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‘Say yes to the dress’: Temple Emanu-El program gives NYC high schoolers a luxury prom dress experience
(New York Jewish Week) – After 30 minutes of perusing the racks of formal dresses and trying on half a dozen of them, Raelynn finally finds the one she’ll wear to the prom: a long, royal blue gown covered in sequins.
Her personal shopper, a Jewish mom who is helping Raelynn pick out coordinating shoes and accessories, announces to the room: “Raelynn, do you say yes to the prom dress?”
Raelynn, a high school senior at Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem, nods with a huge smile on her face. The room — which is not a dress shop or a department store, but the basement social hall at Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El — breaks out into cheers and a round of applause.
Raelynn, who declined to share her last name, is one of more than 350 high school girls from around New York City who will come to the Upper East Side Reform synagogue this week. Now in its eleventh year, Project Prom invites seniors from high schools serving low-income neighborhoods to pick out prom outfits for free.
In addition to serving as personal shoppers, volunteers decorate the social hall with festive streamers and banners, prepare a snack table and set up dress displays in the center of the room.
“This is one of many things we do. We work on food insecurity, we partner with many non-profit organizations, we do whatever we can to repair the world that we live in,” said Rabbi Amy Ehrlich of the work of the synagogue’s tikkun olam, or social action, committee. “But [Project Prom] is a particular joy, especially the women who have come to act as personal shoppers. They want these young women to feel transformed as they step into a gown, maybe for the first time.”
Raelynn was thrilled with her dress, especially as she didn’t think she’d find something she would like. “I’m very picky and dresses aren’t really my thing,” she told the New York Jewish Week while trying on a pair of sparkly silver heels. “I was surprised coming here, I won’t lie.”
Raelynn poses with her prom dress. (Julia Gergely)
The personal shoppers act as styling assistants for the hundreds of girls who will walk through the “boutique” to pick out their prom outfit, shoes and accessories. In addition to some 1,000 dresses to choose from — donated by brands such as BCBG, Steve Madden and Marc Fisher — there are nearly 2,000 pairs of heels in every color, and tables laden with jewelry and handbags.
“It’s my favorite thing to do in my life,” said volunteer Debbie Hailpern.
The girls don’t need to work with a shopper, but having access to one is “a big part of it,” said volunteer and shopper Dana Covey. “At first, the girls are sometimes shy or nervous. Some don’t know what they like or what will fit.” The shoppers and the students also make connections with someone outside of their community and demographic, which can be rare, she said.
“We bring about a better world when we work with people outside our community,” said Ehrlich. “We have to extend our hands to others and also take the hands that are extended to us.”
In between school arrivals, volunteers hustle to rerack dresses and clean up display tables. (Julia Gergely)
Throughout the day on Wednesday and Thursday, girls from 17 schools will arrive at Project Prom via school bus or subway. As Project Prom has grown in size, word of mouth has carried its impact across the city and a growing number of schools and nonprofits have reached out to be included.
Once inside, the students are given a brief orientation and assigned a personal shopper. The shoppers hustle around the room, discussing color, length, fit and cut, the volunteers treating their jobs with commitment you’d see from a Kleinfeld Bridal associate pulling wedding dress options on TLC’s “Say Yes to the Dress.”
Planning the event begins just after Thanksgiving, said Hailpern, who has been volunteering with Project Prom since 2017. “I love just seeing the girls come out in their dresses and helping them with the accessories,” she said as she readjusted the shoe display. “They’re just really super sweet. Some of them know exactly what they want and they have a strong sense of fashion, others don’t. It’s a very joyful thing.”
“You’re making a girl feel beautiful,” she added. “What could be better than that?”
Initially, Temple Emanu-El sourced the dresses through drives and donations from community members. Eventually the committee shifted to reaching out directly to manufacturers — most of whom are happy to donate several dozen dresses in all sizes. Accessories companies get in on the action, too: This year Dessy, a bridal company, donated 400 pairs of ballet flats.
Some 1,700 pairs of shoes were donated by manufacturers for Project Prom this year, according to a volunteer. (Julia Gergely)
Wendy Bienstock, a science teacher at Young Women’s Leadership School, has been bringing her seniors to Project Prom for nearly a decade. “My favorite part is that I know how much fun it is,” she said. “They are very hesitant at first, but they always leave thanking me.”
Bienstock said her students look forward to Project Prom as much as a year in advance. “Some of them will wear these dresses to prom,” she said. “Some of them will wear them to graduation. And some of them will just take them and have a great dress in their closet for summer or college.”
As for Raelynn, she’s excited to wear her dress to her school’s prom on June 9. “They have so many sizes and options, there’s something for everyone here,” she said.
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The post ‘Say yes to the dress’: Temple Emanu-El program gives NYC high schoolers a luxury prom dress experience appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Netanyahu pushes back on Vance’s claims that US is Israel’s ‘only powerful ally’
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected Vice President JD Vance’s recent claims that the U.S. is Israel’s “only powerful ally” left in the world.
When asked on Fox News Sunday what his reaction was to Vance’s remarks, which came as Israeli ministers criticized the framework deal signed by the U.S. and Iran to end hostilities, Netanyahu replied, “I respect JD Vance. We have a very good relationship, but that doesn’t mean that I agree with everything that he says.”
“I have to point out this: Donald Trump is a great, the greatest friend we ever had in the White House, and I stand by that completely,” Netanyahu continued. “Secondly, we have some other friends, like a small country called India, you know, it has 1.4 billion people, and boy, do we have a tremendous support there.”
Netanyahu added that Israel also has the support of “many others,” but did not elaborate on which countries he was referring to.
“The relations are not quite as they appear, and we have, we have many, many friends, and I have to tell you, we also take care of our friends, especially the Christians in the Middle East,” Netanyahu said.
The prime minister also dismissed the claim that there was any rift between the United States and Israel regarding the deal with Iran, telling Fox that he and President Donald Trump were “set on the same goal.”
“President Trump is the leader of the United States. He does what’s good for America. I’m the leader of Israel, the one and only Jewish state. I do what’s good for Israel,” Netanyahu said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, we see eye to eye, but as any, in any family, in any close friendship, there are sometimes differences of opinion, and we discuss them openly.”
Netanyahu also said that he and Trump have “common objectives” regarding the U.S. deal with Iran.
“We want to see Iran give up its nuclear weapons program. We want to see the nuclear enriched material removed. We want to see the enrichment sites for nuclear material dismantled,” Netanyahu said, adding, “as long as I’m prime minister, Iran will not have nuclear weapons.”
On Saturday, Trump told Axios that Netanyahu had requested a meeting at the White House and said that the pair gets along “very good” and that the Israeli leader “knows who the boss is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netanyahu pushes back on Vance’s claims that US is Israel’s ‘only powerful ally’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Former Israeli hostages Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen wed in emotional ceremony
(JTA) — Two former Israeli hostages have wed, in the first marriage of hostages taken when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen were visiting Trufanov’s family on Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7 when they were attacked and abducted to Gaza. Trufanov’s father was murdered. Cohen was freed during a temporary ceasefire after 55 days, while Trufanov was held for nearly 500 days.
They married on Sunday in Israel, in a ceremony attended by multiple former hostages as well as Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who posted a picture of himself under the chuppah, or wedding canopy, with Trufanov and Cohen.
“We prayed for your return, we were moved to tears when you came back home, and this evening we were privileged to rejoice together with you and to bless you under the chuppah on your joyous day,” Herzog wrote.
While other freed hostages have celebrated births and engagements, the wedding is the first for a former hostage. It comes just days after Israel marked the 1,000th day since Oct. 7, and as the government’s handling of the hostage crisis continues to roil Israeli politics ahead of a looming election. Last week, Nitzan Alon, an Israeli army major general who was part of a small hostage negotiation team, said at a conference that more hostages could have been returned alive had the Israeli government made different decisions, strengthening a widespread belief within Israel.
Alon, too, was present at Trufanov and Cohen’s wedding.
After Trufanov stepped on a glass, the traditional signal for the execution of the marriage, Eyal Golan’s “Am Yisrael Chai,” an anthem of Jewish and Israeli solidarity during the Gaza war, began playing.
Rom Braslavski, another hostage who was briefly held with Trufanov in Gaza, posted pictures of himself with his friend at the wedding, as well as a video of him and the newly married couple being hoisted to dance.
“Today, we are together, not in Rafah, not stuffed in a trunk, but free and you are in a beautiful groom’s suit marrying Sapir. How much you talked about her, my brother,” he wrote on Instagram. “There is nothing happier for me than accompanying you on this day, and I hope both of you will bring into the world happy little children and that they won’t know evil. May they not know war, with God’s help.”
Another wedding featuring a former hostage is scheduled for next month. Eliya Cohen, who was held for 505 days, marked his engagement to Ziv Abud in a party that took place last week. He wore a jacket that read “Bring them Home” when other grooms wore it during the hostage crisis. With all hostages out of Gaza since January, Cohen altered it to read “Dad, thank you,” a mantra that he said sustained him during his captivity.
Cohen did not know that Abud had survived the attack on the Nova music festival until after his release. While he was held hostage, she drew attention to his plight by setting a romantic table with an unfilled place on the boardwalk in Tel Aviv.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Former Israeli hostages Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen wed in emotional ceremony appeared first on The Forward.
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Hundreds of Patriot Front members march in Washington on July 4, alarming Jewish groups
(JTA) — Hundreds of people affiliated with the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, in a July 4 show of force by the group founded by a veteran of a landmark 2017 far-right rally that featured an antisemitic chant.
The marchers in Washington wore masks and some carried Confederate flags, according to reports and video from the scene. At times, they chanted “Reclaim America!” — a rallying cry channeling the group’s nativist agenda.
While Patriot Front’s public activities mostly center on its anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ agenda, the Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly cited the group, founded in 2017, as the largest purveyor of antisemitic materials in the United States.
One of the group’s signature slogans, which members displayed on a banner in Washington in 2023, is “No Zionists in Government.”
The previous year, the group’s internal communications, obtained and leaked by an independent media collective, showed that some members used Nazi slogans and that one member was accepted on the basis of an application in which he declared that the “biggest threat to America is Jewish domination over the world.” Group leaders criticized how the chat logs had been obtained but did not challenge the veracity of their contents.
In a statement on Sunday, the ADL called Patriot Front “the most visible white supremacist group operating in the U.S. today” and noted that its previous public rallies had been much smaller.
“The size of the march is concerning,” the ADL said about the Saturday rally.
Patriot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau, was a leading participant in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which attendees chanted “Jews will not replace us” while carrying burning torches. The chant refers to an antisemitic conspiracy theory positing that Jews are engineering mass immigration in order to displace white people. Rousseau later testified that he heard the chant but thought attendees might have been saying “you will not replace us.”
The 2017 rally fueled criticism of President Donald Trump, who did not immediately comment on it and then placed blame on “both sides” while condemning the display of “hatred, bigotry and violence.” It also animated the presidential run of Joe Biden and spurred a successful lawsuit against the rally’s organizers by an advocacy group called Integrity First for America, whose leader, Amy Spitalnick, is now CEO of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs.
“Patriot Front is an offshoot of one of the white supremacist groups we (successfully) sued for orchestrating the Charlottesville violence,” Spitalnick said in a JCPA statement on Sunday. “They are emboldened because their extremism has been wholly normalized by the administration and others.”
Trump has not commented publicly on this weekend’s Patriot Front march, which took place during festivities to celebrate the United States’ 250th birthday. A top administration official did not directly answer when CNN’s Dana Bash asked him whether he would urge Trump to denounce the group.
“What they stand for is nothing that I could possibly agree with,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum told Bash, who is Jewish and has made antisemitism a focus of her recent coverage. “But one of the foundational principles of the United States, which makes democracy messy, is free speech.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hundreds of Patriot Front members march in Washington on July 4, alarming Jewish groups appeared first on The Forward.
