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For Josh Shapiro, a run for governor borne of Jewish identity and political ambition
(JTA) — On the day before he was set to be sworn in as Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro had somewhere important to be: the Jewish community center in the state capital of Harrisburg.
Shapiro and his family spent Monday volunteering at the Alexander Grass Campus for Jewish Life, which was hosting a Martin Luther King Day celebration for the region.
It was an erev-inauguration stop that made sense for Shapiro, elected in November over a Republican whose campaign was continually mired in antisemitism allegations. From his stint as Pennsylvania’s attorney general to his gubernatorial campaign ads to his victory speech, Shapiro has long woven his Jewish identity into his politics — making him an archetype for a new breed of Jewish politician.
“They seem above politics because they exude pride,” said Scott Lasensky, a professor of American Jewish studies at the University of Maryland, about Shapiro and other Jewish politicians who demonstrate comfort with their identity. “It offers a much-needed respite from the reactive, defense posture that has seized the community.”
As Shapiro is sworn in Tuesday on a stack of three Hebrew Bibles — including the one that was on the bimah when a gunman massacred 11 Jewish worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 — the novelty becomes reality: A Jewish day school grad and dad is now one of the most influential elected officials in the United States.
“You’ve heard me quote my scripture before, that no one is required to complete the task, but neither are we free to refrain from it, meaning each of us has a responsibility to get off the sidelines, to get in the game and to do our part,” Shapiro said in his victory speech in November, referring to the famous passage in Pirkei Avot, the compilation of ethical teachings excerpted from early Jewish writings.
It’s a speech that Shapiro’s friends, teachers and associates could have envisioned decades ago. In interviews with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, nearly a dozen of them said Shapiro, 49, has openly melded Jewishness and activism since his early teens, practicing a politics of bringing together disparate communities with his Jewish identity at the core.
“He gets done what he needs to get done, what he wants to get done,” said Robin Schatz, the director of government affairs at the Jewish Federations of Greater Philadelphia. “And it is always in that framework of Jewish values.”
Schatz contrasted Shapiro’s openness about his Jewish identity with one of his Jewish predecessors as governor, Ed Rendell, for whom Schatz worked when Rendell was mayor of Philadelphia.
“Josh shows up for us just by being so proudly Jewish and that is really something because Rendell, who I worked for and who I love, I mean, he never hid his Jewishness, but he didn’t wear it on his sleeve,” she said.
Perhaps Shapiro’s most direct antecedent is Joe Lieberman, the Orthodox former Connecticut senator who was Al Gore’s vice presidential running mate in 2000. Lieberman, the first Jew on a major-party presidential ticket, recalled being ridiculed and questioned by Jewish groups for expressing his faith at campaign events.
That hasn’t happened for Shapiro, who is part of a relatively younger generation including congresspersons Elaine Luria of Virginia and Becca Balint of Vermont who express unabashed Jewish identities when campaigning among the broader public. Luria and two others just left Congress: Andy Levin of Michigan, who was defeated in last year’s primary after redistricting, and Ted Deutch, a Florida Democrat who last year made the transition this year to leading the American Jewish Committee. None of them wears a kippah on the campaign trail or strictly observes Shabbat, as Lieberman did, but all infuse Jewishness in their public comments and personas.
What separates Shapiro is his outsized success in a competitive race in a swing state — a record that has insiders bandying about his name as a potential presidential candidate one day.
Shapiro’s political orientation was apparent early on. Fresh out of his bar mitzvah, a 13-year-old Shapiro looked forward to his chats with Mark Aronchick, who was a leader with Josh’s parents, Steven and Judi, in the movement for Soviet Jewry in the Philadelphia area.
Shapiro centered his bar mitzvah on a letter-writing campaign to free a refusenik, a Jew whose intended emigration was blocked by the USSR’s cruel bureaucracy, and he liked to ask Aronchick about the movement, about organizing activism. But then the conversations took a turn Aronchick didn’t expect. Josh wanted to know about running a big city.
“I had been the chief lawyer for the city of Philadelphia in the early 80s,” recalled Aronchick, who became a mentor to Shapiro. “He was fascinated when we talked about that.”
In an interview last year with the Forward, after a campaign event with union organizers, Shapiro said he understood organizing as an effective tool when he was 6 and he joined his parents in campaigning for the release of Jews in the Soviet Union. (The refusenik who was the focus of Shapiro’s bar mitzvah activism, made it out in time to attend Shapiro’s bar mitzvah, which earned Shapiro Philadelphia news coverage.) Shapiro’s parents “set a very good example for me to live a life of faith and service,” he said.
From left: Then-Democratic candidate for U.S. Senator John Fetterman, former President Barack Obama, Josh Shapiro and President Joe Biden at a rally at the Liacouras Center in Philadelphia, Nov. 5, 2022. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)
Sharon Levin taught Shapiro government at Akiba Hebrew Academy (now called Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy) and said he stood apart at an age when boys interested in politics tend to flex their intellectual muscles through outspoken opinions and grandstanding.
“This was a pretty difficult group of kids, I don’t mean problematic, but kids who like to argue, to debate every point,” she said. “And Josh believes in cooperation, I think of him in those days as a team-builder.”
Todd Eisenberg, now a Montgomery County judge, recalled playing basketball with Shapiro for the high school team.
“He was the point guard so he was always the leader of everything,” Eisenberg said. “And he would always try to get everybody involved and make everybody feel like they’re a part of the process.”
Eisenberg was impressed by Shapiro’s leadership but not surprised — Shapiro had been pulling together kids from across the playground since first grade, when they first met.
“You know how kids are in cliques or they’re picking on other kids, he was never like that,” he said. “He was always nice to everybody involved in everything.”
In high school, Eisenberg said, Shapiro organized a chapter of Students Against Drunk Driving. “I remember him standing up for everybody and being a part of everything,” he said.
Shapiro ran for student president and lost, to classmate Ami Eden (who is now CEO of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s parent company, 70 Faces Media). Shapiro has for decades told people it was the only race he lost.
Levin, his government teacher at Akiba, said Shapiro had a realistic assessment of his skills and what he needed to do to succeed. He went to the University of Rochester, qualifying for the Division III basketball team, but soon realized that excellence on the Akiba court was mediocrity in an NCAA setting, she recalled.
“So he said, ‘my fallback from school was government,’ and he was the first sophomore ever to be student president at the University of Rochester,” she said. “I knocked on every door,” Shapiro recalled to Philadelphia Magazine in 2007.
From Rochester, he moved to a series of legislative aide positions in the 1990s on Capitol Hill, working for Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Hoeffel and New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli. His bosses remember a guy in his early 20s who was soon supervising staffers, and his colleagues recall not minding. Shapiro was pleasant, they say, but clearly on a track for greater things.
“No one ever worked for me who was as bright and focused, with such steely determination,” Torricelli told The Philadelphia Inquirer last year.
By the time he was 31, in 2004, Shapiro was running for his first elected position as a Pennsylvania state representative. He ran against Jon Fox, a Jewish Republican who had been a congressman. Shapiro impressed people in the district with his lowkey straightforwardness, said Betsy Sheerr, a Jewish lay leader and a Democrat who was friendly with both candidates, and that provided a contrast with Fox, who would shift his positions depending on the listener.
“We used to joke that John Fox was multiple choice, you know that one day he was pro-choice and the next day he wasn’t,” Sheerr recalled. “With Josh, there never has been any confusion about where he stands on things.”
Within two years, Shapiro rose to statewide prominence when he brokered a deal to break a deadlock in the state house, where Democrats had a one-seat majority. Under Shapiro’s plan, Democrats would back a moderate Republican, Denny O’Brien, to keep the scandal-plagued incumbent speaker, Republican John Perzel, from reelection. As soon as he got the job, O’Brien named Shapiro deputy speaker.
Shapiro’s backers cite the now-legendary episode as a sign of Shapiro’s leadership; his detractors say it is a signal of his self-promotion and gamesmanship. In 2008, Shapiro turned on a one-time mentor, Democratic state Rep. Bill DeWeese, saying he should step down from the party leadership because of corruption investigations. (DeWeese and Perzel both ended up serving time in prison.)
Schatz said Shapiro remained sensitive to the issues affecting the Jewish community, helping expand Medicare assistance for the elderly, instituting Holocaust education and targeting terrorist-backing countries like Iran for sanctions.
A moderate Democrat, he also stood out for breaking with the establishment. Aronchick recalled Shapiro in 2004 seeking the endorsement of Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who was then a standard bearer for progressives.
“Josh is a consensus builder,” he said. “Others might think, ‘Do I look too progressive?’ It wasn’t a thought on Josh’s mind.”
In 2008, Shapiro was among just a handful of establishment Democrats who endorsed Barack Obama for president in a state that Hillary Clinton won in the primaries. Shapiro defended Obama when his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, came under fire for antisemitic comments.
Obama did well enough in the state, Shapiro told JTA at the time, that he believed he would do well nationally. “I think that demonstrates that the hype that Senator Obama had a problem with the Jewish community was just that — it was hype. It was not reality.” He would be proved right.
The Democratic machine killed off the “deputy speaker” title in 2009, leading the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent to muse, “The Once-Lofty Shapiro; Has He Been Brought Down a Few Pegs?”
But Matt Handel, a onetime Republican activist who left the party after Donald Trump was elected president, said that while Shapiro made enemies in the statehouse, he never let it get to him.
“He can be angry about things, you know, he can find them offensive. But if you watch him speak, he maintains control of what he says and how he responds,” said Handel, who interacted with Shapiro when Handel chaired the Pennsylvania Jewish Coalition, a statewide advocacy body.
Shapiro soon was looking elsewhere: He ran for and won a spot on the three-member Montgomery County Board of Commissioners, where he was elected chairman, effectively the mayor of the populous and prosperous suburban Philadelphia area.
Levin, his high school teacher, recalled a call Shapiro made when he was considering a run for the U.S. Senate.
“What he said was, if, if I end up going to Washington, I’m gonna do a Biden, you know, back and forth on the train, because it’s so important for my kids to remain at the school where I went to school.” A while later he called back.
He said, “You know, I’m not a legislator. I’m an executive.” (Levin remains close to Shapiro and his family; last fall, she ran into Shapiro and his daughter Sophia, who led student outreach during his campaign, at an airport in San Antonio. “Look who I saw!” she said in an email, photos of hugs attached.)
In 2016, Shapiro was elected Pennsylvania attorney general. He led battles against Trump’s efforts to limit entry to the United States of people from a number of Muslim-majority countries, and to keep Trump acolytes from overturning his 2020 loss in the state. He also led a widely publicized investigation of child abuse in the Roman Catholic church.
Shapiro’s gubernatorial campaign launch last April was an ad in which he declared, “I make it home Friday nights for Sabbath dinner,” while the camera closed on challahs. (It also stars his four kids and his wife, Lori, whom he refers to as his “high school sweetheart.”)
Josh Shapiro embraces his wife, Lori Shapiro, on stage after giving a victory speech to supporters at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, Penn., Nov. 8 2022. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)
Shapiro’s ultimate victory was especially sweet to many Jews because he defeated a Republican, Doug Mastriano, who had centered Shapiro’s Jewishness, but not in a positive way. Mastriano had allied with an outspoken antisemite, Andrew Torba, the founder of the far-right social media site, Gab, paying for promotion on Gab and accepting a donation from Torba. (Mastriano renounced antisemitism, but pointedly, not Torba.) Mastriano also mocked the Jewish school Shapiro attended and where he sends his four children.
It is a source of delight to Shapiro and his backers that his open Jewish identity did not alienate Pennsylvanians; indeed, he fared well in the conservative center of the state, a fact that his campaign boasted about in an email sent to the media a week after the election, when most campaigns are wrapping up business.
“Josh Shapiro won Beaver, Berks, Cumberland, and Luzerne counties — significantly outperforming Joe Biden’s margins in 2020 and flipping those counties blue,” the campaign said, attaching a chart showing the flips. “From the very beginning of his campaign, Josh vowed to go everywhere. That meant campaigning heavily where other Democrats don’t often win and investing in communities across the state.”
Jill Zipin, a longtime Shapiro backer who leads Democratic Jewish Outreach Pennsylvania, said Mastriano’s Christian nationalism did not play well in a state that was founded on religious freedoms. “Pennsylvania was founded on religious pluralism, it was founded by Quakers,” she said. “Anyone of any religious stripe was welcome.”
Mastriano’s team, toward the end of the campaign, appeared to notice the resonance Shapiro’s beliefs had among Pennsylvanians. His surrogates pivoted to claiming Shapiro was not a genuine Jew, with one consultant saying Shapiro’s defense of abortion rights made him inauthentic, and Mastriano’s wife claiming she and her husband loved Israel more than Jews did.
The moves may have backfired, said Schatz. Shapiro’s Jewish expression, she said, “was a way of actually relating to religious conservatives. They say that ‘maybe he doesn’t follow our religion, but because he does have a belief, he’s a religious person.’”
In a sign of his polish with Pennsylvanians, Shapiro’s margin of victory was substantially wider than that of John Fetterman, the Democrat elected to the state’s open Senate spot.
“While we won this race — and by the way, we won it pretty convincingly — I want you to know, the job is not done, the task is not complete,” Shapiro said during his victory speech, prompting 15 seconds of cheers and applause.
Shapiro has stayed largely out of the public eye since his election, instead focusing on putting together a transition team and preparing for his inauguration on Tuesday. He did not respond to JTA’s requests for an interview.
That transition team bears signs of Shapiro’s long and deep Jewish ties. Marcel Groen, a retired attorney on the economic development advisory committee, first met the new governor because he attended synagogue with Shapiro’s father. He became a mentor to the inchoate politician, who several years ago recruited Groen’s mother, a Holocaust survivor, to speak to incarcerated teens.
During the encounter, which Groen and Shapiro did not make public at the time, the teens went from standoffish to hugging 93-year-old Sipora Groen after hearing her story. (Sipora died in 2017.) It was, Groen said, typical of Shapiro’s approach to changing hearts and minds: “Josh realized that’s how you reach kids who got in trouble and who needed to understand life in a different manner,” he recalled.
Shapiro’s plans for his inauguration are laced with Jewish significance. In addition to the Tanakh from the Tree of Life synagogue, his swearing-in will reportedly take place on a Bible used by a Jewish soldier from Pennsylvania in World War II.
But asked by CNN’s Dana Bash after the election if he wanted to make history as America’s first Jewish president, Shapiro demurred.
“I have an ambition to get a little bit of sleep, to reintroduce myself to my kids, and then to serve the good people of Pennsylvania as their governor,” he said.
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The post For Josh Shapiro, a run for governor borne of Jewish identity and political ambition appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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ICE targets an anti-Israel protester — this time, a Hasidic Jew
(JTA) — Yehonatan Ovadia, an Orthodox Jew from the anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic sect, has joined a number of protests around New York and New Jersey against Israel.
Now, he’s at risk of being deported there.
Ovadia, 35, is originally from Israel and moved to the U.S. on a temporary religious worker visa in 2022, according to the text of a lawsuit requesting Ovadia’s release. His legal status in the U.S. was revoked earlier this year in connection with a November 2023 protest that he attended during which an Israeli flag was taken down from the town hall of Ramapo, New York. Ovadia said he was there but did not tear down the flag, and hate crimes charges against him were dropped.
But after a request to extend his stay in the United States was denied on the grounds of that protest, according to government documents shared with JTA, Ovadia was detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in August, and remains in ICE custody in New York.
“In violation of our nation’s laws, he overstayed his welcome and refused to depart,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “He will receive due process and remain in ICE custody pending the outcome of his immigration proceedings.”
ICE’s nationwide surge affected the area’s Jewish community earlier this year when the agency detained Ari Ladino, a Jewish bridal shop owner in Teaneck, New Jersey, and his mother. Both are originally from Bogota, Colombia.
Ovadia’s arrest by ICE comes as President Donald Trump’s administration has cracked down on pro-Palestinian activism, including with last year’s high-profile detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent pro-Palestinian protest leader at Columbia University. The administration has accused Khalil and other pro-Palestinian activists and campus protesters of antisemitism.
Such an accusation would be particularly fraught against Ovadia, who is Jewish and holds anti-Israel views for religious reasons. Satmar Jews believe that a state of Israel cannot be established before the arrival of the Messiah.
In a lawsuit filed in August requesting Ovadia’s release, his lawyers argued that the Trump administration was penalizing him for protected speech motivated by religious beliefs. The government took “an official position,” Ovadia’s lawyers wrote, by preferring “one religious position within Judaism and [penalizing] an adherent of another.”
Unlike many Satmar Jews, who oppose Israel but are not active in political pro-Palestinian spaces, Ovadia has protested against Israel a number of times, including alongside members of the pro-Palestinian Hasidic group Neturei Karta.
His lawyer, Eric Lee, shared a statement from Ovadia on Wednesday after The New York Times broke the story of his detention: “From the Jewish people to our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank and all over occupied Palestine! We didn’t forget from you! We are following you and we know that you are facing genocide! Please be strong and continue to believe!
“We know that the Zionist criminal war machine [is] torturing you every day and they want to silence you!” Ovadia said in his statement. “BUT we will be your voice! We will SHOUT AND DEMONSTRATE for you from New York, Washington, Canada, London and from every place that we can be free in the world!”
Chris Godshall-Bennet, another lawyer representing Ovadia, told JTA that the timeline on his client’s possible deportation is unclear, but the government designated Israel as “the location to which they would try to deport him” during a hearing on Wednesday morning.
Ovadia was one of two Hasidic men arrested in 2023 after a larger group protested outside Ramapo’s town hall, where an Israeli flag had been mounted a month earlier, shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. Surveillance footage showed at least four men removing the flag and then cutting it up with scissors, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s notice of denial to Ovadia. He denied having any role in removing the Israeli flag or knowing ahead of time that his companions would do so.
He was arrested and charged with criminal mischief, petit larceny and conspiracy, all as hate crimes. The hate crime charges were dropped and in February 2024 he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, according to his lawsuit, resulting in a $200 fine plus an additional $125 charge.
“I said, ‘You know, I don’t have power, I’m out of money, I have no time, I am a teacher, I need to teach students every day,’” he told the Times. “‘Let’s end this with disorderly conduct.’”
With his religious worker visa set to expire in November 2025, Ovadia applied for a new visa in September, sponsored by Congregation Bnai Yoel in New York’s Orange County, according to USCIS denial notice. USCIS did not deny the request for the work visa, and said that Ovadia was not found to be “inadmissible” for a “conviction or commission of a crime involving moral turpitude.” But the federal agency did not approve the request either, and denied Ovadia an “extension of stay” in the country “as a matter of discretion,” citing the 2023 protest; without an extension of stay, Ovadia had no legal status in the U.S. following his visa’s November expiration.
The DHS said that it is “a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live in the United States of America.”
“The Trump Administration acted well within its statutory and constitutional authority, as it does with any alien who advocates for violence, glorifies and supports terrorists, harasses Jews, and steals property,” DHS wrote.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ICE targets an anti-Israel protester — this time, a Hasidic Jew appeared first on The Forward.
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French far-right leader accused of antisemitism, defended by Israeli minister
(JTA) — A French far-right leader is battling antisemitism allegations days after his party made historic gains in the country’s Senate elections — and an Israeli cabinet minister has come to his defense.
Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s nationalist, anti-immigration National Rally, came under fire this week for accusations that he made antisemitic remarks in private messages.
The controversy arose after the National Rally, whose leaders have sought to distance the party from the antisemitic roots of its founders, jumped to at least 14 seats in the French Senate elections on Sunday. The results meant the party and its allies surpassed the 10-seat threshold to form a parliamentary group in the upper house for the first time.
The Senate will remain controlled by a traditional conservative and center-right alliance, though that bloc lost several seats. The National Rally’s progress will give it more funding and better representation in leadership roles and committees.
Mediapart, a left-leaning French investigative outlet, reported on Monday that Bardella years ago allegedly sent antisemitic statements, including messages that said “all the banks are owned by Jews” and “the Jew must dominated (sic) other peoples, crush them and rob them, a Zionist is necessarily and profoundly Jewish.”
The messages were allegedly sent between 2013 and 2015, during Bardella’s early years in the party, then called the National Front. He joined the party in 2012 at age 16.
Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, who invited Bardella to a Jerusalem conference on antisemitism in 2025, defended him against the allegations. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he knows Bardella personally and that they are in regular contact.
Even if the quotes attributed to Bardella were authenticated, Chikli said, “a man is not sealed at 17. What matters is the 15 years that followed, and the man he became.”
Chikli referenced Bardella’s visit to the sites where Hamas killed Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. He said that Bardella spoke in Jerusalem “against antisemitism and against anti-Zionism” and opposed President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state.
“No one will convince me that Jordan Bardella hates the Jewish people or the Jewish state,” said Chikli. “Just as no one will convince me that Emmanuel Macron respects them.”
Mediapart, which has a history of exposing political scandals, said it independently authenticated Bardella’s alleged conversations and drew them from a larger base of evidence corroborated by witness accounts. JTA has not independently verified the messages.
Bardella said on X that the alleged conversations were “blatant falsehoods” designed to undermine the National Rally ahead of France’s presidential election in April 2027. Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s presidential candidate, is polling in first place as Macron prepares to step down because of term limits.
Mediapart, which has a history of exposing political scandals, said it independently authenticated Bardella’s alleged conversations and drew them from a larger base of evidence corroborated by witness accounts. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has not independently verified the messages.
Bardella said on X that the alleged conversations were “blatant falsehoods” designed to undermine the National Rally ahead of France’s presidential election in April 2027. Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s presidential candidate, is polling in first place as Emmanuel Macron prepares to step down because of term limits. Le Pen and Bardella have led the National Rally as a duo, and Bardella was set to be the party’s candidate until a July court ruling, which upheld criminal financial charges against Le Pen while also lifting a ban on her seeking public office. She has said she would name Bardella prime minister if she wins.
Bardella also said at a parliamentary meeting on Tuesday that he plans to take legal action against Mediapart, including possible complaints for forgery and forged documents, and accused the outlet of waging “total war” against his party. Le Pen, sitting next to Bardella, said that she had “absolute confidence” in him.
Israel’s Chikli said on social media that he and Bardella had common enemies. “Like the leftists in Israel, the leftists in France are experts at character assassination,” he said in his post, sharing a photo of himself shaking hands with Bardella at the Nova massacre site.
Chikli has cultivated ties between the Israeli government and European far-right parties, including others that have been criticized for histories of antisemitic and neo-Nazi figures in their ranks, such as Vox in Spain and the Sweden Democrats in Sweden.
Bardella, the National Rally and Chikli did not immediately respond to JTA requests for comment.
Chikli and Bardella both also accused Mediapart of a left-wing agenda. They each noted that the outlet’s co-founder, Edy Plenel, expressed sympathy in 1972 for the Palestinian militant group Black September, which killed 11 Israelis in a terrorist attack at the Munich Olympic Games that year. Plenel later disavowed those comments, which he said he made when he was 20.
Michel Wieviorka, a Jewish French sociologist who researches racism and extremism, told JTA that the antisemitism allegations strike at the heart of the National Rally’s aim to prove their “respectability.”
Le Pen has sought for over a decade to detoxify the party’s image. In 2015, she expelled from the party her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, a co-founder of the National Rally in 1972 who was repeatedly convicted of hate speech and Holocaust denial. Another founder and early leader of the party was Pierre Bousquet, who formerly served in the Nazi Waffen-SS.
Today, support for Israel has become key to the National Rally’s avowed renunciation of its antisemitic past.
“The strategy of [Bardella’s] party is to appear as the best friend of Jews, and Israel,” said Wieviorka.
Bardella invoked his visit to Israel in his denial of the alleged antisemitic messages.
“Since I began my political engagement, I have never had any ambiguity on the subject of the fight against antisemitism, to the point of being received, in 2025, by the Israeli government,” he said on X.
Meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on X that the accusations against Bardella revealed “the true face of the far right.”
“To all those with short memories: antisemitism is not a slip-up for the [National Rally], it is the history of this party,” said Barrot.
The post French far-right leader accused of antisemitism, defended by Israeli minister appeared first on The Forward.
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In a time of uncertainty, European Jews renovate synagogues and dedicate Torah scrolls
(JTA) —
Getting a “200-year-old lady” ready for a major debut is quite a task. But in Vienna, the Jewish community’s historic main synagogue made it just in time for the Jewish New Year.
The “lady” — Vienna’s stately Stadttempel synagogue, or City Temple — has been rededicated after more than a year of top-to-bottom renovations, from floors to windows, to the heating and cooling systems, from safety features to restroom facilities. The job cost more than 10 million euros, or $11.3 million.
The synagogue was “still beautiful but has its signs of age,” Rabbi Jaron Engelmayer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a phone interview. “And it wasn’t adequate for some matters of today.”
“The whole concept was sticking to what it was and still is, but it has a new face,” said Engelmayer, who has been chief rabbi of Vienna’s Jewish community since 2020. The Orthodox congregation also inaugurated a new Torah scroll in ceremonies Sept. 15. Parts of it incorporated earlier manuscripts “written in the old synagogue of the Middle Ages in Vienna,” making it a bridge to history, he said.
Large and small, Jewish communities in Europe are marking the season of renewal in concrete ways at a time of uncertainty seeded by antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. In Budapest, the historic Rákospalota synagogue — used as a library warehouse for decades — recently held its first service in its renovated premises. And a 15-member Jewish prayer group in Leipzig has welcomed its first Torah scroll, on a 99-year loan.
All are looking to the future, whether fixing a hole in the roof or dedicating a holy book.
“Jews by definition have to be optimistic,” said Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, head of the Munich-based Conference of European Rabbis, which represents some 800 Orthodox Jewish communities.
“They have no other choice. And having said that, if in the past there was a tendency to say, ‘okay, the situation is bad over here, let’s go somewhere else,’ today, wherever you look, the situation is not good,” he said.
Taking action is more constructive than regretting current circumstances, said Rabbi Elisa Klapheck, head of Germany’s non-Orthodox General Rabbinical Assembly, which has 45 member rabbis. “We can lament antisemitism, we can lament attacks on Jewish communities, but that doesn’t help us,” she said. “So I think on a smaller scale, but maybe a much more resilient scale, the chagim [holidays] have shown that there was a positive atmosphere.”
Ruth Ellen Gruber, developer of the Jewish Heritage Europe portal, a project of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, expressed amazement at the pace of the rehabilitations.
“Despite increasing incidents of antisemitism, there are so many synagogue restoration projects that I cannot keep up,” said Gruber. Whether maintenance or preservation, all are “sign[s] of resilience among Jewish communities, volunteers, researchers, NGOs, civic bodies, and others,” she said in an email to JTA.
Examples include the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue in Constanta, Romania; the grand synagogue in Metz, France; the domed synagogue in Trencin, Slovakia; the Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Larissa, Greece; and the historic Yanbol synagogue in Istanbul.
“Some will serve as museums or cultural centers that usually house Jewish heritage exhibitions; others will serve as venues for both Jewish worship and cultural events,” she said.
In Leipzig, Rabbi Esther Jonas-Maerten doesn’t actually have a synagogue building for her Beth Ez Chaim “Lehrhaus,” a study group that meets in private homes. But she now has a Torah scroll for participants in the program, which is open to all who wish to learn more about Judaism.
The scroll, on a 99-year-loan from the Kehilat Shalom synagogue in Gaithersburg, Maryland, will be formally dedicated in ceremonies on Oct. 4. “That will be the first public event with our new Torah,” Jonas-Maerten, a Conservative rabbi, told JTA in a phone interview.
After a long and fruitless search for a scroll her group could afford, she asked Washington, D.C.-based Rabbi Lauren Tuchman to share her appeal: “I wrote a letter basically saying, ‘Most wanted! A sefer Torah!” Jonas-Maerten recalled. “Within two weeks, I got a response.”
The U.S.-Europe connection has been a fruitful one, when it comes to Torahs.
Last year, the Conservative congregation Ki Tov in Warsaw received the gift of a scroll from New Jersey sister congregation B’nai Sholom/Fair Lawn Jewish Center. The scroll, originally from Europe, was donated in memory of Holocaust survivors.
The independent Berlin-Brandenburg congregation Ohel Hachidush received its first scroll in 2008 from Shir Tikvah in Troy, Michigan, and purchased a second scroll in 2024 from retiring Rabbi Moshe Halfon of Mount Sinai Synagogue in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Both needed repair, especially the first one, Cantor Jalda Rebling, a Jewish Renewal movement ordainee who co-founded Ohel Hachidush with Anna Adam, told JTA.
“Its brokenness is also a symbol, I always say, for our Jewish history here in Europe,” said Rebling, “because all our Jewish lives are broken, and we all love this Torah.”
Vienna’s Jewish community currently has about 12,000 members. Before World War II, it numbered close to 200,000, according to the community’s website. Many fled, and about 47,000 Austrian Jews, most of them from Vienna, were murdered in the Holocaust.
Today’s community is “quite small in numbers, but very highly active and diverse in its traditions,” said Engelmayer, whose mother’s family came from Switzerland and father’s from Poland. “It goes from Ashkenazi to Sephardi, from secular to ultra-Orthodox, and it’s a whole range between. And it feels like a family.”
During Engelmayer’s tenure, “there was the COVID crisis and afterwards the war in Ukraine, which brought a lot of fugitives and refugees to Vienna – also Jews. And of course, the 7th of October, which brought a big rise in antisemitism, which is still being dealt with today.”
Nevertheless, celebrants went “through the streets of Vienna with high hats and proudly Jewish, bringing the new Torah scroll into the restored synagogue,” Engelmayer said: All those challenges led to “an increase of inner strength, of holding together, of answering to the crisis by much more Jewish life and being more active and more visible.”
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