Uncategorized
Prominent German rabbi resigns from leadership roles as report confirms allegations against him
BERLIN (JTA) – In a landmark step, investigators commissioned by Germany’s main Jewish organization have concluded that abuse of power and sexual harassment did occur at Germany’s liberal rabbinical seminary — and some of it, they say, may have crossed the line into illegality.
The 44-page “executive summary” of an investigation initiated by the Central Council of Jews in Germany is the latest and most damning report about the leadership of Rabbi Walter Homolka since accusations against him broke into public view last May.
Issued Wednesday after tense public conflict between the council and Homolka’s attorneys, the report concludes that structural changes are required to set Germany’s liberal rabbinical seminary, known as Abraham Geiger College, and other related Jewish institutions on the correct footing.
“A significant cause for the emergence of the problems identified by the investigators at the institutions under investigation is the personal misconduct of Rabbi Prof. Dr. Homolka in his function as a leader or person with great influence, which the investigators are convinced of,” the investigators wrote in their report.
Homolka announced Monday that he would withdraw from all functions in the seminary that he and a German-born American rabbi named Walter Jacob, founded in 1999. He also dropped out of the running on Tuesday for another term as chair of the Union of Progressive Jews in Germany.
A more comprehensive report including details about incidents in which investigators concluded that Homolka and his husband engaged in misconduct is due out in January, according to the Cologne-based law firm Gercke Wollschläger.
The preliminary report was welcomed in a joint statement by the Central Council, the German Interior Ministry and the Brandenburg State Ministry of Science, Research and Culture, which said they would “continue to fund the Abraham Geiger College to the same extent as before until the structural new beginning has been completed.”
It was also greeted with relief by the rabbinical student whose complaints kicked off the scandal.
“I think the report and the subsequent documents are a blessed development,” Itamar Cohen told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It seems to confirm many suspicions which I and others share. It does affirm that I did the right thing and [this] could be the beginning of a new chapter of liberal Judaism in Germany.”
The scandal that erupted publicly in May began after Cohen sought help from Jonathan Schorsch, a professor at the School of Jewish Theology, in dealing with unsolicited pornographic material allegedly received from Homolka’s husband, who was also an employee at the seminary. (Abraham Geiger College is part of the School of Jewish Theology, which itself is under the auspices of the University of Potsdam.)
A German newspaper’s report about the allegations and an apparent effort to obscure them opened the floodgates for criticism of Homolka from past and current students, employees and colleagues. Homolka took a leave of absence from the numerous leadership roles he held with liberal Jewish religious and educational institutions that he had helped found since the late 1990s.
The scandal has shaken the foundations of modern liberal Judaism in Germany, and the new report suggests that those foundations were weak because they rested largely on one individual.
Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of German Jews, said the report made it clear that Homolka could not continue in his previous roles.
Homolka has rejected the allegations against him throughout, and his attorneys told German news media Wednesday that they believed the entire investigation was politically motivated. They accused Schuster of wanting to see Homolka exit Germany’s liberal Jewish leadership and said the Central Council had failed to consider fully the statement Homolka had given to investigators.
Rabbi Walter Homolka. at left, with other leaders of Germany Jewry including Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, at far right, at an event in October 2019. (Wolfgang Kumm/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The report is the first to emerge from a third-party investigation into the allegations against Homolka. A separate investigation by the University of Potsdam, released in late October, found that some of the accusations regarding abuse of power to be justified, but did not find any criminally actionable behavior and thus confirmed Homolka’s ongoing employment there as professor. It did not investigate the sexual harassment accusations, as Homolka’s husband had left his job by then.
The new report did scrutinize those allegations. The investigators said they found 13 specific incidents involving allegations against Homolka’s husband. German libel law bars the publication of his name. Using what they called a “traffic light system,” the investigators classified nine of these incidents as “red” cases, in which 25 instances of misconduct could be identified. Two of these cases involved the “initial suspicion of a criminal offense,” they added.
Regarding allegations of abuse of power against Homolka himself, they found — after interviewing 73 individuals — a total of 45 concrete incidents, 14 of which they classified as “red,” involving a total of 23 instances of misconduct. A detailed account of those cases, including responses that Homolka delivered earlier this week, will be included in the final report in January, they said.
More broadly, they said, their interviews had illuminated a culture of misconduct in which unchecked, unlawful or arbitrary decisions could be made largely because of a consolidation of power under Homolka. He presided over an institution ruled by a “culture of fear,” the investigators found, leaving employees and students alike less likely to express criticism or concerns because of the possibility of reprisals.
The investigators said structural changes were needed if there was any hope of shifting the culture. “As long as institutions are in private hands or even in the hands of an individual, or at any rate within the essential sphere of influence of the person who, in the opinion of the investigators, practices and exemplifies misconduct himself, it is hardly conceivable that the causes of the deficits identified can be remedied,” their report says.
Cohen told JTA he wants to see “real change in the leadership” of all liberal Jewish institutions in Germany, and “an external compliance system set up.”
He said, “I hope to see the institutions Homolka founded take a life of their own, no strings attached.”
Anticipating the report, the Abraham Geiger College had announced its own restructuring plans on Monday, a day after ordaining four new rabbis and two cantors at a ceremony in Berlin.
In a statement, interim director Gabriele Thöne said a new foundation would become the provider of rabbinical training in Potsdam.
Gabriella Thoene, interim director of Abraham Geiger College, in Berlin’s Rykestrasse Synagogue on the occasion of an ordination ceremony, Dec. 1, 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
Further, Thöne said the “door is open to Zacharias Frankel College” — the Conservative movement seminary also under the umbrella of the School of Jewish Theology at the University of Potsdam — “to join the new foundation on an equal basis while at the same time maintaining its independence.”
But in a scathing response issued Wednesday, the Conservative seminary said the Geiger College interim administration had not consulted them about the restructuring.
“A partnership between equal parties requires joint preparation, mutual trust, transparency and consensus. All this has been lacking so far, and continues to be lacking,” the statement said.
Signed by Rabbi Bradley Artson, dean of Zacharias Frankel College and the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, the Conservative seminary in Los Angeles among others, the statement also said the preliminary report released Wednesday “confirmed the asymmetrical constellations of power in the two Potsdam rabbinical training colleges.”
Zacharias Frankel College “was in a state of dependency on the will of one person from the time it was founded in 2013. Our institution was deliberately pushed into invisibility and excluded from communication with funders in Germany,” the statement read in part.
“From the outset, the project of a Masorti rabbinical training in Potsdam was merely a makeshift means of being able to found the School of Jewish Theology [also in 2013] and give it the appearance of representing several denominations, and thus of being pluralistically positioned. Instead, however, the accumulation of power led to a monopolization of non-Orthodox Judaism in one person” – namely, Homolka.
For their part, the government and Jewish funding organizations said in their statement Wednesday that they were “committed to ensuring that there will continue to be both liberal and conservative rabbinical training in Potsdam in the future,” but that the proposals developed so far at the Abraham Geiger College do not meet the requirement of being “a clear cut from the previous structure and a comprehensive new beginning.”
The release of the Central Council-commissioned report was preceded by a volley of statements by lawyers for both parties.
On Monday, the council’s attorneys announced that their preliminary report would come out in two days. On Tuesday, Homolka’s attorneys issued a statement criticizing the impending “sudden” release of the report’s summary, suggesting it reeked of “prejudgment.”
The law firm representing Homolka — Behm Becker Geßner — noted that its client had received “a list of questions with serious accusations” from the council’s attorneys, and that he had responded in writing last Sunday. “Should the result not take into account the meaningful statement of our client, there would be a massive violation of personality rights,” warned the lawyers, who have successfully battled some critical press coverage of Homolka.
The Central Council criticized what it called Homolka’s delay tactics, saying its attorneys had asked Homolka in early September if he would respond to questions but had not gotten any response to questions sent Oct. 19 until late Sunday night, well after multiple previous deadlines. Still, the council confirmed, its investigators would take Homolka’s responses into account.
“This tactic is the main reason why the law firm will not be able to complete the final and detailed report of the investigation by the end of the year,” the Central Council said. “The courage of the numerous victims must not be sacrificed to Homolka’s delay tactics.”
Meanwhile, the Union of Progressive Jews in Germany is to meet next week in Berlin, after a three-month postponement. Board elections will be held for the position of chair, previously held by Homolka.
On Nov. 26, that group published a report from an investigation that it had commissioned, which concluded that there was no proof of abuse of power at Abraham Geiger College.
German rabbis who are part of the General Rabbinical Conference, Germany’s liberal rabbinical association, file into Berlin’s Rykestrasse Synagogue for an ordination ceremony, Dec. 1, 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
On Wednesday, a critic within the body, the State Association of Jewish Communities of Lower Saxony, said the Central Council’s commissioned report “supports us in our demand for the resignation of Walter Homolka from all his offices within the Jewish community, which we already made in May.”
And there is dissent within the General Rabbinical Conference, Germany’s liberal rabbinical association, as well. About a dozen members issued a statement in November, breaking from the official, cautious tone, saying that “the abuse of power proven against Rabbi Prof. Dr. Homolka [in the university’s report of Oct. 26] is not compatible with the values of Jewish and general ethics.”
The association, known as ARK, issued a statement at the end of November stating that, despite differences of opinion in their ranks, they join the call for a structural and personal new beginning, as “a chance for the next phase of rabbinical training in Germany.”
—
The post Prominent German rabbi resigns from leadership roles as report confirms allegations against him appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Three years after Oct. 7, survey says Jewish engagement has reached an elevated ‘new normal’
(JTA) — Levels of engagement in Jewish life have risen overall, establishing a “new normal” three years after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, according to a survey released Thursday by the Jewish Federations of North America.
Thirty-eight percent of Jewish respondents surveyed by the federation umbrella group in May and June said they had increased their Jewish engagement in some way in the last three years, an increase of 7 percentage points over rates in 2025 yet down from the 43% rate in March 2024, in the months after the attacks. The survey had a margin of error of 1.8 percent.
JFNA researchers say the results demonstrate that this initial spike in engagement — which the organization dubbed “the Surge” — has had a lasting effect, prompting people to deepen their involvement in Jewish life even three years on.
“I think the fact that people are continuing to engage with community during a difficult time is a good thing, and it’s an opportunity for us to meet people’s needs in this moment,” Mimi Kravetz, JFNA’s chief impact and growth officer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ahead of the release of the findings Thursday morning.
The number of “Surgers,” she said, includes Jews who were already engaged but have found ways to become more engaged since the attacks.
Many in the Jewish community feared that Jewish engagement “would continue to decline as we got further out from the events of Oct. 7, and that likely people would return to something like their behavior prior to Oct. 7,” Kravetz said. “That is usually what happens after a major incident.”
JFNA surveyed more than 2,800 Jews by text message in May and June of this year. Follow-up questions were generated by AI, which Kravetz said allowed researchers to ask open-ended questions about respondents’ relationship to Jewish community and quickly sort the answers by category.
This approach unlocked new insights. A top motivator for Jewish engagement was “social or interpersonal” connections in informal settings, such as Shabbat dinners or personal invitations to Jewish events. And in what seems like an encouraging sign for congregational Jewish life, 65% of Jews who “Surged” were turning to synagogues — though Kravetz noted that not every shul’s membership has grown as a result.
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, whose adherents place a premium on interpersonal connections and often operate in environments lacking in other Jewish communal infrastructure, was the second-most-popular engagement option.
Jews who had increased their levels of engagement were also more likely to voice support for Israel, the findings said. Ninety-three percent of “Surging” Jews said they were “emotionally attached to Israel,” compared to 51% of Jews whose level of engagement did not change. Additionally, 75% of Jews who grew their engagement agreed that “in general, Israel makes me proud to be Jewish,” compared to 36% who did not “Surge.”
Overall, respondents’ most frequently cited barrier to participation in Jewish life was Israeli politics. Large numbers of Jews said they struggled to connect with Jewish community spaces because they felt misaligned on Israel in one direction or another — data that JFNA said it did not quantify because it came out of the open-ended section of the survey.
The most common complaint, Kravetz said, was that Jews were seeking spaces they thought of as “apolitical.”
Kravetz said that many of those Jews, instead of dropping out of Jewish life, indicated they eventually found communities that aligned better with their values.
“These aren’t people who are walking away,” Kravetz said. “These are people who are leaning into Jewish community and are experiencing this tension. And usually, what we see is people are interested in finding Jewish spaces that meet their needs.”
The challenge for Jewish leaders, Kravetz said, is “to make sure that we have and support that diversity of spaces for people, so that they can find the right space that meets their needs.”
But that diversity has limits, as many prominent Jewish leaders — including heads of JFNA — have also urged Jewish communal spaces to reaffirm a commitment to Zionism at a moment when more and more Jews feel divided on Israel. Some Jewish leaders have explicitly called to reject anti- and non-Zionist Jews.
Kravetz doesn’t see those values as contradictory or damaging to the “Surge.” She pointed to another recent JFNA survey, released earlier this year, querying Jews about their relationship to Zionism.
While that survey found that only a third of American Jews identify as Zionist, it also found that 88% of the same population agree with what has historically been a basic tenet of Zionism: that “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, Democratic state.”
“I think being supportive of the premise of Zionism, and in how we define Zionism, is very much aligned with engaging the majority of the Jewish community,” she said.
The post Three years after Oct. 7, survey says Jewish engagement has reached an elevated ‘new normal’ appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
On Oct. 7, Mamdani spoke in support of Palestinians. A father from Gaza did it better.
On Wednesday in New York City, on the third anniversary of Oct. 7, two people spoke up for Palestinians. One of them was New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The other person actually said something helpful.
In a statement from the mayor’s office, Mamdani expressed sorrow at the loss of over 1,100 Israeli lives and Hamas’ “horrific war crimes,” then pivoted to condemn Israel for its war against Hamas in Gaza, accusing Israel of ongoing genocide, war crimes, apartheid and occupation.
Then came the Hallmark-ian ending, “To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.”
It was four paragraphs of blame with a coda of pablum: no vision for a way forward and no idea of how to improve Palestinian lives, much less Israeli ones.
Vision and healing — that is, leadership — came not from the mayor, but from a Palestinian and an Israeli who spoke later that day at a forum uptown.
“It’s my choice to give the children the anger and the pain or to give them a chance” at a future, said Jaser AbuMoussa, a Gazan who suffered unfathomable loss during the recent conflict. “And I will choose the chance every day.”
“Our neighborhood, from Nir Oz to the sea, can be a paradise because of the human factor on both sides of the border, and not because we necessarily love each other,” said Jonathan Dekel-Chen, a member of the ravaged Kibbutz Nir Oz. “You don’t have to agree on everything to get there.”
AbuMoussa and Dekel-Chen appeared on stage together at the 92nd Street Y, speaking across chasms of grief. From the West Coast, I tuned into a livestream of the event, because if Israelis and Palestinians want a secure and just future, it starts not with pain-inducing pronouncements like Mamdani’s, but with painful conversations like this one.
On Oct. 15, 2023, an Israeli airstrike hit AbuMoussa’s home in Khan Younis in Gaza, killing his wife and two of his children, as well as a nephew, sister-in-law and a cousin. A second airstrike killed his mother, sister, uncle, aunt, a niece and a nephew. AbuMoussa, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, managed to evacuate with his two surviving children to the United Arab Emirates, where they underwent lifesaving surgeries.
“She was an architect,” he said of his wife, Heba. “She was a novelist. She was a poet, and above all, she was a wife and a mother.”
Hamas terrorists took Dekel-Chen’s son Sagui into Gaza, where he was held for 498 days before his release. Terrorists killed 47 out of 420 kibbutz members and took 76 people hostage, including the Bibas family.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad gunmen “rampaged for nine hours through the kibbutz, destroying everything in their path,” said Dekel-Chen, a historian at Hebrew University and visiting professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, which co-sponsored the event. He said he is only alive because he and his wife were on a work trip to the United States at the time.
So many arguments over Oct. 7 turn into comparative victimhood — Mamdani’s statement was an example of that, making sure to emphasize Palestinian loss.
But the Palestinian at the 92nd Street Y didn’t do that.
“To me, suffering is like an absolute value, and we are not here for a competition,” AbuMoussa said.
While on the same day in the same city, the mayor’s statement used the words “genocide,” “apartheid” and “war crimes,” the Gazan father who lost his wife and two of his four children used none of those words.
Both men made it clear that the pain and anger of Oct. 7 and the years that followed are ever-present, a fact of life. But so is the choice of how to channel that anger.
“I will not point it at people,” said AbuMoussa. “I will not point it at Jonathan because he is an Israeli. But I will point it at policies, at leaders, at systems that were invented to kill people.”
While he held Israel responsible for helping to create the catastrophe in Gaza — he pointed out that Israeli attacks have killed 1,400 Palestinians since the ceasefire — AbuMoussa — again, in contrast to Mamdani — excoriated Hamas. The group corrupted Gaza’s political, economic, social and above all religious life. It cast itself as the only legitimate interpretation of Islam, though AbuMoussa said Oct. 7 itself contravened Islamic law.
Hamas never treated protecting civilians as its job, AbuMoussa said, pointing out that Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar’s family went into the tunnels while ordinary Gazans were left out, unprepared.
The Westerners who took to the streets and college campuses in support of resistance hurt Palestinians more than helped them, AbuMoussa said, because they blur Palestinians together with Hamas and the Iranian axis.
These were the very people Mamdani seemed to be pandering to in his statement — who turn Gaza, in AbuMoussa’s words, “into a flag or a pin.”
Dekel-Chen said his harshest critics are often Diaspora Jews who fail to separate what’s good for Israel from the government of Israel.
Because they spent no time trading accusations and blame, both men had plenty of time to discuss their vision for a better future.
Gazans aren’t leaving, despite the Israeli far right’s fantasies, and Israelis aren’t leaving, despite the Islamists’ fantasies, Dekel-Chen said.
It’s the simplest truth, but it carries extra weight when an Israeli Jew who lives a mile from Gaza says it: there are roughly seven million Jews and seven million Arabs between the river and the sea, and no one is going anywhere.
AbuMoussa said he is open to a confederation between Israelis and Palestinians, two states or “whatever.” But Oct. 7 proved the folly of believing the status quo, or just managing the conflict, will bring stability.
The way forward for now, both men said, is to push leaders to carry out the 20-point plan President Donald Trump put forward to help Gaza recover. They agreed that Washington still has the most leverage.
If Gazans had some sort of hope, AbuMoussa said, “I don’t think they will choose Hamas ever.”
Dekel-Chen said the insistence that Hamas fully disarm before any rebuilding “hurts us all.”
“Nothing positive will happen on our side of the border,” Dekel-Chen said, until most Gazans have hope in a post-Hamas future.
That is ultimately why both men decided to speak together — because they recognize what continuing the hatred costs.
“It’s the only way that I know how to honor those that I grieve, and the loss of life on both sides,” Dekel-Chen said.
It was a message, and a conversation that I wish Mamdani had heard in person. Instead, he spent the evening in Union Square, where anti-Israel protesters booed him for appearing with a group called Israelis for Peace.
To his credit, he showed up. But the same constituency the mayor seemed to court that morning turned on him that night, for standing beside actual Israelis calling for peace.
AbuMoussa and Dekel-Chen could have told him: You can stoke division or you can build a future. Choose the future.
The post On Oct. 7, Mamdani spoke in support of Palestinians. A father from Gaza did it better. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel is the one thing both Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidates agree on
(JTA) — Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and GOP opponent Stacy Garrity faced off on Wednesday in a heated gubernatorial debate, clashing over most policy issues — with the notable exception of Israel.
“I want to recognize the anniversary of the Hamas attacks, where 1,200 innocent people were killed, including 49 Americans,” said Garrity, referring to the third anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
“I want to remember the lives that were stolen, the families that were changed forever, and the Americans that didn’t make it home,” she added.
While Garrity, Pennsylvania’s state treasurer, has the endorsement of President Donald Trump, Shapiro has a 25 percentage point lead in a poll released Wednesday. Both candidates won their primaries uncontested in May, and both have been outspoken against antisemitism.
Shapiro, who himself is Jewish, likewise recognized “the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre” at the debate. He recalled how “Hamas, a terrorist organization, broke into Israel and murdered 1,200 innocents, took over 250 hostage, including many Americans.”
“This is a moment where my heart stands with the people of Israel,” he said. “My heart stands with the Jewish community, who I know are grieving as a result of this.”
“This is a moment where we need to stand together against terrorism, against hate and against antisemitism,” the governor added.
Although the candidates shared similar perspectives on Israel during Wednesday’s debate, they clashed on numerous other topics, including the death penalty, voter identification, taxes and tariffs.
Asked by the debate moderator about the plunging support for Israel in the Democratic Party, Shapiro replied that he has “been very, very consistent” in both his “love of Israel” and his disagreements with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Shapiro then noted that Israelis will head to the polls in just a few weeks to choose their next leader. He expressed hope that they would not elect Netanyahu, whom he said “has led Israel down a very dangerous and isolated path.”
“I want America to have a strong relationship with Israel and with the Israeli government,” Shapiro added. “That’s not possible right now with the Netanyahu government in charge.”
Shapiro, one of the most prominent Jewish Democrats nationwide, was among the final candidates considered by Kamala Harris in her vice-presidential search in the 2024 election. He is also seen as a possible 2028 presidential hopeful.
But Shapiro has also faced the challenges posed by increasing antisemitism in America. During Harris’s search, for example, a website and social media feed labeled him “No Genocide Josh” over his support for Israel.
In April 2025, an arsonist set fire to Shapiro’s house just hours after his family had conducted a Passover seder. In 2018, while Shapiro was serving as Pennsylvania’s attorney general, a terrorist killed 11 people and injured six others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh..
Garrity, meanwhile, has more than tripled Pennsylvania’s investment in Israel bonds in her current role. She invested $20 million after the Oct. 7 attack and another $35 million in July 2025.
The post Israel is the one thing both Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidates agree on appeared first on The Forward.
