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Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action
(JTA) — For a decade starting in 2002, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi devoted herself to pro-Israel advocacy. After that, the Jewish philanthropist and activist from Annapolis, Maryland, went all in to fight for disability rights, working in the field for the next decade. Now, Mizrahi is focused on climate change.
“Let me put it this way: In 2021, we donated to one climate organization, and in 2022, we donated to 17 of them,” Mizrahi said, referring to the small charity fund she runs with her husband, tech entrepreneur Victor Mizrahi. This year, the couple made their largest climate-related donation yet, sending a group of nine climate reporters to Israel to meet tech startups working on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mizrahi and her husband have also begun commercially investing in such startups.
“I was hoping other people would solve it,” she said. “But the pace of the change is not nearly meeting the demand at the moment. I felt that even though I don’t know the subject, I’m just going to have to do it because I have kids and I don’t want this world to fall apart.”
Climate change has long ranked at or near the top of a list of issues concerning Jews in the United States, according to multiple surveys, and Jews have been heavily involved in the wider climate movement. But until recently, the issue had a marginal place on the agendas of Jewish communal organizations, which neglected climate even as the subject took on importance in the activism and policies of other religious communities and in the larger philanthropic world.
Mizrahi’s newfound emphasis on climate is an early example of a larger shift that is underway in Jewish philanthropy, a multibillion-dollar world made up of thousands of individual donors, charitable foundations and nonprofit organizations.
“It’s the beginning of what will become a more widespread focus among Jewish groups,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, the founder and CEO of the Jewish climate group Dayenu. “We’re seeing an awakening to this as a profoundly Jewish issue, and awakening to the role that the Jewish community has to play in addressing the climate crisis.”
Scientists say that decisions regarding carbon emissions made in the next few years will affect life on Earth for thousands of years to come. The most recent warning came in March, when leading global experts with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report, stating that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
The large Jewish populations living in the coastal United States are vulnerable to extreme storms, sea-level rise, severe heat and other weather disruptions — a situation dramatized in the recent Apple television series “Extrapolations,” in which a rabbi contends with rising sea waters infiltrating his Florida synagogue. Meanwhile, Israel is experiencing a slew of impacts from drought and floods to security threats tied regional climate-related instability.
A flooded road after heavy rainfall in the central Israeli city of Lod, Jan. 16, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Israeli officials visit the site where a road collapsed into a large sinkhole at Mineral Beach in the Dead Sea on December 7, 2017. Many facilities and beaches have been closed or shut down in recent years following the increase in sinkholes caused by ever-declining sea levels, as climate change strains the country’s water resources. (Mark Neyman/GPO)
The last few months have seen a flurry of new initiatives aimed at both greening Jewish institutions and directing collective action on climate.
In December, for example, Rosenn’s group published a report calculating that endowments of Jewish organizations, from family foundations to local federations, are invested in the fossil fuel industry to the tune of at least $3 billion. The report launched an ongoing campaign called All Our Might that urges Jewish leaders to withdraw these investments and put the money toward clean energy instead.
Meanwhile, many of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the country — representing local federations, Hillel chapters, summer camps, community centers, day schools and nearly every religious denomination — had already joined a new green coalition organized by another Jewish environmental group and were preparing to unveil pledges to do more in the fight against climate change.
The unveiling of the climate pledges happened in March, under the leadership of Adamah, a nonprofit created through the merger of two stalwarts of Jewish environmentalism, Hazon and the Pearlstone Center.
“Climate and sustainability have not been on the list of priorities for the vast majority of Jewish organizations; this coalition and these climate action plans reflect a deep paradigm shift and culture change moving forward,” Adamah CEO Jakir Mandela said at the time.
The commitments made by members of Adamah’s Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition include sending youth leaders to global climate summits, reducing emissions of buildings and vehicles and lobbying the federal government to pass climate policies.
More than 300 congregations and nonprofits have joined. For Earth Day, Adamah announced a million-dollar fund offering interest-free loans and matching grants to Jewish groups for projects to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
If any single event can be said to mark the debut of the climate issue as a top Jewish communal priority, it is probably the recent annual conference of the Jewish Funders Network, which took place in March in Phoenix, bringing together thousands of donors and charity executives.
For the gathering’s first event, before the formal opening of the conference, a group of participants went on a field trip to downtown Phoenix to learn about the local effects of the climate crisis. Far more people signed up than organizers anticipated, and with about 55 passengers, the tour bus chartered for the occasion reached capacity. Mizrahi, who was among the participants, said the trip was helpful as a networking opportunity for like-minded philanthropists.
“We wanted to expose them to how the existential threats posed by climate change are not long term, but are already here,” Yanklowitz said. “People down in the Zone are dying every summer from heat exhaustion and dehydration.”
Based on his debrief with the group afterward, Yanklowitz feels the trip left an impact on participants.
“I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘Oh, I’m changing my commitments.’ But I did get the sense that climate change was kind of abstract for many people, and that now it really hit home,” Yanklowitz said.
The rest of the conference featured multiple talks and gatherings dedicated to climate, including on the main stage, and an announcement that Birthright, which offers free trips to Israel for young Jews, was increasing its own climate activism with the help of a new donation.
In an interview, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, children of Birthright founder Charles Bronfman, said their $9 million gift is meant to honor their father on the occasion of his 90th birthday, while also bringing Birthright more in line with the values of a new generation that is environmentally-minded.
Birthright organizers will use the funding to develop programming focused on climate that could, for example, expose participants to Israel’s clean tech scene. The money is also intended to help Birthright lower its own carbon footprint, potentially by switching to electric buses or adding more vegetarian meals.
The Bronfmans hope that Birthright’s significant purchasing power in Israeli tourism will nudge the industry toward more ecologically sustainable practices.
“To me, Birthright is like Walmart — everyone wants to do business with them,” Stephen Bronfman said. “They have the power to dictate terms to their service providers and affect the supply chain.”
The widespread interest in climate mobilization among Jewish groups comes after years in which the issue languished outside the mainstream. Rosenn, the head of Dayenu, who has attended about 15 conferences of the Jewish Funder Network, noticed a change this year.
“There used to be half a dozen people at a breakfast before the program talking about climate. And it wasn’t even climate, necessarily — it was the environment writ large,” she said.
The Jewish world is, in many ways, still lagging behind the larger climate movement. Divesting endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry, for example, is seen as a bold step among Jewish groups even though at least 1,590 institutions representing nearly $41 trillion in assets have already publicly committed to doing so, according to a website tracking such pledges. About a third of the groups on the list are defined as faith-based organizations, but only three are Jewish: Kolot Chayeinu, a congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn; the Reform movement’s pension system; and the American Jewish World Service, a global justice group.
Rabbi Laura Bellows, now Dayenu’s director of spiritual activism and education, waves matzah as she encourages major financial organizations to divest from fossil fuels at a rally in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2022. (Bora Chung | Survival Media Agency / Courtesy of Dayenu)
Adamah’s own climate plan doesn’t include a pledge to divest but only a promise that it will investigate the option of doing so for its endowment and employee retirement funds. Instead, the plan touts the group’s education and advocacy efforts, and focuses on reducing emissions at its retreat centers.
Adamah’s chief climate officer, Risa Alyson Cooper, acknowledged that Jewish community institutions have been “largely absent” from the divestment movement and said her group regards divestment as one of several required tools for addressing the climate crisis.
She said the Jewish community hit a milestone when 12 of the 20 founding members of Adamah’s climate coalition said in their climate plans that they would consider amending their financial practices. That was significant, she said, in light of the organizations’ complex and deliberate governing structures, which can make executing such changes onerous.
“While the Jewish community may have lagged behind in years past, we are catching up quickly,” Cooper said.
Such a shift would mark not only a milestone for Jewish climate activism but also a departure from how the Jewish community has historically done philanthropy, said Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, executive vice president of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.
She said wielding financial holdings for social impact has been a hallmark of advocacy by Christian groups. Last year, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) opted to divest from fossil fuels in light of the climate crisis.
The Jewish community, meanwhile, has tended to act primarily through charitable donations. One of the reasons for the difference, she said, is that the Jewish community is much less centralized with communal assets spread across many endowments, making the actions of any single group relatively less impactful.
“Adamah had done some really important work to change individual behavior and grow people’s connections to the environment, but the bigger piece of bold collective action to fight the climate crisis was missing,” Kahn-Troster said. “The overall community is late to respond to the urgency of the problem. But I do think that the work of these organizations is very significant, so I’m excited to see it.”
Kahn-Troster’s historical view is informed by the legacy of her father, Rabbi Lawrence Troster, an environmental activist who had pushed for communal Jewish action on climate, and by the passion for climate justice displayed by her 15-year-old, Liora Pelavin, a member of the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, an arm of Adamah.
“Finding a meaningful Jewish space to do grassroots-level climate advocacy that many young people are demanding has been really important to Liora,” Kahn-Troster said.
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The post Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Australian Police Arrest Teens for Antisemitic Harassment of Jewish Schoolboys
Illustrative: Government workers cleaning antisemitic graffiti in Sydney, Australia in February 2025. Photo: AAPIMAGE via Reuters Connect
Australian police have arrested two teenagers suspected of chasing Jewish schoolboys in a stolen car while shouting Nazi slogans in Melbourne last week.
The suspects, one of whom already has a criminal history at age 16, were taking a joyride in the vehicle in the St. Kilda East section of the city when they spotted the Jewish boys walking home, according to Australian media. After initially passing by them, the driver reportedly executed a U-turn and gave chase, nearly striking one of the fleeing boys as he tried to escape what appeared to be an imminent threat to his life.
“Parents said the boys were badly shaken and reluctant to return to school, struggling to understand why they had been targeted,” the outlet J-Wire reported. “One father said the use of Nazi gestures was particularly distressing for families in a community where many are descendants of Holocaust survivors.”
Police confirmed on Friday night that they arrested the 16-year-old boy, who has been charged with aggravated burglary, theft of a motor vehicle, and numerous driving offences.
The announcement from law enforcement came after a 15-year-old was arrested for the incident and charged with theft of a motor vehicle.
The younger boy has been bailed ahead of his court appearance next month, Australian media reported. However, the 16-year-old has been remanded in custody and is set to appear in court on Tuesday.
Australian lawmakers have sought to confront antisemitism in recent weeks with new legislation, following a historic surge in antisemitic incidents across the country.
The wave of antisemitism culminated last month at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, where gunmen, allegedly inspired by the Islamic State terrorist group, opened fire on a Jewish gathering celebrating the start of Hanukkah, killing 15 people and wounding dozens of others.
On Tuesday, the Australian Federal Parliament passed the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate, and Extremism Act, increasing penalties imposed on hate crime perpetrators and creating new ones against “preachers and leaders” who promote hatred. Other provisions of the law, passed as separate acts, impose new gun restrictions and strengthen and aim to strengthen the immigrations system’s threat detection capabilities.
These measures passed as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese apologized for his government not doing enough to combat antisemitism.
A year before the incident, the Executive Council on Australian Jewry (EJAC) reported a 316 percent increase in antisemitic incidents between 2023 and 2024, a figure which included a surge in physical assaults and “graffiti calling to kill Jews as a direct imperative.”
“In the past such deal calls were in the form of the ‘Death to the Jews’ — expressing a sentiment rather than an act,” the group said in its 2025 report. “The same theme has also occurred in hate emails, phone calls, and other messages — calling for the mass death of Jews. The expression of such sentiments has become much more common, adding to the sense of social license for acts of severe physical violence against Australian Jews.”
In other incidents, someone graffitied the home of Lesli Berger, former president of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies; a Jewish man was assaulted by an anti-Israel mob because he took down an advertisement of a pro-Palestinian rally; and, in one notorious episode in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, hundreds of pro-Hamas protesters gathered outside the Sydney Opera House chanting “gas the Jews,” “f—k the Jews,” and other epithets.
Anti-Israel sentiment in Australia has also led to vandalism. In June 2024, the US consulate in Sydney was vandalized and defaced by a man carrying a sledgehammer who smashed the windows and graffitied inverted red triangles on the building. The inverted red triangle has become a common symbol at pro-Hamas rallies. The Palestinian terrorist group, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, has used inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “the red triangle is now used to represent Hamas itself and glorify its use of violence.”
“We are now at a stage where anti-Jewish racism has left the fringes of society, where it is normalized and allowed to fester and spread, gaining ground at universities, in arts and culture spaces, in the health sector, in the workplace and elsewhere,” EJAC president Daniel Aghion said in a statement on the day the group released its 2025 report. “In such an environment, Jews have legitimate concerns for their physical safety and social well-being in Australia. Together, we must do all we can to combat this scourge.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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What an antisemitic conspiracy theory and the Alex Pretti killing have in common
The night after Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, as federal officials continued to spread lies about what happened, a friend asked me for advice on another disturbing instance of misinformation. What she should say, she asked, to a colleague who is posting antisemitic conspiracy theories about last month’s wildfires in Argentina.
That conundrum was related to the horror of our government trying to blame an innocent man for his own murder, I told her. And democracy, our very society, depends on figuring what to do about both.
In both cases, there’s a stubborn refusal to admit reality. Blinded by hate, suspicion or party loyalty, and locked in hermetically sealed media silos, people blame phantoms — in the case of Argentina — or the actual victims — as in Minneapolis — for the ills of our world.
And with each rejection, each accusation, society bends a bit more toward breaking.
In Argentina, after fires ravaged some 3,000 acres earlier this month, retired military general César Milani and others blamed the blazes on Israel.
My friend’s colleague was one of the many thousands of social media posters who spread those accusations, convinced that Israelis in Patagonia deliberately started the fires in order to clear the way for Zionist settlement.
Nothing my friend could say — that authorities had not determined the cause, that the Argentine government itself said the “Zionist fire” accusations were baseless — could convince her colleague otherwise.
“She would just tell me, ‘That’s what they want you to believe,’” my friend said. “What could I say to that?”
I wish I knew. Because all weekend I despaired seeing the same dynamic at work in the United States, in even more tragic circumstances.
Video footage, eyewitnesses and expert analysis show that Border Police shot Pretti multiple times, after they threw him to the ground and removed a holstered firearm he was legally carrying. Videos show that Pretti, who had been using his iPhone to film Border Police and ICE agents, had run to help a woman whom the federal agents had shoved down.
Anyone who takes the time to look and listen to the evidence can agree on what happened. Or so you would think.
Yet many federal officials, including President Donald Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, suggested that the real victims were the agents who killed Pretti.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior aide, called Pretti “a domestic terrorist.” Gregory Bovino, the official in charge of Border Patrol operations, said Pretti sought to “massacre law enforcement.” (Federal officials used very similar language to describe Renée Good, an unarmed mother whom ICE agents shot and killed earlier this month, after her death.)
Pretti “allegedly tried to pull out a firearm,” reported the resolutely pro-Trump OneAmerica News — ignoring the fact, clear in videos of the incident, that it was agents who removed his firearm from his holster, and agents who shot him after.
As with the Argentine fires, these were the accusations that ricocheted across social media, where posters accused Pretti — with zero evidence — of being an agitator paid for by Jewish Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros.
“Pretti was unalived” — online slang for “killed” — “by federal law enforcement officers who were defending themselves from being murdered by a deranged, Soros-paid terrorist,” was one of the typical, depressing posts to pop up in my feed this weekend.
At least in Argentina the government issued a statement debunking the Zionist arson claim, after an investigation found it was baseless.
In the U.S., a full, fair inquiry into Pretti’s death may shed more light on why the killing occurred. But despite some Republican lawmaker’s calls for a joint federal and state investigation, the federal government is so far doing what it did after the Good’s killing: shutting state authorities out and focusing on the actions of the victims, not the shooter. Three days ago an FBI agent assigned to investigate Good’s death resigned after the Department of Justice pressured her to drop her investigation into the agent behind the shooting.
And so a senseless death that could provide a moment of national reckoning, even reconciliation, will be mourned by many Americans in justifiable outrage. But for others, nothing will penetrate their conviction that Alex Pretti was guilty of provoking his own murder.
The historical record provides little hope that people so locked into a point of view shaped by misinformation can ever change their minds.
I always assumed that the public understanding of the Kent State University shootings, on May 4, 1970, was a matter of settled history: Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on peaceful protesting college students, killing four, and we all knew it was an unjustifiable massacre.
But revisiting that history in the wake of Pretti’s death, I discovered that was far from the truth.
“There was still that sentiment out there that they should have shot more students,” Dean Kahler, a former Kent State protester permanently paralyzed after a National Guardsman’s bullet severed his lower spine, told NPR in 2020, “that they should’ve killed more people.”
And long before Kent State, there was Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer accused of treason in 1894 and later fully exonerated, in a case that divided France to the brink of civil war.
Ever since, a succession of right-wing elements in France have stuck to their belief in Dreyfus’ guilt. In 2021, the French lawyer Germain Latour said French antisemites suffered from an “epidemic of mental cholera” that prevented them from accepting the truth.
I wish I hadn’t had to tell my friend that it’s hard, if not impossible, to crack open every closed mind. But I did. My friend’s colleague will likely never stop believing Israel burned Argentina. Pretti’s killers will continue to have millions of defenders who will never see what to most of us is obvious.
Both stories follow the same script: reality conflicts with ideology, so reality gets discarded.
What matters more is that the people who care about finding and defending the facts push their institutions — courts, media, academia, clergy — to do the same. It is, to borrow a recent movie title, one battle after another. But for Alex Pretti’s sake, we cannot quit.
The post What an antisemitic conspiracy theory and the Alex Pretti killing have in common appeared first on The Forward.
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Guinness World Records Starts Accepting Israeli Submissions Again Following Legal Pressure
People stand next to flags on the day the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages, Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who were kidnapped during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, are handed over under the terms of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Guinness World Records (GWR) is once again accepting submissions from Israel and the Palestinian territories, following pressure from an association of British lawyers that claimed the policy was discriminatory and threatened the validity of Guiness’s registered trademarks.
GWR confirmed to UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) via email that it ended its temporary pause on submissions from Israel and the Palestinian territories that was implemented in November 2023, shortly after the start of the war in the Gaza Strip following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terrorist attack across southern Israel.
The exclusionary policy drew widespread condemnation in early December after Guinness World Records refused to accept a submission from the Israeli NGO Matnat Chaim, which was hoping to set a world record with an event in Jerusalem where 2,000 Israeli kidney donors will gather in one place.
GWR told Matnat Chaim at the time it was “not generally processing” record applications from Israel or the Palestinian territories “with the exception of those done in cooperation with a UN humanitarian aid relief agency.” Guinness denied claims that its policy against submissions from Israel or the Palestinian territories unlawfully excluded and discriminated against Israelis and Palestinians because the policy was based on location, not nationality or ethnicity.
In late December, UKLFI wrote to Guinness and warned that the company could face legal risks because of the policy and that it amounted to indirect discrimination. UKLFI noted that marketing publications under the title “Guinness World Records” while excluding records from in Israel or the Palestinian territories could be considered unfair commercial practice under consumer protection law. The policy could also risk the validity of Guinness’s registered trademarks, according to UKLFI.
Starting Jan. 15, GWR resumed its “routine acceptance” of applications, it told UKLFI in an email shared with The Algemeiner.
“We have continued to monitor the situation in the region carefully, reviewing the policy monthly,” GWR wrote. “The recent ceasefire and the return to a more stable environment have been key factors in these reviews. With these factors in mind … we recommenced our routine acceptance of applications for world records from Israel and the Palestinian Territories, including the application made by the Matnam Chaim charity.”
The company added that the decision to resume processing applications from the region was not an admission that its temporary pause had been unlawful or that its trademarks had been used improperly. Guinness also shared that several records set in Israel had in fact been recognized during the temporary pause. They included records for the fastest robot to solve a rotating puzzle clock, most backward somersault burpees in 30 seconds done by a male, oldest female person to perform a headstand, most sequences completed in a game of “Simon,” and tallest drag performer.
“Guinness World Records’ decision to resume accepting submissions from Israel and the Palestinian territories is welcome,” said UKLFI chief executive Jonathan Turner. “Excluding particular countries carries serious legal and commercial risks. Global organizations cannot present themselves as neutral and inclusive while applying exceptional policies to certain countries, particularly where this misleads consumers and disadvantages entire populations.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar also commented on GWR’s change in policy, celebrating that the massive gathering of kidney donors in Jerusalem will be recognized.
“Two thousand Israeli kidney donors are making the largest donation ever, in a selfless act of solidarity and humanity,” Sa’ar posted on the social media platform X on Monday. “Good to see it finally receive the celebration it deserves by the Guinness World Records, which revoked their original distorted decision to deny Israeli kidney donors their rightful recognition.”