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The White House celebrates Hanukkah in the shadow of rising antisemitism
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Two mezuzahs at the vice president’s residence. A custom-built menorah for the White House. A Biden grandson in Hanukkah pajamas.
The Biden administration’s celebration of Hanukkah this year was suffused with grief over reports of burgeoning antisemitism but leavened with words, rites and symbols meant to assure American Jews that this was their permanent home.
Monday night’s Hanukkah party at the White House event included the unveiling of the first menorah to be added to the White House collection. Resident carpenters crafted the elegant slab of weathered wood from lumber left over from a 1950 renovation of the mansion.
As the White House explained in a backgrounder, “Once an item has been added to the White House collection, it is forever a permanent fixture of the White House archives and cannot be removed from the archives by a future administration or Residence Staff.”
“Other menorahs have been borrowed before -— borrowed — beautiful, significant and meaningful ones,” First Lady Jill Biden told the crowd of mostly Jewish guests in the White House’s Grand Foyer, sparkling with gold-themed Christmas decorations, before Monday’s menorah-lighting. “But the White House has never had its own menorah until now. It is now a cherished piece of this home, your home.”
The president picked up on the theme in his remarks after the candles were lit. “You know, to celebrate Hanukkah, previous administrations borrowed a menorah with a special significance of survival, hope, and joy,” he said. “This year, we thought it was important to celebrate Hanukkah with another message of significance: permanence. Permanence.”
It didn’t hurt either Biden’s messaging that just days earlier the cameras caught them crossing the White House grounds holding hands with their Jewish grandson. Beau, whose parents are Hunter Biden and Melissa Cohen, sported a puffy blue coat, a knapsack, and Hanukkah-themed blue pajama pants, emblazoned with white menorahs.
Jews as a permanent part of the American fabric featured the night before at another first: A public lighting of a menorah at the residence of Vice President Kamala Harris, presided over by her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff. Emhoff pointed out the house’s mezuzahs, the small cases affixed to the doorposts of Jewish homes.
“There’s two of them, affixed to our door frames. And as you can see the menorah in the window, all for the first time,” Emhoff said. He likened the moment to the first Hanukkah he and Harris celebrated as a couple, when she embraced his traditions.
“Flash forward to when I met this beautiful woman over here,” Emhoff said, after describing the American Hanukkahs he enjoyed as a child in New Jersey. ‘She bought me a menorah for our first Hanukkah together when we were first setting up our home in Los Angeles, because it was important for her to know that we had a menorah to illuminate this home that we were building together — this life that we were building together because she knows it’s important to me. It’s important to me as a Jew and all of us as part of our religion and our culture. And as she said, as the first Jewish person married to a president or a vice president, I understand the weight of that responsibility, the obligation that that brings.”
Emhoff was referring to his work convening a round table earlier this month to solicit strategies for countering antisemitism. At that event, he personalized the struggle, saying “I’m in pain right now, our community is in pain.”
The word “scourge” kept coming up at the events. “I’ve launched a new effort to develop a national strategy to counter the scourge of antisemitism and convene the first-of-its-kind White House summit on combating hate-fueled violence,” Biden said during his remarks, referring to the task force he launched a week after Emhoff’s event.
Monday’s candle lighters included Bronia Brandman, a Holocaust survivor who met with Biden on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January; Michèle Taylor, the ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council, who is a daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors; and Avi Heschel, whose grandfather, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, fled Nazi-occupied Europe and joined with Martin Luther King in a Black-Jewish alliance during the civil rights movement.
Saying the blessing was Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, the rabbi in Colleyville, Texas, who freed himself and his congregants from a hostage taker last January. “Antisemitism may be on the rise, and thank God that people are standing at our side,” he said. “We have had such overwhelming love and support, especially from our President and from Dr. Biden.”
On Sunday, the first night of Hanukkah, Attorney General Merrick Garland, who is Jewish, spoke at the lighting of the massive “National Menorah” placed on the Ellipse in front of the White House by Chabad-Lubavitch.
He described how his grandmother found refuge in the United States and how two of her siblings perished in the Holocaust. “The protection of the rule of law is the foundation of our system of government,” he said at the lighting. “As attorney general, I will never stop working to guarantee that protection to everyone in our country. All of us at the Department of Justice will never stop working to confront and combat violence and other unlawful acts, fueled by hate.”
The message of permanent refuge was a welcome one, but the degree to which it sank in varied.
Wiliam Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, contrasted Biden’s warm welcome with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s could shoulder to the rabbis who arrived at the White House in 1943 to appeal on behalf of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. “We’re standing here in the citadel of freedom and democracy, where the entire White House is focused on the Jewish people, on the Jewish story of survival,” Daroff said, “where the food is kosher. “
After Monday’s event, celebrants met for an after-party organized by the Jewish Democratic Council of America in the basement of the storied Hamilton hotel. They ate kosher-style sushi, slurped up cocktails (“The Gelty Pleasure”, a mix of Bailey’s, Kahlua, Demerara syrup and cold brew coffee was $14.99) and shared anxieties about America’s uncertain future, particularly in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s recent dalliance with open antisemites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.
“Despite what we saw in the White House tonight, antisemitic incidents are on the rise in this country and not just those hateful comments that we hear,” Rep. Kathy Manning, a Jewish Democrat from North Carolina told the partygoers, “but violent attacks in synagogues, in Jews on the street across the country and frankly, throughout Europe.”
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The post The White House celebrates Hanukkah in the shadow of rising antisemitism appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump: Saudi Expressed Interest in Joining Abraham Accords
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-US President Donald Trump, and United Arab Emirates (UAE) Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed display their copies of signed agreements as they participate in the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between Israel and some of its Middle East neighbors, in a strategic realignment of Middle Eastern countries against Iran, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, US, Sept. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Tom Brenner
i24 News – US President Donald Trump said on Friday that he expected an expansion of the Abraham Accords soon and hopes Saudi Arabia will join the pact that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and some Arab states.
“I hope to see Saudi Arabia go in, and I hope to see others go in. I think when Saudi Arabia goes in, everybody goes in,” Trump told the Fox Business Network in an interview.
The leader spoke days after overseeing the Gaza ceasefire deal that ended the two-year-long war between Israel and Palestinian jihadists, launched on October 7, 2023 with a slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis in a Hamas-led massacre.
Meanwhile Trump has threatened Hamas following the horrific images from the Gaza Strip, where Hamas executed people suspected as collaborators with Israel, saying, “If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them.”
Hours after the release of the final Israeli hostages under the US-brokered ceasefire, Hamas gunmen executed more than 30 Palestinians accused of treason and collaboration in what security sources and witnesses described as a brutal bid to reassert control over the war-torn Gaza Strip.
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Hamas Aims to Keep Grip on Gaza Security and Can’t Commit to Disarm, Senior Official Says
Hamas senior official Mohammed Nazzal speaks during an interview with Reuters, in Doha, Qatar, October 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
Hamas intends to maintain security control in Gaza during an interim period, a senior Hamas official told Reuters, adding he could not commit to the group disarming – positions that reflect the difficulties facing US plans to secure an end to the war.
Hamas politburo member Mohammed Nazzal also said the group was ready for a ceasefire of up to five years to rebuild devastated Gaza, with guarantees for what happens afterwards depending on Palestinians being given “horizons and hope” for statehood.
Speaking to Reuters in an interview from Doha, where Hamas politicians have long resided, Nazzal defended the group’s crackdown in Gaza, where it carried out public executions on Monday. There were always “exceptional measures” during war and those executed were criminals guilty of killing, he said.
PRESSURE TO DISARM
While Hamas has broadly expressed these views before, the timing of Nazzal’s comments demonstrates the major obstacles obstructing efforts to cement a full end to the war in Gaza, days after the first phase of the ceasefire was agreed.
They point to big gaps between Hamas’ positions and US President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza, ahead of negotiations expected to address Hamas’ weapons and how Gaza is governed.
Asked for comment on Nazzal’s remarks, the Israeli prime minister’s office said Israel was committed to the ceasefire agreement and continued to uphold and fulfil its side of the plan.
“Hamas is supposed to release all hostages in stage 1. It has not. Hamas knows where the bodies of our hostages are. Hamas are to be disarmed under this agreement. No ifs, no buts. They have not. Hamas need to adhere to the 20-point plan. They are running out of time,” it said in a statement to Reuters.
Trump’s September 29 plan called for Hamas to immediately return all hostages before committing to disarmament and ceding governance of Gaza to a technocratic committee overseen by an international transitional body.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supported the plan, saying it would dismantle Hamas’ military capabilities, end its political rule, and ensure that Gaza would never again pose a threat to Israel.
Hamas-led terrorists killed 1,200 people and abducted another 251 during the October 7 attacks on Israel that triggered the war.
Pummeled by Israel in the war, the Palestinian Islamist group is under intense pressure to disarm and surrender control of Gaza or risk a resumption of the conflict.
Asked if Hamas would give up its arms, Nazzal, speaking on Wednesday, said: “I can’t answer with a yes or no. Frankly, it depends on the nature of the project. The disarmament project you’re talking about, what does it mean? To whom will the weapons be handed over?”
He added that issues to be discussed in the next phase of negotiations, including weapons, concerned not only Hamas but other armed Palestinian groups, and would require Palestinians more broadly to reach a position.
Asked for its response to Nazzal’s remarks, the White House directed Reuters to comments by Trump on Thursday.
“We have a commitment from them and I assume they’re going to honor their commitment,” Trump said, noting that Hamas had returned more bodies but without elaborating on the issue of it disarming or its interim presence on the ground.
Nazzal also said the group had no interest in keeping the remaining bodies of deceased hostages seized in the October 7, 2023 attacks.
Hamas has handed over at least nine out of 28 bodies. It was encountering technical problems recovering more, he said, adding that international parties such as Turkey or the US would help search if needed.
A senior Turkish official said last week that Turkey would take part in a joint task force along with Israel, the US, Qatar and Egypt to locate the bodies.
Hamas agreed on October 4 to release the hostages and hand over governance to a technocratic committee, but said other matters needed to be addressed within a wider Palestinian framework. It released all living hostages on Monday.
Nazzal said the phase two negotiations would begin soon.
GOALS OF ELECTIONS, ‘HOPE’ FOR PALESTINIANS
On Tuesday, Trump said he had communicated to Hamas that it must disarm or it would be forced to. Trump has also suggested Hamas was given temporary approval for internal security operations in Gaza, and has endorsed Hamas killing members of gangs.
Noting Trump’s remarks, Nazzal said there was an understanding regarding Hamas’ presence on the ground, without specifying among whom, indicating it was necessary to protect aid trucks from thieves and armed gangs.
“This is a transitional phase. Civilly, there will be a technocratic administration as I said. On the ground, Hamas will be present,” he said. After the transitional phase, there should be elections, he said.
Nazzal said mediators had not discussed with the group an international stabilization force for Gaza, which was proposed in Trump’s ceasefire plan.
Hamas’ founding charter called for the destruction of Israel, although the group’s leaders have at times offered a long-term truce with Israel in return for a viable Palestinian state on all Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 war.
Israel regards this position as a ruse.
Nazzal said Hamas had suggested a long-term truce in meetings with US officials, and wanted a truce of at least three to five years to rebuild the Gaza Strip. “The goal isn’t to prepare for a future war.”
Beyond that period, guarantees for the future would require states to “provide horizons and hope for the Palestinian people,” he said.
“The Palestinian people want an independent Palestinian state,” he added.
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Gaza-Egypt Border Crossing Will Remain Closed, Netanyahu Says
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid and fuel line up at the crossing into the Gaza Strip at the Rafah border on the Egypt side, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Rafah, Egypt, October 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
The Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt will remain closed until further notice, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday, adding its reopening will depend on Hamas handing over bodies of deceased hostages.
Netanyahu’s statement came shortly after the Palestinian embassy in Egypt announced that the Rafah crossing, the main gateway for Gazans to leave and enter the enclave, would reopen on Monday for entry into Gaza.
Hamas said later on Saturday it will be handing over two more hostage bodies at 10 p.m. local time (1900 GMT), meaning 12 out of 28 bodies will have been handed over to Israel under a US-brokered ceasefire and hostage deal agreed between Israel and Hamas last week.
ISRAEL SAYS HAMAS TOO SLOW TO RETURN BODIES
The dispute over the return of bodies underlines the fragility of the ceasefire and still has the potential to upset the deal along with other major issues that are included in US president Donald Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war.
As part of the deal, Hamas released all 20 living Israeli hostages it had been holding for two years, in return for almost 2,000 Palestinian detainees and convicted prisoners jailed in Israel.
But Israel says that Hamas has been too slow to hand over bodies of deceased hostages it still holds. The terrorist group has so far returned 10 of 28 bodies and says that locating some of the bodies amid the vast destruction in Gaza will take time.
The deal requires Israel to return 360 bodies of Palestinian militants for the deceased Israeli hostages and so far it has handed over 15 bodies in return for each Israeli body it has received.
Rafah has largely been shut since May 2024. The ceasefire deal also includes the ramping up of aid into the enclave, where hundreds of thousands of people were determined in August to be affected by famine, according to the IPC global hunger monitor.
After cutting off all supplies for 11 weeks in March, Israel increased aid into Gaza in July, scaling it up further since the ceasefire.
Around 560 metric tons of food had entered Gaza per day on average since the US-brokered truce, but this was still well below the scale of need, according to the U.N. World Food Program.
Formidable obstacles to Trump’s plan to end the war still remain. Key questions of Hamas disarming and how Gaza will be governed, the make-up of an international “stabilization force” and moves towards the creation of a Palestinian state have yet to be resolved.