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A Reform synagogue in Brooklyn is holding special High Holidays services for Israelis

(New York Jewish Week) — In Israel, the right-wing government’s effort to weaken the country’s court system has divided society, with some of the fault lines forming between Orthodox and secular Jews.
Thousands of miles away, in Brooklyn, a Reform synagogue is hoping that it can provide a space for local Israelis wrestling with the crisis — and seeking to create community that transcends politics, too.
This weekend, Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope will be hosting its first Rosh Hashanah service geared toward Israelis. The service is part of a larger suite of programs at Beth Elohim aimed at bringing Israelis together to pray and practice Judaism in an atmosphere that is inviting to them.
“I wanted to make sure in that moment, when I thought people might really be feeling despair, that they have a sense that there’s going to be a chance to come together as Israelis in Brooklyn, and that CBE as an institution stands in solidarity with them,” said Rabbi Rachel Timoner, who leads Beth Elohim and announced the service in July, right after the Israeli government passed the first component of the judicial overhaul.
The initiative is an example of how the debate over the overhaul is forging new connections between Israeli and American Jews an ocean away. The Rosh Hashanah service comes about two months after a gathering of some 40 Israelis on the roof of Brooklyn’s Kane Street Synagogue on Tisha B’Av, the summer fast day that commemorates the destruction of the two ancient Jewish temples in Jerusalem. At the Tisha B’Av event, participants also lamented the passage of part of the overhaul.
Beth Elohim’s initiative is also the latest in a bevy of efforts to engage a growing community of expatriate Israelis — many of whom do not identify as religious — within traditional American Jewish institutions.
“For Israelis who didn’t grow up with a synagogue tradition, the chagim are really family time,” said Rabbi Josh Weinberg, who will be leading the service, using the Hebrew word for “holidays.” “And so in a place where they don’t have their parents or grandparents, it’s great that we can try to provide something.”
Beth Elohim has offered opportunities aimed at Israelis for years, including a dual Hebrew-English preschool. Dan Nadel, an Israeli Brooklynite and the music director at Manhattan’s B’nai Jeshurun synagogue, used to be a leader of Beth Elohim’s Shira B’ShiShi program. Hebrew for “Singing on Friday,” it was a monthly Shabbat service for Israelis that was led in Hebrew and incorporated Israeli food, song and poetry. The program ended in 2016 due to a lack of funding but Beth Elohim hopes to restart it.
“That was an easier lift in the sense that it was Friday night. There was music, food and community. It’s a recipe for success if you do all those things,” said Nadel. “High Holidays are a different kind of challenge.”
The High Holiday services — which will also meet on Yom Kippur and take place alongside the synagogue’s main service — will be conducted entirely in Hebrew and will incorporate modern Israeli music and poetry. Attendees can expect to hear classic Israeli folk songs like “Al Kol Eleh,” a 1980 standard by Naomi Shemer about the “bitter and sweet” of life, as well as more modern tunes from artists like Ishay Ribo, an Israeli Orthodox pop star who played to a crowd of 15,000 at Madison Square Garden last week.
“An Israeli folk song can actually take on a different dimension when it’s used as a part of the tefillah,” said Weinberg, using the Hebrew word for “prayer.” Weinberg, a Beth Elohim member and the Union for Reform Judaism’s vice president for Israel and Reform Zionism, immigrated to Israel in 2003 and spent a decade there before returning to the United States.
Weinberg added that the services for Israelis are not bound to the traditional framework typically used in American Reform spaces. He would not say how many attendees he expects but said he hopes to “fill the room” and will be happy “as long as they make a minyan,” or prayer quorum of 10 people.
“We really need to aim at a cross-section of Israelis, mostly a secular crowd, that doesn’t have a great deal of synagogue experience,” Weinberg said. “So we are going to include a lot of music, singing, discussion, and learning.”
The services will also commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a conflict that, in Israel, is mourned as a tragedy in which many families lost loved ones.
Israelis at the service will sing “Lu Yehi,” also by Shemer, which she wrote during the Yom Kippur War as a prayer for Israel’s safety. It was originally inspired by the Beatles’ classic “Let it Be,” and is understood by many Israelis to capture the grief of war and the hope for a brighter future.
There will also be opportunities for attendees to study with each other from source sheets that include both classical Jewish texts and modern sources. Discussion themes will include repentance, new beginnings, Zionism and forgiveness. Weinberg hopes that the High Holiday services will be the start of more Israeli gatherings in Brooklyn, whether or not they are related to the political situation in Israel.
“It’s a diverse group, and people have different opinions and different political leanings,” said Weinberg. “Still, I think it’s an opportunity for people to come together, and to really find more community, a connection to Judaism, to spirituality, and to find a way to celebrate these holidays together.”
For many prospective attendees, finding community at a synagogue will mark a shift. In Israel, the vast majority of congregations are Orthodox, and a large portion of secular Israelis rarely if ever spend time inside them. Religious Jewish Israelis are a key part of the current government’s base, and Omer Granit, another Brooklyn-based Israeli, said some secular Israelis associate Orthodoxy with right-wing politics. Multiple Israelis said that, days before the holiday, they were still unsure whether they would attend.
But Granit recognizes that in the United States, where most Jews are not Orthodox, the landscape is different. And unlike in Israel, where a festive atmosphere pervades the fall, Jews in America need to make more of an active effort to observe the season’s holidays.
“There’s no question of identity in Israel. Everybody celebrates the holidays. But when you come here it becomes an issue,” said Granit, a former Israel Defense Forces officer who has been active in protests against the judicial overhaul. “We do care about the holidays, even if we don’t really relate to the Orthodox way of life.”
He added, “Many Israelis want to keep some of the traditions, and the Reform and Conservative movements make Judaism much more accessible for people like us.”
Nadel said he believes a prayer community for Israelis in Brooklyn can thrive. But he said offering a holiday experience that rings true to Israelis in Brooklyn who have different backgrounds, needs and opinions can be challenging — and Israel’s political crisis could make things harder. “It’s a very thin line to walk because the wounds in Israel are so open right now,” he said.
Yoni Hersch, an Israeli who attended the Tisha B’Av event and is unsure whether he will go to Beth Elohim’s Rosh Hashanah service, said that while those pain points may be difficult to navigate, they also might be what draws Israelis to come together at an American synagogue, more than 5,000 miles from where they grew up.
“In a moment of crisis, people are looking for encouragement and help,” he said. “And what is community if not that?”
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The post A Reform synagogue in Brooklyn is holding special High Holidays services for Israelis appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Officially Sanctioned by Trump Admin, Banned From Entering US

International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
The United States has imposed sanctions on International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan in accordance with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, the US Treasury Department confirmed on Thursday.
Khan was sanctioned by the US after spearheading the ICC’s issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders over their role in the ongoing war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
The White House announced on Monday that Khan would be the first member of the ICC to be issued personal sanctions, and both the White House and Treasury Department noted on Thursday that he has been added to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.
Khan’s assets in the United States are now frozen, and he is banned from entering the country. The announcement came on the heels of Trump’s executive order last week to punish members of the ICC for targeting Israel.
Trump’s order lambasted the ICC for its “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel.” Trump stated that the ICC “abused its power” to pursue an unsubstantiated and politically motivated criminal case against Israeli leaders.
The ICC responded to Trump with a forceful condemnation, stressing that the court produces “independent and impartial” work.
“The court stands firmly by its personnel and pledges to continue providing justice and hope to millions of innocent victims of atrocities across the world,” the ICC said.
Trump signed the executive order after Senate Democrats blocked legislation to sanction the ICC in January. The bill ultimately failed by a vote of 54-45, with Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) being the sole Democrat to vote in favor of punishing the ICC. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) criticized the bill as “poorly drafted and deeply problematic.” The House had passed the legislation.
In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
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Boston Judge Dismisses Hate Crime Charges Against Harvard Students for Assault of Jewish Peer

Demonstrators take part in an “Emergency Rally: Stand With Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza,” amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Oct. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
A Boston Municipal Court judge has dismissed hate crime charges against two Harvard University graduate students who allegedly assaulted a Jewish student at the school in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Harvard Crimson reported on Wednesday.
As previously reported, an anti-Israel demonstration escalated to apparent harassment when Ibrahim Bharmal, former editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo were filmed encircling a Jewish student with a mob that screamed “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at him while he desperately attempted to free himself from the mass of bodies.
Antisemitism on Harvard’s campus skyrocketed after the Oct. 7 atrocities. Harvard stood out as a hub of pro-Hamas support for the terrorist group’s massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages in the deadliest single-day attack on Jews since the Holocaust. While Hamas’s brutal treatment of civilians — which included rape, torture, and beheading of children — shocked the world and led to international condemnation, it emboldened pro-Hamas Harvard students, and later, Harvard faculty to target Jewish and pro-Israel members of the campus community with harassment and intimidation.
Following the Oct. 2023 mobbing of a Jewish student, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were charged by the local district attorney with assault, battery, and violations of the Massachusetts Civil Rights Acts, a hate crime statute that forbids the obstruction of “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” — to which they pleaded not guilty.
The hate crime charge was dismissed on Monday by Judge Stephen McClenon. The students will still face one misdemeanor count of assault and battery each.
According to The Washington Free Beacon, Bharmal has been continuously rewarded with new and better opportunities since allegedly assaulting the Jewish student. Harvard neither disciplined him nor removed him from the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, a coveted post once held by former US President Barack Obama. As of last year, he was awarded a law clerkship with the Public Defender for the District of Columbia, a government funded agency which provides free legal counsel to “individuals … who are charged with committing serious criminal acts.”
Antisemitism in the US surged to catastrophic and unprecedented levels in 2023 — the year in which Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo’s alleged crimes took place — rising a harrowing 140 percent, according to a 2024 audit conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
The ADL recorded 8,873 incidents in 2023 — an average of 24 every day — across the US, amounting to a year unlike any experienced by the American Jewish community since the organization began tracking such data on antisemitic outrages in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all spiked by double and triple digits, with California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Massachusetts accounting for nearly half, or 48 percent, of all that occurred.
The last quarter of the year proved the most injurious, the ADL noted, explaining that after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, 5,204 antisemitic incidents rocked the Jewish community. Across the political spectrum, from white supremacists on the far right to ostensibly left-wing Ivy League universities, antisemites emerged to express solidarity with the Hamas terroistr group, spread antisemitic tropes and blood libels, and openly call for a genocide of the Jewish people in Israel.
Such incidents occurred throughout the US. In California, an elderly Jewish man was killed when an anti-Zionist professor employed by a local community college allegedly pushed him during an argument. At Cornell University in upstate New York, a student threatened to rape and kill Jewish female students and “shoot up” the campus’ Hillel center. In a suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio, a group of vandals desecrated graves at a Jewish cemetery. At Harvard, America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious university, a faculty group shared an antisemitic cartoon depicting a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David dangling two men of color from a noose.
Other outrages were expressive but subtle. In November, large numbers of people traveling to attend the “March for Israel” in Washington, DC either could not show up or were forced to scramble last second and final alternative transportation because numerous bus drivers allegedly refused to transport them there. Hundreds of American Jews from Detroit, for example, were left stranded at Dulles Airport, according to multiple reports.
In another case at Yale University, a campus newspaper came under fire for removing from a student’s column what it called “unsubstantiated claims” of Hamas raping Israeli women, marking a rare occasion in which the publication openly doubted reports of sexual assault.
Harvard University recently agreed, on paper, to be part of the solution for eradicating antisemitism from its own campus.
Last month, it settled two antisemitism lawsuits, which were merged by a federal judge in November 2024, that accused school officials of refusing to discipline perpetrators of antisemitic conduct. Legal counsel for the university initially discredited the students who brought the legal actions, attempting to have their allegations thrown out of court on the grounds that they “lacked standing” and “legally cognizable claim” even as it proclaimed “the importance of the need to address antisemitism at the university,” according to court documents.
With the settlement, which came one day after the inauguration of President US Donald Trump — who has vowed to tax the endowments of universities where antisemitism is rampant — Harvard avoided a lengthy legal fight that could have been interpreted by the Jewish community as a willful refusal to acknowledge the discrimination to which Jewish students are subjected.
“Today’s settlement reflects Harvard’s enduring commitment to ensuring our Jewish students, faculty, and staff are embraced, respected, and supported,” Harvard said in a press release. “We will continue to strengthen our policies, systems, and operations to combat antisemitism and all forms of hate and ensure all members of the Harvard community have the support they need to pursue their academic, research, and professional work and feel they belong on our campus and in our classrooms.”
Per the agreement, the university will apply the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to its non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies (NDAB), recognize the centrality of Zionism to Jewish identity, and explicitly state that targeting and individual on the basis of their Zionism constitutes a violation of school rules.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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US Democratic Voters Overwhelmingly Sympathize With Palestinians Over Israelis: Poll

Voters line up for the US Senate run-off election, at a polling location in Marietta, Georgia, US, January 5, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar.
Democrats in the US widely sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis, according to a new poll.
The Economist/YouGov poll, which was conducted from Feb. 9-11, found that 35 percent of Democrats indicate their sympathies “are more with” Palestinians, and only 9 percent say they are more sympathetic toward Israelis. Meanwhile, 32 percent of Democrats responded that their sympathies are “about equal” between both Palestinians and Israelis, and another 24 percent were not sure.
Notably, Democratic “sympathies” toward Israelis have dramatically declined in the past two months, coinciding with the transition of the Trump administration into the White House. On Dec. 21, according to the poll, 21 percent of Democrats sympathized more with Israelis and 25 percent sympathized more with Palestinians. On Jan. 18, two days before US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Democratic sympathy for Palestinians climbed to 27 percent. During that same timeframe, sympathies for Israelis plunged to 18 percent among Democrats.
Republicans are far more sympathetic toward Israel than Democrats are, the poll found. Sixty percent of Republicans expressed sympathy with Israelis this month, while 6 percent expressed more sympathy toward Palestinians.
In October 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, 73 percent of Republicans indicated more sympathy for Israelis and 3 percent indicated more sympathy for Palestinians. As for Democrats, 34 percent had more sympathy for Israelis immediately following the Oct. 7 massacre, and 16 percent had more sympathy for the Palestinians.
Overall, although a plurality of Americans still supports Israel, sympathy for the Palestinians seems to be gaining steam. American sympathy for Israelis remained virtually unchanged from Jan. 18 to Feb. 8, dropping slightly from 32 percent to 31 percent. However, sympathy for Palestinians spiked from 15 percent to 21 percent within the same three-week span. According to the poll, American support for Palestinians has climbed to its highest level since 2017.
Trump’s recent proposal to vacate Palestinians from Gaza and build a “Riviera of the Middle East” is unpopular with the American public, according to the poll. Only 19 percent of Americans support the plan, the poll found. The policy proposal suffers from weak support among American liberals, with only 6 percent of Democrats supporting it and 74 percent opposing it. In contrast, Trump’s suggestion to relocate Palestinians into neighboring Arab states enjoys substantially greater support among Republicans, with 39 percent agreeing with Trump’s proposal and 33 percent disagreeing with it.
The growing partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a major flashpoint in the 16 months following the Oct. 7 terror attacks. Democratic lawmakers have become increasingly critical of Israel’s approach to the Gaza war, potentially reflecting shifting opinions of the Democratic electorate regarding the Jewish state. Although Democrats have repeatedly reiterated that Israel has a right to “defend itself,” many have raised concerns over the Jewish state’s conduct in the war in Gaza, reportedly exerting private pressure on former US President Joe Biden to adopt a more adversarial stance against Israel and display more public sympathy for the Palestinians. In November, 17 Democratic senators voted to impose a partial arms embargo on Israel, sparking outrage among supporters of the Jewish state.
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