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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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City of Austin Enshrines ‘CAIR Day’ After Texas Designates Islamic Group as Terror Organization
CAIR officials give press conference on the Israel-Hamas war. Photo: Kyle Mazza / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The city of Austin, Texas has declared Jan. 22 as “CAIR-Austin Day,” honoring a controversial organization that has been designated by multiple US states as a terrorist group and scrutinized by federal authorities over alleged ties to Hamas.
On Thursday morning, the local holiday was announced with a proclamation at city hall acknowledging the efforts of civic and community engagement by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of Muslim Americans.
Representatives of the group praised the decision.
“Our proclamation today, declaring Jan. 22 as CAIR-Austin Day, means a lot, not only to the CAIR-Austin staff and board members, but for the whole Muslim community in our city statewide,” CAIR said in a statement.
The proclamation came about two months after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott formally designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations under state law, citing in part what officials described as longstanding ideological and operational ties with Islamist movements hostile to the US and its allies.
Abbott’s proclamation described CAIR as a “successor organization” to the Muslim Brotherhood and noted the FBI called it a “front group” for “Hamas and its support network.” The document also outlined the history of the organizations and their historical associations with figures and networks tied to Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,’” Abbott said in a statement while announcing the designations last month. “These radical extremists are not welcome in our state and are now prohibited from acquiring any real property interest in Texas.”
In response, the Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin chapters of CAIR sued Abbott and the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, arguing the proclamation “chills” their freedom of speech and association under the First Amendment of the US Constitution and “retaliates against” them for exercising such rights. The CAIR chapters asked the court to stop the state from enforcing the designations and requested “compensatory damages,” according to the complaint.
Paxton responded by filing an affidavit defending the Texas proclamation, arguing in part that the terrorist designation is a lawful national-security measure aimed at protecting Texans from extremist influence, not a violation of free speech.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller lambasted Austin’s decision to honor CAIR.
“Austin’s proclamation of Jan. 22 as ‘CAIR-Austin Day’ is an outrageous disgrace and a blatant surrender to radical ideology that’s hijacked city hall. This is pure political theater, shoving left-wing activists ahead of hard-working Texas families,” he said in a statement. “CAIR isn’t some harmless community group. Gov. Abbott and Attorney General Paxton have branded it a foreign terrorist organization under Texas law, citing ironclad ties that endanger America and our allies.”
CAIR has drawn scrutiny over its alleged history of lending material support for foreign terrorist groups. In the 2000s, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) has called on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to investigate CAIR’s status as a nonprofit organization, arguing the group has ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, two internationally designated terrorist groups.
CAIR has denied any ties to Hamas or other terrorist organizations, portraying itself as a civil rights group defending Muslim Americans.
Additionally, CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities in southern Israel.
The head of CAIR, for example, said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israelis in what was the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
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What we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank hiding from ICE
Anne Frank’s story — as told in her famed diary — is about many things: Persecution of Jews, the horrors of fascism, the perseverance of the human spirit.
But one of the main messages that many have taken from her life and death is this: It is wrong for children to be forced into hiding for any reason, and certainly on the basis of their identity.
That’s the connection that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz drew while speaking on Monday.
“We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” he said at a press conference. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank,” he added. Someday, he thinks, someone will write a similar story about the children of Minnesota.
Thus started one of the most vicious recent battles over what, exactly, Frank’s memory should mean. And in that battle, we can see what we risk by questioning whether it’s reasonable to draw any comparisons, ever, between those who lived in terror of the Nazis, and those who live in terror of other inhumane regimes.
The United States Holocaust Museum responded to Walz by posting on social media that “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable.”
“Despite tensions in Minneapolis,” they added, “exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”
There are good reasons to be protective of Anne Frank’s story as a specifically Jewish one. The instinct to treat her experience as one of universal relevance has sometimes been taken too far, as in the case of a 2017 Dutch play about her that didn’t mention Jews or the Nazis.
But there are also good reasons to lean into the belief that Frank’s story is about humanity at large, as well as Jews, specifically. Frank’s father, Otto Frank, who edited her diary after her death during the Holocaust and pushed for its publication, was among those who said he wanted it to have universal appeal.
“I always said that Anne’s book is not a war-book,” he wrote in a letter in 1952. “War is the background. It is not a Jewish book either, though Jewish sphere, sentiment and surrounding is the background.” He wanted his daughter’s story to reach as many people as possible.
That’s the same instinct, I think, that motivated Walz to make his comparison: the drive to force people to confront the truth that children are suffering inhumanity, and to feel that truth must not be tolerated.
Consider just two of the stories of children in Minnesota over these past few weeks.
Liam Ramos, a 5-year-old, was detained along with his father and sent to a facility in Texas. A photo of Ramos wearing a Spiderman backpack while being forced into an SUV by federal agents went viral, in part, I think because of the profound human urge to protect children from the worst of existence — and the desperation provoked by seeing a child fall prey to it anyway.
Or think about a 2-year-old who was detained and flown to Texas along with her father. She was returned to her mother the next day, but it is impossible not to think that this experience of forced separation from her parents will mark her for life.
These two children were from Ecuador. But I do not see how it erases Frank’s Jewishness to show a parallel. It is wrong that she was forced into hiding because of her identity, and it is similarly wrong to force children in Minnesota into hiding because of theirs.
Far more concerning, I think, is the fact that misinformation about Frank’s story is being spread by some who argue that invoking her in this context is inappropriate.
Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, posted in response to Walz that “ignorance like this cheapens the horror of the Holocaust. Anne Frank was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law. She was hauled off to a death camp because of her race and religion. Her story has nothing to do with the illegal immigration.”
That’s a terrible rewriting of history. It’s true that Frank was hauled off to a death camp because of her race and religion. But it is not true that she and her family were abiding by the law.
They went into hiding after Frank’s sister, Margot Frank, received and ignored a summons to go to a labor camp. They were hiding precisely because their existence in Amsterdam had become illegal the second that Margo failed to show up; they were all defying orders.
Frank and her family were quite literally breaking the law. It was the Nazis, and the people who turned in the Frank family, who were following it.
Questions of legality do not provide an excuse to force children into hiding because of their race, religion, or where they were born, nor a reason to scar or harm them.
For my own part, I think we are less at risk of forgetting that the Holocaust was carried out against Jews than of being so concerned about losing Jewish specificity that we miss that there are unspeakable harms being carried out against children today. Many of those harms are happening legally.
People can learn from what happened from Anne Frank, or not. People can disagree about exactly what we ought to learn from what happened to her, too.
But if insisting on the specific Jewishness of that story seems more important to you than recounting the history accurately, I think it’s only fair to ask: Are you actually upset about how people tell this story, or just upset that listeners might take away a different moral than you think they should?
The post What we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank hiding from ICE appeared first on The Forward.
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81 Years After the Holocaust, Antisemitism Pervasive in Germany, Poland
A demonstration in Schwerin, Germany under the slogan “All together to protect democracy”, with a banner reading “Against Nazis”. They want to demonstrate against new borders in Europe and protest against cooperation with right-wing extremists. Photo: Bernd Wüstneck/dpa via Reuters Connect.
Eighty-one years after the Holocaust, antisemitism remains rampant in the heart of the former Third Reich, with rising antisemitic hate crimes in Germany and incidents targeting Jewish communities in Poland drawing widespread condemnation.
On Tuesday, as the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a group of Orthodox Israelis waiting to board a flight to Israel at Krakow Airport in Poland were physically and verbally assaulted by an airport employee, in the latest antisemitic incident drawing condemnation from officials and community leaders.
The travelers were praying before boarding their flight when the employee noticed them and began shouting antisemitic slurs while demanding that they stop.
When the group members explained they were nearly finished, the assailant became even more aggressive, reportedly spitting on one person and pushing another.
As the situation escalated and the assailant grew more hostile, airport police intervened to control the scene, with the incident captured and widely shared online.
In videos circulating on social media, the airport employee is seen approaching the group aggressively, shouting, “Why are you in Poland? Go back to Israel.”
The group members are seen speaking in English, asking him to stop, as he persists in claiming that Poland is “his country.”
Go back to Israel, what are you doing coming to Poland”:
A group of Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews who traveled to Poland were attacked by a local airport employee – but they didn’t stay silent: “Be quiet.” | video pic.twitter.com/vu0Iz3rSy6— daniel amram – דניאל עמרם (@danielamram3) January 27, 2026
According to local media, airport officials have yet to release a public statement, confirm whether the employee has been suspended or disciplined, or clarify if an investigation into the incident is underway.
The airport workers’ remarks were reminiscent of comments made by Polish lawmaker Grzegorz Braun, a far-right politician notorious for his repeated antisemitic statements and outspoken criticism of Israel.
“Poland is for Poles. Other nations have their own countries, including the Jews,” Braun said during a press conference in November in Oświęcim, a town in southern Poland that is home to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp memorial and museum. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed annually on Jan. 27, the date when Auschwitz, the largest and most notorious of the Nazi death camps, was liberated.
“Jews want to be super-humans in Poland, entitled to a better status, and the Polish police dance to their tune,” Braun continued.
Poland, like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
Germany has been one such country to experience a surge in antisemitism.
Most recently, unknown individuals vandalized the memorial at a local synagogue in Kiel, a city in the northwestern part of the country, destroying items left by people honoring the victims of the Holocaust — including a Star of David, candles, and a photograph.
“This attack is an utterly unacceptable act of antisemitic hatred and an affront to the memory of the crimes committed under National Socialism,” Daniel Günther, the minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein, a state in northern Germany, said in a statement. “Anyone who desecrates a memorial site like this violates historical responsibility and the core values of the state.”
“We are witnessing a growing number of antisemitic incidents. Ninety years ago, that hatred marked the beginning of the end,” he continued. “That is precisely why we cannot tolerate a single incident today. Every act must be investigated and punished under the rule of law.”
This latest antisemitic attack comes as the local Jewish community rallies to defend democracy and protest against antisemitism on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Observed each year on Jan. 27, the day honors the six million Jews and other victims killed by the Nazis and commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.
“Holocaust survivors around the world are asking whether democracies and their citizens are sufficiently aware of the dangers posed by the hateful rhetoric of far-right and populist politicians and parties,” Christoph Heubner, vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee from Berlin, said in a statement.
“Antisemitism has an unfortunate characteristic: it serves as an ideological bridge between right-wing extremists, left-wing extremists, and Islamists alike,” he continued. “These forces will continue to grow stronger if, as a society, we do not stop these threatening developments.”
According to newly released figures from the German Ministry of the Interior obtained by the newspaper BILD, antisemitic incidents continued to rise last year, with 2,122 offenses reported in Berlin alome, including 60 violent attacks.
This represents a significant increase of 80 percent compared with the already high number of incidents in previous years, with Berlin police recording 901 such offenses in 2023 and 1,622 in 2024, BILD reported.
“The rise in these figures is alarming, but not surprising. When politicians allow antisemitic demonstrations to go unchallenged, it emboldens certain groups and reinforces their antisemitic attitudes and attacks,” Timur Husein, a member of Parliament from the CDU, Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union, who requested the data, told the German newspaper.
Husein also said that the CDU is looking to strengthen Germany’s assembly laws to ban antisemitic demonstrations, which he says are responsible for a significant share of these crimes.
Earlier this month, the commissioner to combat antisemitism in the German state of Hesse sounded the alarm after an arson attack on a local synagogue in the town of Giessen, warning that it reflects a “growing pogrom-like atmosphere” threatening Jewish life across Germany as Jews and Israelis continue to face an increasingly hostile climate.