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In Chicago, a Black-led church and a Jewish community are addressing painful history through a Sukkot festival
CHICAGO (JTA) — Earlier this month, 40 people gathered in Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood to design a sukkah.
But they hadn’t come together only to build a hut for the upcoming Jewish festival of Sukkot, which begins on Friday evening and revolves around Jews erecting and dwelling in temporary structures for a week.
For this interfaith, intergenerational group, constructing the impermanent space was a step forward in what they hope is an enduring relationship between a Jewish community on Chicago’s North Side and a Black-led church on the West Side.
“Interfaith, interracial, cross-city, cross-neighborhood relationship building does not happen overnight,” said Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann of Mishkan Chicago, the Jewish prayer community partnering on the project. “It’s taken over a year for us to get together three times, four times. This sustained effort of people to continue to build relationships takes a long time.”
The sukkah project is part of the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival, which was launched last year and aims to build connections between the predominantly Black West Side community of Lawndale and the city’s Jewish community, which was once centered in that neighborhood. As part of the festival, which will take place in Lawndale from Oct. 1-15, architects partner with local neighborhood organizations to build the sukkahs, which are repurposed as permanent structures following the festival.
This year, six organizations are building sukkahs, which will later become sites ranging from a pavilion for meditation or a tool library. Mishkan is the only synagogue participating in the festival, and it is building its sukkah in collaboration with the Lawndale Christian Legal Center, a legal services initiative founded by the Lawndale Christian Community Church.
Through building the sukkah, which will later serve as a memorial to 41 victims of gun violence who were part of the legal center, the communities hope to reckon both with present tragedy and historical pain.
The sukkah’s design will address the departure of Jews from Lawndale during the postwar “white flight” era, when white residents left newly integrated urban neighborhoods en masse for the suburbs. Lawndale once had 60 synagogues and 75,000 Jewish residents. By the mid-1950s, only 500 were left.
“It’s a sad, hard, important-to-reckon-with piece of Jewish history in Chicago,” said Heydemann, who delivered a sermon on that topic to the church on a Sunday last year. That Sunday was also Tisha B’Av, the Jewish fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Holy Temples in Jerusalem.
“There are people from the congregation who remember when Jews and Black people both lived in the neighborhood before Jews moved out of the neighborhood, and that was a powerful conversation,” said Diana Collymore, a deacon who has been active in Lawndale Christian Community Church since 2014. “That’s one of the strongest pieces that stayed with people. There were people from Mishkan who remembered what street the grandpa or mom or dad grew up on here.”
The communities are collaborating with two firms: Architecture for Public Benefit and Trent Fredrickson Architecture, whose architects also hope to honor that shared history and create something that is responsive to the community’s needs, backgrounds and experiences.
“One of the community members was talking about this old Jewish restaurant that now doesn’t exist anymore and whenever she would go there she would feel welcome and at home,” said Chana Haouzi, the founder of Architecture for Public Benefit. “We just spoke of feeling invited and like that you could stay as long as you like.”
The relationship between Mishkan and Lawndale Christian began when Heydemann and the church’s lead pastor, Jonathan Brooks, who is also known as Pastah J, participated in a program for early-career clergy at the University of Chicago Divinity School. They have spoken to each other’s congregations and hope for the sukkah-building process to bring their members closer together.
Members are already finding commonalities between the two congregations.
“The Jewish community that came here from Europe, they were driven here from trauma and harm, and the African-American community that came from the South in the Great Migration, they too were fleeing trauma,” Collymore said. “And both have faith and they believe in a God, and their faith brought them and encouraged them and directed them and kept them and settled them in this space.”
One way the communities are connecting and confronting the past is through shared scripture. The group designing the sukkah found meaning in a well-known passage from Ecclesiastes, which is read in synagogue on Sukkot and relates how there is a time and a season for everything under the sun.
The two groups studied the passage, interpreting and analyzing the Hebrew and translated versions. Its text will later be emblazoned on the sukkah’s walls in Hebrew script, transliterated Hebrew and English.
“There’s appreciation around that Ecclesiastes passage,” Collymore said. “Having scripture out of both of our faiths, and especially the kind of passage so appropriate for the way things have changed here, I think this is a catalyst for more deeper conversations.”
The sukkah will have three main walls, which will feature shelves lined with vessels that contain artifacts contributed by the community to share stories and create moments of connection. At one gathering, participants painted and decorated rocks with designs and messages inspired by the passage from Ecclesiastes.
“We’ve documented a lot of the discussion, and I think ultimately it was this idea of understanding how these two communities work together and seeing the points of commonality and the focus on loving and caring for each other and putting people first and also God,” Haouzi said. “It’s really that idea that ends up being manifested in the design itself.”
In addition, Mishkan members have participated in a walking tour of the church’s community spaces and initiatives. In addition to the health center and the legal aid center, the church has a fitness center, a café with a roof deck, an organic farm, a recovery center for men who were recently incarcerated or are in recovery, and other community programs.
“It’s important for predominantly white Jewish people who have been told that they’re not safe in parts of Chicago that don’t look white and Jewish, even if these parts of Chicago used to be their grandparents’ homes, to just come there and see that this neighborhood has incredibly interesting, dynamic people who live here and projects they’re taking on,” Heydemann said. “There’s an incredible amount of [the] neighborhood investing in itself and, beyond the neighborhood, outside people looking and saying, ‘How can we be part of that?’”
When the sukkah design festival opens, the church and Mishkan will host a shared prayer service for the community. They also hope the sukkah provides a space for both shared meals and independent reflection.
“Not only will it be a physical manifestation of this collaboration between both groups but it will also invite other people to join and to host both communities to continue building on their collaboration,” Haouzi said.
Heydemann says her community’s partnership with Lawndale Christian Legal Center has led to members becoming regular monthly donors to the center and reading books that speak to its work. When the sukkah becomes a memorial to victims of gun violence, it will stand in a memorial garden whose design is being led by the legal center.
Heydemann says she hopes that when Jews come to the Sukkah Design Festival, they will feel motivated to do something “to try to reverse the decades of disinvestment.”
“I would hope that Jews across Chicago come to the festival and feel a sense of reawakened connection to this neighborhood, whether or not they have family who ever lived here,” she said. “I would also hope that Jewish people would see the sukkot and understand their own tradition, Judaism, is this beautiful, dynamic, interesting platform for relationship building across traditions.”
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The post In Chicago, a Black-led church and a Jewish community are addressing painful history through a Sukkot festival appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘They Don’t Know What the F—k They’re Doing’: Trump Blasts Israel, Iran Over Ceasefire Breach
US President Donald Trump speaks to media ahead of boarding Marine One to depart to attend the NATO Summit in The Hague, Netherlands, from the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, DC, US, June 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
US President Donald Trump blasted Israel on Tuesday for violating a newly brokered ceasefire with Iran, warning Jerusalem against further escalation and saying the two sides had “been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f—k they’re doing.”
Israeli officials said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out only a limited strike on Iranian radar infrastructure — a move meant to signal deterrence while complying with Trump’s demand to avoid broader retaliation.
The scaled-down response followed what US and Israeli sources described as a tense phone call between the two leaders. According to Axios, Trump urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stand down after Iran launched a missile at Israel less than ten minutes into the truce. Netanyahu reportedly replied that canceling the strike outright was not an option, but ultimately agreed to confine the operation to a single symbolic target.
“ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS! IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” Trump posted on Truth Social shortly afterward, but later added that Israeli jets had turned back “while doing a friendly ‘Plane Wave’ to Iran.”
The ceasefire, which went into effect at 7:00 am Israel time, was broken within minutes by Tehran. Israeli officials later said that three Iranian missiles were launched within the first three hours of the truce. The first came just six minutes in, with two more following shortly after 10:00 am. All were either intercepted or landed in open areas. In response, Israeli warplanes struck a single radar installation north of Tehran, a strike Netanyahu’s office described as a proportional reply to Iran’s violations of the agreement.
But as Israeli jets fired, an incensed Trump told reporters on the White House lawn: “I’m not happy that Israel’s going out now.”
“There was one rocket that I guess was fired overboard [by Iran]. It was after the time limit, and it missed its target. And now Israel’s going out,” Trump said. “These guys gotta calm down. Ridiculous.”
Israel also launched a major offensive deep inside Tehran in the hours before the ceasefire took hold, targeting regime infrastructure and reportedly killing hundreds of members of the Basij and other internal security forces.
Iran retaliated with a missile barrage shortly before the ceasefire took effect. The southern Israeli city of Beersheba was hit in the strike, killing four Israelis and wounding two dozen others. Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited the site on Tuesday, describing the weapon used as one of the heaviest in Iran’s arsenal. “That missile, which is way above 400 kilos, landed here specifically to kill women, children, the elderly — people living ordinary lives,” Herzog said.
Twenty-eight Israelis have been killed in missile strikes so far in the 12-day war, along with more than 3,200 wounded. Of those, 23 remain in serious condition and 111 were classified as moderate. Officials said 15,000 homes were destroyed nationwide.
While Netanyahu hailed the ceasefire as a success that prevented further bloodshed, some senior Israeli officials voiced concern that the deal came too soon. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir praised the military achievements but said the campaign should have continued. “We should have continued for a few more days, overthrowing the Iranian regime and eliminating the source of oxygen for Hamas and Hezbollah once and for all,” he said.
Others also warned of long-term strategic risks. The Ynet news outlet cited Dennis Citrinowicz, former head of the Iran desk at Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, as saying that the absence of a formal agreement leaves Iran free to rebuild its nuclear and missile programs. “There is no mechanism that prevents them from getting stronger again,” he told Ynet. “Without a political agreement, we’ll be dragged into a war of attrition — one far more costly than anything we’ve faced in Lebanon or Gaza.”
Security officials also raised concerns that Iran may attempt to bypass nuclear restrictions by procuring weapons from abroad, or by deepening cooperation with Russia or China. “The success of the operation depends not just on what we destroyed,” the site cited one intelligence official as saying, “but on our ability to stay ahead of their next move.”
Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren said that moving forward, Israel must maintain “a constant and credible military threat on the table.”
“Israel has to act to ensure that Iran can never rebuild [its nuclear program]. And they will try all the time. They’ll start today,” he told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday afternoon.
He noted that for most of Israel’s 77-year history, tactical victories had effectively served as its strategic doctrine, but said that approach was now beginning to shift.
“Every couple of years our enemies try to destroy us, and we have to turn around and remind them that attempts to destroy us are not a good idea,” he said. “But now, for the first time, that pattern can change. The tactic won’t be the strategy; the strategy will be the strategy. And that strategy is changing the nature of this conflict entirely. But it requires vision, it requires statecraft, and it requires courage from our leaders.”
Meanwhile, families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza are calling on the government to expand the ceasefire framework to include a broader deal that would end the war and bring their loved ones home. “The ceasefire agreement must expand to include Gaza,” a statement from the families read. “We call on the government to engage in urgent negotiations that will bring home all the hostages and end the war. Those who can achieve a ceasefire with Iran can also end the war in Gaza.”
Some political sources say Hamas may be more amenable to a deal now that Iranian support appears to have faltered. “Hamas expected a different kind of backing,” one official told Ynet. “With Tehran under pressure and Hezbollah deterred, they may now be open to serious talks on a prisoner exchange.”
Oren, for his part, expressed his hope that the hostages would be part of a deal. “It is my hope that at that negotiating table, the Americans would say to the Iranians, you want sanctions relief? We’ll give you sanctions relief, but every single one of the hostages has to be released in one hour, and Hamas leaders have to get on a boat and go somewhere,” he said.
“I personally would like to send them to Ireland,” he quipped.
The military campaign delivered a clear victory, but a greater challenge now lies in the diplomatic front, Oren said.
“Militarily, Israel and the United States have won the war. Now, diplomatically, we together must win the peace,” he said.
“Iran’s nuclear program must end — no more enrichment, no more warhead and delivery systems — but so, too, must its support for terror and campaign to destroy Israel and America. Lebanon and Syria must be independent and free to make peace with us. Gaza must be demilitarized, Hamas dismantled, and every last of our hostages redeemed.”
“This is one of history’s greatest inflection points,” he told The Algemeiner. “We must not miss it.”
The post ‘They Don’t Know What the F—k They’re Doing’: Trump Blasts Israel, Iran Over Ceasefire Breach first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Pro-Hamas Campus Groups Call for Toppling US Government, Killing Soldiers
A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a megaphone at Columbia University, on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, in New York City, US, Oct. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
The National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) organization condemned the US bombing of nuclear facilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran over the weekend, threatening that the American government will be deposed.
The anti-government comments came one day after US President Donald Trump ordered the bombing of three key Iranian nuclear sites — Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz — where Western governments believe the Islamist regime was working to build nuclear weapons. Tehran has claimed its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes
“The empire will fall, from Gaza to Tehran,” NSJP said, writing on the Instagram social media platform. “The unprovoked attacks the US and the Zionist entity have launched against Iran prove only one thing: imperialism in the region will not stop at suffocating Palestine. From Iraq to Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and now Iran, the Empire [sic] demands constant expansion and destabilization.”
It added, “We must be clear: Nuclear development is neither a crime nor the reason for the US’ war against Iran. The US Empire cannot permit the continued existence of a country that dares to stand against Zionism and imperialism.”
On Monday, Asaf Romirowsky, a Middle East expert and the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), said that NSJP is mirroring an ideology that university professors have trafficked and taught to their students since the 1960s.
“Left-wing academics have loathed ‘American imperialism’ since the Vietnam War and used it to explain and more importantly justify violent ‘’iberation movements’ around the world. Both communist and Muslim revolutions and insurgencies have been applauded over the years by American academics and their European counterparts,” Romirowsky said. “Some of that has been transmitted to students disinterested in the details of Islamic theology (which underlie Iranian policy). Anti-imperialism situates the Palestinian cause firmly on the political left and glosses over its theological basis in Sunni theology — which is perfectly well expressed in the Hamas Charter and countless other Hamas statements.”
SJP splinter groups across higher education rallied to share NSJP’s post, as noted by the antisemitism watchdog group AMCHA Initiative on Monday. Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Florida reposted it to their Instagram stories, while an SJP group for graduate students of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) did so as well. At Columbia University, a group which calls itself “Unity Fields” posted a photograph of the coffins of fallen US soldiers, captioning it, “Soon, Inshallah,” which means “God willing” in Arabic.
Within Our Lifetime (WOL), another pro-Hamas group which directs campus activities, said, “From Iran to Palestine, from Lebanon to Syria to Yemen, it is our duty from within the belly of the beast to stand against the US empire and zionist [sic] entity’s barbaric, illegal genocidal aggression, and to stand by all those resisting the ongoing genocide in Gaza by any means necessary.”
The tight coordination of the group’s messaging demands a complete accounting of NSJP’s funding, according to Alex Joffe, a historian and editor of the BDS Monitor for SPME.
“The relationship between NSJP and other action-oriented groups, such as Within Our Lifetime and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, suggest nearly complete overlap in interests and even personnel. Most problematic are the relationships between these Muslim and communist vanguard groups and the nominally legitimate Democratic Socialists of America and Working Families Party,” he explained. “These overlaps and penetrations into broader politics leaves outstanding the question of who is directing whom. The instant pivoting of Communist Chinese Party-backed groups like Code Pink to support Iran points to the fact that they, like NSJP, are not grassroots movements but primarily tools for state actors, above all Qatar, China, Iran, Russia and North Korea.”
He continued, “The question of who funds NSJP is therefore more important than ever. With NSJP and other organizations threatening and engaging in domestic violence, the national security threats have increased and should be addressed by local and federal authorities.”
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.
“Divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said in September 2024. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
The tweet was the latest in a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
On the same day the tweet was posted, Columbia University’s most strident pro-Hamas organization was reported to be distributing literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group’s movement to destroy Israel during the school’s convocation ceremony.
“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said a pamphlet distributed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to an event which took place the previous December. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Middle East experts have long suspected that foreign agents are conspiring with SJP chapters — and its spinoffs — in the US to convulse college campuses and lobby for the disintegration of the US-Israel relationship, an outcome that would benefit Middle Eastern powers such as Iran, whose leaders regularly call for the destruction of both the US and Israel.
In July 2024, then-US National Intelligence Director Avril Haines issued a statement outlining how Iran has encouraged and provided financial support to the anti-Israel campus protest movement and explaining that it is part of a larger plan to “undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.” Haines also confirmed that US intelligence agencies have “observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Pro-Hamas Campus Groups Call for Toppling US Government, Killing Soldiers first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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UK to Ban Group Palestine Action Under Anti-Terrorism Laws
Police officers block a street as pro-Palestinian demonstrators gather in protest against Britain’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s plans to proscribe the “Palestine Action” group in the coming weeks, in London, Britain, June 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jaimi Joy
Britain said on Monday it would use anti-terrorism laws to ban the organization Palestine Action, making it a criminal offence to belong to the group after its activists damaged two UK military planes in protest at London’s support for Israel.
The proscription would put the pro-Palestinian group on a par with Hamas, al-Qaeda, or ISIS under British law, making it illegal for anyone to promote it or be a member. Those who breached the ban could face up to 14 years in jail.
Palestine Action has regularly targeted British sites connected to Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems as well as other companies in Britain linked to Israel since the start of the conflict in Gaza in 2023.
In its latest and most high-profile action, two of its members entered a Royal Air Force base in central England on Friday, spraying paint into the engines of the Voyager transport aircraft and further damaging them with crowbars.
“The disgraceful attack on Brize Norton … is the latest in a long history of unacceptable criminal damage committed by Palestine Action,” Home Secretary [interior minister] Yvette Cooper said in a written statement to parliament.
“The UK’s defense enterprise is vital to the nation’s national security and this government will not tolerate those that put that security at risk.”
She said the group‘s actions had become more aggressive and caused millions of pounds of damage.
Under British law, the Home Secretary can proscribe a group if it is believed it commits, encourages, or “is otherwise concerned in terrorism.” The banning order will be laid before parliament on June 30 and will come into effect if approved.
Palestine Action, which says Britain is an “active participant” in the conflict in Gaza because of military support it provides to Israel, called the ban “an unhinged reaction” which it would challenge, and accused Cooper of making a series of “categorically false claims.”
“The real crime here is not red paint being sprayed on these war planes,” it said in a statement.
Earlier on Monday, the group was forced to change the location of a planned protest after police banned it from staging a demonstration outside parliament, otherwise a popular location for protests in support of a range of causes.
The post UK to Ban Group Palestine Action Under Anti-Terrorism Laws first appeared on Algemeiner.com.