Uncategorized
How a youth hockey league is accommodating Shabbat-observant players
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) — Six hours of hockey games squeezed in between Saturday night and Sunday may seem like suboptimal scheduling, but for Alex Ottensoser, a forward on the North Jersey Avalanche 16U travel ice hockey team, it’s the main reason he signed up.
As a Sabbath-observant Jew, Ottensosser would have to miss many of the games on most other hockey teams, and that’s if a team would be willing to take a player who would miss Saturday games in the first place. That all changed when his mother’s friend mentioned the idea of forming a team for players who similarly observe Shabbat.
That idea came seven years ago, when several parents from New Jersey’s Bergen County approached the Avalanche, a competitive youth ice hockey program based out of Hackensack, New Jersey, about starting a Sabbath-observant team. Up to that point, Robert Rudman, one of those parents, says his son, now a junior in high school, would have had to miss at least one game every weekend because of his family’s Sabbath observance.
After some discussion with the Avalanche organization, Rudman says they offered to make a parallel team that was similarly competitive with the organization’s existing teams but also accommodate their religious practices.
Since then, the Avalanche have been attracting Sabbath observant players from the New York metropolitan area. “We’ve grown so much that this past year we had four teams made up of at least 15 players, so about 60-65 kids,” said Rudman. Now, “if you come to The Icehouse [in Hackensack] – which is where the Avalanche play their games – after Shabbat, you’re going to see four different age groups all playing.”
Rudman estimates that 95% of the players on these teams are Sabbath observant, although they have also attracted a small number of nonreligious players who simply want to keep their Saturdays free. The Avalanche teams are open to boys and girls, although the vast majority of current players are boys.
Jews who observe Shabbat have been accommodated in a wide array of fields. Former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was the first observant Jew to hold a cabinet position. Former senator and vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman managed to make it work. And Ryan Turell, the former Yeshiva University star now playing in the NBA’s G League, hopes to become the first Orthodox player in the NBA.
Yet, for practical reasons, youth ice hockey has remained hard to access for Sabbath-observant Jews. Competitive youth ice hockey requires large time commitments from players and their families, including on weekends. Teams from the age of 6 and up typically have multiple weekly practices, and games Saturdays and Sundays, from September through March. Because of this intense schedule and competition for limited rink time, Saturday games are built into the culture of youth hockey, perhaps more than most other sports.
Sabbath-observant Avalanche teams have had their share of success on the ice, including winning state championships at the A and AA levels. (Courtesy of the Avalanche)
Jewish students in the New York metropolitan area have filled this void, compensating for their schools’ lack of ice rinks, with floor hockey. The yeshiva league currently stands at 15 teams and has developed into its own subculture, complete with local youth leagues and a summer camp. Still, the pull of ice hockey remains strong, and a small number of Jewish high schools now field ice hockey teams.
For Ottensoser, fitting in two weeknight practices and multiple weekend games with his Ramaz Upper School workload, and commuting from the city to practices and games, requires efficiency. “I find a way to do work in the car and make use of the time,” he said.
While hockey teams that accommodate Sabbath observant players may be uncommon, it’s not without precedent. The Avenue Road Hockey Association has fielded Toronto-area teams with similar accommodations, and the NY Icecats, a hockey program based out of rinks in New York and Hackensack, also fields teams “arranged to accommodate Sabbath observant families.” In addition, some Sabbath-observant players do manage to play on competitive teams without these accommodations, including on several teams in Long Island.
“[W]e are in an era where the schedule is much more fungible. It’s much easier to create specialized schedules for people,” said Judith Shulevitz, journalist and author of “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.” “So I think it’s easier to accommodate schedules for particular means.”
That said, she also sees a broader appreciation for a day of rest, citing the players from non-observant backgrounds who have joined the Sabbath-observant Avalanche teams. In her view, kids are too driven and scheduled, with not enough down time. “As soon as you begin to grasp the importance of a day of rest, you will begin to grasp the idea of a day of rest with others and begin to structure your time in such a way that it becomes possible,” Shulevitz said. “That’s what they’ve done. They want the day of rest. They’ve joined a [Sabbath-observant team] so they’ve created a structure for themselves.That’s a social good in and of itself.”
Ultimately, while the Sabbath-observant Avalanche teams have had their share of success on the ice, including winning state championships at the competitive A and AA levels, Rudman says the goal is not to get players to the NHL. (The league currently features a small but historically strong group of Jewish players, including Edmonton Oiler Zach Hyman who wears the number 18 for chai, or life in Hebrew.)
“It’s so they can be kids and play the game they love, without having to sacrifice anything in terms of their religion,” he said.
—
The post How a youth hockey league is accommodating Shabbat-observant players appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Nearly 90% of Turkish Opinion Columns Favor Hamas, Study Shows
Pro-Hamas demonstrators in Istanbul, Turkey, carry a banner calling for Israel’s elimination. Photo: Reuters/Dilara Senkaya
About 90 percent of opinion articles published in two of Turkey’s leading media outlets portray the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in a positive or neutral light, according to a new study, reflecting Ankara’s increasingly hostile stance toward Israel.
Earlier this week, the Israel-based Jewish People Policy Institute released a report examining roughly 15,000 opinion columns in the widely read Turkish newspapers Sabah and Hürriyet, revealing that Hamas is often depicted positively through a “resistance movement” narrative portraying its members as “martyrs.”
For example, Turkish journalist Abdulkadir Selvi, writing in Hürriyet, described the assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as “a holy martyr not only of Palestine but of Islam as a whole” who “fought for peace,” while portraying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the new Hitler.”
JPPI also found that most articles in these two newspapers took a neutral stance on the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, offering almost no clear condemnation of the attacks and failing to acknowledge the group’s targeting of civilians.
Some journalists even went so far as to praise the violence as serving the Palestinian cause, the study noted.
In one striking example, Hürriyet published an article just one day after the attack, lauding the “resistance fighters” who carried out a “mythic” assault on the “Zionist occupying regime” and celebrating the killings.
In other cases, some journalists went as far as to portray Hamas as treating the Israeli hostages it kidnapped “kindly,” denying that the terrorist group had tortured and sexually abused former captives despite clear evidence.
“There was not the slightest indication that the Israelis released by the Palestinian resistance had been tortured,” Turkish journalist Hilal Kaplan wrote in Sabah, denying claims that the hostages had suffered brutal abuse.
“They all looked exactly the same physically as they did on Oct. 6, 2023, more than a year later,” he continued.
Prof. Yedidia Stern, president of JPPI, described the study’s findings as “deeply troubling,” urging Israeli officials not to overlook the Turkish media’s positive portrayal of Hamas and denial of its abuses.
“We must not normalize incitement and antisemitism anywhere in the world – certainly not when it comes from countries with which Israel maintains diplomatic relations,” Stern said in a statement.
According to the study, nearly half of the columns expressed a positive view of Hamas, while approximately 40 percent took a neutral position.
The analysis also found that around 40 percent of opinion columns mentioning Jews or Judaism contained antisemitic elements, with some invoking “Jewish capital” to suggest global power, while others compared Zionism to Nazism or depicted Jews as immune from international criticism.
For instance, two weeks after the Oct. 7 atrocities, Turkish journalist Nedim Şener wrote in Hürriyet that global Jewish capital and control over media and international institutions had brought the United States and Europe “to their knees,” allowing Israel to carry out a “genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”
Uncategorized
ADL appoints former head of embattled Gaza aid foundation to its board
The Anti-Defamation League named Rev. Johnnie Moore, who led the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, to its board of directors last week.
Moore became the public face of the foundation over the summer as it faced blame for hundreds of Palestinian civilians being killed while attempting to access aid at distribution centers that critics said were risky and inefficient.
But the ADL described the foundation, which was created with support from the U.S. and Israeli governments, as a “historic effort to provide nearly 200 million meals for free to the people of Gaza,” in a press release.
The ADL’s leadership has become more protective of Israel in recent years as it has shifted away from its historic work on civil rights issues unrelated to antisemitism. That change included a 2017 reworking of its governance structure, which had been run by a committee of several hundred lay leaders, to a more traditional nonprofit board.
The United Nations reported in August that 859 Palestinians had been killed near the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, mostly by the Israeli military. Doctors Without Borders said that the centers had “morphed into a laboratory of cruelty” with children being shot and civilians crushed in stampedes.
Moore’s role involved defending the organization. He blamed Hamas and the United Nations for causing mass starvation in Gaza and presented the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as the best means of distributing food to civilians without allowing it to be diverted to militants.
“Hamas has been trying to use the aid situation to advance their ceasefire position,” Moore said during a July presentation to the American Jewish Congress.
The foundation shut down in December.
An evangelical leader and former campaign adviser to President Donald Trump’s with no background in international aid prior to his work with the foundation in Gaza, Moore brings a Christian perspective to the ADL’s board at a time when evangelicals are increasingly divided over Israel and antisemitism. “As a Christian, I consider it a responsibility to stand alongside ADL in this critical moment for the Jewish community and for our nation,” he said in the statement announcing his appointment.
He was appointed alongside Stacie Hartman, an attorney and lay leader based in Chicago, and Matthew Segal, a media entrepreneur who former President Joe Biden named to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. They join a mix of philanthropists and business leaders, including Jonathan Neman, the CEO of salad chain Sweetgreen, and Max Neuberger, the publisher of Jewish Insider.
The post ADL appoints former head of embattled Gaza aid foundation to its board appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Man Charged With Hate Crime for Car Ramming at Chabad Headquarters in Brooklyn
Police control the scene after a car repeatedly slammed into Chabad World Headquarters in Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. The driver was taken into custody. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Police in New York City charged a man on Thursday with a hate crime and other charges after he allegedly rammed his car repeatedly into Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters in Brooklyn.
The suspect, 36-year-old Dan Sohail, has been charged with attempted assault as a hate crime, reckless endangerment as a hate crime, criminal mischief as a hate crime, and aggravated harassment as a hate crime, New York City Police Department (NYPD) Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny announced at a press conference on Thursday.
“The hate crime right now is that he basically attacked a Jewish institution,” Kenny explained. “This is a synagogue, it was clearly marked as a synagogue, he knew it was a synagogue because he had attended there previously.”
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement is an influential force in Orthodox Judaism that operates around the world. The iconic 770 Eastern Parkway building in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn became the world headquarters of the Hassidic movement in 1940.
The NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force is leading the investigation into the car ramming.
Sohail is a resident of New Jersey and has no criminal history in New York City, Kenny said. The vehicle he allegedly used on Wednesday night was registered under his name and, earlier this month, Sohail attended an event at the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters.
“We believe that he was in Brooklyn last night to continue this attempt to connect with the Lubavitch Jewish community,” Kenny said. Sohail was due in court on Friday.
Footage from the incident showed Sohail drive his vehicle multiple times into the rear door of the 770 Eastern Parkway building in Crown Heights, according to Kenny, who added that the suspect stepped out of his vehicle, removed several blockades from his path, and cleared snow away from a sidewalk before ramming into the building.
Later, when talking to police, Sohail claimed his foot slipped and that he lost control of the car because he was wearing “clunky boots,” Kenny said. No injuries were reported and the damaged synagogue door is currently being repaired, according to Yaacov Behrman, head of public relations at the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters.
“It is clear the incident was intentional,” Behrman added. “The attacker removed the metal bollards that typically block the ramp and protect the entrance shortly before driving into the building. The bollards have since been restored.”
The car ramming took place the same day as the 75th anniversary of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson being chosen as the leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, chairman of the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters, said in a statement on Thursday night that the incident “underscores a painful and undeniable reality: acts of hate, intimidation, violence, and antisemitic aggression are no longer isolated incidents or abstract threats.”
“Condemnation alone is insufficient. Real deterrence requires prompt, decisive action by the justice system — through swift prosecution and meaningful consequences — to discourage further incidents and ensure public safety,” he said. “As this incident occurred while the anniversary of the beginning of the Rebbe’s leadership was being observed worldwide, we reaffirm our faith that the world is meant to be refined — not ruled by fear or force, but cultivated as a place of moral clarity, responsibility, and goodness. We remain committed to that vision, even in the face of events such as this.”
The ramming incident occurred amid an alarming surge in antisemitic hate crimes across New York City.