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At a small Tel Aviv protest ahead of the Israel-Hamas hostage deal, families feel hope and uncertainty
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Wearing a face that bore the marks of 47 days of anguished waiting, Hadas Kalderon took to the streets to block traffic on a central Tel Aviv thoroughfare next to Israel’s military headquarters.
Kalderon was demanding that Israel’s leaders, who were meeting in the complex, approve a deal to release at least 50 of the hostages held by Hamas — including, possibly, her son and daughter.
“We want them all back, I will fight to the end until everyone comes back,” said Kalderon, whose 16-year-old daughter Sahar, 12-year-old son Erez and their father — her ex-husband, Ofer — were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7. They are among the approximately 240 hostages held by Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza, abducted during the attack that day.
The deal set to be approved by Israel’s government on Tuesday will free at least 50 Israeli hostages — among them women, children and the elderly — in exchange for some 150 Palestinian women and minors in Israeli prison on security offenses. Israel has also agreed to a four-day pause in its war against Hamas in Gaza.
Kalderon understood that this hostage deal won’t bring the entire family home. But she sees it as a crucial first step.
“The father of my children is there, I want my children to have a father but we have to live in reality,” she said of the proposed deal, which will reportedly exclude men and soldiers. “At first we must take out the weak. Babies, children and elderly will not survive. And then it will be open to bring them all.”
Compared to recent protests that brought tens of thousands of Israelis to the streets, and even a march from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem last week that drew many supporters to call for freeing the hostages, only a small group of approximately 100 Israelis gathered Tuesday night to call for the hostage deal’s approval. In spite of the small crowd blocking the busy Begin Boulevard, police made no effort to disperse the crowd and even some of the stranded motorists showed little of the frustration they have displayed about previous protests.
“It is good that they are doing this,” said a driver of a stalled Egged bus. Referring to a massive protest movement that spread across Israel for much of the year prior to Oct. 7, he said, “It is not like the judicial reforms. These are Israeli citizens captive in Gaza, it is much more important.”
Despite the milestone deal, there were few signs of celebration in light of the deal’s fraught implications for those not included.
“The deal is not simple,” said Shir Sella, a 24-year-old cousin of the Kalderon family. “We are very worried that it will make it harder to release the men and it is a question of what we are giving up. … I feel like the government betrayed us by not protecting us.”
Concerns have also simmered over what kinds of dangers a multi-day pause in fighting might pose to Israeli soldiers fighting in Gaza; Israeli officials have said the soldiers would remain in place during the truce. Soldiers who are being held hostage are also not being released.
“As a mother of a soldier in captivity, I would be terrified,” said Michal Roth, whose son is serving in Gaza as a soldier.
“It is such an unhuman dilemma that we are in and I think that Hamas is trying to tear us apart with this deal,” Roth added. “But there is no win-win and even with my own child in Gaza, as a mother my thoughts are with the kids held captive and not him.”
On the other side of the road, a small group of counter-protesters gathered to express opposition to the hostage deal, a view mainly reflected by the far-right political parties in Israel’s parliament who vowed to vote against the deal. Limor Son Har-Melech, a right-wing member of Knesset from Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party, stood at a distance from both protests.
“It pains me to see the split,” she said. “I have good relations with families on the other side calling for a deal but I think it is a very dangerous deal for us.”
Son Har-Melech was badly injured while pregnant in a terrorist attack in 2003 that killed her first husband, Shuli Har-Melech. Terrorists who carried out that attack were among about 1,000 Palestinians released from Israeli prisons in 2011 as part of a deal with Hamas to free the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, she said.
“We do not learn from history — we need to learn from the Shalit deal,” Son Har-Melech said, noting that current Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was also released at the time.
“Hamas is abusing our weaknesses and there would be a better chance to return them all if we showed strength,” she said, adding that “if we do not have unity we lose anyways.”
Atara Levy, an activist with Women Wage Peace, came to the protest to show solidarity for her friend Netta Heiman, whose 84-year old mother Ditza was taken captive from Kibbutz Nir Oz. (Vivan Silver, one of the group’s cofounders, was murdered on Oct. 7 in her home on Kibbutz Be’eri. She had been thought to be one of the captives until her body was discovered.)
“We need a diplomatic solution and there is no choice but to accept the deal,” Levy said. “I am not sure if this is a step towards peace, but it is definitely a step in the right direction for the nation to survive, because a state that cannot return its captives has no legitimacy.”
While Levy does not have much hope for the country’s leadership, tomorrow she will join a zoom meeting with “hundreds” of Palestinian women from the West Bank and Gaza who want peace and “are supporting us, that we are one.”
Efrat, a protester from Tel Aviv who declined to share her last name, said that she feels “horrible” about the deal — because of how much pain and uncertainty remains.
“Even if 50 are brought home, there are still more than 150 left behind,” she said. “I do not feel like I can be okay as a citizen of Israel or as a human being without them all home.”
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Jews, Israelis Targeted in Austria Amid Surge in Antisemitic Incidents; Local Jewish Community Calls for Action
Illustrative: Pro-Palestinian protesters shout slogans and hold flags during a demonstration against Israel’s military action in the Gaza strip, in Vienna, July 20, 2014. Photo: REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger
Austria is facing a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel rhetoric, prompting outrage from the country’s Jewish community and urgent calls for authorities to take swift action against growing anti-Jewish hatred.
On Saturday, a group of pro-Palestinian activists burst into the opening of the Salzburg Festival — one of the world’s premier events for opera, music, and drama — waving Palestinian flags and shouting antisemitic slogans.
As Austrian Vice-Chancellor Andreas Babler began his opening speech at the event, six individuals stormed the stage, aggressively waving Palestinian flags and shouting “Blood on your hands!” along with other antisemitic slurs.
The Salzburg Festival.
A frenzied white Austrian on stage, screaming in German about those bloody J*ws.
I’m sure we’ve seen that before… pic.twitter.com/b6oNyTwZRT
— Joo
(@JoosyJew) July 28, 2025
The incident raised alarming questions about the event’s security, as the six protesters gained easy access while wearing fake, misspelled staff IDs with fictitious names, revealing a clear failure in background checks.
According to festival director Lukas Crepaz, security measures and control checks have been significantly strengthened. The six activists were arrested, and authorities continue to investigate the incident.
Elie Rosen, president of the Jewish Community (IKG) of Salzburg, Styria, and Carinthia, condemned the incident, calling the disruption of the Salzburg Festival’s opening a “targeted political provocation, carried by openly anti-Israel rhetoric.”
“Jewish life in Austria must not become the collateral damage of political agitation,” Rosen said in a statement. “We often hear powerful statements at commemorative events condemning antisemitism.”
“But where are Israel’s outspoken supporters when real solidarity is needed? Antisemitism takes many forms and frequently starts with the silence of the majority,” she continued. “Hatred toward Israel is not a legitimate form of protest.”
In a separate incident last week, an Israeli couple was denied access to a campsite in Ehrwald, a village in western Austria, after attempting to make a reservation to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.
According to local media, the couple attempted to register at the campsite, but after revealing their Israeli passports, they were denied entry and asked to leave, forcing them to find alternative accommodations.
“We have no place for Jews here,” the campsite operator reportedly told them.
When asked for comment, the campsite operators told the German newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine, “These people should much rather take care of the many children in Gaza. Otherwise, there is nothing to say.”
In another incident last week, a group of well-known Israeli classical musicians reported being refused service at a pizzeria in Vienna after staff overheard them speaking Hebrew.
One of the musicians recounted that while they were ordering their food, the waiter asked them which language they were speaking. When they replied Hebrew, the waiter allegedly told them, “In that case, leave. I’m not serving you food.”
“The initial shock and humiliation were profound. But what struck us even more deeply was what came next – or rather what didn’t. The people around us were clearly startled, some offered sympathetic glances … and then, quietly, they went back to their dinners, their conversations, their wine – as though nothing had happened,” one of the musicians wrote in a post on X.
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‘All of Our Strength’: Over 1,000 Pro-Israel Activists Gather in DC for Solidarity Conference
2025 Israel on Campus Coalition National Leadership Summit. Photo: ICC.
Over 1,000 Jewish students, faculty, and activists amassed in Washington, DC on July 27-29 to attend the Israel on Campus Coalition’s annual National Leadership Summit (NLS), an electric event which achieved creating the atmosphere of both a festival of Jewish elation and an academic conference.
Founded in 2002, the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) is a nonprofit organization that describes its mission as inspiring college students to defend and hold pride in the state of Israel. One of its major initiatives is the “microgrants” program, which helps pro-Israel campus groups organize events about Israeli culture and society. Another, the ICC Community Impact Fellowship, awards college students a $1,000 stipend for completing a leadership seminar in which they are trained in civic engagement, coalition building, and rapidly responding to antisemitic and anti-Israel events on their campuses.
Demand for a spot at this year’s 2025 conference exceeded the nonprofit’s capacity to host the thousands of students who signed up to be a conferee at what is recognized as the largest gathering of pro-Israel students in the country. Hundreds were waitlisted and encouraged to reapply next year. Those whom ICC did select were flown out to DC and billeted at the Capital Hilton, all expenses paid. They were joined – for the first time ever – by a delegation of faculty from the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) and staff from most major Jewish organization in the US, from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to StandWithUs (SWU).
“We just ultimately believe that we’re better when we use all of our strength as a movement,” ICC chief executive Jacob Baime told The Algemeiner on Monday during an interview. “And we’re not the only ones who feel that way. The other side does as well, having mounted a highly professionalized coalition, well-funded, well-coordinated effort with many groups involved. We need our partners and the different perspectives they hold too.”
When The Algemeiner last attended NLS, the world was not yet one year removed from Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, the deadliest day in modern Jewish history since the Holocaust. Jewish students and ICC staff, many of whom have family members and friends who were affected by the atrocities or were later drafted into the war it precipitated, were still laboring to comprehend what had become a new and unprecedented world – one in which classic antisemitic tropes had resurfaced to corrupt public debate, anti-Jewish violence occurred daily across the world, and anti-Zionist groups were taking over college campuses and converting them into outposts of antisemitic hate.
As such the event aimed to inspire Jewish students “take back the campus,” an effort advanced by an infantry of social media influencers.
This year’s NLS leaned more heavily into supplying students with information, facts, and statistics curated and presented by the most accomplished Middle East scholars, government leaders, and nonprofit executives in the global pro-Israel community. Social media influencers and celebrities took the stage as well, showcasing their strengths as spirited advocates who remind students why the issues under discussion relate to their contemporary experiences as young people and consumers.
Speakers included Alyza Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law; Col. Miri Eisin of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Jonathan Schanzer, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute; Miriam Elman of the Academic Engagement Network; and Dr. Ayal Feinberg, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights. On offer as giveaways were Douglas Murray’s recently published polemic On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization and Dina Powell McCormick and David McCormick’s co-authored book, titled Who Believed in You?: How Purposeful Mentorship Changes the World.
“We wanted students to engage with ideas that touch on the entirety of the campus ecosystem and the subjects they may be asked to comment on,” Baime explained to The Algemeiner. “Oct. 7, the war, and its aftermath have changed the American pro-Israel movement forever.”
The obverse side of the conference’s educational objectives was wholesome fun for the 800 college aged conferees in attendance. They were treated to a buoyant concert in the Hilton’s Presidential Ballroom featuring the jazz-pop fusion act “All of the Above” and the rapper Duvbear, an 18-year-old who is emblematic of what Generation-Z calls “rizz.” Celebrities such as former NBA player Meta World Peace, former NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho, and professional boxer George Foreman III afforded the students quick meet and greets and selfies. Capital Hilton staff carted out pounds of food – Latin, Asian, and Kosher – from its kitchens every several hours, fostering opportunities for socializing and being photographed on an ICC-themed “red carpet.”
University of California, Davis rising junior Toby Jacob told The Algemeiner that the nonprofit’s strength is its staff.
“The staff here is so knowledgeable and so capable,” Jacob said. “It can feel really scary when you’re dealing with these like large scale issues in your student government, with your administration – and to have people who have the resources to walk you through it is vital.”
Tessa Veksler, an NLS 2025 moderator who became the most recognizable pro-Israel activist of Generation-Z after being elected the first Shabbat-observant president of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s student government, agreed.
“When I was on campus going through the worst of the worst, I knew that ICC had my back and that I could count on the staff and the organization to be there at a moment’s notice,” Veksler said. “They exceptionally equip students with the tools to be able to lead themselves, and so there is an expectation that if you are an ICC fellow that you take the tools ICC gives and put in the work to go and become involved in student government and be the person to make the impact.”
She continued, “It’s a remarkable thing, and there’s a reason why I have stayed as involved as I am.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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‘Devastated’: Wesley LePatner, Killed in Manhattan Mass Shooting, Was a Jewish Communal, Philanthropic Leader
A man holding a rifle walks into an office building at 345 Park Avenue shortly before a shooting that killed several people, in the Midtown Manhattan district of New York City, US, July 28, 2025, in a still image taken from surveillance video. Photo: Surveillance Camera/Handout via REUTERS
Wesley LePatner, an executive at Blackstone and a Jewish communal leader, was one of the victims of the mass shooting in Midtown Manhattan on Monday that killed four people and wounded a fifth in addition to the shooter, who died by suicide.
LePatner, 43, was an active member of the Jewish community and served on the UJA Federation of New York’s board of directors, which said it is “devastated by the tragic loss.”
“Wesley was extraordinary in every way — personally, professionally, and philanthropically,” the federation wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “An exceptional leader in the financial world, she brought thoughtfulness, vision, and compassion to everything she did. In 2023, we honored her with the Alan C. Greenberg Young Leadership Award at our Wall Street Dinner, recognizing her commitment to our community and her remarkable achievements, all the more notable as a woman in a traditionally male-dominated field.”
In her acceptance speech, LePatner said, “Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I would be up on this stage two decades later [after attending her first UJA Wall Street dinner]. UJA has many super-powers, but its most important in my view is its power to create a sense of community and belonging, and that ability to create a sense of community and belonging matters now more than ever.”
She also explained that “UJA stepped in early and fixed my feeling out of place by connecting me with senior Goldman Sachs women who were further along in their careers and personal lives, but equally committed to their Jewish community and identity.”
“I was an American,” she said, “but I was first and foremost Jewish.”
LePatner was also a supporter of Israel, leading a solidarity mission with UJA after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
“In the wake of Oct. 7, Wesley led a solidarity mission with UJA to Israel, demonstrating her enduring commitment in Israel’s moment of heartache,” the UJA Federation of New York said in its statement. “She lived with courage and conviction, instilling in her two children a deep love for Judaism and the Jewish people.”
In addition to serving on the board of directors of the New York UJA, she was also on the board of trustees at The Abraham Joshua Heschel School — a pluralistic Jewish day school in New York. The Forward reported that school representatives wrote in an email that “there are no right words for this unfathomable moment of pain and loss.”
“It was a rare z’chut, a rare privilege, to know Wesley and to learn from her. She was a uniquely brilliant and modest leader and parent, filled with wisdom, empathy, vision, and appreciation,” they continued.
David Greenfield, CEO of the Met Council, posted on X that “Wesley was an amazing person who was also tremendously talented leader. She volunteered with her kids [at the Met Council] to feed those in need.”
LePatner graduated from Yale summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and met her husband on the first day of school in 1999.
She is survived by her husband and two children.