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Moscow’s former chief rabbi: ‘The best option for Russian Jews is to leave’
(JTA) — Pinchas Goldshmidt, the former chief rabbi of Moscow who fled the country earlier this year, said other Russian Jews should leave before it’s too late in an interview with the Guardian.
“When we look back over Russian history, whenever the political system was in danger you saw the government trying to redirect the anger and discontent of the masses towards the Jewish community,” Goldschmidt told the Guardian. “We saw this in tsarist times and at the end of the Stalinist regime.”
He argued that Russia’s floundering invasion of Ukraine is starting to foster a similar environment.
“We’re seeing rising antisemitism while Russia is going back to a new kind of Soviet Union, and step by step the Iron Curtain is coming down again. This is why I believe the best option for Russian Jews is to leave,” Goldschmidt said.
Goldschmidt, who was born in Switzerland but has been serving Russian Jewry since 1989, left the country in June, nearly four months after Russia began its invasion. He said that he was being pressured to support the invasion and feared the impact his refusal might have on Moscow’s Jewish community.
“Pressure was put on community leaders to support the war and I refused to do so. I resigned because to continue as chief rabbi of Moscow would be a problem for the community because of the repressive measures taken against dissidents,” he said.
However, others in Russia have denied that claim, including the director of Moscow’s Choral Synagogue which reelected him chief rabbi almost immediately after he left.
Other Jewish leaders in Russia have remained in the country, such as Berel Lazar, a rabbi affiliated with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement who despite long being seen as close to Putin has spoken out against the war.
But Jews, like Russians of all ethnicities, have been fleeing Russia en masse since the war began in late February. In August, it was estimated that more than 20,000 of Russia’s 165,000 Jews had fled the country.
“There’s a section of Russian society called the creacle, the creative class of business and cultural leaders, intellectuals and artists,” Goldschmidt said, “and I think it’s safe to say a great percentage of those people have left Russia, which is and will be very detrimental to Russian society.”
During the interview with the Guardian, Goldschmidt, who is also the president of the Conference of European rabbis, additionally discussed other issues facing European Jewry, such as rising antisemitism around the world, and how the state of European Jewry compares to the situation for Jews in the United States.
“For many years, Jews in the U.S. believed that it was an exception, that whatever happened in Europe and other countries could never happen there,” Goldschmidt said. “But over the past three years there have been more attacks on Jews there than in Europe.
“What is changing is the political system is much more polarized but also the discourse has been upended by social media. The polarization we’re seeing has made antisemitism much more acceptable.”
During the interview, Goldschmit also praised Ukraine’s Jewish community, denying Putin’s line that it is Nazi state.
“Show me another country that is in the grip of Nazis where the Jewish community is thriving,” Goldschmidt said.
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The post Moscow’s former chief rabbi: ‘The best option for Russian Jews is to leave’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel
Something significant is happening between Israel and Syria, and it deserves more attention than it is getting.
With the backing of the United States, Israeli and Syrian officials have agreed to create what they call a “joint fusion mechanism” — a permanent channel for coordination on intelligence, de-escalation, diplomacy and economic matters — during meetings in Paris. It appears to be the beginning of institutionalized contact between two countries that have formally been at war since 1948.
If this process continues, it will count as a genuine foreign-policy success for President Donald Trump’s administration.
To understand how profound that change would be, it is worth recalling the two countries’ shared history.
Israel and Syria — which the U.S. struck with a set of targeted attacks on the Islamic State on Saturday — have fought openly or by proxy for decades. Before 1967, Syrian artillery positions in the Golan Heights regularly shelled Israeli communities in the Hula Valley and around the Sea of Galilee. After Israel captured that region in 1967, the direct shelling stopped, but the conflict did not.
Syria remained formally committed to a state of war; Israel entrenched itself in the Golan Heights; both sides treated the frontier as a potential flashpoint to be managed carefully. After Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979, Syria became Israel’s most dangerous neighboring state.
A 1974 disengagement agreement created a United Nations-monitored buffer zone, which mostly ensured peace along the border, but did not resolve anything fundamental. In Lebanon, Israel and Syria backed opposing forces for years, and their air forces clashed briefly during the 1982 Lebanon War. Later, Iran’s growing role in Syria and Hezbollah’s military buildup added new threats. The Syrian civil war then destroyed basic state capacity and created precisely the kind of militia-rich environment Israel fears along its borders.
Now, with the dictator Bashar al-Assad gone and the former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa in power, Syria is a broken country trying to stabilize. Sharaa’s past associations, disturbingly, include leadership of jihadist groups that were part of the wartime landscape in Syria. But today he governs a state facing economic collapse, infrastructure ruin and a population that needs jobs and basic services. His incentives are simple and powerful: ensure the survival of his regime, invite foreign investment, and secure relief from isolation and sanctions. Those goals point toward the U.S. and its partners, including Israel.
The Trump administration has made it clear that it wants to see new Syrian cooperation with Israel, with the suggestion that progress with Israel will become a gateway to international investment, and to a degree of political acceptance that Syria has lacked for years. Al-Sharaa’s willingness to engage is therefore not a mystery.
Israel’s motivations are also straightforward. After the Gaza war, Israel is facing a severe reputational problem. It is widely viewed abroad as reckless and excessively militarized. The government is under pressure over not only the conduct of the war but also the perception that it has no political strategy and relies almost exclusively on force. A diplomatic track with Syria allows Israel to present a very different picture: that of a country capable of negotiations with ideologically opposed neighbors, de-escalation, and regional cooperation.
There are significant security incentives, too.
Israel wants to limit Iran and Hezbollah’s influence in Syria. It wants a predictable northern border. It wants assurances regarding the Druze population in southern Syria — brethren to the Israeli Druze who are extremely loyal to the state, and who were outraged after a massacre of Syrian Druze followed the installation of al-Sharaa’s regime. It wants to ensure that no armed Syrian groups will tread near the Golan. A coordinated mechanism supervised by the U.S. offers a strong diplomatic way to address these issues.
The U.S. will benefit as well. The Trump team is eager to show that it can deliver lasting diplomatic achievements in the Middle East after the success of the Abraham Accords in Trump’s first term. A meaningful shift in Israel–Syria relations would be a very welcome addition, especially as the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in the Gaza war faces an uncertain future.
The main questions now are practical. Can the “joint fusion mechanism” function under pressure? What will happen when there is, almost inevitably, an incident — a drone downed, a militia clash, a cross-border strike? Will the new system effectively lower the temperature, or will it collapse at the first crisis?
Will Iran — facing its own profound internal political crisis — accept a Syria that coordinates with Israel under U.S. supervision, or will it work to undermine al-Sharaa? How will Hezbollah react if Damascus appears to move away from the axis of “resistance” and toward a security understanding with Israel?
How would an Israel-Syria deal impact Lebanon’s moribund efforts to dismantle Hezbollah’s military capacity? Al-Sharaa has already helped significantly by ending the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran through his territory. Might he also actively help with the disarming of the group?
No one should expect a full peace treaty soon. The question of possession of the Golan Heights probably remains a deal-breaker. Public opinion in Syria has been shaped by decades of official hostility to Israel, and Israeli politics is fragmented and volatile.
But diplomatic breakthroughs can confound expectations. They usually begin with mechanisms like this one, involving limited cooperation, routine contact and crisis management.
If this effort helps move the border from a zone of permanent tension to one of managed stability, that alone would be a major shift. It would also send a signal beyond the region: U.S. engagement still matters, and American pressure and incentives can still change behavior.
The post A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s Netanyahu Hopes to ‘Taper’ Israel Off US Military Aid in Next Decade
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published on Friday that he hopes to “taper off” Israeli dependence on US military aid in the next decade.
Netanyahu has said Israel should not be reliant on foreign military aid but has stopped short of declaring a firm timeline for when Israel would be fully independent from Washington.
“I want to taper off the military within the next 10 years,” Netanyahu told The Economist. Asked if that meant a tapering “down to zero,” he said: “Yes.”
Netanyahu said he told President Donald Trump during a recent visit that Israel “very deeply” appreciates “the military aid that America has given us over the years, but here too we’ve come of age and we’ve developed incredible capacities.”
In December, Netanyahu said Israel would spend 350 billion shekels ($110 billion) on developing an independent arms industry to reduce dependency on other countries.
In 2016, the US and Israeli governments signed a memorandum of understanding for the 10 years through September 2028 that provides $38 billion in military aid, $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment and $5 billion for missile defense systems.
Israeli defense exports rose 13 percent last year, with major contracts signed for Israeli defense technology including its advanced multi-layered aerial defense systems.
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Israel supporter and close ally of Trump, said on X that “we need not wait ten years” to begin scaling back military aid to Israel.
“The billions in taxpayer dollars that would be saved by expediting the termination of military aid to Israel will and should be plowed back into the US military,” Graham said. “I will be presenting a proposal to Israel and the Trump administration to dramatically expedite the timetable.”
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In Rare Messages from Iran, Protesters ask West for Help, Speak of ‘Very High’ Death Toll
Protests in Tehran. Photo: Iran Photo from social media used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law, via i24 News
i24 News – Speaking to Western media from beyond the nationwide internet blackout imposed by the Islamic regime, Iranian protesters said they needed support amid a brutal crackdown.
“We’re standing up for a revolution, but we need help. Snipers have been stationed behind the Tajrish Arg area [a neighborhood in Tehran],” said a protester in Tehran speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. He added that “We saw hundreds of bodies.”
Another activist in Tehran spoke of witnessing security forces firing live ammunition at protesters resulting in a “very high” number killed.
On Friday, TIME magazine cited a Tehran doctor speaking on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital recorded at least 217 killed protesters, “most by live ammunition.”
Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Setare Ghorbani, a French-Iranian national living in the suburbs of Paris, said that she became ill from worry for her friends inside Iran. She read out one of her friends’ last messages before losing contact: “I saw two government agents and they grabbed people, they fought so much, and I don’t know if they died or not.”