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For Orthodox Israeli teens, battling climate change can be a lonely fight
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
(JTA) — Abigail Lerer, a Modern Orthodox vegan teen from Ra’anana, Israel, is working on changing throwaway culture in her family. ‘’It makes me feel frustrated, there is just no need,’’ Lerer says about using single-use dishes at meals. To win over reluctant family members who worried about the inconvenience, she took on responsibility for washing the dishes and taking out the recycling.
Eventually, after years of slideshows and lectures, Lerer’s family came to understand her point of view. They don’t have single-use utensils in their home anymore and her mother even brings reusable containers to stores when she buys nuts and grains.
Now, Lerer just wants the rest of the county to catch up. There are few environmentalists in the haredi or “ultra-Orthodox” community, where religious leaders do not put a high priority on protecting the environment and where large families often rely on single-use plastic cutlery for the sake of convenience.
A study by Kantar Ministry of Environmental Protection found that 73% of the general population use single-use plastic regularly compared to 96% of the haredi population who do so. This year, Israel’s new finance minister rolled back high taxes on disposables after haredi Orthodox leaders complained that they unfairly targeted their lifestyle. Community activists argued that they compensate for the big environmental impact of single-use plastic by flying and driving far less than the general population.
Even among Modern or Religious Zionist Orthodox communities, who tend to be less insular and have fewer children than the haredim, environmental action still lags.
Lerer, who subscribes to a vegan, minimal-waste lifestyle, says the solution lies in leadership. If religious figures endorsed eco-conscious living as a Jewish obligation, then this would galvanize the necessary action, she said.
“You need to make it halachic and then people will care,” she says, meaning legal according to religious law. But, she is skeptical that this will occur due to the highly complex nature of the Jewish legal system.
Rabbi Dr. Natan Slifkin, who founded the Biblical Museum of Natural History in Israel, explores how traditional Judaism relates to science. He said the haredi Orthodox community doesn’t have the same level of concern for environmentalism because of insularity. ‘’They lack thinking about any issues that extend beyond their community,” he said. Because they are poorer than many other sectors of the population, economic considerations always come first, Slifkin said.
Bar Kaima was founded in early 2020 and aims to connect young Israelis to environmental causes. (Courtesy of Esther Hamou)
Nevertheless, environmental groups in religious circles do exist. Esther Hamou, 18, who dresses exclusively in second-hand clothes, volunteers in a religious environmental organization, Bar Kayma. The group uses arguments in the Torah such as tikkun olam — fixing the world — and baal tashchit — the prohibition against wanton destruction — to combat skeptics and to persuade religious Jews to be more sustainable.
This past January, Hamou organized an environmentally themed event for Tu Bishvat, the Jewish new year for trees. As part of her anti-plastic activism, Hamou requested that all attendees bring their own cup for refreshments. Despite her efforts in linking eco-friendly living to Judaism, Hamou finds that ‘’people just don’t want to hear it.’’
Penina Schorr is attempting to change this. The 14-year-old lives in a Modern Orthodox community in Jerusalem and tries to encourage her peers to avoid using throwaway plastic. They ‘’sometimes’’ listen. Schorr has been raised in a plastic-conscious home; they only use throwaway plastic in exceptional circumstances such as the day before Pesach, when strict rules require only kosher-for-Passover utensils for the holiday. However, her family’s attitude is not widespread, and most people in her community are far less vigilant.
She said that in Orthodox religious schools like hers there is a sense of ambivalence towards environmental issues. Her geography teacher, she said, justifies inaction, claiming that God would never destroy the world and that the claims of climate activists and scientists can’t be legitimate.
Practicality is also an obstacle. According to Ariel Shay, a volunteer at Plastic Free Israel, one of the main reasons Israelis with large families use single-use plastic is a fast cleanup after a meal.
Hadas Shlomi, 17, an activist from the north of Israel, feels alienated in her secular school because of her commitment to the environment: Peers mocked and teachers misunderstood her climate anxiety. Her parents are not on her wavelength either. She attributes the indifference of the older generation to the fact that they won’t be alive when the climate crisis peaks.
Shlomi appreciates the dedication of teens who are trying to convince their Orthodox friends and families to use fewer single-use plastics. As a leader of Strike for Future Israel, she knows the teens’ hearts are in the right place but sees the focus on individual actions as ineffective. Instead Shlomi lobbies the government to ban oil and gas drilling and pass a bill that sets a target of reducing emissions by 50% by 2030.
While these endeavors have not been successful yet, compounded by the transition to a new, more right-wing government in 2022 that is even more accommodating to haredi voters, Shlomi has the attention of some elected officials. In January 2022, the government required 30 hours of climate change education to the school year.
The changes apply to Israel’s secular and Religious Zionist school tracks. The government has sway in far fewer haredi Orthodox schools.
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The post For Orthodox Israeli teens, battling climate change can be a lonely fight appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Board of Peace Members Have Pledged More Than $5 billion for Gaza, Trump Says
A drone view shows the destruction in a residential neighborhood, after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the area, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Gaza City, October 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas/File Photo
US President Donald Trump said Board of Peace member states will announce at an upcoming meeting on Thursday a pledge of more than $5 billion for reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in Gaza.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump wrote that member states have also committed thousands of personnel toward a U.N.-authorized stabilization force and local police in the Palestinian enclave.
The US president said Thursday’s gathering, the first official meeting of the group, will take place at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, which the State Department recently renamed after the president. Delegations from more than 20 countries, including heads of state, are expected to attend.
The board’s creation was endorsed by a United Nations Security Council resolution as part of the Trump administration’s plan to end the war between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza.
Israel and Hamas agreed to the plan last year with a ceasefire officially taking effect in October, although both sides have accused each other repeatedly of violating the ceasefire. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 590 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops in the territory since the ceasefire began. Israel has said four of its soldiers have been killed by Palestinian militants in the same period.
While regional Middle East powers including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel – as well as emerging nations such as Indonesia – have joined the board, global powers and traditional Western US allies have been more cautious.
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Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site
Along Britton Road in Rochester, New York, a brick gatehouse sits across from ordinary homes. Beyond it lies Britton Road Cemetery, its grounds divided into family plots and sections claimed over time by Orthodox congregations and fraternal associations, past and present. Names like Anshe Polen, Beth Hakneses Hachodosh, B’nai Israel, and various Jewish fraternal organizations are found here.
On the east side of the cemetery, a modest gray headstone draws visitors who do not personally know the man buried there, who were never taught his name in school, and who claim no personal connection to his life. Some leave notes. Some light candles in a small metal box set nearby. Others whisper prayers and stand for a moment before going. They come because they believe holiness can be found here.
The grave belongs to Rabbi Yechiel Meir Burgeman, a Polish-born teacher who died in 1938. He did not lead a major congregation or leave behind an institution that bears his name. And yet, nearly a century after his death, people still visit.
Over time, Burgeman has come to be remembered as a tzaddik nistar, a hidden righteous person, whose holiness is known through their teaching and daily life rather than through any title or position. His grave has become a place of intercession. People come to pray for healing, for help in times of uncertainty, and for the hope of marriage. What endures here is not an individual’s biography so much as a practice: the belief that a life lived with integrity can continue to shape devotion, even after the body has been laid to rest.
In life, Burgeman was not known as a miracle worker or a public figure. He was a melamed, a teacher of children, living plainly among other Jewish immigrants in Rochester’s Jewish center in the early decades of the 20th century. At one point, he was dismissed from a teaching post for refusing to soften his instruction. He later opened his own cheder, or schoolroom. There was no congregation to inherit his name, no institution to archive his papers. When he died, he was buried in an ordinary way at Britton Road Cemetery, one grave among many.
What followed was not immediate.
Remembered in return
The meaning attached to Burgeman’s resting place accumulated slowly. Stories began to circulate. People spoke of his kindness, his discipline, his integrity. Over time, visitors came. The grave became a place not of answers, but of belief. For generations, this turning toward the dead has taken this same form. It is not worship. It is proximity. A way of standing near those believed to have lived rightly, and asking that their merit might still matter.
In Jewish tradition, prayer at a grave is a reflection on those believed to have lived with righteousness, asking that their merit accompany the living in moments of need. Psalms are traditionally recited. Words are often spoken quietly.
I have done something similar too. Years ago, before I converted to Judaism and before I had the means to travel, I sent a written prayer through a Chabad service that delivers letters to the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in New York. Someone else carried it. I cannot say with absolute certainty what happened because of it. Only that the practice itself made space for hope that I was seen, and that a prayer was later answered in ways that shaped my life and deepened my understanding of Judaism.
Burgeman’s grave functions in a similar register, though without any institutional frame. People come not because his name is widely known, but because the story has endured. Over time, that story gathered details. The most persistent involves a dog said to have escorted Jewish children to Burgeman’s cheder so they would not be harassed along the way by other youths. The dog then stood watch until they were ready to return home. The versions differ. Some are reverent. Some are playful. Some verge on the miraculous. The story endures because it names something children needed: care, in a world that could be frightening.
In recent decades, Burgeman’s afterlife has taken on a digital form. His name surfaces in comment threads and genealogical forums, passed along by people who never met him and are not always sure how they are connected. Spellings are debated. Dates are corrected. A descendant appears. A former student’s grandchild adds a fragment. Someone asks whether this is the same man their grandmother spoke of. No single account settles the matter. Instead, memory gathers. What once traveled by word of mouth now moves through hyperlinks.
The internet allows fragments to remain visible. Burgeman’s story survives not because it was officially recorded, but because enough people cared to remember it. In this way, his legacy resembles the man himself: quiet, unadorned, sustained by actions rather than declaration.
This story does not offer certainty. It is about remembering a life and asking if we might still learn from it and if, perhaps, it can bring us closer to faith. Burgeman left no grand monument. He left descendants. A grave. A life of Jewish values that continues to teach.
Burgeman did not seek recognition in life. After death, he became something else: a teacher still teaching, not through words, but through the way people continue to act on his memory. That is the lesson. Not any miracle. Not any legend. The quiet insistence that a life lived with integrity does not end when the casket is placed into the earth.
Some graves are instructions.
This one still asks something of us.
The post Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site appeared first on The Forward.
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Turkey Sends Drilling Ship to Somalia in Major Push for Energy Independence
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a ceremony for the handover of new vehicles to the gendarmerie and police forces in Istanbul, Turkey, Nov. 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Murad Sezer
i24 News – Turkey has dispatched a drilling vessel to Somalia to begin offshore oil exploration, marking what officials describe as a historic step in Ankara’s drive to strengthen energy security and reduce reliance on imports.
Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Alparslan Bayraktar announced that the drilling ship Çagri Bey is set to sail from the port of Taşucu in southern Turkey, heading toward Somali territorial waters.
The vessel will pass through the Strait of Gibraltar and around the coast of southern Africa before reaching its destination, with drilling operations expected to begin in April or May.
Bayraktar described the mission as a “historic” milestone, saying it reflects Turkey’s long-term strategy to enhance national energy security and move closer to self-sufficiency.
The operation will be protected by the Turkish Naval Forces, which will deploy several naval units to secure both the vessel’s route and the drilling area in the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. The security arrangements fall under existing cooperation agreements between Ankara and Somalia.
The move aligns with a broader vision promoted by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, aimed at reducing Turkey’s dependence on foreign energy supplies, boosting domestic production, and shielding the economy from external pressures.
Bayraktar said Turkey is also working to double its natural gas output in the Black Sea this year, while continuing offshore exploration along its northern coastline. In parallel, Ankara is preparing to bring its first nuclear reactor online at the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, which is expected to begin generating electricity soon and eventually supply about 10% of the country’s energy needs.
The current drilling effort is based on survey data collected last year and forms part of Ankara’s wider plan to expand its energy exploration activities both regionally and internationally.