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‘Kidnapped’ posters calling attention to Israeli hostages keep getting torn down

(New York Jewish Week) — The hundreds of flyers lining the walls of the Union Square subway station bore the faces of Israeli hostages, with the word “kidnapped” in bold letters above the photo and a plea to bring them home below.
“Entire Israeli family,” one of the pages said; “80-year-old Israeli grandfather,” read another. Others showed the faces of teenagers, a young couple or migrant workers, all missing and believed to be held by Hamas in Gaza.
But some of the posters were also hard to make out. Within minutes or hours of going up, many of them had been partially ripped off the subway station’s walls, tears obscuring the victims’ faces or details about their lives, while others were defaced with marker or surrounded by messages such as “Free Palestine.” Others were removed because of city regulations.
This week, the walls of New York City’s subway stations, campus buildings and other public spaces — along with those of other cities across the globe — have been plastered with the posters, a grassroots campaign to raise awareness of the roughly 200 hostages Hamas captured in its Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The fast-spreading initiative has given an outlet to supporters of Israel abroad who feel frustrated by their inability to aid the war effort, and isolated by their distance from the fighting.
But the posters have also become one more front in the battle for public opinion on the war — with opponents of Israel tearing down the posters, berating the activists and launching a counter-campaign highlighting Palestinian losses.
“We wanted to put the message out there. We wanted the world to know,” said one of the creators of the “Kidnapped From Israel” project, an Israeli street artist who goes by the nom de plume Dede Bandaid. “Every place they will tear them down, we will put up many, many more.”
An Israeli activist prepares to put up posters near New York City’s Union Square subway station, October 16, 2023. (Luke Tress)
Bandaid and his partner, Israeli artist Nitzan Mintz, were in New York on a three-month art residency when the war broke out. Within a day of Hamas’ attack, they decided to put their skills as street artists to use by designing and printing out the flyers. Initially, they printed 2,000 posters, taped them up around the city, and tried to enlist the help of passersby, most of whom dismissed the project.
“We felt that people don’t want to know the stories and it made us very sad,” Bandaid said. “We got home and we were very broken and we thought, ‘There’s no chance to make this project work.’”
They then posted a DropBox folder with the fliers on social media and collapsed into sleep. “When we woke up in the morning, our phones were just filled with photos and videos from people sharing what they were doing,” Bandaid said. “The whole city was filled with posters.”
The project spread online, overwhelming their DropBox capacity, so they set up a website where anyone could download the images, and began receiving requests for translations from abroad. There are now posters in more than a dozen languages, including Greek, Romanian, Finnish and Indonesian, and campaigners dispersing the posters in far-flung locations such as Paris, New Zealand and Prague. Bandaid estimates that around 1,000 activists took up the initiative in Berlin.
Celebrities including Gal Gadot have gotten on board, posting the images on social media, while other campaigners have adapted the flyers and projected them onto the sides of buildings, put them on billboards or on digital truck displays in New York City and elsewhere. WhatsApp groups created earlier this year by Israeli expatriates to coordinate protests against Israel’s judicial overhaul now feature callouts to put up the posters.
“I feel like for me to start with this campaign, I needed that, not just for my own people but also for myself to feel to be part of a community,” said Israel artist Ronit Levin Delgado, who connected with Mintz through mutual friends in the art world. “For me as an Israeli, with all my family in Israel, that’s the only thing I can do right now because I cannot be there.”
Israeli artist Ronit Levin Delgado in New York City’s Union Square, October 16, 2023. (Luke Tress)
To obtain consent to use the photos, Bandaid and Mintz work with a designer in Israel, Tal Huber, who contacts the families of the hostages to obtain their pictures and identifying details. Around 100 of the 200 hostages are featured on the flyers. Some of the families have reached out to the artists, asking that their loved ones be included in the campaign. Others, after receiving notice that their loved ones were killed, have asked that their photos be removed.
“The idea of being kidnapped, the idea of wanting someone to have his freedom, I think it’s a very strong message and I think many people believe in that,” Bandaid said. “We just lit the match, but everyone took it to their own end.”
Levin Delgado, who lost a friend from the artist community in the massacre of 260 people at an outdoor party, assembled with several dozen other activists, mostly Israelis, at Union Square to post the images in and around the subway station on Monday night. She said the group put up 2,000 posters in four hours, and part of their goal was to interact with passersby, some of whom stopped to ask about the project.
One young woman stopped on her way down to the station platform to ask Levin Delgado about the flyers. “They’re taking everyone, no mercy for anyone. Women, children,” Levin Delgado told her. “We just want to raise awareness and bring them back.”
The woman appeared sympathetic. “I heard about what’s going on, but I wasn’t sure specifically. I didn’t know about the hostages,” she said. “I’ll definitely share it. I’ll take a picture.”
But almost as soon as they went up — in some cases, within minutes — many of the posters were torn down, leaving glue marks and tattered paper on the station walls.
A torn poster about Israeli hostages surrounded by pro-Palestinian messages in New York City’s Union Square, October 16, 2023. (Luke Tress)
Levin Delgado noticed pro-Palestinian activists pasting messages around hostage flyers posted outside the station. The pro-Palestinian posters featured the Palestinian flag, or a photo of a Palestinian captioned with the words “Murdered” and “Stop the oppression.” The posters appeared to be an imitation of the Israeli fliers.
In some cases, someone had written “Free Palestine” in black marker on the Israeli hostage posters. Other fliers bore the image of a Palestinian-American boy killed in Illinois on Monday.
Levin Delgado confronted the pro-Palestinian activists, concerned they were removing the Israeli posters, and got into a heated exchange about the conflict.
“We have almost 2,000 that got murdered,” Levin Delgado said.
“We have millions over the last many years,” one of the pro-Palestinian activists said, a significant exaggeration of the Palestinian death toll throughout the history of the conflict. The pro-Palestinian activists declined to be interviewed by the New York Jewish Week.
Pro-Palestinian activists put up posters near New York City’s Union Square subway station, October 16, 2023. (Luke Tress)
Tensions stayed high, but the two sides finally agreed to leave each other’s posters alone. The verbal sparring continued, however, and minutes later, another passerby tore another Israeli hostage poster down and threatened to punch Levin Delgado when she addressed the incident.
Not all posters were removed for ideological reasons. Some came off subway station walls due to Metropolitan Transportation Authority policy, which bars putting unauthorized signs up on MTA property. An MTA spokesperson said staff remove any posters they see while making their rounds, and added that the fliers were allowed elsewhere. Activists have posted them on street light poles, walls and other public spaces.
Union Square isn’t the only place where the posters have sparked debate. At New York University, just blocks away, the campus group Students Supporting Israel posted photos online of the posters being thrown in the trash, and of people holding bunches of the crumpled, torn posters in their arms.
Ari Axelrod, an American Jewish actor, director and singer, said police had politely removed some of the fliers he helped put up at Columbus Circle on Monday. Axelrod had been leaving the roundabout’s subway station when he came across a group of Israelis and offered to join them. A pro-Palestinian activist then barged into the group and started tearing down the flyers, Axelrod said.
“This guy just comes up and says, ‘Put up all the faces of the Palestinian hostages of the past 75 years,’” Axelrod said. “He kept talking, saying, ‘You’re supporting genocide. You’re supporting ethnic cleansing.’”
The pro-Palestinian activist left the scene to summon police, who told the Israelis that the signs were not allowed on MTA property. One of the Israelis, who had put up the posters, asked that only police or MTA officers remove the flyers so they would not be “desecrated” by others.
“The cops were very understanding. ‘We get why you’re doing it, we understand, but it has to come down,’” Axelrod said, quoting the police. “The police said, ‘We’ll stand guard, we’ll leave it up for a little bit and make sure nobody else takes it down.’”
Axelrod said he watched the police as they surveyed the posters, reading the names and looking at the pictures.
“One of the police officers says, ‘Four years old. Jesus,’” before he started removing the posters, Axelrod said.
The group of Israelis headed back up to the sidewalk, where the person who had directed the effort to hang the posters broke down in tears.
Back downtown, after clashing with rival activists, some of the Israelis kept hanging the posters. Levin Delgado, still toting a bag of flyers and glue, made a last lap around Union Square to check how many remained on the wall. At a staircase down to the subway, she was elated to find a row of posters nearly intact, but then noticed two freshly-drawn swastikas on the opposite white tile wall. She sprayed the hate symbols with glue and pasted an image of a kidnapped Israeli family on top.
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Iran Accused of Targeting Jews at Home and Abroad as 14 Nations Condemn Assassination Plots

People walk near a mural of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, amid the Iran-Israel conflict, in Tehran, Iran, June 23, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Britain, the United States, France, and 11 other allies issued a joint statement on Thursday condemning a rise in Iranian assassination and kidnapping plots in the West, as a new report warned Tehran has been intensifying efforts to target Jewish communities abroad.
On Tuesday, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released a report detailing Iran’s systematic violations of religious freedom, both domestically and through operations targeting individuals abroad.
Within Iran, despite officially recognizing Judaism, the Islamist government also “publicly demonizes Jews as enemies of Islam, denies and distorts the history of the Holocaust, [and] surveils Jewish houses of worship,” the report said.
By promoting such antisemitic views and permitting assaults on Jewish sacred sites throughout the country, “authorities have nurtured a hostile environment in which Iranian Jews feel increasingly threatened.”
According to the report, Iran is also “directly engaging criminal networks abroad to carry out attacks against Jewish targets and make Jews in Europe unsafe,” especially in the aftermath of the recent 12-day war with Israel.
The study revealed that the Iranian regime continues to promote and incite antisemitism abroad — through criminal networks, social media, and online platforms — and has actively recruited gangs across Europe “to carry out attacks on Israeli embassies and Jewish sites, including houses of worship, memorial centers, restaurants, and community centers.”
On Thursday, Western allies condemned a surge in assassination, kidnapping, and harassment plots by Iranian intelligence services targeting individuals across Western countries, urging Iranian authorities to immediately halt these illegal activities.
“We are united in our opposition to the attempts of Iranian intelligence services to kill, kidnap, and harass people in Europe and North America in clear violation of our sovereignty,” the joint statement read.
The new report and joint statement came as Iran continued to defy international demands regarding its nuclear program, facing mounting pressure and new US economic sanctions aimed at compelling a return to nuclear talks.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned that “the road to negotiation is narrow” in the wake of the recent conflict with Israel and the United States.
Araghchi also insisted that Washington must agree to compensate Iran for the losses suffered during last month’s conflict if it hopes to bring Tehran back to the negotiating table.
“They should explain why they attacked us in the middle of … negotiations, and they have to ensure that they are not going to repeat that [during future talks],” the top Iranian diplomat said. “And they have to compensate [Iran for] the damage that they have done.”
However, Araghchi also reaffirmed that a deal would be off the table as long as US President Donald Trump continued to demand that Iran commit to zero uranium enrichment.
“We can negotiate, they can present their argument, and we will present our own argument,” Araghchi said. “But with zero enrichment, we don’t have a thing.”
On Wednesday, the United States announced a new round of economic sanctions targeting Iran and entities tied to its oil trade, as part of continued pressure on the Islamic Republic “until Tehran agrees to a deal that promotes regional peace and stability, and abandons all aspirations for nuclear weapons.”
As for negotiations with Europe, Araghchi said during the interview that Tehran would walk away from the talks if European powers continued on their current course, accusing them of failing to honor their obligations under the 2015 nuclear agreement.
“With the Europeans, there is no reason right now to negotiate because they cannot lift sanctions, they cannot do anything,” the Iranian diplomat said. “If they do snapback, that means that this is the end of the road for them.”
Under the terms of the UN Security Council resolution enshrining the 2015 accord — which imposed temporary restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for large-scale sanctions relief —international sanctions could be reimposed on Iran, restoring all previous UN economic penalties including those targeting Iran’s oil, banking, and defense sectors, through a “snapback” mechanism that would take about 30 days. France, Britain, and Germany have warned they would reinstate UN sanctions on Tehran if no new agreement is reached by the end of August.
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ADL Files Civil Rights Complaint Against Baltimore City Public Schools, Alleging Rampant Antisemitism

Baltimore City Hall is seen in Baltimore, Maryland, US, May 10, 2019. Photo: Stephanie Keith via Reuters Connect
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has filed a Title VI civil rights complaint against Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS), alleging that officials refused to respond to allegations of antisemitism in a manner consistent with US federal law.
“All schools have a fundamental obligation to maintain a learning environment that protect students from discrimination,” ADL vice president of litigation James Pasch said in a statement announcing the action. “On this essential measure of keeping its Jewish students safe from harassment and intimidation, Baltimore City Public Schools have failed.”
Jewish students allegedly experienced relentless bullying in BCPS, where students pantomimed Nazi salutes, treated campuses as a canvas for Nazi-inspired and antisemitic graffiti, and sent text messages threatening that the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas will be summoned to kill Jewish students the bullies do not like. Teachers behaved even worse than students, the complaint said. At Bard High School, an English teacher performed the Nazi salute three times and later admitted to administrative officials that he did so intentionally to harm “the sole Jewish student” enrolled in his class. Following the incident, he suggested that the student unregister for his class because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be discussed in it.
In every case, according to the complaint, BCPS officials “slow-walked” investigations, deflecting parents’ inquiries into their status with bureaucratic spin even as they denied Jewish students justice. Moreover, the ADL continued, BCPS was first notified of an antisemitism problem on its campuses over a year before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel stoked anti-Jewish hatred. The ADL alleged that the school system’s refusing to take action constituted a textbook example of a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids public schools receiving federal funding to treat students unfairly on the basis of race, ethnicity, or shared ancestry.
“Parents of Jewish students in Baltimore have pleaded repeatedly with BCPPS to take decisive action to stop the harassment of and discrimination against their Jewish children. Their pleas have been ignored,” the complaint said. “Jewish students and parents have filed more than a dozen reports with BCPS. In each case, the schools have labeled these weighty allegations as ‘inconclusive’ and appear to have taken action against the perpetrators.”
The ADL is calling on the school system to take imminent, remedial steps to address antisemitism, including adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, requiring BCPS officials to undergo trainings on the history of antisemitism and how to fight it, and additions to school curricula which educate students about the history of anti-Jewish bigotry and its harms.
Antisemitism in K-12 schools is receiving increased attention, notably in California, after years of falling under the radar.
In April, a civil rights complaint filed by StandWithUs and the Bay Area Jewish Coalition alleged that the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California allows Jewish students to be subjected to unconscionable levels of antisemitic bullying in and outside of the classroom.
The 27-page complaint, filed with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), described a slew of incidents that allegedly fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students after Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities set off a wave of anti-Jewish hatred across the US. SCUSD students, the compaint said, graffitied antisemitic hate speech in the bathrooms, vandalized Jewish-themed posters displayed in schools, and distributed stickers which said, “F—k Zionism.” All the while, district officials enabled the behavior by refusing to investigate it and blaming victims who came forward to report their experiences, according to the complaint.
“SCUSD has allowed an egregiously hostile environment to fester for its Jewish and Israeli students in violation of its federal obligations and ethical responsibility to create a safe educational space for all students,” Jenna Statfeld Harris, senior counsel and K-12 specialist at StandWithUs Saidoff Legal, said in a statement at the time. “SCUSD leadership repeatedly disregards the rights of their Jewish and Israeli students. We implore the Office for Civil Rights to step in and uphold the right of these students to an inclusive education free from hostility toward their protected identity.”
In March, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed a civil rights complaint which recounted the experience of a 12-year-old Jewish girl who was allegedly assaulted on the grounds of the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino, California — being beaten with a stick, told to “shut your Jewish ass up,” and teased with jokes about Hitler. According to the court filings, one student admitted that the behavior was motivated by the victim’s being Jewish. Despite receiving several complaints about the treatment, a substantial amount of which occurred in the classroom, school officials allegedly declined to punish her tormentors.
“While an increasing number of schools recognize that their Jewish students are being targeted both for their religious beliefs and due to their ancestral connection to Israel, and are taking necessary steps to address both classic and contemporary forms of antisemitism, some shamefully continue to turn a blind eye,” Brandeis Center founder and chairman Kenneth Marcus said in a statement at the time of the filing.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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France, Spain Locked in Diplomatic Dispute Over Removal of French Jewish Teenagers From Flight

A Vueling aircraft approaches landing at Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport, as Vueling employees prepare for strike, in Barcelona, Spain, Nov. 2, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Nacho Doce
The forced removal of French Jewish teenagers from a flight in Spain has triggered political outrage in France, after their group leader was handcuffed by Spanish police and a government minister insulted the teens as “Israeli brats.”
French ministers Aurore Bergé and Benjamin Haddad have sharply criticized Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente’s comments and denounced the Spanish government’s overall response to the incident.
Earlier this week, Puente referred to the group of teenagers as “Israeli brats” in a post on X, which he quickly deleted after it went viral and sparked widespread condemnation.
The French ministers issued a strong rebuke of the remarks for “equating French children who were Jewish with Israeli citizens, as if this in any way justified the treatment they were subjected to.”
“At a time when antisemitic acts have been on the rise across Europe since the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, in Israel, we call on Vueling [the airline of the flight in question] and the Spanish authorities to fully investigate and clarify the events,” Bergé and Haddad said in a statement.
“We will never accept the normalization of antisemitism. We will always stand with our fellow citizens who suffer from antisemitic hatred, and we will never compromise,” the French officials continued.
Last week, a group of 50 French Jewish students was forcibly removed from a plane in Valencia — reportedly for singing in Hebrew — an incident that resulted in the arrest of their summer camp director, who has accused Spanish law enforcement officers of using excessive force against her.
According to her lawyer, she was left with bruises on her legs, arms, and body after being harshly handcuffed and placed in an arm lock.
“No action justified the disembarkation or the excessive and brutal use of force by the Civil Guard against the young woman, who has just been notified of 15 days of total incapacity to work,” Bergé and Haddad said in a statement.
The Spanish low-cost airline Vueling denied the allegations, insisting the incident was not related to religion but rather that the group was causing a disruption.
In a statement, the airline asserted that the group was removed because of its members’ “highly combative attitude that was putting the safety of the flight at risk.”
After meeting with the group’s counselor on Tuesday, Bergé and Haddad said she denied the official version of events, emphasizing that the crew was hostile from the beginning and that the group’s removal and the Civil Guard’s response were unjustified.
The children, aged 10 to 15, are members of the Kineret Club — a summer camp for Jewish families run by the Matana charitable association — which had just concluded their trip in the coastal resort town of Sant Carles de la Ràpita, between Valencia and Barcelona.
According to local reports, the children were singing in Hebrew while boarding the plane to return home, which prompted a hostile response from the crew.
Witnesses reported that the group stopped singing at the crew’s request and complied quietly with boarding instructions, yet airport police still intervened and ordered them to disembark.
Other passengers on the plane who witnessed the incident reported that staff made antisemitic remarks toward the group, including one employee who allegedly referred to Israel as a “terrorist state.”
Last week, amid an ongoing investigation into the incident, French authorities reached out to the CEO of Vueling and the Spanish ambassador to France to assess whether the group was subjected to religious discrimination.