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In Turkey, a festival revives a jewel of the Sephardic world and aims to break stereotypes
IZMIR, Turkey (JTA) — Prague has the dubious honor of being chosen by Adolf Hitler to be a record of what he hoped would be the vanquished Jews of Europe. The Nazis left many of the city’s synagogues and Jewish sites relatively intact, intending to showcase them as the remnants of an extinct culture.
That has made Prague a popular tourist destination for both Jewish travelers and others interested in Jewish history since the fall of the Iron Curtain: the city provides an uncommon look into the pre-war infrastructure of Ashkenazi Europe.
Could Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city, become a Sephardic version, in terms of history and tourism? That’s the goal for Nesim Bencoya, director of the Izmir Jewish Heritage project.
The city, once known in Greek as Smyrna, has had a Jewish presence since antiquity, with early church documents mentioning Jews as far back as the second century AD. Like elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, though, its community grew exponentially with the influx of Sephardic Jews who came after their expulsion from Spain.
At its peak, the city was home to around 30,000 Jews and was the hometown of Jewish artists, writers and rabbis — from the esteemed Pallache and Algazii rabbinical families, to the musician Dario Marino, to the famously false messiah, Shabbetai Zevi, whose childhood home still stands in Izmir today.
Today, fewer than 1,300 remain. The establishment of the state of Israel, coupled with a century of economic and political upheaval, led to the immigration of the majority of Turkish Jewry.
“From the 17th century, Izmir was a center for Sephardic Jewry,” Bencoya told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We can’t recreate that, but we cannot forget that either.”
Izmir is located on Turkey’s Aegean coast. (David I. Klein)
Celebrating in the former Jewish quarter
Bencoya, who is in his late 60s, was born in Izmir but spent most of his adult life in Israel, where he led the Haifa Cinematheque, but he returned to Izmir 13 years ago to helm the heritage project, which has worked to highlight the the culture and history of Izmir’s Jewish community.
Over nine days in December that included the week of Hanukkah, thousands attended the annual Sephardic culture festival that he has organized since 2018. The festival included concerts of Jewish and Ladino music, traditional food tastings, lectures on Izmir’s Jewish community, and — since it coincided with Hanukkah and also a Shabbat — both a menorah lighting ceremony and havdalah ceremony were conducted with explanations from Izmir’s leading cantor, Nesim Beruchiel.
This year’s festival marked a turning point: it was the first in which organizers were able to show off several of the centuries-old synagogues that the project — with funding from the European Union and the local municipality — has been restoring.
The synagogues, most of which are clustered around a street still called Havra Sokak (havra being the Turkish spelling of the Hebrew word chevra, or congregation) represent a unique piece of cultural heritage.
Nesim Bencoya speaks from his office next to the restored Sinyora Synagogue in Izmir. (David I. Klein)
Once upon a time, the street was the heart of the Jewish quarter or “Juderia,” but today it is right in the middle of Izmir’s Kemeralti Bazaar, a bustling market district stretching over 150 acres where almost anything can be bought and sold. On Havra Sokak, the merchants hock fresh fruits, and hopefully fresher fish. One street to the south one can find all manner of leather goods; one to the north has markets for gold, silver and other precious metals; one to the west has coffee shops. In between them all are other shops selling everything from crafts to tchotchkes to kitchenware to lingerie.
Several mosques and a handful of churches dot the area, but the synagogues revive a unique character of the district that had been all but lost.
“The synagogues here were built under the light of Spain. But in Spain today, there are only two major historic synagogues, Toledo and Cordoba, and they are big ones. You don’t have smaller ones. Here we have six on one block, built with the memory of what was there by those who left Spain,” Bencoya said.
Those synagogues have been home to major events in Jewish history — such as when Shabbetei Zvi broke into Izmir’s Portuguese Synagogue one Sabbath morning, drove out his opponents and declared himself the messiah (he cultivated a large following but was later imprisoned and forced to convert to Islam). The synagogue, known in Turkish as Portekez, was among those restored by the project.
Today, only two of Izmir’s synagogues are in regular use by its Jewish community, but the others that were restored are now available as exhibition and event spaces.
Educating non-Jews
Hosting the festival within Izmir’s unique synagogues has an additional purpose, since the overwhelming majority of the attendees were not Jewish.
“Most of the people who come to the festival have never been to a synagogue, maybe a small percentage of them have met a Jew once in their lives,” Bencoya said.
That’s particularly important in a country where antisemitic beliefs are far from uncommon. In a 2015 study by the Anti-Defamation League, 71% of respondents from Turkey believe in some antisemitic stereotypes.
The festival included concerts of Jewish and Ladino music, traditional food tastings and lectures on Izmir’s Jewish community.(David I. Klein)
“This festival is not for Jewish people to know us, but for non-Jews,” Bencoya said. Now, “Hundreds of Turkish Muslim people have come to see us, to listen to our holidays and taste what we do.”
Kayra Ergen, a native of Izmir who attended a Ladino concert and menorah lighting event at the end of the festival, told JTA that until a year ago, he had no idea how Jewish Izmir once was.
“I know that Anatolia is a multicultural land, and also Turkey is, but this religion, by which I mean Jewish people, left this place a long time ago because of many bad events. But it’s good to remember these people, and their roots in Izmir,” Ergen said. “This is so sad and lame to say out loud, but I didn’t know about this — that only 70 years ago, 60% of this area here in Konak [the district around Kemeralti] was Jewish. Today I believe only 1,300 remain. This is not good. But we must do whatever we can and this festival is a good example of showing the love between cultures.”
“I think it’s good that we’re respecting each other in here,” said Zeynep Uslu, another native of Izmir. “A lot of different cultures and a lot of different people. It’s good that we’re together here celebrating something so special.”
Izmir’s history as a home for minorities has not been all rosy. At the end of the Ottoman period, the city was around half Greek, a tenth Jewish and a tenth Armenian, while the remainder were Turkish Muslims and an assortment of foreigners. In the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922 — remembered in Turkey as the Turkish War of Independence — the Greek and Armenian quarters of Izmir were burned to the ground after the Turkish army retook the city from the Greek forces, killing tens of thousands. A mass exodus of the survivors followed, but the Jewish and Muslim portions of the city were largely unharmed.
Izmir is not the only city in Turkey which has seen its synagogues restored in recent years. Notable projects are being completed in Edirne, a city on the Turkish western border near Bulgaria, and Kilis, on its southeastern border near Syria. Unlike Izmir, though, no Jews remain in either of those cities today, and many have accused the project of being a tool for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government to assuage accusations of antisemitism, without actually dealing with living Jews.
Losing Ladino and a ‘quiet’ mindset
Bencoya lamented that he is among the last generation for whom Ladino — the Judeo-Spanish language traditionally spoken by Sephardic Jews, but only spoken by tens of thousands today — was at least a part of his childhood.
“When you lose language, it’s not only technical, it’s not only vocabulary, it’s a whole world and a way of thinking,” Bencoya said.
The project is challenging a local Jewish mentality as well. Minority groups in Izmir, especially Jews, “have for a long time preferred not to be seen, not to be felt,” according to Bencoya.
That mindset has been codified in the Turkish Jewish community’s collective psyche in the form of a Ladino word, “kayedes,” which means something along the lines of “shhh,” “be quiet,” or “keep your head down.”
“This is the exact opposite that I want to do with this festival — to be felt, to raise awareness of my being,” Bencoya said.
The Bikur Holim Synagogue is one of the few still functioning in Izmir. (David I. Klein)
One way of doing that, he added, was having the festival refer to the community’s identity “as Yahudi and not Musevi!” Both are Turkish words that refer to Jews: the former having the same root as the English word Jew — the Hebrew word Yehuda or Judea — while the latter means “follower of Moses.”
“Yahudi, Musevi, Ibrani [meaning Hebrew, in Turkish] — they all mean the same thing, but in Turkey, they say Musevi because it sounds nicer,” Bencoya said. “To Yahudi there are a lot of negative superlatives — dirty Yahudi, filthy Yahudi, and this and that. So I insist on saying that I am Yahudi, because people have a lot of pre-judgements about the name Yahudi. So if you have prejudgements about me, let’s open them and talk about them.”
“I am not so romantic that I can eliminate all antisemitism, but if I can eliminate some of the prejudgements, then I can live a little more at peace,” he added.
So far, he feels the festival is a successful first step.
“The non-Jewish community of Izmir is fascinated,” Bencoya said. “If you look on Facebook and Instagram, they are talking about it, they are fighting over tickets, which sell out almost immediately.”
Now, he is only wondering how next year he will be able to fit more people into the small and aged synagogues.
“For Turkey, [the festival] is very important because Turkey can be among the enlightened nations of the world, only by being aware of the differences between groups of people, such as Jews, Christians, others, and Muslims,” he said.
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Liberal Jews hail wave of Democratic victories a day after the election
(JTA) — While liberal Jewish Americans reveled in a blue wave of victories after Tuesday’s pivotal midterm elections, centrist and conservative voices issued words of caution about the increasing fragility of the country’s relationship with Israel.
The pro-Israel liberal group J Street hailed the results as a “resounding victory for new politics on Israel and Palestine,” celebrating that 98% of J Street-backed candidates were projected to win their races.
“We are proud to have supported a record number of candidates who share our commitment to Israel’s future, democracy and a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, said in a statement that lists all the successful politicians that had the lobby’s support.
Voters, he argued, rejected the president’s policies and “made clear they want a different direction for America and a different approach in the Middle East.” He pointed to the losses of Republican stalwarts Susan Collins in Maine and Mike Lawler in New York, calling them “prominent champions of the old approach to Israel politics.”
The day before, J Street had said it “ran the largest super PAC investment in organizational history,” raising $10 million for more than 200 candidates. The lobby warned, however, that “AIPAC and its supporters will continue to influence American foreign policy, finding creative ways to override the will of voters with dark money.” AIPAC didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Halie Soifer, CEO of the liberal Jewish Democratic Council of America, likewise lauded the Democratic victories as a referendum on Trump, quipping that the president asked voters to “pretend he was on the ballot in the midterms, and Jewish Americans did just that.”
“Jewish voters are not a monolith, but they widely disapprove of Donald Trump,” she said in a statement, describing the administration’s agenda as “antithetical to core Jewish values.”
Soifer added, “Jewish Americans want leaders who will lower costs, defend our freedoms, stand against antisemitism, support Israel’s security, and hold the Trump administration accountable for its corruption, cruelty, and lawlessness.”
This cycle was JDCA’s largest-ever midterm Jewish voter engagement, involving a seven-figure investment in vast mobilization efforts, the group said in a statement.
JDCA noted that its political action committee ran many targeted ads, including in Ohio and Texas, where Democratic Senate candidates Sherrod Brown and James Talarico defeated their Republican rivals. The group also said its PAC funded ads for successful House candidates Cait Collins in New York, Piya Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz in Florida and Christina Hines in Michigan.
But not all Jewish Democrats were thrilled by the outcome.
Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Democratic Senate staffer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said the “obvious” bad news coming out of the election was the normalization of “a vitriolic, occasionally untethered, and all too often fact-less attack on Israel and its bona fides.”
A registered Democrat, Robins said, “it’s painful to hear the enemies of Israel celebrating as they have today, and claiming that this is their referendum on Israel.”
Robbins said that such habituation was already clear in last year’s election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel. This cycle’s shift, he added, was apparent in the success of Abdul El-Sayed in his Michigan Senate race and the primary loss of Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman to former city comptroller Brad Lander.
Robbins also expressed concern about “the push among anybody wanting a career in the Democratic Party” to distance themselves from Israel, which in many cases amounts to antisemitism, he said.
He particularly called out the House wins of Christopher Rabb in Philadelphia, Claire Valdez and Darializa Chevalier in New York City, Melat Kiros in Denver and Troy Jackson in Maine. Jackson, Robbins added, ended up repeating anti-Israel diatribes that have become popular among many members of the progressive left.
“The fact that he defeats somebody who was a stalwart and very knowledgeable friend of Israel, Susan Collins, is more bad news,” he said.
Robbins stressed that the Jewish community must take the results as a “warning sign” and stop assuming that “raising money and honoring people and dinners” is sufficient, without “making the case in the public square.” Members of the pro-Israel Jewish community cannot “just assume that people will realize that, of course, the victims of a genocidal attack are not the perpetrators of a genocide,” he added.
At the same time, Robbins, who also served in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under former president Bill Clinton, pointed to other results he was happy with. “The good news is that the Democrats elected a number of people who are moderate and therefore sensible when it comes to the realities of the Middle East, and those people’s voices in Congress may be a blessing.”
He acknowledged that the voices of these moderates who support Israel could be consequential in the Democratic caucuses in both the House and the Senate.
Jonathan Greenberg, director for combatting antisemitism at Defending Education and a former AIPAC staffer, called the election as “a disastrous night for the Republican Party.”
“I really don’t think there’s any way for a conservative to look at what happened last night and say that there’s a silver lining,” added Greenberg, who ran for state office in Illinois as a Republican in 2012 but now is unaffiliated.
He called upon Republicans to seize the opportunity to rebuild a stronger foundation, after “years of bad rhetoric and a cycle full of bad candidates.” He slammed Democrats for failing “to police their own side,” while also recognizing that some moderate Israel supporters were successful in this election.
“If the the more blue dog-type Democrats who got elected last night are willing to stand up to the crazies in their party and say, ‘This isn’t us, and you’re not welcome to say things like that in our party,’ then, yeah, that would be great,” he said.
Greenberg credited Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, for his outspokenness on this issue, while stressing that “he can’t be the only one.” In Moskowitz’s primary race, he was a staunch defender of Israel against progressive challenger Oliver Larkin.
“You have to have a critical mass of passionate people – the ascendant far left has that right now,” Greenberg added. “If the center doesn’t organize itself and forcefully push back, then they’ll lose.”
For Robbins, this tumultuous period for American Jews has been a long time in the making and is hardly a surprise. He said he has warned Israelis for the past 10 to 15 years about an anti-Zionist shift in the Democratic Party, but he has repeatedly received the response, “Hakol b’seder,” the Hebrew phrase for “everything is OK.”
“I would say, ‘No, kol is not b’seder,’” Robbins concluded.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Liberal Jews hail wave of Democratic victories a day after the election appeared first on The Forward.
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Republicans made inroads with Jewish voters. Democrats won anyway.
Jewish voters appear to have moved toward Republicans in Tuesday’s midterm elections, even as Democrats won a sweeping victory and regained control of both chambers of Congress.
A national NBC News exit poll found that 68% of Jewish voters supported Democrats, compared with 31% who backed Republican candidates. The same polling firm found in 2024 that 78% of Jews backed Kamala Harris. In Michigan’s closely watched Senate race, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed underperformed in precincts with large Jewish populations compared with other statewide Democratic candidates.
That suggests a smaller Democratic advantage than in previous elections, though differences in polling methods make it difficult to measure the size of the shift.
But some Jewish Democrats dispute the idea that Jewish voters are turning away from their party.
Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, argued that “the Jewish vote was a critical component of a winning democratic coalition,” given that the blue sweep was so big. “This election was a tsunami. It was not won by any one state or by any one election. And therefore, I think it’s important to look at the national numbers, which indicate that the Jewish vote is unchanged from where it was in the last midterm election.”
Soifer pointed to a GBAO Strategies exit poll scheduled for release Thursday, showing that 72% of Jewish voters supported Democratic candidates. That is nearly identical to the 71% who voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 survey also sponsored by J Street. But it is slightly lower than the 74% who supported Democrats in the 2022 midterms and the 77% who backed Joe Biden in 2020.
The results show a complicated picture. Jewish voters remain overwhelmingly Democratic even as some have grown frustrated with the party’s direction on Israel and antisemitism. And any Republican gains among Jewish voters were not enough to overcome the broader Democratic wave.
That was especially clear in Michigan, where El-Sayed, a fierce critic of Israel, defeated Republican Mike Rogers despite concerns among some Jewish Democrats about his views and rhetoric. An exit poll found that 60% of Jewish early voters still supported El-Sayed, while Rogers made some minor gains.
In New York’s 17th Congressional District, Republican Rep. Mike Lawler lost his reelection bid to Democrat Cait Conley, despite receiving overwhelming support in the heavily Hasidic neighborhoods of Rockland County.
Measuring the Jewish vote
Exit polls are not actual vote counts, and the Jewish samples in national surveys are relatively small. Steve Sheffey, a pro-Israel Democratic activist, warned in a Times of Israel essay last year that national polls not specifically designed to measure Jewish voters can produce significantly different results.
The same caution applies when comparing this year’s results with previous elections. Differences in sampling, religious identification and turnout make it hard to measure exactly how many percentage points the Jewish vote has shifted.
Two national surveys conducted earlier this year show Jewish voters remain firmly in the Democratic camp. A September poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 71% of Jewish voters planned to support Democrats for Congress, compared with 23% who planned to support Republicans. Another survey, conducted by GBAO Strategies, found Democrats with a 67%-26% lead among Jewish voters. A 2021 poll found that 74% of Jewish voters approved of the way Joe Biden was handling the U.S.-Israel relationship and 68% had planned to vote for Democrats in the 2022 midterms.
JDCA’s Soifer said “widespread speculation” that Jewish Americans may be leaving the Democratic Party “proved to be absolutely false” nationwide. The outcome “was the largest repudiation of a sitting president that we’ve ever seen, and Jewish voters played a role in that,” she said.
Jewish Democrats crossed party lines in Michigan
Still, a stable Democratic majority does not necessarily mean Jewish voters are satisfied with the party.
The Jewish Electorate Institute survey in September found that 35% of Jewish Democrats said the rise of anti-Israel candidates made it harder to identify with their party. Michigan offered one of the clearest tests of whether those concerns could cause Jewish Democrats to cross party lines in particular races without abandoning their party altogether.
The Mercury Public Affairs survey of 482 Jewish voters who cast ballots before Election Day found that, among Jewish voters who said they backed Sen. Elissa Slotkin in 2024, 23% voted for Rogers this time, and among those who voted for Harris in the presidential election, 18% crossed over to Rogers, while another 11% voted for someone else or skipped the Senate race.
A Republican Jewish Coalition spokesperson pointed to election returns in heavily Jewish precincts as further evidence of a shift. Sam Markstein said unofficial results of Huntington Woods showed a 30-percentage-point shift toward Rogers compared with 2024, while Southfield Township shifted 12.9 points, Birmingham 11.4 points and West Bloomfield Township 7.1 points. The RJC spent $2 million to target the approximately 50,000 Jewish voters in those neighborhoods.
Analysis by Millions of Michiganians, a progressive Super PAC, of 72 precincts with the highest number of Jewish voters, showed El-Sayed receiving 60% of the vote, underperforming the Democratic gubernatorial nominee by just 6.2 percent, with a shift of 1.3 percent compared to 2024.
What comes next?
The larger question is what these results mean for the Democratic Party’s relationship with Jewish Americans.
Soifer acknowledged concerns about the direction of her own party, but maintained, “This election wasn’t about Israel, including for Jewish voters.” She added that the group, along with other liberal Jewish organizations, plans to “play a large role” in helping set the agenda of the new Democratic majorities in Congress.
Nonnegotiable Michigan, a coalition of Michigan rabbis and Jewish Democrats opposing El-Sayed, said in a statement on Wednesday that they hope the party “will govern by reuniting our coalition, delivering for the American people, and rejecting the divisive voices and worldview of those who traffic in antisemitism.”
Other organizations called for continued engagement with leaders in both parties to confront antisemitism and extremism. “We don’t need to agree on everything to know that their partnership will be key to countering antisemitism and protecting democracy,” said Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
Democrats also celebrated major victories by prominent Jewish politicians, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff. Their success could strengthen their standing in the party in shaping the debate over Israel and antisemitism and raise their profiles as possible contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination.
The post Republicans made inroads with Jewish voters. Democrats won anyway. appeared first on The Forward.
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From pop icon to outspoken Zionist: Boy George’s emotional visit to Nova
(JTA) — RE’IM, Nova Festival Memorial Site, Israel – Iconic 80s pop star Boy George is in Israel this week. He’s made all the usual stops on a celebrity visit: met with the president, placed a note in the Western Wall and, of course, performed two concerts. But it was his visit to the Nova Festival Memorial Site near Kibbutz Re’im on Tuesday that underscored the main reason for his visit.
An outspoken supporter of Jews and Israel, even as he has faced a backlash from within the music industry, the iconic ’80s pop star said that hearing about the massacre and seeing the site where more than 360 people were killed on Oct. 7, 2023 had only strengthened his convictions.
“I saw what happened on October 7… I was up very early, and I saw it, and it just horrified me,” Boy George told a press conference on Tuesday, following a tour of the memorial with former hostages, survivors and other members of the Tribe of Nova Community Association.
“But what horrified me more was hearing people that have no connection to what happened telling me it wasn’t true, that it was made up, and that I shouldn’t believe it,” he said.
Boy George, a British singer who achieved international fame in the 1980s with Culture Club and hits such as “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” and “Karma Chameleon,” holds a pioneering place in modern pop history. With his androgynous look, Rastafarian-inspired dreadlocks and oversized hats, the white singer challenged conventional ideas about gender and sexuality at a time when doing so could come at a cost.
He countered convention again in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, speaking out on behalf of Jews and Israel when parts of an entertainment industry were calling for boycotts and blacklists of Israeli performers and their allies.
Boy George, 65, told journalists in Israel this week that he had lost long-time friends over his position on Israel, but said he was not particularly troubled by it, because he felt he was doing the right thing.
“I feel odd being thanked for doing what’s just normal,” he said. “Music should make people feel safe, celebrated, and like they belong. That’s the music I want to make.”
The singer said some of the reactions to his support for Israel have been “shocking to me, but also a bit predictable.”
He said that the attacks against him have ranged from bashing his music to calling him “irrelevant,” and even accusing him of being a “Zionist.”
“Until I started getting called a Zionist, I hadn’t really explored what it meant, and then I was like, ‘well, I guess it must be,’” Boy George said. “In the end, I just put a thing up [on social media] saying, ‘I’m a Zionist, get over it.’”
Two incidents this year solidified his support for Jews and Israel. In April, he arrived in the London Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green and witnessed the aftermath of the stabbing of two Jewish men. He later went on British television, tearily condemning the attack and calling for support for “our Jewish community.”
In May, at a travelling exhibit about the Nova attack, he heard the testimony of a young survivor, May Hayat. The 33-year-old Tel Avivian witnessed the murder of two friends before Hamas terrorists set her free.
Moved by Hayat’s story, the singer wrote “We Will Dance Again,” a slogan he borrowed from the Tribe of Nova community. Released on July 26, its lyrics include, “you say genocide / I say war.”
“One of the things I’ve always hated doing is explaining why I’ve written something,” Boy George said of the song, which drew massive criticism from some in the music industry but has become an anthem for Israelis.
“Very often, what I write is sort of personal, a little bit surreptitious, secretive… but I’m afraid with ‘We Will Dance Again,’ there was no secrecy or subtext whatsoever,” he said.
“I kept hearing that word [genocide] over and over and over and obviously, I’ve done a bit of research on the word, and I know it wasn’t the right word and I felt, well, if it’s being bandied about by every single person that I speak to, then maybe I should put it in the song,” he said.
The singer also highlighted another line from the song: “If you’re ever confused / I stand with the Jews.”
The singer said he doubted the song would get airplay, “but it really wasn’t about that… it was about what do I need to do about what I feel deeply inside.”
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Hayat said she was flattered that Boy George was inspired to write a song after hearing her story, but added that this was precisely why she now devotes her time to telling others what happened on Oct. 7.
“If I was saved and I am still alive, then I have to tell this story for myself and for those who can’t tell their story,” she said. The song “strengthens me in doing what I am doing.”
Boy George said that being at the site of the Nova festival was “very powerful.”
“Obviously, you can see there’s a lot of healing that’s gone on, and that’s really important because an outsider never knows what they’re supposed to feel,” he said, after touring the memorial, which includes photos of each victim, as well as tributes from friends and family.
Boy George was accompanied to the Nova site by Sylvan Adams, president of the World Jewish Congress Israel. Adams, together with the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem and Live Nation Israel. Boy George was accompanied to the Nova site by Sylvan Adams, president of the World Jewish Congress Israel. Adams, together with the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem donated 1,500 concert tickets to Nova survivors and bereaved families so they could attend Saturday night’s concert.
“At a time when too many international artists have chosen to boycott Israel or remain silent in the face of antisemitism, you chose to come,” said Adams. “You used your voice and your international platform to stand with the Jewish people, despite the threats and boycotts. That takes courage. And moral clarity.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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