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Tradition! Young adults on the Upper West Side flock to a new, independent Shabbat service
(New York Jewish Week) — It was a mild Friday afternoon in mid-December and Avital Katz and Ilana Sandberg didn’t know what to expect once Shabbat began.
The pair had texted, emailed and posted on Instagram to invite as many people as possible to an egalitarian Shabbat service that they were hosting in the living room of a friend’s townhouse apartment on West 75th Street. Katz and Sandberg were craving a younger, fresher Friday night experience on the Upper West Side, but while they knew others felt the same, they weren’t sure how many people would show up.
In the end, Katz said, the final tally was “shocking”: 55 people crowded into the room for that first service, bringing their own prayer books and traveling significant distances to join a Shabbat community they’d only just heard about.
“We knew people wanted it,” said Katz, 29, who teaches at a Jewish day school in the neighborhood. “But we were just so excited and so grateful that this was something that actually excited people and we weren’t just making it up in our heads.”
Over the next four months, Katz and Sandberg, a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, held four additional Kabbalat Shabbat services, with a tentative schedule stretching out into the summer. Their informal prayer community, known as a minyan, has no name — yet — but it does have a third organizer, growing buzz among young adults on the Upper West Side and the support of a slew of synagogues in the neighborhood and beyond.
This Kabbalat Shabbat minyan’s arrival marks something of a return-to-nature on the Upper West Side, a pulsing heart of Jewish life in New York City. Over the years, other minyans had sprouted up in the neighborhood, which is popular among young Jewish professionals because of its density of synagogues and kosher restaurants, the vibrancy of its dating scene and the networks of camp and college friends who are committed to maintaining Jewish community in their lives.
Some of these minyans faded away as members moved away, while others evolved into more established communities with dues, leases and programs for families. But the informal, lay-led minyans that were drawing young adults just before the pandemic — such as the Wandering Minyan, Shira B’Dira (Hebrew for “Songs in an Apartment”) and one sponsored by Camp Ramah, the Conservative movement’s summer camp network — have been slow to reemerge.
Katz and Sandberg are members of a congregation, Kehilat Hadar, that itself grew out of an informal minyan launched back in 2001. But Kehilat Hadar doesn’t regularly hold Friday-night services, which tend to be challenging for people with young children to attend. Plus, Katz and Sandberg thought that an independent minyan with less established roots might be more appealing for many people who hadn’t yet found a Jewish community of their own.
Of course, there are numerous synagogues in the neighborhood, but none seemed quite right: Congregations such as B’nai Jeshurun and Romemu use musical instruments — something considered taboo on Shabbat by many observant Jews — and Orthodox congregations tend not to appeal to people who are committed to egalitarianism. Plus, Katz, Sandberg and the third organizer, Bradley Goldman, were looking for a service led by people who aren’t rabbis, so the participants could feel more ownership over the experience.
“Obviously, there are some choices,” Katz said. “But there wasn’t anything that kind of fit with a more traditional Friday night davening [praying] that really focuses on young people who might end up moving away from the Upper West Side after a few years.”
She had heard others expressing the same longing as the world reemerged from Covid limitations. “All of these Shabbat meals that we were going to, everyone — whether or not they go to shul constantly or have rarely gone when they’ve moved to the Upper West Side — was talking about how there’s really not a lot of options for Friday night davening that are appealing to the 20s and 30s crowd, either religiously or age-wise,” she said.
The crowd at their services are all young people, many of whom know each other already, most who live on the Upper West Side — but anyone is welcome. In fact, Katz stays at the door to welcome anyone and everyone who walks by, which she said has been her favorite part of the experience.
A large contingent of attendees also have a background either attending or working for one of the camps in the Ramah network, and many prayers use Ramah tunes, creating a sense of nostalgia for those who attended the camps.
“We create such a powerful Shabbat experience at camp and I wanted to be able to capture that here with the same people,” said Adina Scheinberg, a Ramah alum who led a recent service that took place at Schechter Manhattan, the Conservative day school located on West 100th Street, that drew around 60 people.
After the service, which includes traditional Kabbalat Shabbat liturgy and maariv, or the evening service, attendees have the opportunity to schmooze with each other, snack and have a drink. “We want to be as inclusive as possible,” Katz said. “If you just want to come for the snacks, we love that too.”
The setting at Schechter was familiar to anyone who has attended Kehilat Hadar services in recent years: Kehilat Hadar has partnered with Congregation Shaare Zedek since 2019 and they meet together every Saturday morning at Schechter while Shaare Zedek’s permanent space is undergoing a major redevelopment. For Kehilat Hadar, the new minyan is not competition but an exciting addition to the fabric of Jewish life in the neighborhood.
“Friday night davening has always gotten a different crowd from Shabbat morning davening,” said Emily Scharfman, president of Kehilat Hadar’s board. She said Kehilat Hadar has held monthly Friday night services but lacked the volunteer capacity to hold weekly ones, particularly as community members have grown their families over the past 20 years.
“We are happy to be supportive of something that was mission-aligned, from a traditional, egalitarian perspective, especially coming from two people within our community,” Scharfman said, adding that Kehilat Hadar and Shaare Zedek would likely not have sponsored a minyan with a mechitzah separating men and women, or one that brought in music.
Kehilat Hadar has sponsored at least one of the Shabbat services, paying to rent the space at Schechter Manhattan for the evening and providing the snacks. And they’re not the only ones: The Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale helped rent space at SAJ, a Reconstructionist synagogue, for a future Shabbat, while Ramah plans to sponsor a service on May 5.
Though the presence of JTS, the flagship Conservative seminary, has always meant that there are ample young adults on the Upper West Side committed to innovative prayer experiences, Sandberg said she’s especially pleased that her growing new minyan draws from beyond that community.
“It’s logical that I as a rabbinical student was looking for something like this and that I felt like there was a gap in the community that I was hoping to find on the Upper West Side,” Sandberg said. “But it is really gratifying that this sentiment is shared by so many people and that this minyan can be something that young Jews on varying levels of being involved and engaged and observant are looking for.”
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The post Tradition! Young adults on the Upper West Side flock to a new, independent Shabbat service appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Four Seats or No Seats? Why Israel’s Final Polls Disagree Over Amcha Yisrael
Conflicting projections for Ofer Winter’s party illustrate the uncertainty of measuring public support near an electoral threshold.
A Channel 12 poll gives Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael four parliamentary seats.
An i24NEWS survey reaches the same seat total.
Other final polls find that the party does not qualify for representation.
How can surveys conducted close to the same election produce such different results?
The answer lies partly in the difference between measuring a vote share and converting it into parliamentary seats.
A Statistical Boundary
Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent.
For a party receiving substantially more than that percentage, modest sampling fluctuations may change its expected number of seats without calling its parliamentary presence into question.
For a party whose support lies near 3.25 percent, the same type of fluctuation may change its projected representation from several seats to zero.
This does not necessarily mean the polls are measuring completely different political realities.
They may be producing estimates close to the same threshold but on opposite sides of it.
Sample Size Is Only One Factor
The i24NEWS survey conducted on October 22 included 5,124 adult respondents and reported a sampling error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
That is a substantial sample by conventional political polling standards.
But a larger sample does not eliminate every source of uncertainty.
Different pollsters may employ different recruitment methods, weighting systems and procedures for estimating turnout.
They may also differ in how they handle respondents who are undecided or reluctant to state their preferences.
These choices can matter particularly for smaller parties.
The Problem of Turnout
Opinion polls generally estimate voting preferences before actual voting takes place.
Election results reflect the ballots cast by people who participate.
Differences between intended and actual turnout can affect parties in different ways.
Analysts must therefore consider not only how many respondents express support for a party, but also whether the poll’s turnout model accurately reflects the eventual electorate.
Without transparent, comparable information about the methods used by each polling organization, it is difficult to identify which methodological difference is responsible for a particular disagreement.
Reading the Final Surveys
The appropriate interpretation of Amcha Yisrael’s polling is neither that its parliamentary representation is guaranteed nor that exclusion is certain.
The available surveys demonstrate uncertainty around a legally decisive boundary.
The four-seat projections reported by Channel 12 and i24NEWS are meaningful observations.
So are the below-threshold findings published by Channel 13, Maariv and Zman Yisrael.
Each survey is a measurement of electoral intentions under a particular methodology, not a count of actual votes.
For readers following Israel’s election, this makes Amcha Yisrael an instructive case study in how polling uncertainty interacts with electoral law.
The final result will provide the definitive seat allocation. The polls explain why the outcome was difficult to measure in advance.
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As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich
In Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain and France signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler that caved to the Nazi leader’s demand that Germany be given a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Five months later, Hitler ordered the German military to forcibly take the remainder of the neighboring country.
On Oct. 9, 2026, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck a deal allowing Russia to sell diesel fuel to global markets, most importantly to the US. Then Trump waived a package of sanctions on Russia that had been passed by Congress. By replenishing Russia’s war coffers, it is likely more Ukrainians will die because of these twin gifts from America’s president to the warmongering Russian autocrat.
Why is Trump doing this? He seems to be hoping the diesel deal will help him avert disaster in the upcoming midterms. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Trump seriously thinks that this will get him the Nobel Peace Prize by ending the war in Ukraine through helping Putin win it. Perhaps it’s one more scheme to further enrich himself and his family. Or maybe Putin really does have something on Trump.
In any event, it feels like Munich all over again.
There are some remarkable parallels between Czechoslovakia’s predicament in 1938 and Ukraine’s nine decades later: separatists in two vulnerable Central European democracies were encouraged and supported by a neighboring authoritarian regime that sought to seize adjacent territory under the pretext of protecting a minority from oppression.
And at the center of both narratives is betrayal: of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France, and Ukraine by Trump.
In the spring and summer of 1938, Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-allied Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, held secret meetings with Hitler and other Nazi officials. They concocted a plan: Cause so much disorder in the Sudetenland that the Czech government would declare martial law, thus creating an excuse for German troops to march in to protect the ethnic German minority.
Tensions that had long existed along the Czech frontier erupted into gunfire and death in the Sudeten town of Habersbirk on the morning of Sept. 13, 1938. A mob of German separatists hung a swastika banner from a church tower, stormed the police station, kidnapped the wife of a cop, and engaged in gunfights with police officers that lasted hours. Four Czech police officers and four insurgents died. Outbreaks of violence, terror and torture raged along the border for days, backed by Freikorps paramilitary troops who crossed from Germany and by SA and SS men who took part in cross-border sabotage and armed attacks.
The uprising had the desired impact. Just 17 days later — on Sept. 30, 1938 — Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany signed the Munich Agreement, yielding to Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to him. After landing at an airport outside London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a document in his hand and jubilantly proclaimed:
“The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.”
“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said later that day.
But it didn’t take long for Hitler to show he could not be trusted. Hitler’s army marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland followed less than six months later, and by 1942 German forces controlled territory spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to deep inside the Soviet Union.
Ethnic Germans’ uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1938 found an echo nine decades later in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where unrest that began with pro-Russia protests in 2014 evolved into the war Russia has been waging on its neighbor for nearly five years.
In the spring of 2014, paramilitary units led by Russian intelligence officers stormed government office buildings in several towns and cities in Donbas, seizing weapons and clashing with police. In a scene reminiscent of the Habersbirk siege of 1938, on April 14, 2014, pro-Russian militants seized the police station in Horlivka, beat up the police chief, and murdered a member of the city council, whose body was found in a river. Similar clashes occurred throughout Donbas.
Two Kremlin-backed pseudo-states soon emerged: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russia funneled tanks, artillery, air defense systems and fighters into Donbas, fueling a war between separatists and Ukrainian forces that dragged on for years.
Like Hitler in the Sudetenland, Russia’s de facto occupation of Donbas was not enough for Vladimir Putin. His eyes were on all of Ukraine, and he spent years manufacturing pretexts for the full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Trump has been buttering up Putin for more than a decade, starting with his 2015 campaign for president, when he effusively praised the ruthless Russian autocrat’s leadership style. Putin is a “strong leader,” is “far more respected than our president,” meaning the immensely popular Barack Obama, and was someone he “would get along with very well,” Trump said back then.
Trump’s admiration for Putin took on ominous tones after becoming president. During a press conference after the two leaders’ 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump questioned intelligence findings on Russian election interference and said he believed Putin’s denial. “I don’t see any reason it would be Russia,” Trump told reporters, with the Russian strongman standing at his side.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, Trump called it “a pretty smart move,” praised Putin as a “genius,” and also said it wouldn’t have happened if Trump was still president, remarks that were amplified by Russian state media.
During Trump’s second term, his buddy-buddy relationship with Putin has turned into a virtual strategic alliance, as the American president repeatedly makes moves and statements that seem designed to please the Russian autocrat. There are Trump’s threats to abandon NATO, his humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 2025 meeting inside the Oval Office, and most recently Trump’s demand that Ukraine cease its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, his call for Zelensky’s ouster, and envoy Steve Witkoff thanking Putin for being a “humanitarian.”
Putin has proposed a summit between himself, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. It’s notable that Ukraine has not been invited. This is also what happened in Munich nine decades ago, when Czech delegates were excluded from the room, and others decided Czechoslovakia’s fate.
Last October, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters the Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.”
It seems the fate Trump envisions for Ukraine is similar to the one Hitler envisioned for Czechoslovakia. It would be naïve to think that Putin’s expansionist ambitions would stop there.
The post As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich appeared first on The Forward.
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A Chabad Jew was stabbed in NYC. He returned the next day to continue wrapping tefillin.
(JTA) — Less than 24 hours after he was stabbed in midtown Manhattan, Yosef, a Chabad-Lubavitch man from Crown Heights, was back on the same street where he’d been assaulted, popping into Diamond District businesses as usual to help employees wrap tefillin.
Yosef, 26, who did not share his last name to maintain his privacy, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he was back on 47th Street on Thursday afternoon, the day after the stabbing, without missing a beat in his Monday-through-Thursday rounds even as police investigate the incident as a possible hate crime.
A number of the people he visited pieced together that the widely circulated footage of a man being stabbed the previous night was of him.
“They were in shock. They were obviously scared for me,” said Yosef, who has been wrapping tefillin and distributing Shabbat candles to Jewish Diamond District employees for about three years. He started that routine when his father, a Chabad Jew who works in the jewelry business, realized he needed his son’s help to handle the demand for those acts. Yosef told Chabad.org that he was “still shaken” by the attack a day later.
Still, he told JTA, “We can’t allow some hate to stop us.”
Yosef said he felt it was important to communicate that message because “we need more mitzvahs in the world, we need more light in the world.”
Yosef was taken to Bellevue Hospital on Wednesday evening around 6 p.m., where medical staff assessed that he had no internal bleeding and would not need stitches. No arrests have been made, but the assailant has been described as a woman in her 40s.
The attack has renewed concerns about security that have faced Chabad adherents and institutions, which often host public events and maintain a visible street presence. But the threat didn’t diminish their presence in midtown Manhattan on Friday.
Multiple Chabad men stood under a bright yellow tent on the sidewalk wrapping tefillin for a steady stream of workers in the heavily Jewish Diamond District.
“The Rebbe says that the way to defeat darkness is only through the addition of light,” said Shmuel Cohen, who was handing out small photographs of the movement’s late leader, the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Cohen told JTA that he had not heard about the attack that took place just down the block two days earlier, though his partner under the sidewalk tent had. Cohen said that the best way to respond is through “the observance of Torah and mitzvot without being ashamed of our Judaism but presenting it to everyone.”
Also on Friday, Chabad officials met with New York Police Department representatives for their annual meeting about security ahead of Chabad’s international conference in Crown Heights, the Brooklyn neighborhood where the movement is headquartered. The conference begins on Nov. 5.
Chabad has been targeted in multiple high-profile attacks in the past year, including the deadly Bondi Beach shooting in Australia in December. The following month, a man rammed a car into the doors of the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn, raising further questions over how the movement should balance its commitment to making its events accessible with security.
Meanwhile, Jews have been targeted in more than half of hate crimes committed in New York City in 2026, despite making up about 12% of the city’s population.
“Security is our top priority. Our goal is to provide an environment where every participant feels safe and can fully experience the purpose and spirit of the gathering,” said Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky, a top organizer of the upcoming conference.
In the wake of the attack, Yosef said he is not concerned about going out in public as a visibly Jewish person and doesn’t plan to change how he approaches the world.
“I was wearing the same clothes on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday,” he said. “I didn’t change my routine.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A Chabad Jew was stabbed in NYC. He returned the next day to continue wrapping tefillin. appeared first on The Forward.
