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An Orthodox congregation in Manhattan launches a matchmaking initiative as a response to the Oct. 7 attack in Israel
(New York Jewish Week) — Since Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, there has been an outpouring of fundraisers and activism from New York synagogues and Jewish institutions. Some shuls are holding fundraisers, others are packing medical kits, still more are writing letters to IDF soldiers.
But at one Upper East Side congregation, a new form of activism is emerging in response to the gruesome attack, ongoing war and rising antisemitism: matchmaking.
The Altneu Synagogue — the innovative, two-year-old Orthodox congregation on the Upper East Side that began after its rabbi, Benjamin Goldschmidt, was fired from Park East Synagogue — has launched a matchmaking initiative for singles in their congregation and their immediate friends.
According to Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, who founded the synagogue with her husband, making Jewish couples is one way to ensure a Jewish future at a time when so many are worried the idea is in danger.
“Everyone’s trying to figure out what to do from here,” Chizhik-Goldschmidt told the New York Jewish Week. “I felt very much that the best way to respond to darkness and death is to bring in more light and more love and to bring people joy. Traditionally, that is the Jewish response to catastrophe.”
On the evening of Nov. 11, the Altneu sent an email to their congregants announcing the matchmaking initiative; the Goldschmidts also spoke about it after services on Shabbat and posted it on their social media. “The reception has been amazing,” Chizhik-Goldschmidt said, adding that in less than two weeks, almost 200 people have signed up. About half are members of the Altneu.
Chizhik-Goldschmidt said that the idea for a matchmaking program had come up organically among several members over the last few months — interest in Jewish matchmaking was given a pop culture boost when Netflix released their hit series “Jewish Matchmaking” earlier this spring. But as a busy rebbetzin and mother of three young children, Chizhik-Goldschmidt felt she lacked the bandwidth to launch something new.
The events of Oct. 7, however, changed all of that.
“It’s a moment where a lot of people were like, ‘Wow, it’s on me to find someone to continue our Jewish peoplehood,’” said Chizhik-Goldschmidt, who herself was set up with her husband a decade ago at the insistence of community members and mutual friends.
“It has been ringing in my head since Oct. 7 that I need to help,” she added. “We, as a community, need to help those who are looking for love and those who want to start families. This moment shook us awake and I think it sort of forced us to shed a lot of our pretenses, the artifice, all the games that I often see, especially in Manhattan around dating.”
The Altneu approach to matchmaking is, like the synagogue’s name, a combination of old and new: Interested parties fill out a Google form that asks about family upbringing, education, hobbies, passions and religious observance, as well as what they are looking for in a partner. The forms are collected by a group of “connectors,” five women ranging in age from their late 20s through 50s, who will parse the answers and suggest matches. The program is open to singles of any age — the only requirement is that the candidate must have a reference from an Altneu member.
“We did not want to be launching a new version of another dating website — that wasn’t the goal,” Chizhik-Goldschmidt said. “The goal is just to sort of leverage our network.”
Joe Piroozian, who has been attending Altneu Shabbat services and its daily minyan for about 10 months, said that because of the congregation’s strong sense of community, he feels he has a better chance of meeting his future spouse there than on dating apps.
“The best way to do it is to be set up by people who understand your lifestyle, understand where you like to spend your weekends, where you spend your days,” the 29-year-old told the New York Jewish Week. “What better group of people to get set up by than the people that you spend most of your time with?”
A 25-year-old woman in the community, who asked to remain anonymous, said that finding a Jewish partner is “the most important piece of my life,” adding that she chose to participate because of the care the congregation is putting into the process. “Especially with the state of the world, I’m hoping to find my life partner and build a beautiful Jewish home.”
“In a city like New York, there are a lot of ways to meet people. But going to big fundraisers and events and meeting hundreds of people at a time is not always the best, most conducive place to really meet your match,” said another Altneu member, Alexa Sokol, 30, who has been attending services at The Altneu since last spring. “I’m looking forward to having a little bit more of an infrastructure for dating and having an intermediary to feel like there’s more support to the dating process rather than just meeting someone and you’re on your own,” she added.
The Altneu community gathered for a celebration of Purim, March 6, 2021. (Eli Weintraub)
Synagogue matchmaking is not a completely unheard-of practice — as the rebbetzin pointed out, many couples meet at the kiddush buffet that follows services, say, or are introduced by friends and family. But Chizhik-Goldschmidt says the Altneu initiative puts matchmaking on the communal agenda. “We’ll talk about assimilation, but what are we actually doing to fight assimilation?” she said.
Eden Schonfeld Fischman, one of the matchmakers, said that the program felt different to her because it emphasizes community involvement and intergenerational connections, without feeling stuffy or formal.
“It’s not like your grandmother’s shadchan,” said Fischman, using the Hebrew word for matchmaker. She joined the congregation since it launched in October 2021. “At the Altneu, this is something that’s very organic. We have so many young professionals that are as committed to a community and their religion as they are to their careers here.”
After Oct. 7, “people have a little bit different take and feel about hopefully being with another Jewish person,” she added. “The Jewish community is clutching to our identity. We realize what’s at stake here now, so I think we’re in the right place at the right time.”
Piroozian said that actively looking for a partner has become a much bigger priority for him since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7. “Specifically during this time, I feel the need to strengthen our community. The best way to strengthen our community and to fight antisemitism is by building strong families with religious and moral values,” he said.
“There’s been a mass awakening with Jews around the world on consciously and unconsciously that their identity matters,” Sokol said. “Having places where your Jewish growth is considered and encouraged — including marriage — helps people who are on the fence push themselves to the next step.”
The first round of forms will close in a few weeks, Chizhik-Goldschmidt said.
“We have limited energy, we have limited time, we have limited resources,” she said. “If this whole initiative only results in just one pair finding one another, it’s worth it.”
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The post An Orthodox congregation in Manhattan launches a matchmaking initiative as a response to the Oct. 7 attack in Israel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Hits Israel With 17 Percent Tariffs; Israeli Officials Express Shock, Frustration
US President Donald Trump waves as he walks before departing for Florida from the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, DC, US, March 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
The United States will impose 17 percent tariffs on goods imported from Israel under a major new trade initiative that US President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday, sending shockwaves throughout the Jewish state as Israeli officials expressed frustration with the decision.
The duty on Israel is part of Trump’s newly unveiled sweeping set of tariffs in which the US will impose a 10 percent baseline tariff on all imports to the US and higher duties on some countries with which it has larger trade deficits. Washington decided on the 17-percent figure for Israel because it is half of the 33 percent tariffs that the White House says the Jewish state has put in place for some American products.
Israel sends over $22 billion worth of commodities to the US annually, including diamonds, medications, and electronic devices. Israeli officials reportedly expect the country’s robust high-tech sector to be spared because they believe the US tariffs will not be applied to services.
However, if the tariffs do apply to the high-tech sector, the implications could be profound.
“If the tariffs apply to software products as well, particularly Software as a Service (SaaS) – the main area of activity for many Israeli high-tech companies – this move could fundamentally alter how Israeli companies approach the American market and even discourage potential investors and customers,” Karin Mayer Rubinstein, CEO of Israel Advanced Technology Industries, told The Jerusalem Post.
“We are all going to feel this in our pockets,” Ron Tomer, president of the Manufacturers Association of Israel, told Israeli radio on Thursday, claiming that the American tariffs against the Jewish state are tantamount to “abandonment by a friend.”
Trump’s announcement came one day after Israel removed all tariffs on US goods. Israeli officials had hoped that dropping the tariffs would prevent the White House from placing its own tariffs on the Jewish state.
“The removal of tariffs on American goods is another step … to open the market to competition, to diversify the economy, and to lower the cost of living,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a joint statement with Economy Minister Nir Barkat and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Jerusalem will reportedly launch efforts to convince the Trump administration to reverse its decision.
Smotrich said that the finance ministry is still “analyzing” the expected and potential impact of the impending tariffs on the country and will be starting “discussions” with key figures across various Israeli industries.
Israel and the United States — the Jewish state’s largest trading partner — completed $34 billion in bilateral trade in 2024. Of that, about $22 billion came from exports from Israel to the US.
Trump announced his so-called “Liberation Day” on Wednesday, in which his administration unveiled an expansive slate of tariffs on international trade partners, citing a “lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships” that is “indicated by large and persistent annual US goods trade deficits.”
Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), a US group advocating pro-Israel policies within the Democratic Party, slammed the Trump administration’s decision to levy tariffs against the Jewish state, arguing that the White House has fractured America’s relationship with arguably its closest ally.
“President Trump made a grave error in slapping a higher tariff on Israel than on Turkey and even Iran, especially given the fact that Israel eliminated all tariffs on American goods,” DMFI President and CEO Mark Mellman said in a statement.
Mellman argued that White House inadvertently helped the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement (BDS) against Israel advance some of its major goals.
“The president’s action helps the BDS movement achieve one of its key goals — damaging the US-Israeli economic relationship,” he said. “This action undermines the longstanding and robust economic relationship between the United States and Israel, a relationship that has been built on trust, mutual benefit, and a commitment to free and fair trade.”
The post Trump Hits Israel With 17 Percent Tariffs; Israeli Officials Express Shock, Frustration first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘Patently Falsified’: Hamas Deletes Thousands From Gaza Death List, Including Over 1,000 Children
Palestinian fighters from the armed wing of Hamas take part in a military parade to mark the anniversary of the 2014 war with Israel, near the border in the central Gaza Strip, July 19, 2023. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
Hamas has quietly removed thousands of names from its official casualty reports in Gaza, prompting fresh scrutiny of the accuracy of the death toll figures that have been widely cited by media and international organizations since the start of the Palestinian terrorist group’s war with Israel.
An analysis, conducted by Salo Aizenberg of the US-based nonprofit Honest Reporting and first reported on by the Telegraph, revealed that 3,400 individuals listed as killed in earlier updates released by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health in August and October 2024 no longer appear in the March 2025 report. Among those missing from the latest list are 1,080 children.
“Hamas has manipulated the number of fatalities they report since the start of the war, overcounting civilian deaths and concealing combatant losses,” Aizenberg told The Algemeiner.
“I took all the unique deaths and ID numbers from the August and October lists. I combined them. I removed duplicates and then compared it to the March list. And there were 3,400 names that didn’t appear,” he said. “In my mind, the 1,080 children are particularly notable.”
Aizenberg said the systematic inflation of civilian death tolls by Hamas is not a new phenomenon. “They have done this in every round of conflict. For example, in 2009’s Cast Lead, Hamas initially claimed that 1,300 Palestinians died and only about 50 were combatants. Months later Hamas admitted that in fact 600-700 were their fighters,” he said.
The casualty lists compiled by the Gaza Ministry of Health are distributed as downloadable PDFs and include personal details such as names, identification numbers, and dates of death. These lists have been widely cited by international media and relied upon by humanitarian groups and United Nations agencies monitoring the toll of the war. The health ministry is under the control of Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip.
The discrepancy in figures has raised questions about the continued reliance on these data sets, especially given mounting evidence of inconsistencies.
“The evidence is now all out there in the public domain,” Andrew Fox, a former British paratrooper who has worked with Aizenberg on data-verification projects in the past, told The Algemeiner. “These Hamas numbers are error-strewn and clearly manipulated.”
Aizenberg built databases by converting the PDF lists into spreadsheets, allowing for comparative analysis across different time points. That process revealed the March 2025 report included significantly fewer names than earlier versions. The findings cast doubt on previously unchallenged casualty estimates.
Hamas has claimed that more than 50,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began in October 2023. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it has killed 20,000 Hamas combatants during that time and maintains that it takes extensive precautions to avoid civilian casualties. “The IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target children,” the IDF said in a statement.
According to a December report authored by Fox and published by the Henry Jackson Society, nearly half of those killed in Gaza are combatants, directly contradicting claims that the vast majority of casualties are civilians. The report also pointed to demographic inconsistencies, including the repeated listing of women and children to support allegations of indiscriminate attacks, and the lowering of adult men’s ages to inflate the number of minors reported killed.
“You can’t say it’s a genocide when half the people that have died are combatants who are still fighting,” Fox told The Algemeiner at the time.
The debate over casualty figures was intensified by a February 2025 article published in the medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that Gaza’s true death toll could be as high as 64,000. That estimate was based on a statistical extrapolation using “capture-recapture” methods applied to a subset of the ministry’s data. The researchers behind the study said they only used what they called “hospital-recorded deaths” from June 2024 and asserted that these records were the most verified.
But Aizenberg said that claim does not hold up to scrutiny. He reviewed the same June dataset used by the Lancet study and found that 881 names in that core group were later removed in the March update. In his view, this undermines the foundation of the statistical model used to estimate excess mortality.
“They do this very careful statistical analysis, taking three lists and doing capture, recapture from vetted lists of hospital recorded deaths,” Aizenberg said. “And then I took their June list that they used again [in the February report] and I found 881 were also removed from the March list. So even after a really careful study [its] core data sources are not valid.”
Past reports have noted that the casualty forms used to populate the lists could be submitted online by anyone with access to a Google Form, raising concerns about verification protocols.
Despite these issues, some international entities, including the United Nations, and news outlets have continued to cite the figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, occasionally with the disclaimer that the numbers could not be independently confirmed.
Fox said such caveats are insufficient and that the deletions from Hamas’s own published records have, in his view, stripped away any plausible justification for continuing to rely on the ministry’s figures. “It is malpractice and deeply irresponsible on the part of any media organization still using them. There is simply no excuse for repeating them as credible,” he said.
The post ‘Patently Falsified’: Hamas Deletes Thousands From Gaza Death List, Including Over 1,000 Children first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Most Americans Agree With Deporting Mahmoud Khalil, Foreign Students Who ‘Support’ Terror Groups, Poll Finds
Mahmoud Khalil speaks to members of media about the Revolt for Rafah encampment at Columbia University during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, in New York City, US, June 1, 2024. Photo: Jeenah Moon via Reuters Connect
About two-thirds of the American people support the deportation of non-citizen students, such as Mahmoud Khalil, who indicate support for internationally recognized terrorist groups, according to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll.
The poll — conducted from March 26-27 among registered US voters — was released amid ongoing furor over the Trump administration’s sweeping arrests and detainments of non-citizen students who have allegedly expressed support for terrorist organizations, primarily Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in many cases participated in raucous, often destructive and unsanctioned anti-Israel demonstrations on university campuses.
According to the newly released data, most Americans, 63 percent, believe that the Trump administration should “deport” foreign students who “voice support” for terrorist groups like Hamas, while a slightly higher 67 percent want such deportations for non-citizens on campuses who “actively support” such terrorist groups. About one-third of voters in each case said they believe the students should stay in the US.
Meanwhile, the data showed that 63 percent of Americans believe the Trump administration should revoke permanent resident status for “pro-Hamas activists like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University,” compared to 37 percent who indicated the government should not be able to revoke one’s green card in such circumstances.
Khalil, who was born in Syria and came to the US in 2022, was one of the leaders of the anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University last year, when activists illegally seized parts of the campus and refused to leave unless the school boycotted the world’s lone Jewish state. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained him early last month for what the Department of Homeland Security alleged to be leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” Khalil, who became a permanent US resident last year, is fighting his deportation in court and arguing the government is violating his civil rights.
However, a striking 69 percent of respondents in the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll said the federal government should “have the authority to revoke the green card of a permanent legal resident and deport them if it can prove that such a person actively supported a terrorist organization like Hamas.” By comparison, 31 percent said the government should not have such authority.
Republicans overwhelmingly support the deportation of non-citizens who indicate support for terrorist groups, with 83 percent claiming that those who “voice support” for terrorist groups should be removed from the country and 84 percent responding that non-citizen students who “actively support” terrorist groups should be deported.
In contrast, only 42 percent of Democrats said they endorse deportation for foreign students who voice support for terrorist groups, compared to 58 percent who want them to stay on US spoil. Meanwhile, a slight majority, 51 percent, indicated the government should deport those who “actively support” such extremist organizations, while 49 percent oppose deportation in such circumstances.
As for green card holders such as Khalil who allegedly support Hamas, 82 percent of Republicans said the Trump administration should be able to revoke their permanent resident status, compared to just 48 percent of Democrats. Only 18 percent of Republicans oppose the revocation of green cards in these cases, just a fraction of the 52 percent of Democrats who feel the same way.
More broadly, a striking 86 percent of Republicans believe the government should have the authority to revoke the green card of a permanent legal resident and deport them if they actively supported a terrorist group like Hamas, while 14 percent oppose such a measure.
By comparison, just 55 percent of Democrats support deportation and the taking away a green card in such a situation, compared to 45 percent who oppose it.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has detained several non-citizen anti-Israel activists on university campuses for participating in often destructive demonstrations while allegedly supporting Hamas, the US-designated terrorist organization that has ruled Gaza since 2007. Some of these arrests, particularly of Khalil, have sparked significant backlash, with critics accusing the White House of undermining free speech rights.
During the 2024 US presidential election, as part of a broader effort to entice Jewish voters, Trump vowed to deport foreign supporters of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas if elected to office.
“We will deport the foreign jihad sympathizers, and we will deport them very quickly. And Hamas supporters will be gone,” Trump said during a “Stop Antisemitism” event in August. “If you hate America, if you want to eliminate Israel, then we don’t want you in our country. We really don’t want you in our country.”
The post Most Americans Agree With Deporting Mahmoud Khalil, Foreign Students Who ‘Support’ Terror Groups, Poll Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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