened in 2010. “My personal joke is that I learned to speak Yiddish in the Chinese restaurant from my customers,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2013. Schoenfeld died Jan. 14 at 72.
Lori Zabar
A lawyer and activist devoted to landmarks — including her family’s gourmet food emporium.
Lori Zabar, left, with Kate Wood and David Sprouls at the book launch of “Interior Landmarks: Treasures of New York,” at The Four Seasons, Oct. 8, 2015. Zabar was the first director of the NYC Historic Properties Fund at the New York Landmarks Conservancy. (New York School of Interior Design)
Lori Zabar, a lawyer, author, antiques dealer and historic preservationist whose grandparents founded Zabar’s, the Upper West Side gourmet food emporium, died Feb. 3 the age of 67. The cause of death was cancer. The first director of the NYC Historic Properties Fund at the New York Landmarks Conservancy, she died shortly before the publication of “Zabar’s: A Family Story, with Recipes” in May. In an excerpt from her book published in the New York Jewish Week, she wrote about the perfectionism of her grandfather Louis when he opened the first reiteration of what became the famed “appy” store and a landmark in its own right: “For this new venture, Louis would sample deli meats and fish from various purveyors before he would commit to doing business with those suppliers. To taste fish, Louis would tour dozens of local smokehouses, large and small, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens. He was notorious among the wholesalers for rejecting more than he accepted. His retail mantra was simple: the highest quality at the lowest price.”
Sheldon Silver
A powerful politician undone by a corruption scandal.
Then-Speaker of the New York State Assembly Sheldon Silver walks in front of the State Capitol in Albany, New York, March 12, 2008. (Daniel Barry/Getty Images)
Sheldon Silver, who for two decades wielded enormous power as the speaker of the New York State Assembly before being brought down by a corruption scandal, died Jan. 24 at 77 at Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he had been serving a 6 1/2-year sentence on federal corruption charges. An Orthodox Jew and Democrat who represented New York’s Lower East Side, Silver was one of the most influential political leaders in the state, using the power of his office to guide legislation and stall opposition even when, for 12 years, Republican George Pataki was governor and Republicans held a majority in the state Senate. Silver’s arrest and conviction sent shock waves through New York’s Jewish establishment. “Shelly Silver was one of the strongest forces for progressive issues in the New York State Legislature,” Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, a Jewish Democrat from Manhattan, told the New York Times. “It’s a tragedy that those achievements have been overshadowed by his criminal record.”
Pinchas Stolper
A leader of the Orthodox Union and its powerhouse youth movement.
Rabbi Pinchas Stolper delivers a Passover message to NCSY alumni on April 10, 2014. (YouTube)
Rabbi Pinchas Stolper, a pioneer in making Orthodox Judaism accessible to young people, died on May 25 at 90. Stolper helped turn the National Council of Synagogue Youth into a national powerhouse. He served as the first full-time national director of NCSY and as the longest-serving executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, and wrote a series of books making the holidays and Shabbat more accessible to younger readers. He retired from the leadership of the Orthodox Union in 2000, the same year that a rabbi under his supervision. Baruch Lanner, was accused of years of sexual and physical abuse. In the first report about the scandal, he told the New York Jewish Week that he had heard several complaints from young women about improper behavior by Lanner, but lacking specific allegations, let the youth leader off with a warning.
Miriam Winiarz
A Staten Island widow who was devoted to outreach.
Miriam Winiarz and her husband Rabbi Mendy Winiarz were known for their outreach to Jews on Staten Island. (Courtesy)
Miriam Winiarz lived through the unthinkable: In 2015, her husband Dovid Winiarz died in a Maryland car crash, leaving the Staten Island mother alone to raise their 10 children. And yet, after losing her husband, she remained a pillar in the borough’s Jewish community, Mendy Mirocznik, president of the Council of Jewish Organizations of Staten Island, told silive.com. She continued the kiruv, or outreach work that she and her husband had conducted before his death, bringing other Jews closer to their tradition through social media and through his rabbinate. “This was somebody who, when they got wind of the situation, somebody had a problem, they would interrupt their own lives and make you a priority,” said Mirocznik. Miriam Winiarz died in early December at the age of 56 after what was described as a brief illness. Her funeral at Young Israel of Staten Island in Willowbrook drew more than a thousand people. A fund has been set up to support her children, the youngest of whom is 14.
Philip Pearlstein
Modern realist painter and champion of Jewish art.
Modern realist painter Philip Pearlstein photographed in his New York studio in 1971. (Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)
Philip Pearlstein, an artist whose painting of nudes revived realistic painting after decades of dominance by abstraction, died in Manhattan on Dec. 17 at age 98. Born in Pittsburgh, he moved to Manhattan in 1949 as a sort of chaperone to a young Andy Warhol. He became an instructor at the Pratt Institute, and taught at Brooklyn College from 1963 until his retirement in 1988. Pearlstein served on the board of the Covenant Foundation in the early 2000s, and , according to Judith Ginsberg, former executive director of the foundation, opened the board to funding Jewish art in a bigger way and promoting the artists Debbie Friedman, Liz Lerman and Liz Swados.
Barbara Roaman
A grandma with a keen fashion sense and commitment to social justice
Barbara Roaman and her granddaughter, Sandy Fox. (Courtesy)
Barbara “Bobby” Roaman, who died on Nov. 6 at 91, was born in Manhattan and lived on the Upper West Side as a child. After attending Syracuse University and Columbia University, where she majored in Spanish, she moved to Long Island with her husband, Richard. In a eulogy shared with the New York Jewish Week, her granddaughter, Sandy Fox — an editor at In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies — remembered both her sense of fashion and her work in the civil rights movement on Long Island:
“Our conversations as a child instilled in me much more than a love of clothing. She taught me values of social justice and tzedakah, or what she would have called charitable giving, and because she wasn’t at all religious, those were the pillars of her Judaism. She and my grandfather were born in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They were upwardly mobile and privileged. In their class status and whiteness, they had blind spots when it came to race. Nevertheless, their commitments to social justice and civil rights were inspiring to me as a child and teen. They were involved in attempts to desegregate Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s. In more recent years, grandma had become involved in a local group called ERASE Racism, and donated to many non-profits that I also care about: Planned Parenthood, Democratic campaigns of all kinds, American Jewish World Service, and so on. It would have been so easy for them to become Republicans, as many Jews in their generation did. But they didn’t…. My mom died when I was 18, and from then on we tried to bridge that cavernous loss that affected us so differently but both so profoundly. She could not replace my mother and I could not replace her daughter, but we came pretty damn close. I sensed that she poured into me everything she wished she had poured into my mother.”
René Slotkin
A survivor of Mengele’s sadistic experiments on twins.
Ita Guttmann and her twins, René and Irene (then Renate), were photographed for Nazi propaganda while they were imprisoned at Theresienstadt. (Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Irene Guttmann Slotkin Hizme)
René Slotkin, who with his twin sister Renate (Irene) was subjected to Josef Mengele’s infamous medical experiments on twins, died July 10 at age 84. Born in Teplice-Sanov, a city in northern Bohemia, he and his sister were sent, at 4, with their mother, to Theresienstadt. After a year, the three were shipped to Auschwitz. Then they were split up, the children becoming part of the infamous medical experiments conducted by Mengele, the sadistic “Angel of Death.” Orphaned, Slotkin and his sister survived a death march and arrived in New York in 1950. He was married at a young age and, after serving as a sergeant in the U.S. National Guard, worked for a box manufacturing company as a cost estimator. In 2019, he joined the Speakers Bureau at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, sharing his testimony with students. “I am here because of good people, good people everywhere,” he told the museum in an interview.
Sarah Schlesinger
A force in musical theater education.
At NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts , Sarah Schlesinger was the recipient of the David Payne Carter Award and the University Distinguished Teacher Award. (tisch.nyu.edu)
Sarah Schlesinger was an award-winning lyricist and librettist whose works, with composer Mike Reid, included “The Ballad of Little Jo,” “The Last Day,” “Casanova Returns,” “Prairie Songs,” “A Wind in the Willows Christmas” and “In This House.” But her most lasting legacy may well be the composers and lyricists she mentored as an arts professor and dean at the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She joined the program in 1989, served as associate chair of the department from 1995 to 1997, and was named chair in 1998. “Under her leadership, the program produced a huge, international alumni network of artists who are at the forefront of every facet of musical theatre activity: as creators, teachers, scholars and business leaders,” the program said in a statement. “Her insight, razor-sharp mind and her ability to get things done and to identify and encourage faculty, students and alums was frankly staggering in its longevity and reach. Sarah was a force that could make things happen.” Schlesinger died Dec. 14 following an illness.
Menahem Schmelzer
The ‘go-to’ librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Menahem Schmelzer tended perhaps the greatest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere. (Courtesy Jewish Theological Seminary)
In 1966, after a fire gutted the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, Menahem Schmelzer led what the flagship Conservative seminary said in a statement was “the extraordinary effort to reopen it, restore it to health, and ultimately open a new Library building in 1983.” When he stepped down as its longtime librarian in 1987, he had watched over the resuscitation of perhaps the greatest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere. Schmelzer, who spent four decades at JTS, also served as provost and held the title of Albert B. and Bernice Cohen Professor Emeritus of Medieval Hebrew Literature and Jewish Bibliography. A Holocaust survivor who was born in Hungary, Schmelzer was also a scholar in his own right, specializing in medieval Hebrew literature and the Jewish liturgical poetry known as piyyut. David Kraemer, the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian at JTS, remembered his colleague as “the ‘go-to’ person on questions of Jewish bibliography for researchers around the world.” He died on Dec. 10 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.
Steven Salen
Holocaust survivor who dressed presidents
Steve Salen in an undated photo in his Manhattan atelier. (Family)
Born Zoltan Salomon in Czechoslovakia in 1919, Steven Salen first learned tailoring at a trade school run there by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Then the Nazis arrived and they deported Salen. He never saw his parents or seven of his 11 siblings again. But he stuck with his trade, establishing himself after arriving in New York City as a tailor to the elite, making garments for the likes of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Martin Scorsese (and keeping mementoes of their business at his Bayside home). Salen was an old-school, word-of-mouth tailor who started working at FL Dunn on Fifth Avenue in New York, and eventually had his own full-floor atelier on Madison Avenue and 53rd Street, at the heart of the city’s high-fashion district. In 2011, when Salen already topped 90, a New York style blog profiled his shop, noting that it was one of fewer than 30 bespoke tailors in a city that had once been home to more than 300. Salen would work until 95 before retiring; he died Nov. 23 at 103.
Maximilian Lerner
A World War II “Ritchie Boy” who went undercover behind German lines.
Maximilian Lerner served as a translator and interrogated prisoners on behalf of U.S. intelligence during World War II. (Via Museum of Jewish Heritage)
Maximilian Lerner, an Austrian Jewish immigrant, served as a translator and interrogated prisoners on behalf of U.S. intelligence during World War II as a member of the “Ritchie Boys,” a special unit trained in espionage and frontline interrogation. He died Sept. 10 at his home in Manhattan at age 98. Lerner left Austria with his family two months after Germany’s March 1938 annexation of his homeland and, after layovers in Paris and Nice, came to the U.S., via Lisbon, in 1941. After volunteering for the draft, he became one of the 2,000 to 3,000 European-born Jews who learned to interrogate prisoners of war and civilians, interpret and translate for foreign officials, and read codes. “I wore civilian clothes”— posing as German behind enemy lines – “a number of times,” he told the New York Jewish Week in 2004. “This was my war. I would do whatever it took.” After the war, her worked for a horticultural products business and later started his own business in the same field. He also earned a master’s degree in business education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1952, and wrote two spy novels and an autobiography. In recent years Lerner volunteered at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, talking to groups about his experiences.
Chave Hecht
A camp director devoted to Jewish outreach.
Rebbetzin Chave Hecht and Rabbi J. J. Hecht receive a dollar and a blessing from the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, before a trip to South Africa in 1989. (Hecht Family/JEM van Chabad.org)
Rebbetzin Chave Hecht, the founder of Camp Emunah Bnos Yaakov Yehudah — an overnight camp for observant Jewish girls — and a host of other educational initiatives originating in the Chabad-Lubavitch community, died Feb. 8 at the age of 95. Born in the East New York section of Brooklyn and educated at public schools, she, along with her husband, the late Rabbi J.J. Hecht, also directed a Jewish summer day camp on Coney Island for public school children, pioneering Chabad’s outreach to non-observant Jewish families. Rebbetzin Hecht ran the day-to-day operations of Camp Emunah for decades, when her husband was back in Brooklyn running his synagogue. “She slept in her office,” her son, Rabbi Sholem Ber Hecht, a Chabad emissary in Queens, told Chabad.org. “She had no secretary; if you called the camp at 7 a.m. or 10 p.m., she answered the phone.”
Frederick Terna
Survivor, Brooklyn artist and “someone to watch” late into his 90s.
Artist Fred Terna, a Holocaust survivor, continued painting well into his late 90s. (Courtesy of Terna)
Holocaust survivor and painter Frederick Terna, who remained active at his Brooklyn studio into his late 90s, died on Dec. 8 at 99. Born in Vienna and raised in Prague, he was imprisoned in four Nazi concentration camps, including Terezin, where he began to make art. Terna moved to New York in 1952; his work was collected by a variety of museums and institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Albertina Collection in Vienna and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Earlier this year he was named to the New York Jewish Week’s “36 to Watch” list of notable Jewish New Yorkers.
Saida Somekh
Immigrant, entrepreneur and loving grandmother.
Saida Somekh demonstrates her cooking skills for her family. (via Instagram)
Saida Somekh, who owned Dora Hosiery, a go-to lingerie shop in Midtown Manhattan for decades, died Nov. 5. She was 94. Her granddaughter, Erin Dana Lichy, a real estate agent and a new cast member on “The Real Housewives of New York,” remembered her in an Instagram post:
“She came from a different world, married very young and was expected to raise a family as a stay-at-home mom with little choice in her major life decisions. Well, that didn’t work for her, so she forged her own path. As a young immigrant with little practice in English, she became a female homeowner, businesswoman and successful entrepreneur…. As a grandmother, she was simply always there, like one’s backbone. She was a pillar of strength. Her presence made me feel safe and warm. She loved purely, deeply and didn’t pass judgment. She was patient. If I ever needed to fix a garment or didn’t have something to wear, she’d sew me something from scratch, however long it took. She was warm to my friends and anyone close to me. She would send us home with bags of food and cook with me for hours if I wanted to learn new a new dish. All I had to do was ask. My kids adored her and she them. They brought her so much joy and watching how prideful she was of them was heartwarming. She had pictures of us all around her house just so she could look at ‘her babies’ every morning when she woke up.”
Freddie Roman
Catskills comedian and keeper of the flame.
Freddie Roman, left and fellow comedian Shecky Greene attend “The Friars Club Salute to Freddie Roman and Stewie Stone” at New Tork’s Pierre Hotel, April 21, 2014. (John Lamparski/WireImage)
Comedian Freddie Roman, who died Nov. at 85, was never a crossover star in the mold of Alan King, Jackie Mason or Joan Rivers — three other Jewish comics with roots in the Catskills. And yet in a capstone to a long and steady career he resurrected the spirit of the Borscht Belt with the 1991 show “Catskills on Broadway” and, as the long-serving dean of the Friars Club, he injected new life into the fading Manhattan showbiz venue by inviting younger comics to join. Born Fred Kirschenbaum in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, Roman started emceeing at age 15 at the the Crystal Spring Hotel in the Catskills, which was owned by his uncle and grandfather. He soon was performing at hotels and resorts in the region for the largely Jewish crowd. “Catskills on Broadway,” starring him and fellow tummlers Dick Capri, Marilyn Michaels and Mal Z. Lawrence, was a bona fide hit, running for 453 performances. “I’m like the Fidel Castro of comedians,” he once said of his tenure at the Friar’s Club. “I’m president for life.”
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Iran’s Execution Spree Continues Unabated, Alarming Human Rights Groups
A February 2023 protest in Washington, DC calling for an end to executions and human rights violations in Iran. Photo: Reuters/ Bryan Olin Dozier
The Islamist regime in Iran has ramped up its executions in what one human rights watchdog group described as “an unprecedented increase compared to previous years,” leading observers to raise alarm bells over Tehran’s crackdown on dissent.
Iran has executed 1,286 human beings so far this year through the end of October, according to a new report by the Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA).
The organization identified 31 recent executions on murder and drug-related charges, adding, “As of the time of this report, prison authorities and responsible institutions have not publicly announced these executions.”
While most of the executed are accused of murder or drug charges, human rights groups say these charges are often fabricated, conceal the real crime of political opposition, and target minority groups as Baluchis, Kurds, and Arabs.
The Times reported on Sunday that family members of political prisoners on Iran’s death row now wait by their phones in a state of terror and trauma. “Every phone call is a nightmare for me, especially in the morning. It might bring heartbreaking news,” one woman in Tehran told the British paper. “Every night I go to bed with the same dread of what tomorrow may bring.”
The increase in executions — usually carried out by hanging at dawn — have reportedly inspired hunger strikes among prisoners around the country.
One unnamed Iranian activist in exile described to The Times how the executions served as intimidation against those who would resist, saying that “the noose has become the regime’s loudspeaker” and “every hanging is a message: we are still in charge.”
Amnesty International called the increase in killings “state-sanctioned murder on an industrial scale.” Human rights groups have noted the current pace is the highest since 1988, when the regime infamously executed thousands of political prisons, and has already surpassed last year’s total of 1,001.
“Over the past year, as its nuclear program and network of militant proxies have been severely weakened, the regime has become even more reliant on domestic repression,” Shahin Gobadi, of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, told The Times.
The inhumane conditions of Iranian prisons also act as a tool to repress those who would speak out for freedom. Those who have escaped describe being packed so tightly into cells that they needed to sleep in shifts under lights that remained on permanently.
On Thursday, the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) released a report about Goli Kouhkan, a victim of child marriage who has lived on death row in Iran, scheduled for execution in December.
“Girls are married off at age 13 or even younger, and subjected to decades of beatings and rape, with no real possibility of divorce or escape,” said Bahar Ghandehari, director of advocacy at CHRI. “Many are often killed by family members if they try. Courts must consider these circumstances as mitigating factors when sentencing.”
Ghandehari explained how “the Iranian regime is deeply complicit in these killings because it does not take even the most basic measures to end child marriage or to protect girls and women from domestic abuse — situations that all too often end in death, although it is usually that of the woman.”
Zahra Rahimi co-founded the Imam Ali Popular Students Relief Society and has described the process by which child brides are forced into marriages in Iran.
“The judge will ask questions such as, ‘What is the price of meat? If you want to buy something for your home, what do you buy?’ and based on the girl’s answers, he will determine whether she is ready for marriage,” Rahimi said. “In this process, there is no lawyer, psychologist, doctor, expert, or trusted person to talk to the child … Where the court did not allow marriages to take place [for example, when the girls were under 9 years old], the girls were sent into ‘temporary marriages’ until they turned 13, and then their marriage would become legal.”
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South African Jews Blast Gov’t Over Continued Embassy Closure in Tel Aviv Amid Escalating Tensions With Israel
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa attends the 20th East Asia Summit (EAS), as part of the 47th ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Oct. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hasnoor Hussain
South African Jews have strongly denounced their government’s foreign policy toward Israel, urging officials to reopen the country’s embassy in Tel Aviv, which has remained closed for two years amid Pretoria’s deepening hostility toward the Jewish state since the start of the war in Gaza.
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) on Tuesday blasted the government for abandoning its own citizens abroad by keeping the Tel Aviv embassy closed.
The group said the resulting vacuum has created serious difficulties for thousands of South Africans in Israel and forced SAJBD to take on crisis-response duties that should fall to the state.
“This knee jerk, virtue signaling exercise did nothing to contribute to the peace deal that thankfully other governments, including the United States and several Arab nations, were able to achieve, through hard work and negotiations with both sides of the conflict,” SAJBD’s national director, Wendy Khan, wrote in a column for the South African Jewish Report, referring to the US-backed ceasefire to halt fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Kahn also slammed the government for its glaring double standard: during the 12-day war between Iran and Israel in June, the South African embassy in Tehran proactively contacted citizens in the Islamic Republic to offer consular assistance and support — yet no comparable effort was made for South Africans in the Jewish state, even as civilian areas there were directly targeted by Iranian missiles.
“It was left to the SAJBD to arrange for the repatriation of South African citizens when the war ended, arranging for three Ethiopian Airlines flights to be added to bring South African citizens home,” Kahn said. “This was a task other governments arranged for their citizens.”
South Africa closed its embassy in Tel Aviv on Nov. 17, 2023 — exactly two years ago — citing concerns over the war in Gaza, in a move that marked the beginning of an increasingly hostile campaign against Israel.
According to Kahn, President Cyril Ramaphosa assured SAJBD at the time that the closure would last only “for the duration of the war” in Gaza. However, even though a ceasefire has been in place for over a month now, the embassy remains closed.
“The war has ended, and we therefore call on Ramaphosa to honor his commitment of reopening the embassy in Tel Aviv,” she said.
Since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct.7, 2023, the South African government has taken an openly hostile stance toward the Jewish state, emerging as one of its fiercest critics and seeking to undermine it on the international stage.
Last month, the South African Medical Association (SAMA) cut all ties with the Israel Medical Association (IMA) in one of the country’s latest attempts to boycott Jerusalem, prompting the resignation of at least 80 Jewish doctors and medical professionals.
SAMA is also urging the World Medical Association (WMA) to suspend the IMA’s membership until “meaningful changes” are made.
In its statement, SAMA set several conditions for lifting its suspension, including the release of Palestinian medical personnel, condemning the destruction of Gaza’s health-care system, opposing the blockade of essential medical supplies, and ensuring adequate medical care for all individuals under Israeli control.
The local Jewish community slammed SAMA’s decision, labeling it “underhanded.”
“Instead of representing our country’s medical professionals, they have chosen political expediency over the interests of their members,” SAJBD said in a statement.
“This action will serve only to alienate members of the association, causing unnecessary division and creating rifts between professionals and communities in our country,” the statement read.
This move came as diplomatic relations between the two countries continued to plunge, with South Africa pulling its diplomats from Tel Aviv, hosting Hamas representatives at a government-backed conference, and pursuing its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
Most recently, South Africa insinuated that Israel is seeking to “cleanse Palestinians” out of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The apparent accusation came after the surprise arrival of 153 Palestinians on a chartered flight that landed in Johannesburg last week. The group arrived without departure stamps from Israel in their passports.
South African border police kept the Palestinians on the plane for several hours before Ramaphosa allowed them entry on a standard 90-day visa exemption.
“We are suspicious, as the South African government, about the circumstances surrounding the arrival of the plane,” Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola told reporters.
“We do not want any further flights to come our way because this is a clear agenda to cleanse out Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank and those areas, which South Africa is against,” he added. “It does look like it represents a broader agenda to remove Palestinians from Palestine into many different parts of the world and is a clearly orchestrated operation.”
According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, an agency called Al-Majd was behind the flight in addition to others chartered for those fleeing Gaza and had contact with the Israeli government. Al-Majd, which is reportedly operated by a dual Israeli-Estonian national, says on its website that it seeks to “provide aid and rescue efforts to Muslim communities in conflict and war zones.”
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Surging LGBTQ enrollment in Jewish seminaries signals ‘astounding’ shift in US rabbinate
(JTA) — Hannah Karpel-Pomerantz and her wife met as rabbinical school classmates in Jerusalem four years ago, bonding over their love of Jewish texts and rituals. This August, as they began their final two years of school, Hebrew Union College splashed the couple across its website in an essay celebrating their relationship.
“HUC wanted to feature me and my wife as a love story — as something that makes the school look good,” Karpel-Pomerantz said. “It signals that American progressive Jewish life has evolved to the point where LGBTQ inclusion is a no-brainer.”
A new national study suggests just how deeply that shift has taken hold: 51% of the rabbinical students surveyed identified as LGBTQ+. It’s an eye-popping finding that provides the first empirical evidence for a phenomenon many in the non-Orthodox rabbinate have been noticing for years.
“If you take a historical perspective, it is rather astounding, given the fact that rabbinical schools weren’t even accepting LGBTQ students until the 1990s or later,” said Jonathan Krasner, a professor of Jewish studies at Brandeis University.
The demographic shift can be linked to a broader transformation in the rabbinate, as the old “sage on the stage” model gives way to a more pastoral, responsive style of leadership. Aspiring rabbis are entering the field with new expectations, while congregations are placing unprecedented demands on clergy, fueling a placement crisis that has left many pulpits empty.
As they make the case for their students, educators say LGBTQ rabbis, shaped by the long fight for inclusion, are emerging as the leaders the community needs amid polarization and rising antisemitism.
“For 23 years, SVARA has invited queer Jews into the long project of upgrading the tradition,” said Rabbi Benay Lappe, founder of the queer yeshiva whose alumni now populate rabbinical schools across the country. “Queer people understand upheaval, resilience, and creativity — the same toolkit that catalyzed rabbinic Judaism itself. When people who’ve had to reimagine their own lives step into spiritual leadership, they bring clarity and empathy that enrich the whole community.”
Lappe added, “The question is not ‘Why so many queer people?’ but rather, ‘Why is this extraordinarily good news for the future of Judaism?’”
The new research, published by a group called Atra, bills itself as the first comprehensive, cross-denominational study of the American rabbinate. But its headline-grabbing LGBTQ+ figure requires some clarification: It is based on a survey of 181 volunteer respondents, with limited participation from Orthodox students, making it impossible to know how precisely it reflects the entire population of aspiring rabbis.
Still, the study’s lead researcher, Wendy Rosov, said the finding should not be dismissed. “Even if the estimate is high, it’s not far off — it is not a crazy statistic,” she said.
Rosov noted that seminaries do not systematically track students’ sexual orientation or gender identity, but several told her team informally that as many as half of their current students identify as LGBTQ+. She also pointed to broader survey data showing rising rates of LGBTQ identification among young Americans — and among young Jews in particular — which helps explain the pattern.
There is clear year-over-year evidence within the study itself. Among surveyed rabbis ordained before 2004, only 7% identified as LGBTQ+. The share rises to 15% for those ordained between 2005 and 2014, 29% for the 2015-2024 cohort, and 51% among current students.
The study does not attempt to explain the trend, and Rosov declined to offer theories, citing a lack of data.
Scholars and educators expect the dramatic numbers to stir murmurs in some corners of the Jewish community about the “queering of the rabbinate.” Krasner said those anxieties echo an earlier chapter in Jewish history, when women began enrolling in rabbinical schools in significant numbers and some predicted a “feminization” of Judaism and a loss of rabbinic authority.
“Those concerns were overblown,” he said. What mattered then, he added, is what matters now: that people can see themselves reflected in their religious leaders. “I’m not worried about the rabbinate ‘going queer.’ We should be cautious about that kind of anxiety.”
Deborah Waxman, president of Reconstructing Judaism, remembers that earlier era firsthand. When she came out to her mother during her first year of rabbinical school in 1993, the reaction was immediate — and telling.
“My mother cried,” Waxman recalled. “She said, it’s already going to be so hard for you as a woman rabbi, I’m so worried that you will never get employed as a lesbian.”
At the time, Waxman said, those fears weren’t unfounded. Many queer students worried that being open about who they were could jeopardize their ordination or leave them unemployable. Waxman’s career bridges both eras, and she has learned to reinterpret the social anxieties of the past as markers of how dramatically the landscape has shifted.
One leading theory among rabbinic educators is that the surge in LGBTQ students represents not only a new openness but also generations of pent-up aspiration. For much of modern American Jewish history, LGBTQ Jews were barred from the rabbinate. Once that barrier fell, seminary leaders say, the long-deferred interest began to surface.
Andrew Rehfeld, president of Hebrew Union College, calls it a “backlog of interest.”
“For years, gay and lesbian Jews were excluded not only from leadership, but from many communities themselves,” Rehfeld said. “Now that the doors are open, it’s not surprising there’s an equilibrium happening.”
Shuly Rubin Schwartz, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary and a historian of American Judaism, said she is reminded of the pattern that unfolded before. When the rabbinate first opened its doors to women, she said, there was an initial wave of interest from people who had long been denied access.
“You have a group that has been marginalized throughout Jewish history finally given the opportunity to exercise leadership,” she said. “What we’re seeing now is similar.”
Another theory holds that the trend reflects a deeper affinity between queer identity and Jewish spiritual life.
Lappe sees this clearly through SVARA, her queer-centered yeshiva, where thousands of LGBTQ Jews have engaged in Talmud study over the past two decades. Many of her students later apply to rabbinical school.
“This shift isn’t an accident,” she said, referring to the new study. “It’s a predictable outcome of a tradition that has always been renewed by people moving through upheaval. When people who have had to courageously reimagine their own lives step into spiritual leadership, they bring clarity, empathy, and a commitment to justice that enriches the whole community. That shows you where this energy is coming from.”
For many aspiring rabbis, that process begins long before they arrive on campus.
Karpel-Pomerantz said LGBTQ Jews often come to the rabbinate with a level of self-awareness that grows out of the work of understanding their identities. “LGBTQ people are sometimes almost on the fast track to having done a lot of the soul-searching that can help prepare people for the rabbinate in a meaningful way,” she said.
The increase in LGBTQ enrollment has come in tandem with an evolution in the role of a rabbi. Once defined primarily as a learned authority who delivered sermons and rendered halakhic decisions, the rabbi was positioned above the community. Today, rabbis are expected to serve as pastoral caregivers, counselors, organizers and companions in moments of crisis. Their authority is less formal and more relational, grounded in presence, empathy and trust rather than in scholarly distance.
Krasner noted that LGBTQ Americans are generally overrepresented in “helping professions” like social work, counseling, and education. Rabbinic work, increasingly centered on pastoral care, fits that pattern.
Karpel-Pomerantz sees the same phenomenon in herself and in many peers. “I’m in rabbinical school because I want to be a clinical pastoral educator,” she said. “First, I need to become a hospital chaplain, and then I can learn to teach other people how to do it.”
Even as seminaries become more welcoming, the job market is still uneven for LGBTQ clergy. Rabbi Leora Kaye, director of career services for the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the association for Reform rabbis, said she tries to prepare students honestly.
“I can’t promise them they won’t encounter bias,” she said. “What I do promise is that we’ll do everything we can to make it as safe as possible. We respond when situations arise. We don’t let people face it alone.”
As a sign of the Reform movement’s commitment, she cited anti-bias training that is now a requirement for search committees in congregations before they begin interviewing rabbis.
Often, Kaye said, LGBTQ graduates find congregations that are enthusiastic about their leadership.
“We see many situations where sexuality or gender identity is not an issue at all, or where it’s embraced,” she said. “Communities want rabbis who are compassionate, grounded, and capable. And many of them are explicitly seeking rabbis who reflect their own diversity.”
Rehfeld also said that despite broad acceptance in many congregations, discrimination still happens. He recalled how one HUC graduate ended an interview process after being asked inappropriate questions.
“The harm was real for the student,” he said. “But the bigger loss was for the congregation. Discrimination keeps talent out of the pool.”
The student ultimately found a “fantastic” pulpit, he added: “They still ended up in middle America in a relatively rural place that they never thought about living.” He sees the outcome as a testament to the movement’s ethical guidelines and support systems.
Both working as rabbinic interns at congregations in the Los Angeles area, Karpel-Pomerantz and her wife feel confident about what they have to offer and optimistic about what will come after graduation.
“At this particular moment in history, there is something really valuable about people who have multiple marginalized identities being willing to take on the role of leader of communities,” she said. “And I hope that our communities are able to see the presence of queer folks as the gift that I believe it to be.”
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