Upwards of 10,000 haredi Orthodox Jewish men protested on Sunday night outside the Israeli consulate in New York City against the conscription of Orthodox Jews in the Israeli military.

The protest, which was organized by the Central Rabbinical Congress, a consortium of Orthodox Jewish groups, comes amid one of Israel’s tensest political debates: whether haredi men should be subjected to the draft.

Last year, the Israeli Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Israel must draft haredi Orthodox Jews into its army, ending the longstanding exemption for yeshiva students from military service that has existed since the country’s founding.

Since then, haredi men have staged frequent street protests in Israel, including outside the Knesset in Jerusalem, and the debate reached a new flashpoint last month when over 100 haredi Orthodox men were arrested for draft-dodging while attempting to leave the country for an annual pilgrimage for Rosh Hashanah.

Now, the protest movement has spilled over to New York, home to the large haredi communities outside of Israel. At the rally Sunday night, rabbinic leaders from the anti-Zionist Satmar hasidic sect and Grand Rebbes spoke from cherry pickers above the protesters, who held signs reading “We would rather die as Jews than live as Zionist soldiers,” and “Stop terrorizing religious Jews,” according to footage of the event.

“Americans are unaware of Israel’s horrific treatment of Orthodox Jews. From night raids in Orthodox neighborhoods to checkpoints to arrests of Yeshiva students, Israel is persecuting the very religious people that it claims to protect,” said Rabbi Isaac Green, one of the New York protest’s organizers, in a statement. “Israel should not force Orthodox Jews to join an anti-religious army to fight wars against their religion.”

Ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstrate outside of the Israeli consulate in New York City. (Solomon Fox)

Rabbis Aaron and Zalman Teitelbaum, the two rival leaders of the Satmar sect, both urged their followers to join in the demonstration, marking one of the rare times they have organized over the past two years due to their policy of not protesting against Israel during times of war.

As more men arrived at the demonstration, the mass of protesters began spilling onto the street, leading to some clashes and shoving matches with police officers trying to control the crowd, according to amNewYork.

Currently, around 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men in Israel are believed to be eligible for service, and the IDF has called for 12,000 recruits to meet the needs posed by the war in Gaza.

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The post Thousands of haredi Orthodox Jews protest Israeli military draft in New York City appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

This piece first ran as part of The Countdown, our daily newsletter rounding up all the developments in the New York City mayor’s race. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. There are 15 days to the election.

Rabbis speak out

• Two leading New York rabbis are using their pulpits to condemn Zohran Mamdani as he holds onto a commanding lead in the last weeks of the race.

• Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, who heads the Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue on the Upper East Side, decried the frontrunner in a speech to his congregation on Shabbat. “I believe Zohran Mamdani poses a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community,” he said, citing Mamdani’s views of Israel and Zionism.

• Cosgrove also urged his congregants to convince their Jewish friends and family to vote against Mamdani. He said Jewish New Yorkers should “prioritize their Jewish selves” by voting based on their connection to Israel, rather than local issues such as affordability.

• “As Jews, ahavat Israel — love of Israel — does take precedence over other loves,” said Cosgrove.

• Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, who leads the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side, addressed Mamdani in his own video that was shared with his congregation days earlier.

• Hirsch said Mamdani’s “ideological commitments” against Israel served to “delegitimize the Jewish community and encourage and exacerbate hostility towards Judaism and Jews.” He told Mamdani, “I urge you to reconsider your long-held views of Israel’s right to exist.”

• Hirsch also said, “Most Jews are deeply offended by your ongoing accusations of Israeli genocide.” Four in 10 American Jews said they believed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, according to a Washington Post poll conducted in early September.

• A Fox News survey last week found that Jews were closely split between Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo, who is polling a distant second in the race.

• Other New York rabbis have been plagued by the question of whether to endorse in this election, since the IRS reversed a decades-long policy that barred endorsements from the pulpit. Hirsch previously told our reporter Grace Gilson that he was alarmed by Mamdani but would not make an endorsement, warning fellow clergy that “it diminishes us if we are perceived as being in a partisan camp.”

Sliwa called on to quit

• Curtis Sliwa faced calls to quit the race during a meeting at Fifth Avenue Synagogue on Sunday, where our reporter Joseph Strauss saw attendees pleading with the Republican nominee who is polling third. The day before, on Shabbat, he visited The Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side. Later in the day, he headed to Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, where Mamdani spoke last week.

• The Fifth Avenue Synagogue crowd was not unanimously anti-Sliwa, but they convened with the purpose of stopping Mamdani’s rise. One person accused Sliwa of being a “spoiler.”

• “We all love you, we want you to win,” said synagogue president Jacob Gold, who stood by Sliwa at the podium. “But you’re at 15%, and Cuomo’s at what percent? And Mamdani’s at what percent?” Gold said that he wanted Sliwa to “merge with Cuomo.”

• Cuomo himself urged Sliwa to drop out after the first general election debate on Thursday, during which he fielded barbs from both Sliwa and Mamdani.

• “There is no Curtis as a candidate. There’s Curtis as a spoiler,” Cuomo said to conservative Jewish radio host Sid Rosenberg on Friday. “If Curtis is not in the race, I win. And that’s a choice for Republicans. Do you vote for Curtis so you can say ‘I voted Republican’ and wind up electing Mamdani? Or do you vote for me?”

• Sliwa responded to his detractors, including Jewish billionaire Bill Ackman, in an interview with Jewish YouTuber Nate Friedman. He called Ackman a “jerk” who did not understand politics or live in New York City. To Cuomo, he said, “Get your own votes.”

Mamdani turns 34

• Mamdani celebrated his birthday on Saturday, taking the chance to address voters who express concerns about his age.

• “You’re worried about a 33-year-old becoming mayor of New York City,” he said in a video. “And I want you to know, I hear you. That’s why this weekend I’ll be making a change. I’m turning 34, and I’m committing that for every single day from here on out, I will grow older.”

• Mamdani asked supporters to mark his birthday by signing up for a canvassing shift. “The best gift is to beat Andrew Cuomo a second time,” he said.

Trump watch

• President Trump continues to muse about the race. But after saying that Mamdani “hates Jewish people” and reiterating his threats to cut federal funding from New York under a Mayor Mamdani last week, he suggested over the weekend that the election result wouldn’t make much difference to him.

• “Would I rather have a Democrat than a communist? Barely. They’re almost becoming the same thing,” Trump said on Fox News on Sunday morning. “I don’t know that I’m going to get involved.”

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The post Prominent NYC rabbi urges congregants to vote against Zohran Mamdani in Shabbat sermon appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

I’m a big walker. It’s how I stay sane, if one could call what I am, sane. I listen to books, podcasts and music. The lake I live on upstate has a road straight around it, so it is a perfect and beautiful four-mile walk. I walk around it once or twice every day.

Not long ago, I went walking in Central Park, which is down the block from my apartment in Manhattan. About a quarter of a mile of the way in, I saw out of the corner of my eye something interesting on the curb. Oddly, it looked like art.

When I went over to see what it was, it turned out to be a beautifully, albeit austerely, painted brick, with what I thought were three viewpoints of a prisoner in black and white. On the side was a piece of masking tape with a series of numbers, which made it seem like it was an installation, and this was the edition number. Maybe it was some new Banksy installation, I thought, and greedily picked it up. Had I found some secret treasure? It was heavy enough to be an encumbrance, but already, in my assessment, too valuable to leave.

By the time I got halfway around the park, I collected three more and was trying to do my seven-mile walk carrying four heavy bricks in a plastic bag I picked out of the trash. I knew I’d never make it all the way around. I decided to hide them under a bush at 74th and Fifth and come back later to collect them.

I had lunch with my friend Christine who afterwards walked with me to the secret hiding place and helped me carry them through the park. She was equally astonished by them. When I got home, I showed my spouse, Kevin, a talented writer and editor, who knew at once what they were. They were Jewish prisoners from the concentration camps and the numbers hastily taped to the sides were some kind of identification numbers. I wondered if they were the ones tattooed on their arms.

Kevin looked on the web and found something called the Arolsen Archives where you could look up the numbers like the ones on the bricks and find out who the prisoners were, so they were more like the filing numbers, the tally of the murdered. It seemed logical, though I couldn’t find any of the four on the bricks.

Why hadn’t I immediately known what the images were? I am a Jew. I have always been obsessed with the Holocaust. I saw Claude Lanzmann’s monumental nine-hour documentary, Shoah, twice. I spent eight harrowing hours at Theresienstadt two years ago. I created an opera out of Giorgio Bassani’s Holocaust novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. My grandmother flooded us when we were children with photos of everyone who was murdered in the little Polish village she mercifully escaped the day it was wiped off the map. But it took Kevin, a Catholic, to identify them.

I suddenly felt very strange. Had I disturbed some kind of Holocaust memorial someone was in the process of installing all over the park? But they seemed so delicate and randomly placed — one good rain might destroy them. The masking tape was already falling off. Maybe someone has an explanation, or knows what I should do with them, I thought. They should be protected. They are disturbing and moving, and chillingly beautiful. They should be seen.

Taken by their aesthetic beauty, but curiously oblivious to their power, I arranged them on the shelves in our bedroom. But as soon as Kevin entered the room, he said, “Those cannot stay in here.” It never occurred to me that sleeping in a bed where these faces were staring down at you might be upsetting.

I posted my story and images of the bricks on Facebook seeking to find answers, and received all kinds of responses, including, especially from my writer and artist friends, an almost haughty and judgmental, “Put them back!” I felt guilty, ashamed, and thought about it, but it didn’t feel right.

This is what I wanted to happen: People would see what I had posted, understand how extraordinary my discovery was, and answer the questions that I had: Why would someone do this? The pieces were oddly located — one on the curb, one on a wall, on a bench, but all out in the open for anyone to find — was anyone checking on them? Why was I the only one that saw them? Was I, in fact, the only one? Were they a memorial? An installation? Were they Banksy? Was I holding a treasure and finally about to get rich? Of course I couldn’t sell them, but I thought about it.

No one had any answers, though, and none of my 5,000 Facebook friends raised their hand to say, “I made them, and this is why.”

I am a composer, and sensitive to the gesture — an artist’s quiet activist act, the element of chance, the small revolution, the poetry of it. Perhaps I should have left them undisturbed, let the artist have his/her/their way. But I didn’t, I couldn’t, and here we are.

Now what?

The world feels so precarious right now — violent and unpredictable. This looked like it might be some profound political statement, some cry from the artist’s studio, some shriek in the dark in these bricks. But I don’t know what it was, and I’m dying to find out.

I still question my obliviousness to what the images were when I first saw them. It rattles me. Could I be inured to such horrors?

Last night, when I went to sleep, I dreamt I was in a building with three other men. We were wiring a building to blow it up. When the blast was imminent, and the building started collapsing, they got out and I didn’t. I woke up startled, shaking, sweating and wondering: What do these bricks signify?

And why was it me that found them?

Can anyone tell me?

Anyone?

The post Hidden in Central Park, a modest installation of Holocaust art — but what was it doing there? appeared first on The Forward.