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At this unique yearlong Torah study program in Jerusalem, students are encouraged to ask ‘Why?’
JERUSALEM — Walk the streets of Jerusalem on any given weekday morning, and you will discover there’s no shortage of intensive Torah study in this city that symbolizes the beating heart of the Jewish people.
Yet among the many yeshivas and seminaries it’s rare to find a beit midrash, or Jewish study hall, marked both by a commitment to egalitarian values and serious Torah study — not to mention one where Jews of color, LGBTQ+ Jews, converts, and Jews from marginalized groups are integral to the community.
The Conservative Yeshiva, which is part of the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center, threads that unique needle: It is a place in central Jerusalem where leaders and seekers from all backgrounds come to deepen their Jewish scholarship and find their place in Jewish tradition.
“Students come here with a sense of intellectual integrity and honesty to engage with traditional texts,” said Liz M.K. Nelson, a former kollel student from the yeshiva originally from Detroit who is now the yeshiva’s recruiter. “They come here on their individual journeys, with their different approaches to Judaism, with a real sense of determination to pursue their individual spiritual goals in an intentional community.”
Even when it comes to Jewish texts that challenge their views and values, Nelson said, “Here they can grapple with them in a space where everyone is dedicated to working through them with a sense of commitment to tradition, community, and integrity.”
The Conservative Yeshiva offers a range of programs, from summer experiences to winter break learning programs to partnerships that can lead to a master’s degree in Jewish education or even the rabbinate.
But the flagships of the institution are its long-term learning programs.
Called Lishma — a Hebrew term that means doing or learning for its own sake — the program welcomes post-college students of any age. The Lishma program is currently accepting applicants for the fall; it is open to both full-time and part-time students.
Students from the Lishma and Advanced Halakhah programs eat with faculty at a weekly community lunch. (Jonny Finkel)
Orah Liss, a native of Frankfurt, Germany, who was raised in a Masorti home (the equivalent of Conservative Judaism outside of North America), came to Lishma after completing a Jewish studies program in Sweden focused on Jewish literature, history and philosophy. Liss, 26, was looking to learn more from and about traditional Jewish texts.
“I wanted to build the familiarity with it — not just the what, but the why. I wanted to read the Talmud and have an understanding of it,” Liss said. “For me the halacha is very important, as is the traditional prayer service, so I wanted a place with the traditional aspects along with egalitarianism.”
The generous spirit of the yeshiva community became evident when Liss was saying Kaddish for her grandmother, she said. Even on days when there were no scheduled prayer services, she said, “I asked for people to come for a minyan and on every day people showed up.”
Some students use the year at Lishma as a stepping-stone to rabbinical school. A new track called Omek (Hebrew for “depth”) offers specialization in areas that expands students’ Jewish literacy and breadth of spiritual knowledge on the pathway to becoming a rabbi at one of the seminaries with which the Yeshiva works — such as the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles.
The focus isn’t just Jewish study, but also community building, immersion in authentic Jewish living and even innovation in worship.
Devorah Gillard, 66, a Lishma student from Nova Scotia, Canada, said she came to the Conservative Yeshiva at the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center to learn Torah in an open environment.
“The Conservative Yeshiva encourages you to ask and explore and expand. You are not judged. They hear what you have to say — your doubts and fears —and they help you to grow,” she said.
Raised as an evangelical Christian, Gillard’s lifelong spiritual journey led her to convert to Judaism eight years ago. She’s now a board member of the Canadian Foundation for Masorti Judaism in Toronto. “I wanted to understand what it meant to be Jewish, to get to the depth of Torah,” Gillard said.
Ejnat Willing discusses the Talmud in a class at the yeshiva in the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center. (Jonny Finkel)
She said her fellow students have a zeal to engage with Judaism and do good in the world that’s infectious.
“These are people who are really serious about their religion and God and don’t just daven,” or pray, Gillard said. “They are more aware of the environment, food insecurity and inclusion. They go after what they want to do in this world.”
The Lishma program draws some 30 students a year to its Jerusalem campus from near and far. They study Talmud, Tanakh, and Midrash as well as Jewish philosophy and prayer in a way that seeks to accommodate modern scholarship and the contemporary world. Students come from all kinds of levels of Jewish knowledge and Hebrew proficiency; the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center offers supporting programs to bring people up to speed as needed.
Allan Fis-Calderon spent most of his 20s advancing his career as a movie scriptwriter in Mexico City. But when the Covid-19 pandemic shut the world down, Fis-Calderon, 30, began to revisit his desire to study Torah. His rabbi from the city’s egalitarian Beit El Masorti synagogue suggested he look into the Conservative Yeshiva.
“So far this has been the best experience in my life — to experience Judaism from a liberal place where they take me into account. I feel at home and part of the group,” he said. “This has given me the opportunity to study Torah and develop myself as a Jew.”
Being in Israel at this crucial moment, where it feels like society is deeply divided, has made him appreciate Israel even more, Fis-Calderon said.
Much of the learning is conducted using the traditional Jewish method of chevruta, where students learn in pairs, but there is also plenty of classroom time with teachers.
Rabbi Joel Levy, the rosh yeshiva (yeshiva head), said his goal is to move every student along on their own journey of Jewish discovery.
“This is an immersive environment but not a coercive one. People need space and time to work out their relationship with Judaism and literacy,” Levy said. “Some people will come out of the other end saying they want to keep Shabbat and others will not keep Shabbat. I consider it a success when that decision has been made as an informed adult.”
Levy’s job, he said, is to create a space where people can take their own search seriously and openly.
The students who come to the Conservative Yeshiva hail from a range of Jewish denominations, races, ages, sexual orientations and gender identities. Though each may be in their own place in their individual religious journey, they learn and experience Jerusalem and Israel together as members of a Jewish community, he said.
“It is a total privilege to be with a group of people who are thinking about and searching for how to translate the wisdom and value of our tradition to today’s beautifully complex world,” Levy said.
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The post At this unique yearlong Torah study program in Jerusalem, students are encouraged to ask ‘Why?’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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How a new tool in Lithuania helps people read letters from their Jewish ancestors
(JTA) — VILNIUS, Lithuania — At a family reunion in California in 2013, Felicita Trueblood discovered a portal to the past: a binder full of letters from her great-grandfather, a rabbi in Ukraine, from before World War II.
As exciting as the discovery was, the letters were illegible to her — until now, thanks to an artificial intelligence tool developed by Sergii Gurbych, a researcher in Lithuania who hungered for information about his own Jewish past. They unveiled a world of grief but also brought Trueblood solace, uncovering the truth about her great-grandfather’s death.
The letters, about 50 pages in total, had sat untouched for decades in her cousin’s house in Palm Springs. They were penned in Yiddish by Pavel Malisoff, Trueblood’s great-grandfather in Konotop, Ukraine — then in the Soviet Union — to his son, Trueblood’s great-uncle Solomon, who immigrated to the United States and changed his last name to Malis.
Between 1927 and 1934, the letters bridged two worlds — on one side, a father in Ukraine witnessing a community on the brink of destruction, and on the other, a son journeying from New York to California under the weight of the Great Depression. Malis died in 1985. For nearly a century, no one else read those pages.
At the 2013 reunion, none of the living family members could decipher their ancestor’s Yiddish letters, written in Hebrew script. Trueblood, who is now 75, felt compelled to take charge of the treasure trove. She grew up in San Diego with few traces of her Jewish past. Her mother, Malisoff’s granddaughter, became a Christian Scientist before marrying her father, a non-Jewish descendant of colonial Americans. Trueblood wanted to know who her great-grandfather was and the life he inhabited, long cut off from her family memory.
“I was raised outside the Jewish community, with no day-to-day connection,” Trueblood told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But I was always fascinated.”
Trueblood soon ran into obstacles. She found only a handful of translators who could help decipher the handwritten letters, and the cost of hiring them to work through the whole stack was prohibitively high.
But 13 years after inheriting the letters, she saw a Facebook post about VILNISH, a new project in Lithuania that aims to turn handwritten and historical printed texts in Yiddish and Hebrew into digital texts that can be easily searched and translated.
Gurbych, a researcher at Vilnius University’s Center for the Study of East European Jewish History, built the AI model behind VILNISH, which launched late last year. Born in Ukraine, Gurbych studied Hebrew and Yiddish on top of electrical engineering. At Vilnius University, he focuses on developing digital approaches to analyzing archival Jewish texts.
Gurbych’s particular interest is texts written between World War I and World War II, when Jewish cultural and intellectual life flourished in Vilnius. In 1925, Vilnius became the first headquarters of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO, which continues to preserve the Yiddish language and Eastern European Jewish heritage in New York City.
Gurbych turned to a plethora of diaries, memoirs and other documents that were written by Jews in the interwar period and stored in the National Library of Lithuania. They provided the perfect material to teach a language model to recognize handwritten texts from the period. As he trains VILNISH on more and more handwriting types, it becomes a more universal tool.
Soon after Gurbych publicized the service, he began to hear from people like Trueblood, who sought to read letters left behind by their relatives.
Their urge to connect with the past was familiar to Gurbych. His own grandfather was a Jew born in 1915 in the Polish city of Łódź. During the Holocaust, he escaped the Łódź Ghetto days before its liquidation by the Nazis, when most of the 67,000 Jews who lived there were killed. Gurbych’s grandfather settled in present-day Ukraine in the Soviet Union.
Gurbych is drawn to pieces of writing that evoke the atmosphere, the tastes and smells of life for Jews in Poland before their communities were destroyed.
“I want to know more about the world where my grandfather lived,” said Gurbych. “He died in 2001, and I just feel that I didn’t speak with him about this time enough. He was a person who lived in the Soviet Union, so he was just closed, and didn’t very much like to talk about his Jewish background and about life in interwar Poland.”
Trueblood contacted Gurbych in May. Within a month, he sent her translations of all her great-grandfather’s letters. She was stunned by the vivid images of Malisoff’s life in Konotop, marked by poverty and separation. All of his 11 children were forced to relocate across the Soviet Union or immigrated to Canada and the United States.
Konotop was racked by famine during Stalin’s rapid forced collectivization of agriculture. Malisoff described “people walking half naked, hungry, with only a few coins in their pockets, without a piece of bread, without proper clothing, silently, without work and without money.” The “spiritual condition” was destroyed, he wrote, as the Sabbath, the holidays, kosher food, circumcisions and religious teaching disappeared — “as though they had never existed.”
It wasn’t just an AI language model that supplied her these windows to the past, said Trueblood. Gurbych had the knowledge of Jewish history and religious tradition to explain the terms used by her great-grandfather, a rabbi, and to point her toward the stories and texts that he referenced.
“What I got back was just beautiful, because he understands the context, the history, the biblical references,” she said.
She also made a discovery that shifted her understanding of how her great-grandfather died. Trueblood and her other living relatives knew that Malisoff had been tortured by Stalin’s regime for receiving small packages of money from family members in California. They always believed that was how he died.
But after the letters from Malisoff stopped abruptly in 1934, other letters from his wife and children revealed the truth: Malisoff had died not from torture, but from a heart attack at 74. A letter from one of his children in the Soviet Union gave Trueblood the unexpected gift of her great-grandfather’s dignified death and memorial service.
“Our old father of blessed memory has passed away, but his good and beautiful name has not died,” the letter said. “It lives on, and will continue to live for many years. The town paid him the highest honors. The entire town, old and young alike, accompanied him on his final journey, and he was given the place of highest honor in accordance with his good deeds.”
Gurbych hopes that VILNISH will retrieve such memories for many more people like Trueblood, while also helping academic researchers who face huge sets of archival documents in Yiddish and Hebrew that few people can read.
The tool also has the potential to support the descendants of Jews who were persecuted during the Holocaust as they prepare materials to confirm their eligibility for repatriation or citizenship, such as synagogue records, internal rolls of Jewish communities and other historical documents.
Trueblood was struck by how many others have yet to access threads to their past, as stacks of paper like hers sit untouched in attics and libraries.
“These letters are all over the world,” she said. “There are thousands of them out there that haven’t been translated.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post How a new tool in Lithuania helps people read letters from their Jewish ancestors appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump: ‘The war will be over very shortly after the election’
(JTA) — President Donald Trump heckled the leaders of Iran at the first-ever Republican midterm convention on Wednesday, while promoting the idea of renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself.
“The war will be over very shortly after the election,” Trump said in a 100-minute address. “They’re hanging out for dear life, hoping that we lose, so they can deal with dumb, weak Democrats, and they can have their nuclear bomb. But we’re not going to let that happen.”
The president expressed confidence that Iran is “going to be quitting or dropping out” of the war “right after Election Day, because they want a deal desperately.”
“We’re winning it,” Trump said, referring to the war in Iran. “We control the Hormuz Strait.”
The U.S. and Israel started the war in February 2026. Since then, Trump has repeatedly predicted victory or an imminent end to the conflict. But six months later, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted amid competing U.S. and Iranian efforts to control the vital waterway.
On Wednesday, Iran said it attacked 10 ships near the strait after the U.S. sank five Iranian oil tankers, in the largest exchange of attacks on shipping by the two sides since the war began.
“I should get something out of this — the Trump Strait,” the president continued, repeating an idea he had proposed about a week ago. “I’ll have an announcement. We’ll call it the Trump Strait, and I’m sure the Iranian leadership will be thrilled with that.”
Declaring that they’re probably not “too happy about anything,” Trump said that Iran “is falling apart” and described the country as “the bully of the Middle East.”
“They’re not the bully anymore,” the president continued. “We’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Trump: ‘The war will be over very shortly after the election’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger
(JTA) — The pro-Israel mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, lost his reelection campaign Wednesday to a progressive pro-Palestinian challenger in the latest demonstration of how Israel politics are seeping into local U.S. elections.
Incumbent Brett Smiley, who converted to Judaism in 2024 while in office, was bested by state Sen. David Morales in the Democratic primary in this deep blue city. Morales, a democratic socialist, carried endorsements from leading progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna. With 99% of ballots counted, Morales had garnered 52.5% of the vote to Smiley’s 47.5%.
During the campaign, pro-Smiley flyers were defaced with Hitler mustaches and devil horns, acts which his opponent condemned.
The city’s Democratic primary also serves as a preview for a significant general election vote on divestment. In November, Providence will become the largest American city to cast a vote on a measure that, despite not naming Israel directly, could stop the city from investing in companies linked to Israel.
Morales supports the binding divestment vote, while Smiley and local Jewish and pro-Israel groups have opposed it. The mayor called the ordinance “both unenforceable and likely in violation of existing state law” in a statement to Jewish Insider.
During the campaign, Morales criticized Smiley for participating in a mayoral summit run by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, in which Smiley serves in a leadership capacity. Morales accused the group of suppressing pro-Palestinian speech and not being transparent about its funders.
The Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative, which promotes business ties between the state and Israel, opposes both the ballot initiative and Morales. Avi Nevel, the group’s founder, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency prior to the primary that Morales was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.”
It was a night of overthrowing incumbents in the state, as Rhode Island’s sitting governor also lost his primary to an intra-party challenger. That race, however, did not pivot on Israel: Gov. Daniel McKee’s popularity in the state has sunk following a scandal involving the closure of a major bridge.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger appeared first on The Forward.
