A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Poland on Wednesday returned 91 Jewish religious objects to Greece that were stolen by the Nazis from Greek synagogues and Jewish families during World War II.

The handover took place at a ceremony in Warsaw and marked the first time that Poland has repatriated cultural items illegally taken from their country of origin. The returned items included Torah scrolls, hanging ornaments, and fabrics.

The objects were stolen by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a Nazi organization that focused on looting Jewish cultural items throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. The items were discovered in Poland after the war, and in 1951, the Polish Ministry of Culture transferred the Greek-Jewish artifacts to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where they were stored until this week.

Iranian Kurdish fighters from the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) take part in a training session at a base on the outskirts of Erbil, Iraq, Feb. 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

The Trump administration, weighing whether the war with Iran could eventually require US troops on the ground, has begun reaching out to Kurdish opposition leaders in Iran with an offer of “extensive US aircover” as it looks for ways to destabilize the regime while the American-Israeli campaign intensifies, an idea one analyst told The Algemeiner would be very difficult to translate into action.

The outreach comes amid reports from Iran that it had preemptively attacked Kurdish forces in Iraqi Kurdistan, claiming the strikes caused heavy losses.

According to The Washington Post, which cited people familiar with the matter, US President Donald Trump held calls with Kurdish minority leaders in Iraq, including Masoud Barzani and Bafel Talabani, as well as anti-regime Iranian Kurdish groups about taking control of areas in western Iran.

A senior official from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan said Washington asked Iraqi Kurdish authorities to “open the way and not obstruct” and to “provid[e] logistical support” to Iranian Kurdish groups mobilizing in Iraq.

“He told us the Kurds must choose a side in this battle — either with America and Israel or with Iran,” the anonymous official told the paper.

Trump himself on Thursday encouraged Iranian Kurdish forces to go on the offensive but did not indicate whether the US has been coordinating with them.

“I think it’s wonderful that they want to do that; I’d be all for it,” the president told Reuters in an interview.

When asked if the US would provide air cover, Trump responded, “I can’t tell you that,” but noted that the Kurds’ objective would be “to win.”

“If they’re going to do that, that’s good,” he added.

Iran’s intelligence ministry said it had information that “separatist groups” intended to breach its western borders for an attack.

“We targeted the headquarters of Kurdish groups opposed to the revolution in Iraqi Kurdistan with three missiles,” the ministry said, according to a statement published by the state-run IRNA news agency.

Accounts diverged Wednesday night over whether an Iranian Kurdish ground invasion had begun. Fox News said Kurdish militias based in Iraq had crossed into Iran, but Tasnim, Iran’s semi-official outlet, reported via Reuters that its journalists in three border provinces found no evidence of an incursion. Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, who initially cited a US official as confirming the operation, later said reports were “conflicting,” adding that a senior official in one Iranian Kurdish faction also denied that any offensive was underway.

Peshawar Hawramani, a spokesperson for the government in the federated Kurdistan region of Iraq, known as the Kurdistan Region of Northern Iraq, has released a statement denying involvement in any incursions or armament. 

“[A]llegations claiming that we are part of a plan to arm and send Kurdish opposition parties into Iranian territory are completely unfounded,” Hawramani said, calling the reports “malicious.”

Reports that speak about a role of the Kurdistan Region and the allegations claiming that we are part of a plan to arm and send Kurdish opposition parties into Iranian territory are completely unfounded. We categorically deny them and affirm that they are being published…

— Peshawa Hawramani (@PHawraman) March 5, 2026

The London-based Asharq Al-Awsat outlet reported that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Ali Bagheri Kani, deputy secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, have pressed Iraqi officials for details about the phone calls between Trump, Barzani, and Talabani.

Iran also told Iraq’s federal authorities in Baghdad that it “must provide sufficient guarantees and take the necessary measures” to prevent Iraqi Kurdish groups from aiding Iranian opposition groups, the report said, citing unnamed sources. 

Iran’s Kurdish population — estimated at roughly 8 million to 12 million people — lives largely in mountainous western provinces along the Iraqi border, where several armed opposition factions have long operated and where some Iranian Kurdish groups maintain bases across the frontier in northern Iraq.

The country’s Kurdish minority has a long history of political activism based on decades of rebellion against central rule, a dynamic that predates the Islamic Republic. Kurdish forces briefly established their own state in northwestern Iran, the Republic of Mahabad in 1946, before it was crushed, and Kurdish groups have periodically clashed with successive governments in Tehran ever since.

A day earlier, CNN reported that the CIA has been working for months with Iranian Kurdish groups to foment an uprising.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters Wednesday: “None of our objectives are premised on the support or the arming of any particular force. So, what other entities may be doing, we’re aware of, but our objectives aren’t centered on that.”

Northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region has long served as a rear base for Iranian Kurdish dissident groups, but only so long as local leaders kept them from launching attacks into Iran. That delicate arrangement could unravel if fighters mobilize across the border as part of the wider war effort, said Seth Frantzman, a regional analyst who has studied Kurdish militant groups.

If Iranian Kurdish factions begin operating from Iraqi territory and the broader US-Israeli campaign fails to decisively weaken Tehran, Kurdish authorities in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah could find themselves exposed to retaliation from Iran, Frantzman said. Leaders in Iraqi Kurdistan “have tried for years to keep the balance” hosting Iranian Kurdish opposition groups while maintaining a working relationship with Tehran, he said.

Even if Washington were prepared to support Kurdish factions, turning them into an effective anti-regime force would take far longer than the current conflict timeline suggests.

Frantzman said any outside backing would take time to put in place, requiring logistics channels and training. “These types of programs, advising and assisting groups, or arming them, takes time,” he said, pointing to past US experiences from Afghanistan to Syria as examples. 

Frantzman said Kurdish factions would be looking for assurances that outside support would last, wary of being pulled into an uprising only to be left exposed if backing fades and Tehran reasserts control.

“They would be very wary and skeptical of taking chances today, having already lost lives and lost territory,” he told The Algemeiner.

He pointed to several examples, most notably the US-backed Kurdish campaign against the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria, when Washington trained and equipped Kurdish fighters to form the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces in 2015. The campaign, which took more than four years, required sustained support and came at a heavy cost, with about 11,000 fighters killed.

Even that effort, he noted, which targeted a terrorist group in a limited area rather than an established state, took over four years to complete. Any comparable attempt inside Iran — a country of roughly 90 million people with a far larger military and security apparatus — would be far more difficult.

Reading from a Torah scroll in accordance with Sephardi tradition. Photo: Sagie Maoz via Wikimedia Commons.

We live in a culture that is very good at avoiding ultimate questions. Death is kept offstage. Time is treated as infinite. The modern self is trained to strive, consume, showcase, curate, and distract, but not often to reckon. The deepest matters are postponed, not necessarily out of malice, but out of habit: there is always another headline, another obligation, another performance of busyness.

That is why Ben Sasse’s recent conversation with Peter Robinson at the Hoover Institution lands with unusual force. On its surface, it is an interview with a former senator and university president. In reality, it is something rarer in modern elite discourse: an unsparing confrontation with mortality.

Sasse has been diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer. The question hovering over the exchange is not legislative strategy or partisan maneuvering, but what remains when the usual distractions and ambitions are stripped of their power. He speaks candidly about regret, forgiveness, prayer, and what he calls “redeeming the time”: learning, as life narrows, to hold ambition lightly and to love more deliberately.

It is a moving reflection. But it is also, in a deeper sense, an ancient one.

Judaism has long insisted that the awareness of death is not a morbid fixation but a form of moral clarity. Kohelet – the book of Ecclesiastes – offers the sober verdict that modern life works so hard to avoid: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” Not because nothing matters, but because so much of what we chase is mist: acclaim, accumulation, the restless display of importance.

The rabbis sharpen the point further. “Repent one day before your death,” the Talmud teaches. The student, understandably, asks: But how can a person know the day of death? And the answer is the point: Precisely because no one knows, one must repent today.

In other words, the moral task is not postponed until the final crisis. The human condition is already one of finitude. The question is whether we live as if we remember it.

This is what the Jewish tradition calls cheshbon hanefesh — an accounting of the soul. Not an exercise in self-obsession, but in proportion. What matters? What endures? What have we mistaken for ultimate that is, in truth, only temporary?

Judaism’s most piercing liturgical moment, recited each year on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, makes the matter unavoidable: “Who shall live and who shall die … Who by water and who by fire…”

Unetaneh Tokef does not offer comfort through denial. It offers clarity through truth: life is fragile, time is borrowed, and our pretensions are thin.

What mortality does, what Sasse’s diagnosis forces into view, is the stripping away of the false absolutisms that so often govern modern life. Reputation becomes less urgent. The metrics of elite success begin to look strangely weightless. And what remains, if we are fortunate, is relationship: family, forgiveness, obligation, love, and the hope that one’s days have been oriented toward something beyond the self.

Sasse, in his own Christian idiom, is showcasing ideas that Judaism has long institutionalized: the urgency of finitude, the moral demand of time, the necessity of living now as if the horizon is real.

His reflections are poignant precisely because modern America is, in so many respects, a culture of evasion. We have constructed entire systems – technological, professional, political – designed to keep first things at bay. Attention is scattered. Status becomes performative. The self becomes a brand. Seriousness is treated as optional.

And nowhere is this evasion more concentrated than among the people who govern our institutions. Our ruling class speaks endlessly in the language of urgency – power, justice, crisis – while quietly building lives organized around careerism, self-protection, and distraction. We have created a secular priesthood of ambition that cannot speak honestly about death, judgment, or the limits of human control.

The rabbis would recognize the spiritual danger immediately. They were never sentimental about public striving. Honor, they warned, is intoxicating. Recognition is fleeting. The pursuit of status can become a kind of idolatry; not because achievement is evil, but because the modern temptation is to treat achievement as ultimate.

“It is not your duty to finish the work,” Pirkei Avot teaches, “but neither are you free to desist from it.” The line captures Judaism’s balance: responsibility without grandiosity, obligation without self-worship. The work matters, but the work is not God.

That balance is precisely what our age lacks. We live amid unprecedented technological abundance, yet also amid unprecedented distraction. The self is curated. Attention is monetized. Institutions are hollowed out not only by ideology, but by exhaustion and drift.

Nowhere is this more visible than in higher education itself. Our most credentialed institutions often train young people to speak endlessly about justice and power, while offering them remarkably little formation in humility, duty, or the permanent things. They produce graduates fluent in moral performance, yet increasingly incapable of moral seriousness.

Even politics, which once demanded sacrifice, is increasingly consumed as spectacle: another theater of resentment, branding, and noise.

And yet a republic cannot survive on noise. Democracies depend on citizens capable of restraint, gratitude, seriousness, and moral perspective. They require people who can locate politics within a larger horizon of obligation – family, faith, community, the inheritance of civilization itself. A nation that cannot distinguish the urgent from the ultimate will not remain healthy or free for long.

Sasse’s conversation is powerful not because it offers a novel insight, but because it forces an old truth back into view: time is not infinite, ambition is not redemption, and the ultimate questions cannot be deferred forever.

The High Holy Day liturgy does not ask whether we will die. It assumes it. It asks instead what we will do with the time we are given: “Who shall live and who shall die…”

Death is the one fact no algorithm can curate and no institution can evade. It strips away our distractions and reveals what is real. The question is not whether life is short. The question is whether we will go on pretending otherwise – until we no longer have the luxury.

“Teach us to number our days,” we regularly pray, “that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

And wisdom begins when we stop confusing busyness for meaning, ambition for redemption, and noise for life.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.