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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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After Beirut Strike, Netanyahu Says ‘No Immunity’ for Terrorists
Rescuers work at the site of an Israeli strike that took place yesterday, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, May 7, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Azakir
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday there was no “immunity” for Israel’s enemies, a day after the Israeli military targeted a Hezbollah commander in its first strike on Beirut‘s southern suburbs since a ceasefire declared last month.
Israel said the attack killed the commander of the Iran-backed terrorist group’s elite Radwan force.
Hezbollah, which controls Beirut‘s southern suburbs, has yet to issue any statement on the strike or the commander’s status.
“He likely read in the press that he had immunity in Beirut. Well, he read it and it is no longer the case,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
Hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah reignited on March 2 when the Islamist group opened fire at Israel after Tehran came under US-Israeli attack.
Wednesday’s strike raises pressure on the Lebanon ceasefire that emerged in parallel to a truce in the wider Middle East war, with a halt to Israeli strikes in Lebanon being a key Iranian demand in Tehran’s negotiations with Washington.
Announced on April 16 by US President Donald Trump, the Lebanon ceasefire has led to a reduction in hostilities: the Beirut area was not struck by Israel for weeks before Wednesday’s attack.
But the sides have continued to trade blows in the south, where Israel has carved out a self-declared security zone.
Netanyahu said the Hezbollah commander, identified as Ahmed Ali Balout by the Israeli military, “thought he could continue to direct attacks against our forces and our communities from his secret terrorist headquarters in Beirut.”
“I say to our enemies in the clearest possible way: No terrorist has immunity,” he said.
LEBANESE PM: TOO EARLY FOR ‘HIGH-LEVEL’ MEETING
More than 2,700 people have been killed in the war in Lebanon since March 2, Lebanon’s Health Ministry says. Some 1.2 million people have been driven from their homes in Lebanon, many of them fleeing from southern Lebanon. According to Israeli officials, the majority of those killed have been Hezbollah terrorists.
Israel has announced 17 soldiers have been killed in southern Lebanon, along with two civilians in northern Israel.
At least 11 people were killed in Israeli strikes in three different areas of south Lebanon on Wednesday, according to a tally of Lebanese health ministry announcements.
Hezbollah said it carried out 17 operations against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, while the Israeli military said it had struck more than 15 militant infrastructure sites in the south the same day.
The Israeli military says Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel since March 2.
Hezbollah says it has the right to resist Israeli forces occupying the south.
Israel’s control zone extends as deep as 10 km (6 miles) into southern Lebanon. Israel says it aims to protect northern Israel from Hezbollah terrorists embedded in civilian areas.
The Lebanon ceasefire was announced for an initial 10 days and then extended for an additional three weeks during a meeting between the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors to Washington, hosted by Trump at the Oval Office.
Hezbollah strongly objects to the Lebanese government’s contacts with Israel, which reflect deep differences between the group and its critics in Lebanon.
Trump said last month he looked forward to hosting Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun in the near future, and that he saw “a great chance” the countries would reach a peace deal this year.
But on Wednesday, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said that it was premature to talk of any high-level meeting between Lebanon and Israel, and said that shoring up a ceasefire would be the basis for any new negotiations between Lebanese and Israeli government envoys in Washington.
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A View From My Campus: Sacrificing Science and Innovation for Political Symbolism
Illustrative: A BDS demonstration outside the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
In 2021, then-president of Rutgers, Jonathan Holloway, traveled to Tel Aviv to sign a partnership with Tel Aviv University (TAU) for future research at a cutting-edge facility being constructed in New Brunswick, The HELIX, which stands for The Health and Life Science Exchange.
This project includes collaborations with Robert Wood Johnson Hospital, Nokia Bell Labs, the NJ Economic Development Authority (NJEDA), Devco, and the American Technological University, all aimed at advancing innovation across industries.
The $665 million project offers “premier workspaces & laboratories for both startups and established companies operating across the gamut of healthcare, biotech, pharma, and, most broadly, the life sciences.” According to the NJEDA’s calculations, the cross-cultural development will bring an economic benefit of $340.4 million to the state.
But amongst Rutgers’ anti-Israel student groups, and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activists, there have been calls to terminate the partnership between Rutgers and Tel Aviv University, one of the leading research universities in the Middle East. This opposition came long before Oct. 7, 2023, and the war that followed.
According to these groups at Rutgers, the partnership with “Israeli universities play[s] a key role in supporting Israel’s system of apartheid rule,” and they call for “nothing less than complete divestment from these egregious investments, which drown our endowment fund and university facilities in blood.”
Note that they don’t actually care if this program or TAU connects in any way to the Israeli military or government; treating any Israeli, regardless of affiliation, like a human is apparently beyond the pale.
Notably, TAU was the first university in Israel to establish a Commission for Equity, Diversity, and Community, and has increased the representation of Arab students on campus to close to their proportion in the general population, a feat that is only possible in a place like Israel. It’s also important to note that, like many other universities in Israel, TAU leadership has gone out of its way to advocate for Palestinians.
Yet, somehow in the distorted truth of the BDS movement, TAU is complicit in “genocide.” Morally focused political movements on campus have historically claimed to fight for justice and against discrimination, exemplifying the higher education ideals of open-mindedness and critical thinking. And yet, these groups want to terminate partnerships for research, for innovation, for healthcare-based initiatives, for job and economic growth, and for expanding the academic frontier.
The Endowment Justice Collective, a Rutgers anti-Israel group, sent a letter to the administration claiming, “[a]ny collaboration which serves to bolster TAU’s reputation, provide it with a public platform, or materially support its operations shores up the legitimacy of an institution which aids and abets Israel’s oppression and genocide of Palestinians.”
But what will ending this huge project achieve, apart from a symbolic show of solidarity to a global movement whose priorities seem to obsessively focus on attacking Jews at Palestinians’ expense?
By taking intellectual pursuits such as the HELIX and dismissing them as politically motivated human endeavors, they become the very thing they seek to speak out against. TAU has the Neubauer Fellowship, an initiative specifically for Palestinian PhD students and faculty in STEM fields to provide high-level lab access and funding to elevate Palestinian representation in advanced research. When calls to cut ties like these set a precedent, they put such fellowships at risk as well. Rather than advancing equity, these efforts can ultimately backfire, restricting opportunities for Palestinian researchers and weakening the academic partnerships that make such programs possible.
Academic research and partnerships remain among higher education’s greatest strengths. They drive medical breakthroughs, technological innovation, and cross-cultural understanding. When groups like SJP demand the severance of ties with institutions like Tel Aviv University, they don’t just protest a government, but wall off the very pathways of discovery that benefit all of humanity. On our part, we must reject the close-mindedness of movements that prioritize ideological purity over global progress.
The author is a CAMERA Fellow at Rutgers University. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CAMERA.
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Unreported: Palestinian Youth Leadership Center Named After Munich Olympics Massacre Planner
An image of one of the Palestinian terrorists who took part in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
A Palestinian center for “training and nurturing young leaders, children, and trainees” sounds amazing, right?
It’s an initiative that Western donors would undoubtedly love to support, and something everyone would consider a step in the right direction to Palestinian Authority (PA) reform.
But what is the name of the center?
“The Martyr Salah Khalaf Center for Training Young Leaders”
Who was Salah Khalaf, you ask?
Maybe he was a famous Palestinian leader who could inspire the youth arriving at the center to participate in “programs and activities,” which are held “in accordance with the vision and goals of the PLO Supreme Council for Youth and Sports”?
In fact, Salah Khalaf headed the terror organization Black September, a secret branch of Fatah. Attacks he planned include the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics (Sept. 5, 1972) and the murder of two American diplomats in Sudan (March 1, 1973).
A PA role model par excellence!
Furthermore, the center is not only named after terrorist Salah Khalaf — but is hosting children specifically on Prisoner’s Day to indoctrinate them to honor terrorist prisoners. The pictures below show young children visiting the center:
This is a classic example of how the PA subtly transmits its ideologies and values to young Palestinians. Naming education centers, streets, and schools after terrorist murderers ensures that everyone is reminded of the name and the “role model” daily. This cements the terrorist’s status as a PA “celebrity.”
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has reported on the center in the past, documenting that its walls are adorned with images of terrorist Salah Khalat, former PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and current Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
Supervising the Salah Khalaf center is the PLO Supreme Council for Youth and Sports, which is headed by none other than top PA official Jibril Rajoub, who is also Fatah’s Central Committee Secretary.
Palestinian Media Watch has documented that Rajoub is an avid terror supporter. He recently praised a murderer of 12 people as “the most sacred thing”:
Official PA TV reporter: “The Fatah Movement, the Ramallah and El-Bireh District, the [PA-funded] Prisoners’ Club, the [PLO] Commission of Prisoners’ [Affairs]… set up a mourning tent for Martyr and released prisoner deported to Egypt Riyad Al-Amour [i.e., terrorist, responsible for murder of 12], who died as a Martyr…”
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “The most sacred thing in the eyes of the Palestinians is those who sacrificed their lives and their freedom – our Martyrs.”
[Official PA TV News, April 9, 2026]
In keeping with this view, Rajoub has announced that terror against Israel — which he and other PA leaders refer to as “resistance in all its forms” — is “still on the agenda” for Fatah:
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “National unity must be based on the adoption of UN resolutions by all of us, which grant us a state and also resistance in all its forms [i.e., including terror].
I tell you as a Fatah member, resistance in all its forms is still on the agenda of this [Fatah] Movement … Let no one think that we are surrendering. I tell you that the first among us who believes this is [PA President] Mahmoud Abbas … We all know the nature and essence of Fatah … Either popular resistance without blood if there will be a state, or else resistance in all its forms.”
Posted text: “During the opening of the first national youth conference.”
[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page,
Jan. 19, 2026]
Rajoub has also announced his support for terrorists and the PA’s “Pay-for-Slay” program that rewards them financially, vowing the PA “won’t give up on” them “or their rights or their status”:
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “I want to see hundreds of young people holding processions to end the [Hamas-Fatah] rift and holding processions for reforms that stem from our reality and our will and align with our aspirations and interests. Not what [US President] Trump wants or John Doe or whoever, I don’t know what their problem is with the prisoners.
This is not a reform, this is a burial, elimination, and denial of our history and heritage. We won’t give up on the Martyrs or the prisoners or their rights or their status, not in our awareness nor in our project, whether the political, militant, or organizational.”
[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Jan. 19, 2026]
Western donors who are supporting the PLO Supreme Council for Youth and Sports would do well to examine the kind of activities the Council is involved in. Presumably they would hardly appreciate the glorification of one of the planners of the Munich Olympics massacre.
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.