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Park East Synagogue is still searching for its next leader as another assistant rabbi exits
(New York Jewish Week) — The ongoing search for a successor to Park East Synagogue’s 92-year-old rabbi has hit a fresh hurdle, as the rabbinic search committee has been disbanded and another of the congregation’s rabbis has left his job.
For more than a year, the prominent Orthodox congregation on Manhattan’s East Side has sought someone to succeed Rabbi Arthur Schneier, a Holocaust survivor who has led the synagogue for six decades. But none of the prospective candidates has yet panned out, while at the same time multiple assistant rabbis have exited the synagogue.
The synagogue suggested in a statement that another of its assistant rabbis could be the heir apparent. But Park East members worry that the turmoil is endangering the future of their storied synagogue, which has hosted a pope and a string of other dignitaries as Schneier has shaped the synagogue into a stage for his human rights activism.
In February, Schneier told the New York Jewish Week, “When it comes to the selection of a rabbi, it is entirely up to the membership.” But multiple synagogue members said the rabbinic search committee disbanded after a top British rabbi withdrew from consideration in February and Schneier is now running the search himself.
“Members feel disenfranchised,” said one Park East member who is familiar with the synagogue’s management and, like others in the community, asked to remain anonymous for fear of ruining their relationships in the congregation.
“It is very difficult,” the member said. “We’ve had Rabbi Schneier here for a very long time and many people do love him very much, and it’s hard for them to imagine someone else taking that place.”
Some are sympathetic to Schneier’s position. Reuven Kahane, a longtime member at Park East who often delivers sermons at the synagogue, told the New York Jewish Week that “Rabbi Schneier has flaws and makes mistakes — like everyone else.”
The Star of David stands atop the Park East Synagogue, March 3, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
“But who has done so much for so many?” Kahane asked. “The rabbi literally watched Kristallnacht, then turned that tragedy into saving Jewish lives for 70 years.”
The uncertainty began in late 2021, when the synagogue abruptly fired Schneier’s popular assistant rabbi, Benjamin Goldschmidt, whom Schneier’s allies accused of trying to stage a coup. Four months later, the synagogue announced a search for a “worthy successor” to Schneier. Goldschmidt has since founded his own popular congregation, called the Altneu, in the same neighborhood.
In February, Park East appeared close to hiring Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, who leads a large synagogue in London. But a question-and-answer period at the synagogue following a lecture by Schochet devolved into argument when a member publicly protested the rabbi’s views about same-sex marriage. Schochet eventually withdrew from the rabbinic search.
Now, Rabbi Elchanan Poupko — who has taught at the synagogue’s affiliated day school since 2015, and who has served as the synagogue’s interim assistant rabbi since last year — confirmed that he is leaving the synagogue. Members said Poupko was well liked and was once floated as a prospective successor to Schneier. When he assumed the assistant rabbi role, he posted on LinkedIn, “May it be the will [of Hashem] that … the Divine Presence, rest in our work.”
Both Poupko and the synagogue attributed his departure to his physician wife’s work as a professor of neurology at the University of Connecticut. Poupko said “the schlep is too much” between the two workplaces.
“We wish Rabbi Poupko, his wife Rachel, and their daughters the best in their new home in Connecticut,” the synagogue said in a statement. “Their contributions to our community have been greatly appreciated and they will be missed.”
The synagogue’s statement added that it has asked another assistant rabbi, David Flatto, to serve as “acting Associate Rabbi.” Flatto previously served as the rabbi of another prominent Upper East Side Orthodox synagogue, Kehilath Jeshurun, and is a professor of law and Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
His biography on the Park East website says he is at the synagogue “until he resumes his academic responsibilities at Hebrew University in the fall,” but members told the New York Jewish Week that they understand Schneier wants to keep Flatto on as his successor.
“He is well known and respected by the Park East community having served as our Assistant Rabbi in 2022,” the synagogue’s statement said. “He exhibited warmth and caring in his outreach and pastoral duties during Shabbat, High Holiday services, and during life cycle events.”
Neither Flatto nor Schneier responded to requests for comment.
Two members of the disbanded committee declined to comment, and the synagogue’s statement did not address an inquiry about the committee’s status, saying, “Our search for a full-time candidate is ongoing. We will continue to engage our membership in this process.”
The member who is familiar with Park East management said the search committee “chose to disband themselves” after Schochet dropped out. The member added that the committee members, “frankly, did not feel that they had any more interest in putting more effort based on the fact that the last person didn’t go so well.”
Now, members say, Schneier and a close circle of confidantes are spearheading the search.
“He’s holding on to the last vestiges of power, like an older relative who just doesn’t know when to hang it up,” said another member who is active at the synagogue and who also asked not to be named. “He’s a good man, but this is just pathetic.”
That member and others said there had been a spat between Poupko and Flatto surrounding Shemini Atzeret, the Jewish holiday immediately following Sukkot last fall. Flatto allegedly had “a temper tantrum” because Poupko was asked to participate, the member said, and ultimately refused to lead services. Other members confirmed that account.
“He literally just didn’t show up,” the active member said. “I was ticked because we’re paying him. He acted immature, so he left a very bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.”
Some members say that while they’re impressed with Flatto in many ways, they still place him in the same category where a growing list of rabbis have found themselves during the past year and a half: respected and appreciated but, ultimately, not exactly right for Park East Synagogue.
“He’s a fantastic person, a wonderful intellectual, a great professor,” the member familiar with the synagogue management said about Flatto. “A senior rabbi requires a lot of delicate interactions that I don’t think he is really up to.”
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The post Park East Synagogue is still searching for its next leader as another assistant rabbi exits appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Jewish women who kept Confederate graves from disappearing
In June 1866, just over a year after the Civil War ended, young Jewish men in Richmond, Virginia, removed their coats and set to work among the graves of their fallen comrades. Some were “frail of limb,” a newspaper noted. They wheeled gravel and turf, filled the graves, and tamped the earth down “in a very substantial manner.” It was the last sad tribute they could offer.
The work that day was organized by Jewish women in the city. Their aim was permanence: to enclose the soldiers’ graves, to mark them, and to ensure they would not disappear “before the relentless finger of time.”
The Hebrew Cemetery in Richmond was established in 1816, decades before the Civil War reshaped the nation and long before the city became the capital of the Confederacy. It was the second burial ground for the Beth Shalome Congregation, Virginia’s first synagogue. Tucked within its grounds is the Soldiers’ Section, where 30 Jewish Confederate soldiers are buried, in what is believed to be one of only two Jewish military cemeteries in the world outside Israel.
They came from across the South, including Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and beyond. A bronze plaque at the entrance reads: “To the glory of God and in memory of the Hebrew Confederate soldiers resting in this hallowed spot.”
What matters here is not only who is buried — but who remembered them, and how.
The work the war left behind
In 1866, just a year after the war’s end, Jewish women in Richmond organized the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association. That same year, the group issued an appeal “to the Israelites of the South” for aid to enable the society to care for the graves of Jewish Confederate soldiers from all over the South who lie buried in the cemeteries of Richmond.
It was a duty, an act of chesed shel emet, Hebrew for the truest form of kindness, performed for those who could not repay it.
Newspaper accounts from the period are striking for their clarity and urgency. These women understood that the work of memory is laborious — physical, ongoing, and vulnerable to neglect. Graves, they warned, could vanish unless someone acted.
So they took responsibility.
By the late 1860s and 1870s, the Association’s work had grown to include an annual memorial service. Reports describe flowers laid carefully on each grave, marble slabs placed at the head of each burial, names and regiments inscribed so those resting there would not slip into anonymity.
An 1868 account observed that “each grave has been marked in a manner that ensures that the names of the still tenants of this beautiful spot will be preserved from oblivion; and handed down to be further cherished by the generations yet to come.”
That language echoes a Jewish concept. Zachor. Remember.
Memory, they understood, does not preserve itself.
Importantly, these memorial services were not closed affairs. One report from 1868 noted that the crowd gathered in the cemetery “was not confined to any one denomination.” Jewish lives were honored in the public view, but still held apart from Richmond’s larger Confederate cemeteries, Hollywood and Oakwood, which were not consecrated for Jewish burial and could not accommodate Jewish ritual requirements, including separate sacred ground.
Tending the dead
The care itself remained constant, but the language surrounding it did not.
What is striking in early accounts of the Soldiers’ Section of the Hebrew Cemetery is not the absence of politics, but how its weight changes over time.
In the earliest years, memory and the war were still closely bound. The 1866 appeal issued by the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association spoke openly of a “glorious cause” and framed the soldiers’ deaths within the language of Confederate sacrifice. Like other women’s memorial groups in the postwar South, these Jewish women used care for the dead to assert dignity and a claim to sacrifice in a defeated society.
Yet even then, the work itself was grounded in restraint. The focus was on names, tending, and preservation — on preventing the graves from vanishing. The labor was physical, repetitive, and unglamorous. Whatever meanings surrounded it, the work remained the same.
As decades passed, the emphasis shifted. By the 1930s, memorial services featured a cadet, Walter McDonald of the Catholic Benedictine College, sounding taps and the ceremonial laying of wreaths. Confederate organizations were invited to attend. In 1940 and 1941, the public was welcomed to observe the 74th and 75th annual memorials. After 1941, the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association continued to participate alongside other organizations in Memorial Day observances, but it appears that by 1947 the local observance of “Hebrew Memorial Day” or “Jewish Confederate Memorial Day” faded as a distinct commemoration.
Across generations, the observance persisted, a refusal to abandon the dead to neglect. Memory grew larger than any one explanation. The women’s work became less about what the war had meant, and more about what the living still owed to their dead.
A refusal to forget
This is a complex story that shows how history so often complicates memory. It sits at the intersection of some of America’s most divisive episodes and a small minority faith community declaring its presence and its sacrifices over decades.
When the Civil War ended, Jews needed to be buried. What followed was a choice.
The Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association chose to take responsibility. To remember “many a loved brother, son, and husband.” To insist that whatever judgment history would render, oblivion was not acceptable for “Israelitish soldiers of the Confederate army.”
Today, the Soldiers’ Section in Richmond’s Hebrew Cemetery remains. Names are still remembered. The work begun in 1866 was not temporary.
The post The Jewish women who kept Confederate graves from disappearing appeared first on The Forward.
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Spanish PM Sanchez Says US Invasion of Greenland ‘Would Make Putin Happiest Man on Earth’
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomes US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, Aug. 6, 2025. Photo: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via REUTERS
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said a US invasion of Greenland “would make Putin the happiest man on earth” in a newspaper interview published on Sunday.
Sanchez said any military action by the US against Denmark’s vast Arctic island would damage NATO and legitimize the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
“If we focus on Greenland, I have to say that a US invasion of that territory would make Vladimir Putin the happiest man in the world. Why? Because it would legitimize his attempted invasion of Ukraine,” he said in an interview in La Vanguardia newspaper.
“If the United States were to use force, it would be the death knell for NATO. Putin would be doubly happy.”
President Donald Trump on Saturday appeared to change tack over Greenland by vowing to implement a wave of increasing tariffs on European allies until the United States is allowed to buy Greenland.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said additional 10 percent import tariffs would take effect on February 1 on goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Great Britain — all already subject to tariffs imposed by Trump.
Those tariffs would increase to 25 percent on June 1 and would continue until a deal was reached for the US to purchase Greenland, Trump wrote.
Trump has repeatedly insisted he will settle for nothing less than ownership of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. Leaders of both Denmark and Greenland have insisted the island is not for sale and does not want to be part of the United States.
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Damascus and Kurdish Forces Agree to Immediate Ceasefire
Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa speaks during a Ministerial formation of the government of the Syrian Arab Republic, in Damascus, Syria, March 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
i24 News – Syrian state media reported on Sunday that the Syrian government and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have reached an immediate ceasefire after days of clashes in Kurdish-held areas of the northeast.
The agreement, announced electronically by Damascus, marks a major shift in Syria’s ongoing efforts to reassert control over its Kurdish-majority regions.
According to the Syrian presidency, the deal, signed by President Ahmed al-Sharaa and SDF commander Mazloum Abdi, calls for a full halt to combat operations on all fronts, the withdrawal of SDF-affiliated forces to the east of the Euphrates, and the integration of SDF fighters into Syria’s defense and interior ministries on an individual basis.
The agreement also stipulates that the Syrian government will assume military and administrative control over Deir al-Zor and Raqqa, take over all oil and gas fields, and assume responsibility for prisons and camps holding ISIS members and their families. The SDF has committed to evacuating all non-Syrian PKK-affiliated personnel from the country.
“All lingering files with the SDF will be resolved,” Sharaa said, adding that he is scheduled to meet Abdi on Monday to continue discussions. The ceasefire is intended to open safe corridors for civilians to return to their areas and allow state institutions to resume their duties.
US Special Envoy Tom Barrack praised the agreement, describing it as a “pivotal inflection point” that brings former adversaries together and advances Syria toward national unity. Barrack noted that the deal facilitates the continued fight against ISIS while integrating Kurdish forces into the broader Syrian state.
The ceasefire comes after days of heavy fighting in northeastern Syria, highlighting both the fragility and potential of Damascus’ reconciliation efforts with Kurdish forces.