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Israeli tensions spill over into Berlin at summit of European Jewish leaders
BERLIN (JTA) — Novelist Ruby Namdar’s appearance at a major conference of European Jewish leaders wasn’t meant to include a speech to an empty chair. But there he was on Sunday night, addressing the chair he had thought would hold Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for Diaspora affairs.
Chikli had been scheduled to address the summit, organized by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the European Council of Jewish Communities, but arrived too late to speak and left early Monday, amid a political crisis in Israel.
“In Israel right now under this government… our house has become rotten and corrupt,” Namdar told cheering conference attendees. “We have lost all shame in Israeli politics. It must be restored.”
Namdar, an Israeli who lives in the United States, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he spoke out because he worried that others at the conference would not.
“A large part of the Jewish leaders of the world and of Europe are here, and I know that many of them, if not most, are very concerned, very worried, feel very alienated,” he said. “But they’re not able to voice it because they’re instinctively so used to supporting Israel, even though it has become harder and harder with every passing year.”
The episode reflected the degree to which Israel’s political crisis is affecting Jews abroad, even reshaping what is discussed during convenings meant to elevate Diaspora Jewish life. On Monday, the saga took a sharp turn, after a historically large protest movement forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to delay controversial proposed reforms to the country’s judicial system.
It was the fifth edition of the summit and the first one held in person since the pandemic hit three years ago. The gathering included leaders and Jewish professionals from 35 communities across Europe and covered a broad range of topics, from how to combat antisemitism to how European Jewish communities have responded to Russia’s war against Ukraine; from gender issues to the challenges of “creating Judaism with no synagogues.”
Rates of emigration to Israel from parts of Europe have been high in recent decades, in the wake of the Ukraine war, the rise of right-wing populism and several violent antisemitic attacks by Muslim extremists and neo-Nazis. But some attendees at the conference said the recent crisis there was shaking the sense of safety that many European Jews associate with Israel.
“Democracy is a very important part in our lives especially as young leaders because we have been preached that it is such an important dogma,” Joelle Abaew, a German-Jewish teenager and member of the youth group BBYO’s international board, told JTA. “When, especially as young Jews, most of us identify with our homeland in Israel and if we don’t see that [strong democracy] there, we might question: Is that even our homeland, can we even identify with what they are doing?”
Jonathan Marcus, who is active in several Jewish organizations in Berlin, said he had seen people moving back from Israel to Germany in recent months “because of the current climate,” reflecting a trend of liberal Israelis considering emigration in response to the crisis. He also said he was worried about the religious agenda that some in Israel’s right-wing government want to advance — doing so in the language most often used to describe concerns about religious law in Europe.
“I worry on a personal level: What can I do to make sure we don’t wake up in a Jewish mullah regime?” Marcus said. “Will Israel be where my family and friends live, and be a part of my life?”
Namdar was not the only one to speak out against Chikli. A protest like the ones that have taken place across Israel and the Diaspora took place outside the conference venue, the Hilton Berlin. Inside the hotel’s dining room where Chikli was due to speak, conference guests found fliers distributed clandestinely on each table announcing that hosting him was “a slap in the face of hundreds of thousands of Israelis defending democracy for us too.”
Alexander Oscar, president of Shalom, Bulgaria’s main Jewish umbrella group, said at previous conferences he has attended it would have been unheard of to aim such statements at Israeli government officials. He said that though many European leaders are not Israeli citizens, “we all have our families in Israel and consider the state of Israel our homeland.”
“This is the first time ever I have seen this in conferences with other, you know, other countries, but never for the State of Israel.” Oscar said. “And it makes me happy, because what it says is that Israel is a democracy, and that it has a strong civil society.”
The protesting dovetails with a widening gulf he says that he and other Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe are finding with Israel.
“Over the past several years, we are seeing how, in various ways, the State of Israel is actually more prone to supporting the individual states in Europe, sacrificing the interests of the local Jewish communities,” Oscar said. “I’m speaking, in particular, about countries like Poland, like Hungary and Bulgaria nowadays. The local Jewish community is fighting with different groups, and even with the authorities, in terms of preventing the Holocaust distortion, and also combating antisemitism.”
“So we are ending up when the State of Israel is not defending the Jewish communities, in areas where until five, six years ago, it would have been impossible even to think of,” he added.
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The gift Tom Stoppard gave to me — and to all who adore him
In 2022, during a reporting trip to London, I had tea with a source who confessed to me that her mother’s central interest was the work of Tom Stoppard. It was more than an interest, really: “He was the main thing in her life,” she said.
There are artists you admire, and then there are artists you flat-out adore. Particularly cerebral types, like Stoppard, risk falling into the first category: They may generate great thoughts, but those great thoughts have a great chance of leaving you cold. That wasn’t the case for Stoppard, who died Saturday at 88, and was a thinker worth adoring. His best work achieved a rare balance: Audiences left his most affecting plays with both a fresh perspective on the world, and a feeling of great warmth toward it.
I felt that myself, after seeing a much-heralded revival of Stoppard’s Travesties on Broadway in 2018. It’s quite a highbrow play, about the brief intersection, in Switzerland during World War I, of the lives and work of James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, founder of Dadaism. It made me laugh until I cried. And the gloss Stoppard bestowed on this obscure episode of history followed me out of the theater, giving a brief sheen to everything and everyone I saw. I felt as though I floated back to Brooklyn, and as if the Q train might be full of personalities I’d never guess were important until years afterward.
Much of Stoppard’s work revolved around the question of what it really means to live an important life — one that is not just full, but has some kind of identifiable impact on others. The main character of Travesties isn’t Joyce, Lenin or Tzara; he’s an endearingly self-satisfied British diplomat, Henry Carr, who briefly found himself in the same circles as those luminaries. As the play opens, decades later, he’s trying to conjure up a memoir about his time in the presence of the greats, with the implication that he deserves to be considered among their ranks.
In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the play that made Stoppard into a star at age 29, the two title characters grapple with their inability to in any way change the course of a narrative — that of Hamlet — that they know will lead to their deaths. In Shakespeare in Love, the film that won Stoppard an Oscar in 1998, he and his coauthor Marc Norman imagined the king of English playwrights as a young man full of talent but still struggling toward greatness, in need of an overwhelming emotional shock to propel him into complete ownership of his gifts.
There are the 19th-century Russian revolutionaries of the ambitious trilogy The Coast of Utopia; the intellectuals seeking to redefine the world and its history in Arcadia; the striving academics of The Hard Problem; the newly emancipated Viennese Jews of Leopoldstadt, the play Stoppard wrote that most profoundly invoked his heritage. Over and over, variations of the same question emerge. What does it mean to live completely and well, as an individual and a member of society?
“If there is any meaning in any of it” — “it” being the brutal course of history, its neverending cycles of destruction — “it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities,” Joyce declares in Travesties. Later, Carr echoes him — a surprise, as the two hold very little respect for one another. When told that the only relevant function of art is “social criticism,” he protests.
“A great deal of what we call art,” he says, “has no such function, and yet in some way it gratifies a hunger that is common to princes and peasants.”
Not everyone wants to be an artist, and, as Carr reflects at the end of Travesties, it’s a sure thing that not everyone can be. But in the wake of Stoppard’s death, I’ve found myself thinking about the mother of my one-time source, so enraptured by what Stoppard created that her own child saw his work as the most profound passion of her life.
It’s easy to say that kind of effect made Stoppard’s life important. But the quieter story, I think, is that it made that devoted fan’s life important, too. Because she loved Stoppard, she saw herself as more firmly secured in her own existence; she saw herself as having a purpose and place.
To help someone experience their own significance — to gratify the common hunger that afflicts us all — is a great gift. And Stoppard gave it to many, including to me.
The post The gift Tom Stoppard gave to me — and to all who adore him appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran to Boycott World Cup Draw Over Visa Restrictions
Soccer Football – World Cup Playoff Tournament and European Playoff draws – FIFA Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland- November 20, 2025 The original FIFA World Cup trophy is kept on display during the draws. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
Iran intends to boycott next week’s World Cup draw due to the limited number of visas allocated to the country’s football federation.
According to the Tehran Times, the United States issued visas to only four members of Iran‘s delegation, with requests for three additional visas denied, including one for Iranian Football Federation (FFIRI) President Mehdi Taj.
“We have informed FIFA that the decisions taken are unrelated to sport and that the members of the Iranian delegation will not participate in the World Cup draw,” FFIRI spokesman Mehdi Alavi said on Friday, per the report.
Alavi said the federation has been in contact with FIFA in an effort to resolve the situation.
The World Cup draw will take place on Dec. 5 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
The expanded 48-team World Cup is being hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico from June 11 to July 19, 2026. Matches will be played at 16 venues, including three in Mexico and two in Canada.
The draw will sort the teams into 12 groups of four. The top two teams from each group and the eight best third-place teams will advance to the knockout stage.
Iran has secured a spot in its fourth consecutive World Cup and seventh appearance overall.
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Dublin to Rename Chaim Herzog Park in a Move Slammed as Attempt to Erase Jewish History
Anti-Israel demonstrators stand outside the Israeli embassy after Ireland has announced it will recognize a Palestinian state, in Dublin, Ireland, May 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Molly Darlington
i24 News – Citing the Gaza war, Dublin city council voted to rename a park honoring Israel’s sixth president, the Irish-born Chaim Herzog, in further manifestation of anti-Israel sentiment in the country.
While a new name is yet to be chosen, reports cite efforts by pro-Palestinian activists to change it to the “Free Palestine Park.”
Former Irish justice minister Alan Shatter harshly criticized the vote, charging that “Dublin City Council has now gone full on Nazi & a committee of the Council has determined it should erase Jewish/Irish history. Herzog Park in Rathgar is named after Chaim Herzog, Israel’s 6th President, brought up in Dublin by his father, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, a friend of Eamon De Valera, who was Chief Rabbi of Ireland & Israel’s first Chief Rabbi… Some councillors want the Park renamed ‘Free Palestine Park.”
The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland issued a statement regarding the renaming of Herzog Park.
“It sends a hurtful and isolating message to a small minority community that has contributed to Ireland for centuries. We call on Dublin City Councillors to reject this motion. The removal of the Herzog name from this park would be widely understood as an attempt to erase our Irish Jewish history.”
A virtuoso diplomat and an intellectual giant, Herzog had served in a variety of roles throughout his storied career, including a memorable stint as the ambassador to the United Nations, where in 1975 he delivered a speech condemning the Soviet-engineered resolution to brand Zionism as a form of racism. The address is now regarded as a classic, along with the oration from the same session by the US Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar slammed the decision, saying that Ireland’s “antisemitic and anti-Israel obsession is sickening.”