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An Orthodox woman says she is no longer welcome to pray at a New York synagogue because she is trans
(JTA) — When Talia Avrahami was asked to resign from a job teaching in an Orthodox Jewish day school after people there found out she was transgender, she was devastated. But she hoped to be able to turn to her synagogue in Washington Heights, where she had found a home for the last year and a half.
The Shenk Shul is housed at Yeshiva University, the Modern Orthodox flagship in New York City that was locked in battle with students over whether they could form an LBGTQ club. Still, Avrahami had found the previous rabbi to be supportive, and the past president was an ally and a personal friend. What’s more, Avrahami had just helped hire a new rabbi who had promised to handle sensitive topics carefully and with concern for all involved.
So Avrahami was shocked when her outreach to the new rabbi led to her exclusion from the synagogue, with the top Jewish legal authority at Yeshiva University personally telling her that she could no longer pray there.
“Not only were we members, we were very active members,” Avrahami told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We hosted and sponsored kiddushes all the time. We had mazel tovs, [the birth of] our baby [was] posted in the newsletter, we helped run shul events. We were very close with the previous rabbi and rebbetzin and we were close with the current rabbi and rebbetzin.”
Avrahami’s quest to remain a part of the Shenk Shul, which unfolded over the past two months and culminated last week with her successful request for refunded dues, comes at a time of intense tension over the place of LGBTQ people in Modern Orthodox Jewish spaces.
Administrators at Shenk and Y.U. said they are trying to balance Orthodox interpretations of Jewish law, or halacha, and contemporary ideas around inclusion — two values that have sharply collided in Avrahami’s case.
Emails and text messages obtained by JTA show that many people involved in Avrahami’s situation expressed deep pain over her eventual exclusion. They also show that, despite a range of interpretations of Jewish law on LGBTQ issues present even within Modern Orthodoxy, the conclusions of Yeshiva University’s top Jewish legal authority, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, continue to drive practices within the university’s broader community.
“I completely understand (and am certainly perturbed by) the difficulty of the situation. Nobody wants to, chas v’shalom [God forbid], oust anybody, especially somebody who has been an active part of this community,” the synagogue’s president, Shimon Liebling, wrote in a Nov. 17 text message to his predecessor. But, he continued, “When it came down to it, the halachah stated this outcome. As much as we laud ourselves as a welcoming community, halachah cannot be compromised.”
Liebling went on, using the term for a rabbinic decision and referring to a ruling he said the synagogue rabbi had obtained from Schachter: “A psak is a psak.”
The saga began this fall, several weeks after Avrahami lost her short-lived job as an eighth-grade social studies teacher at Magen David Yeshivah in Brooklyn, which she had obtained after earning a master’s degree at Yeshiva University. She had been outed after a video of her in the classroom taken during parent night began circulating on social media.
Around the High Holidays, when Orthodox Jews spend many days in their synagogues, Avrahami learned that people within the Shenk Shul community were talking about her, some complaining about her presence. As she always had, she had spent the holidays praying in the women’s section of the gender-segregated congregation.
Concerned, Avrahami reached out to the new rabbi, Shai Kaminetzky. He confirmed the complaints and told her he wanted further guidance from a more senior rabbi to deal with the complex legal issue before him: Where is a trans woman’s place in the Orthodox synagogue?
For Avrahami and some others who identify as Modern Orthodox, this question has already been resolved. They heed the rulings of the late Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, known as the “Tzitz Eliezer,” an Orthodox legal scholar who died in 2006. He ruled that a trans woman who undergoes gender confirmation surgery is a woman according to Jewish law.
But Waldenberg’s determination is not universally held among Orthodox Jews — and one prominent rabbi who does not accept it is Hershel Schachter. In a 2017 Q&A, Schachter derided trans issues, saying about one trans Jew, “Why did he decide that God made a mistake? He looked so much better as a man than as a woman.” He also suggested that a trans person asking whether to sit in the men’s or women’s section should instead consider attending a Conservative or Reform synagogue, where worshippers are not separated by gender.
“We know we’d have no problem if we were at a Reform or Conservative synagogue when it comes to the acceptance issue. The thing is, that’s not the only thing in our life,” Bradley Avrahami told JTA.
The couple became religiously observant after spending time in Israel and the two now identify as Modern Orthodox. They were married by an Orthodox rabbi in 2018, and when they had their baby via surrogate in 2021, it was important to them that the infant go through a Jewish court to formally convert to Judaism. Avrahami seeks to fulfill the Jewish legal and cultural expectations of Orthodox women, wearing a wig and modest skirts. The pair both adhere to strict Shabbat and kashrut observance laws.
“We didn’t want to be the only family that kept kosher at the synagogue, we didn’t want to be the only family that is shomer Shabbat and shomer chag,” Bradley Avrahami added, referring to strict observance of the Sabbath and holiday restrictions. “It kind of becomes isolating.”
Kaminetzky kept both Talia Avrahami and Eitan Novick, the past president, in the loop about his research, in which he consulted with Schachter. It was a natural place for him to turn: He had studied at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and learned from Schachter there. And while the Shenk Shul includes members not affiliated with Yeshiva University, it is closely entwined with Y.U., occupying space in a university building and hiring rabbis only from a list of options presented by the university.
After speaking with Schachter, Kaminetzky reached a conclusion, according to messages characterizing it by Liebling, the synagogue president.
“He made an halachic decision that Talia isn’t able to sit in the women’s section for the time being,” Liebling wrote Nov. 17 in a message to his predecessor as president, Eitan Novick. But Liebling left the door open for change, writing, “All in all, the ‘official shul policy’ is still being decided.”
He said Kaminetzky had spoken extensively the previous evening with the Avrahamis and had been determined to share his judgment in a way that was respectful “despite the difficult-to hear halachic conclusion.”
Liebling added a parenthetical: “I honestly can’t imagine how difficult it is for them. If I were told I couldn’t sit in the men’s section, I’d be beyond heartbroken and likewise feel displaced.”
Talia Avrahami did indeed feel heartbroken. She told Kaminetzky and others that she felt like she wanted to die, alarming her friends and prompting some of them to reach out to the rabbi. “The concern about Talia’s well-being is likewise the #1 — and only — factor on my mind right now,” Kaminetzky told one of them that night.
The Avrahamis stopped attending the Shenk Shul, but they held out hope for Kaminetzky to change his mind, or for the synagogue to set a firm policy that would permit her participation. Over the next six weeks, though, they heard nothing — a situation that so disappointed Novick that he and his wife also stopped attending. (Kaminetzky’s third child was born during this time.)
“We really feel like this is a pretty significant deviation from the community that we have been a part of for 11 years, which has always been a very accepting place,” Novick said. “This is just not the community that I feel comfortable being a part of if these are the decisions that are being made. It’s not just about the Avrahamis.”
While Avrahami waited for more information, Yeshiva University and Schachter were already in the process of rolling out what they saw as a compromise in a different conflagration over LGBTQ inclusion at the school. Arguing that homosexuality is incompatible with the school’s religious values, Yeshiva University has been fighting not to have to recognize an LGBTQ student group, the YU Pride Alliance, and has even asked the Supreme Court to weigh in after judges in New York ruled against the university. This fall, the school announced that it would launch a separate club endorsed by Schachter, claiming it would represent LGBTQ students “under traditional Orthodox auspices.” (The YU Pride Alliance called the new club “a desperate stunt” by the university.)
Multiple people encouraged Avrahami to make her case directly to Schachter. When she headed to a meeting with the rabbi on Jan. 1, she hoped that putting a face to her name and explaining her situation, including that she had undergone a full medical transition, might widen his thinking about LGBTQ inclusion in Orthodoxy.
The meeting lasted just 15 minutes. And according to Avrahami, who said Schachter told her she was the first trans person he had ever met, it didn’t go well.
In an email to another rabbi who attended the meeting, Menachem Penner, Avrahami said Schachter had called her “unOrthodox” and accused him of “bullying Rabbi Shai Kaminetzky into accepting bigoted psaks.”
Penner, the dean of Yeshiva’s rabbinical school, characterized the conversation differently.
“Rabbi Schachter rules that it is prohibited to undergo transgender surgery and does not accept the opinion of the Tzitz Eliezer post-facto,” he wrote in an email response that day in which he denied that Kaminetzky had been pressured to follow Schachter’s opinion.
“That’s simply a halachic opinion that many hold,” Penner wrote. “He did not call you ‘unorthodox’ — you come across as very sincere in your Judaism and he wished you hatzlacha [success] — but simply said that the surgery was unorthodox, meaning it was not something that is accepted by what he feels is Orthodox Judaism.”
The meeting so angered Avrahami that she asked Liebling to refund her Shenk Shul dues that day, saying that Kaminetzky had kicked her out of the congregation.
“Of course! I’ll send back the money ASAP!” Liebling responded. “I’m so sorry how things are ending up.”
Yeshiva University and Schachter, through a representative, declined to comment, referring questions directly to the Shenk Shul. Kaminetzky directed requests for comment to a representative for the Shenk Shul.
“We have had several conversations with the Avrahamis and we understand their concerns,” the Shenk Shul said in a statement. “It’s important to emphasize that the Avrahamis were not asked to leave the congregation.”
That response doesn’t sit right with Novick, who said blocking Talia Avrahami from praying on both the men’s and women’s sides of the synagogue was tantamount to ejecting her.
“They seem to be trying to have their cake and eat it, too,” he said of the synagogue’s leadership. “They may not be wrong in saying they didn’t tell Talia she was ‘kicked out’ of Shenk, but they’ve created a rule that makes it impossible for her to be a full participant in our community.”
Bradley Avrahami argued that the rabbis who ruled on his wife’s case were short-sighted, giving too little weight to the fact that Jewish law requires Jews to violate other rules in order to save a life. Referring to that principle and pointing to the fact that transgender people are at increased risk of suicide, he said, “It was pikuach nefesh for the person to have the surgery.” His brother, he noted, survived two suicide attempts after coming out as trans.
“They really just don’t understand the harm that they caused when they make these decisions and put out these opinions,” Bradley Avrahami said. “A rabbi should not take a position knowing that that position will cause someone to want to harm themselves.”
Bradley Avrahami said he has received several harassing calls to his work number at Yeshiva University’s Azrieli Graduate School, where he is liaison for student enrollment and communications and taught Hebrew in the fall 2022 semester. Talia Avrahami, meanwhile, has struggled to find a job to replace the one she left under pressure in September, although she recently announced that she had landed a temporary position.
For now, they are attending another synagogue in Washington Heights, though Talia says she and her husband would consider returning to Shenk Shul if she were invited back and permitted to participate.
So far, there are no signs of that happening. On Jan. 1, after her meeting with Schachter, Talia sent a WhatsApp message to Kaminetzky.
“We elected you because you said you would stand up for LGBT people, not kick us out of shul,” she wrote.
The message went unanswered.
—
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At US Commission on Civil Rights hearing, Jewish students warn against politicizing campus antisemitism
(JTA) — Instead of practicing with her a capella group or preparing to lead Shabbat services, University of Maryland senior Tekoa Sultan-Reisler spent her Friday afternoon testifying about campus antisemitism in front of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
She shared that she had witnessed antisemitism at her school, and heard about it from other students in J Street U, the college division of the liberal pro-Israel lobby that she leads. But she was also very clear on another point: She did not want Jewish college students’ pain to be used for a political agenda.
“Jewish students do not want to be used as a pretext to justify this divisive and xenophobic action of the administration,” Sultan-Reisler said in her testimony. “Instead, protecting students’ right of free speech and expression would allow all students to feel safe on campus, regardless of faith or ethnicity.”
Sultan-Reisler and other students who testified similarly criticized the Trump administration’s decision to defund universities that did not comply with its terms for addressing antisemitism. They took the stand on Friday on the second day of a two-part hearing called by the civil rights commission in an independent investigation — the first — into how the federal government has responded to campus antisemitism.
The commission, which has the power to issue subpoenas, is appointed by Congress and the president and currently has a narrow Democratic majority. A bipartisan group of representatives requested the antisemitism investigation in 2024.
Friday’s session followed several tense exchanges on Thursday as commission members pressed those testifying — including representatives of antisemitism watchdogs StandWithUs and the Brandeis Center — on whether the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights should have its full funding back, and the costs and benefits of different government agencies’ own civil rights offices. They also made partisan jabs, with many accusing either the Biden or Trump administration of failing to protect Jewish students.
Craig Trainor, former acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education, criticized the Biden administration for its slow pace in resolving antisemitism discrimination complaints at universities.
“The Biden Education Department’s Offices for Civil Rights’ policy agenda was deeply unserious and counterproductive and its response to the antisemitic harassment and violence consuming America’s college campuses was weak and ineffective,” Trainor said.
Kevin Rachlin, vice president for government relations and Washington director of the The Nexus Project, meanwhile, lambasted the Trump administration’s attempt to shrink the Office of Civil Rights.
“By closing those offices, by removing those personnel, by reducing those resources you have effectively hobbled the very organization that is dedicated to protecting not just Jewish students but all students,” Rachlin said.
Like her peers who testified over the past two days, Sultan-Reisler recounted specific incidents of antisemitic intimidation. She recalled that in November 2023, the words “Holocaust 2.0” were written in chalk on the campus sidewalk, and during an on-campus demonstration, a student waved the flag of Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization. But said she didn’t think the Trump administration’s response to allegations of campus antisemitism had made her safer.
Among the other students testifying was Harvard University’s Tova Kaplan, who was one of 10 students to pen an op-ed last year arguing that Trump’s response to antisemitism had harmed research and academic freedom without helping Jewish students.
Others who testified, including many non-students and older adults, said they thought the Biden administration had been too reserved in tackling campus antisemitism and praised the Trump administration’s heavier-handed tactics.
“Despite the elimination of encampments and other results of the threat to withhold federal funding from schools which failed to protect Jewish students, the underlying hatred which gave rise to the encampments is alive and well and could explode again at any time,” said Leonard Gold, a retired attorney and the executive producer of “Blind Spot,” a documentary about campus antisemitism after Oct. 7.
Since 2025, the Trump administration has canceled billions of dollars in HHS research grants for universities like Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton in an effort to coerce universities to comply with demands like making hiring, admissions, and course material changes. Harvard University defended its handling of campus antisemitism and decided to reject those demands.
The commission is accepting written testimonials until March 20. The commission’s report is expected by the end of the 2026 fiscal year.
The final report could feature more information from within federal agencies. In one tense exchange, Mondaire Jones, a Democrat and former congressman from New York who is one of the investigation’s chairs, asked Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Greg Dolin why the justice department had not yet handed over documents the commission requested.
“You have a statutory obligation to comply,” Jones said. “That is very clear under federal law.”
The post At US Commission on Civil Rights hearing, Jewish students warn against politicizing campus antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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After 4 years of war, Ukraine’s Jews adapt to a life of sirens, shortages and uncertainty
(JTA) — KYIV, Ukraine — Viktoria Maksimovich’s students at the Sha’alavim Jewish Day School no longer run for shelters when air raid sirens sound.
“They don’t want to hear the alarms. They don’t care about the shots and bombs. They don’t care about it. This is the biggest problem right now, as they won’t look for a shelter,” she said in a virtual interview from her school in Kharkiv, Ukraine. “It’s like usual life for them, and a lot of them grew up like this during the war and don’t remember normal life.”
Indeed, the Russian invasion, which marks its fourth anniversary on Tuesday, has reshaped everything in the lives of Ukrainian Jews, from big choices about whether to stay or flee to the seemingly mundane decision about whether to take the elevator or the stairs when visiting high-rise buildings.
With Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure a near-daily occurrence, taking the elevator means risking being trapped for hours if the power goes out. Recognizing that the dilemma has trapped elderly Jews in their homes, Maksimovich and her colleagues recently organized a service day for their students, who baked challahs and hiked up many flights of stairs to deliver them to Kharkiv’s elderly Jews.
“They managed it and were so happy about it because they met those old people and saw in their eyes, ‘You are here and brought us challahs and candles for Shabbat,’” Maksimovich recalled. “It was amazing.”
The fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion arrives in grim fashion for Ukrainians, with the Russian and Ukrainian armies locked in a bloody stalemate and support from the United States and Europe increasingly uncertain. Ukrainian cities are regularly barraged with drones and missiles, not only exacting a devastating tally of civilian deaths and injuries but making it increasingly challenging for Ukrainian civilians to carry out the basic functioning of their lives.
The last four months have been particularly challenging due to power and water cuts that have left Ukrainians frigid and in the dark. Whereas during the first three years of war, especially in the metropolitan center of Kyiv, life went on largely as normal, albeit punctuated by attacks. Now, mobile “resilience hubs” offering warming and charging dot the landscape, and the sound of generators is overpowering.
For Ukraine’s Jews, the situation means that children are gathering in bomb shelters to light Shabbat candles, the elderly rely on intermittent aid deliveries, and everyone is hunkered down for the worst winter since the war began.
“When the full-scale invasion began, I did not think it would last two weeks, but here we are,” said Julia Goldenberg, founder of the Ukrainian Charitable Funds and partner of World Jewish Relief. “And I still do not think the war will be over even this year.”
Before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, there was a core Jewish population of 40,000 living in Ukraine. Since then, however, thousands have fled to Israel and Europe, reshaping hubs of Jewish life in the country. Now, with conditions worsening, even far from the front lines, Goldenberg expects even more to leave.
Many will be seeking security for their children, whose schooling and experiences have been peppered with trauma and interruption since even before the war. In-person schools had only resumed after a yearlong COVID closure for a semester before war broke out.
“Parents tell us of children who can’t sleep at night, children who react to all kinds of different sounds. It’s challenging to work with them,” said Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya, who is based in Tel Aviv and travels to Ukraine regularly to lead Masorti Kyiv, one of the country’s only Conservative congregations.
Jewish schools have borne a wide range of effects. Ariel Markovitch, director of the JCC in Kyiv, recounted how a Russian missile struck the Perlina school and kindergarten in Kyiv in October 2024, where refugees fleeing fighting on the front lines in Ukraine’s east had been sleeping.
Inna Federova, 55, the head of Ukraine’s oldest Jewish day school, Lyceum No. 299 or Orach Chaim, said missiles were only one challenge of many.
“It fractured our community,” she said about the war. “I am a Jewish mother first, and I wanted to be there for the kids, but I couldn’t be once they were scattered all over Europe.”
At least one of the school’s alumni, Igor Tish, was gravely injured while fighting on the frontline, while the Israeli teachers who taught Hebrew and other subjects have not returned since being evacuated in the days before the Russian invasion. Instruction is more rudimentary now, Federova said.
“We have a physical education teacher who does exercises with the children in the shelter, because it’s very hard for them to sit still for so long without moving,” she said, adding: “They’ve lived through bombings, evacuations, constant anxiety. Our teachers received special training from psychologists, including Israeli specialists, on how to support children emotionally during wartime.”
Other support for Jews in Ukraine has come from the Joint Distribution Committee, which leads disaster response for Jewish communities living in conflict zones around the world ; Chabad, the global Jewish network whose emissaries are at the front line of Jewish life in many smaller communities; and Goldenberg’s group, which works to preserve Jewish life and welfare in Ukraine.
Sustained by a network of global donors, the Ukrainian Charitable Funds has helped elderly Jewish Ukrainians repair their homes after Russian airstrikes. Goldenberg recalled one woman she worked with: “She had no windows. She lost all of them in a Russian strike, but did not have the funds to fix them.”
While the advent of war in Israel in 2023 spurred concerns about whether Jewish donors would continue to send support to Ukraine, Gritsevskaya said aid from both inside and outside had made a difference.
“I think in the Jewish community, there is a huge sense of being hugged,” she said, adding, “Ukraine is an amazing example of the ability of Jews to unite and to help others in unbelievable situations. In general, I think that people who are connected to Jewish communities are more capable of going through the difficult things they go through because they have the wider Jewish world.”
Even as she gears up for a potential war in Israel, Gritsevskaya is planning on heading back to Ukraine this summer for another session of Ramah Ukraine, a camp that has already filled with Ukrainian Jewish teens eager for a respite from the challenges of war.
“I would rather not think of the fears I have,” she said. “They are so overwhelming, we have to focus on what must be done.”
Federova, too, said she continues to focus on the positives as she and her students start a fifth year of war.
“We have children from different backgrounds, some from observant families, some who are just discovering their roots, and the school gives them that connection,” Federova said about Orach Chaim. “Even during the hardest times when the alarms go off and when we don’t know what will happen tomorrow, I look at them and think ‘if we can give them knowledge and faith, then we have done something important.”
This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.
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Anti-Zionist ‘Catholics for Catholics’ Group to Honor Carrie Prejean Boller at Event Featuring Candace Owens
Carrie Prejean Boller, who was ousted from the White House Religious Liberty Commission in February 2026 following outrage over her repeated downplaying of antisemitism. Photo: Screenshot
Right-wing, anti-Zionist activist Carrie Prejean Boller, who was recently removed from the White House Religious Liberty Commission over her conduct and repeated downplaying of antisemitism, will receive a “Catholic Champion” award next month at a gala organized by Catholics for Catholics, a group which urges Catholics to reject Zionism and promote American nationalism.
Prejean Boller’s behavior at a Feb. 9 commission hearing intended to address rising antisemitism in the United States included an impassioned defense of antisemitic personalities Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, as well as her peddling of unsubstantiated claims that Israel has intentionally starved and murdered Palestinian civilians.
“I would really appreciate it if you would stop calling Candace Owens an antisemite,” Prejean Boller said to Seth Dillon, CEO of the political satire site Babylon Bee, during the hearing. “She’s not an antisemite. She just doesn’t support Zionism, and that really has to stop. I don’t know why you keep bringing her up, and Tucker.”
In January, Owens blamed Zionists for directing US President Donald Trump’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and chose to repost rapper Ye (former Kanye West)’s “Death Con 3 on Jewish People” tweet from 2022, praising the sentiment as a “whole vibe.” She has labeled Jews as “pedophilic,” accused them of murdering Christians, and blamed them for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in addition to making comments casting doubt on the Holocaust. In November, Owens admitted she had grown obsessed with the Jewish people.
During the hearing earlier this month, Prejean Boller, a former Miss California, also pressed witnesses, including Jewish religious leaders, on Israel and Zionism, questioning whether opposition to the Jewish state should be considered antisemitic, and castigated Israeli military action in Gaza. She donned a Palestinian flag pin on the lapel of her suit. Prejean Boller’s conduct drew audible boos from the audience and confusion from her colleagues, as well as widespread backlash online.
The next day, Prejean Boller posted on X defending herself, writing, “I will continue to stand against Zionist supremacy in America. I’m a proud Catholic. I, in no way will be forced to embrace Zionism as a fulfillment of biblical prophesy [sic]. I am a free American. Not a slave to a foreign nation.”
The commission was established by US President Donald Trump to examine religious freedom issues and was intended to focus on concrete challenges facing Jewish communities, including bias and harassment. It is supposed to produce a report for Trump on religious liberty later this year.
Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas and chair of the commission, announced Prejean Boller’s expulsion from the panel on Feb. 11, saying she “hijacked” the hearing for her “own personal and political agenda.”
Then John Yep, president of Catholics for Catholics, announced on Feb. 12 that Prejean Boller would receive his group’s “Catholic Champion” award at its upcoming March 19 Catholic Prayer for America Gala in Washington, DC. Speakers announced for the event include Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Owens, her former Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh, Father Chris Alar, Sister Dede Byrne, and Yep himself.
“Politics is always downstream from religion. While Catholics acknowledge that the modern 1948-State of Israel has a NATURAL right to exist, pushing a false ‘Biblical Mandate’ to support its domination of the entire Holy Land is neither Catholic, nor in America’s interests,” Yep stated. “Tragically, this theological error has often been used to justify both, horrific crimes against our Christian Palestinian brethren, and catastrophic foreign policy decisions by American leaders.”
Yep insists that his group only opposes Zionism and does not promote antisemitism.
“Of course as Catholics, antisemitism — hatred of Jews — is wrong,” Yep wrote. “But so is equivocating resisting ‘Zionism’ with hatred of Jews. This is what my fellow Catholic Carrie Prejean so boldly stood for on the panel for Religious Liberty.”
Yep frames his group’s purpose as defending Catholics for expressing their faith publicly. “When one of our own is out there bravely trying to stand up for what is right and is getting attacked, rest assured we won’t sit back,” he said. “We are a movement of faithful patriots that back frontline warriors like Carrie, who love God and the USA with the power of our Catholic faith.”
Simone Rizkallah, the director of the Coalition of Catholics Against Antisemitism, pushed back against Yep’s plans in a statement to the Christian Post calling Prejean Boller’s actions “inappropriate behavior that warranted her removal, as Lt. Gov. Patrick rightly determined.”
Rizkallah said that Prejean Boller “should not be rewarded for such conduct, nor should it be held up as a model of Catholic witness.”
“The violence against our Jewish friends that American Catholics have witnessed on American soil in the last few years should be enough to disturb us,” she added. “At the very least, it should alert us to the tone-deafness — if not outright malice — of Miss Prejean’s behavior and the scandal of celebrating it.”
After acknowledging that the Catholic Church disagreed theologically with Christian Zionists who come from an Evangelical tradition which regards the state of Israel through the lens of fulfilling Biblical prophecy, Rizkallah said that “while the Catholic Church does not embrace prophetic or eschatological forms of Christian Zionism, Catholic theology does leave room for distinctly Catholic theological reflection that affirms the enduring covenantal significance of the Jewish people and the moral legitimacy of Jewish self-determination in their historic homeland.”
Last month, Pope Leo XIV marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a statement reaffirming the Catholic Church’s “unwavering” opposition to antisemitism. He also concluded with a link to Nostra Aetate, a declaration from the Second Vatican Council and promulgated on Oct. 28, 1965, by Pope Paul VI, that called for dialogue and respect between Christianity and other religions. The theological reform called for a position of Christian-Jewish brotherhood, advocating “the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham’s stock.”
Leo has made speaking out against rising antisemitism a topic of regular concern since his papacy began last year.
Catholics for Catholics, founded in 2022, describes itself as “a militant organization dedicated to the evangelization of this great country through public prayer, powerful media, and strategic political action. We’re warriors who love Christ, our Lady, and the USA.”
The group’s logo is a shield with the Virgin Mary in the foreground and a 1776 American flag in the background. It has received an endorsement from Trump who said “your love of God and Country is evident in everything you do. We admire your dedication to preserving America’s founding principles through your faith.”
In a statement, Catholics for Catholics claimed that Zionism “has too often warped the minds of Christians about their own faith, and deadened their hearts to the plight of their brethren in the Middle East.” The group said that Catholics were being intimidated to “speak about the 1948 State of Israel in a way they speak about no other nation. And if we don’t comply with their demands, they’ll slander us as ‘Antisemites.’”
On Feb. 10, Yep wrote on X that “if an American thinks it’s bad to have blind support for the Country of the VATICAN …for example send billions of tax pay dollars to them..or other things…We Catholics dont consider you ‘anti-catholic.’ We humbly ask you in return not to use your religion to make us blindly support a foreign nation and call us ‘anti semitic” if we dont. Thank you [sic]!”