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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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Indiana synagogue that shaped Reform movement is sold — and will become a coffee shop, event space
The 1867 synagogue in Lafayette, Indiana — once a laboratory of the Reform movement — has been sold, after a grassroots effort to bring it back into Jewish hands fell short.
In recent months, a small group of local Jews tried to crowdfund roughly $300,000 to buy the building, hoping to turn it into a cultural and educational center preserving the city’s Jewish history. But the campaign ran out of time.
“Including pledges, we had about $60,000,” said Robyn Soloveitchik, one of the organizers. They needed nearly five times that amount. Now, the donations will be returned.
The sale of the building closed May 1 to a new owner, Ed Bahler, a local businessman whose family has worked in construction for decades.
“We hope to make it a super vibey, cool, historic coffee shop and place to have events,” Bahler said. He plans to preserve the exterior, which has landmark status and is topped by a large Star of David, but said it requires repairs to brickwork, gutters and landscaping.
The former sanctuary, with its high ceilings and stained glass windows, will remain a focal point.
Bahler said the project is partly about giving back. “We’re invested in the community,” he said, noting that seven of his children attended Purdue University in neighboring West Lafayette.
Soloveitchik said her group knew from the outset the purchase effort faced long odds. “Of course, it’s not what we wished for,” she said, “but we did know it was going to be an uphill battle.”
The nonprofit she and others formed to purchase the building plans to continue operating, shifting its focus to other preservation efforts in the state. “Hopefully we can find a way to stick around and just do a little bit of good for our community, even if this project didn’t work out,” she said.
Michael Brown, executive director of the Indiana Jewish Historical Society, called the outcome disappointing. “I’m sad that they weren’t able to acquire the building,” he said.
He hopes Bahler will mount a plaque or display photos documenting the building’s history as a pioneering synagogue.
A changing landscape
What happened in Lafayette is part of a broader pattern across Indiana.
In April in Terre Haute, the state’s oldest continuously operating Jewish congregation sold its synagogue building after more than a century. The 1910 structure, known for its sweeping stained glass windows, is expected to become a wedding venue.
“We had to sell in order to continue operating,” said Scott Skillman, president of the United Hebrew Congregation. They now plan to meet at a smaller location, or to rent space from a church.
Like many small towns, Terre Haute has seen its Jewish population shrink for decades. “There’s no amount of programming that’s going to change that,” Skillman said.
Other Indiana synagogues have found more unusual second lives that would have been unimaginable to the people who built them.
When a new baseball stadium was built in 2012 in South Bend, the team owner had to figure out what to do with a 1901 Romanesque Revival–style synagogue on the property that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The team spent $1 million restoring the building, where the team gift shop now operates. A mural on the wall of what’s now known as the Ballpark Synagogue riffs on the Sistine Chapel, depicting God passing a baseball to Adam along with the words “Play Ball.”
Wendy Soltz, a history professor at Ball State University who led the federally funded Indiana Synagogue Mapping Project, has documented 66 purpose-built synagogues across the state dating back to the 19th century. Of those, 24 have already been demolished.
The Lafayette building, she said, had “statewide and national significance.”
A legacy reshaped
The Lafayette synagogue was founded in 1849 as Ahavas Achim.
The congregation was among the early adopters of Reform Judaism in America and is believed to have hosted one of the first egalitarian minyanim in the country. The building it moved into in 1867 stood as a marker of that ambition — a place where a small Midwestern Jewish community helped shape a national religious movement.
Rabbi Julian Morgenstern served the shul, and later rose to lead Hebrew Union College. He helped secure visas for several Jewish scholars fleeing Nazi persecution, including Abraham Joshua Heschel. Several other future luminaries passed through Lafayette’s pulpit.
The congregation moved to a new Lafayette location in 1969. Since then, the old building has housed churches, the Red Cross and other nonprofits.
Lafayette today has two synagogues, one Reform and one Conservative. It also has a Chabad and Hillel connected to Purdue University. The school has roughly 1,500 Jewish students, according to Hillel.
For more than a century, Ahavas Achim’s building anchored Jewish life in the city. Now, it is entering a new chapter, one shaped by a different vision of community.
Bahler said he hopes to open the coffee shop and event space by the third quarter of this year, pending rezoning and renovations.
“We saw a historic building that had a very interesting spirit to it,” he said. “Something that could be brought alive into a place that draws people — a place of connection.”
The post Indiana synagogue that shaped Reform movement is sold — and will become a coffee shop, event space appeared first on The Forward.
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Liberal Zionists are under attack. A new book proves their work has never been more important
As much as American Jews may care about what happens in Israel, we’re in the bleachers, watching what Israelis are up to on the field.
That’s what makes Ariel Beery’s new book, Being Israeli After the Destruction of Gaza, so timely and necessary. “I wanted to explain to the English-speaking world what we liberal democrats in Israel are experiencing,” Beery wrote me in an email, “and give voice to liberal democratic Israelis that may help them speak to their global friends about the present moment.”
The book is based on long interviews that Beery — a 46-year-old American-born tech and social entrepreneur who has lived in Israel since he was 19 — conducted with 11 thoughtful, articulate Israeli Jews. All of them, like him, struggle with the terror and carnage of Oct. 7, Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and the ongoing challenges to Israel’s democracy — but still maintain that Israel must be a secure home for Jews and a democracy for all its citizens.
The book is a lesson in what liberal Zionism looks like within Israel, illustrating pragmatic approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a time when, in the United States, the loudest pro- and anti-Israel voices tend to drown out those that are most rational.
Beery’s book is a lifeline, because it proves American Jewish liberal Zionists are not alone — and neither are our Israeli counterparts.
The politically homeless liberal Zionist
American Jews are deep into a post-Gaza War reckoning.
Liberal Zionists like myself are politically homeless. The left writes us off as apologists for what they call a genocidal ethnostate, and the right is either embracing full-bore Candace Owens-style antisemitism or treating Palestinian suffering as a non-issue.
Mainstream American Jewish organizations, which were once the standard-bearers of liberal Zionism, have largely remained mum about Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault on democracy and the pogroms that West Bank Jews carry out against their Palestinian neighbors.
That sense of homelessness can make us feel more disconnected from Israel. Even many Israelis who share the traditional liberal Zionist vision of coexistence have, post-Oct. 7, rejected compromise with Palestinians.
But we are not alone. We share, like so many of the people Beery spoke with, a post-Oct. 7 shattered faith in Israel’s government and its military.
“It felt like the murder-suicide of your parents,” Alina Shkolnikov, the former head of the Russian desk at the IDF spokesperson unit, told Beery. “You found out that the two entities you trusted most all of your life, and gave service to — that they were nothing.”
Nor are we alone in the sense that the war that came after was both just, and criminal.
“Gaza is our Dresden,” the journalist Bernard Avishai told Beery. “World War II was a just war, but the firebombing of Dresden was still a war crime. The fact that the war was just doesn’t mean that everything done in the prosecution of the war was just. Those are two different questions. And we have to be able to hold them both.”
By mid-2024, Avishai and others in the book point out, Hamas was militarily crippled and Hezbollah neutered. Where was the justification to continue? “The surgery was done. What we needed was immunotherapy. And instead of immunotherapy, the government kept cutting.”
‘I’m the Free French’
As in the U.S., Israeli liberal Zionists are in despair over the country’s lack of political leadership.
“What does it mean, at the level of consciousness, for a state that says I don’t fix things, I just live from crisis to crisis?” said Yau Levy, a tech entrepreneur. “No Palestinian state, no concessions, no political process, no day-after plan.”
And yet none of the interviewees have given up.
“The mindset I have is: I’m the Free French,” said Aliza Inbal, a former diplomat who served as a speechwriter for the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “The battle for an enlightened Israel, whatever Israel may look like in the future, is not something that’s going to be won in a year or two. But we have to fight the fight.”
That sentiment encapsulates the big difference between the handwringing here in the U.S. — where Jews either live within a static fantasy of their preferred Israel, or are free to wash their hands of it for good — and there. It’s apt that Beery’s title wryly echoes that of Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Devastation of Gaza, which became a lightning rod for asserting that Zionism itself is the problem, reflecting the growing American anti-Zionist movement. American Jews have the privilege of engaging in theoretical conversations; Israelis have no choice but to believe in a better future, and work to make it happen.
The possibility of a better future sounds pie-in-the-sky given the facts on the ground. Hamas is still a major force in Palestinian life. Younger Israelis, according to the most recent poll, have shifted right. The massacre of Oct. 7 convinced many Israelis once open to compromise with the Palestinians that coexistence is for suckers.
But there are 14 million people between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, and nobody is going anywhere. There is no military solution. There is only finding a way to live together fairly, or apart.
“I don’t expect the Palestinians I work with to be anything other than Muslims who, at the end of the day, might want us to leave,” Meredith Mishkin Rothbart, who works on Arab-Jewish civil society initiatives, told Beery. “But the people who work with me, as much as they would like me to leave and get out of their face and even if they believe we should never have come here to begin with, they’re choosing peaceful means to try to fix it and come to a new reality. Just like I am.”
The question Israel’s leadership refuses to answer, Yau Levy said, is “Not what we oppose, but what do we actually want? What are we building toward? What is the positive vision that justifies the sacrifice?”
American Jews don’t really have to answer that question. They can drift away from thinking about Israel when it gets too ugly, or cheerlead as Israel’s most retrograde politicians destroy it from within. But Israelis cannot opt out, not out of the country where they live, nor out of its demographic realities. Their hopes for their future, and their children’s future, are bound to striving for a better outcome.
The asymmetry should give us humility — and spine. If Israel’s liberal Zionists haven’t given up, neither should we.
The post Liberal Zionists are under attack. A new book proves their work has never been more important appeared first on The Forward.
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US, Israel Said to Plan New Iran Strikes as Tehran Pounds UAE
People walk past a billboard with a graphic design about the Strait of Hormuz on a building, amid a ceasefire between US and Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 27, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Israel and the US are coordinating plans for another round of strikes on Iranian targets, CNN reported Tuesday, as Iran kept up its attacks on the United Arab Emirates for a second straight day and amid reports that the Gulf state’s defense increasingly appeared to be drawing on Israeli support.
CNN cited an Israeli source as saying that the plans, largely drawn up before the ceasefire with Iran began in April, include strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure and targeted killings of senior officials.
“The intention would be to carry out a short campaign aimed at pressuring Iran into further concessions in negotiations,” the source said, adding that any decision to resume the war would be made by US President Donald Trump.
CNN also reported that an Israeli-operated Iron Dome battery intercepted an Iranian missile over the UAE on Monday, the first known use of the system to defend a Gulf state. The system had been secretly deployed there at the start of the war, according to the report, along with Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers sent to operate the system.
The system has so far intercepted dozens of Iranian missiles in the UAE, according to Israeli officials cited in a separate report by Axios.
The UAE said Iran fired 12 ballistic missiles, three cruise missiles, and four drones at the country on Monday. And then, according to Emirati officials, Iran launched additional missiles and drones on Tuesday. The UAE’s Foreign Ministry called the attacks a “serious escalation” and a “direct threat” to national security, adding that the UAE reserves its “full and legitimate right” to respond.
Another report by the London-based Iran International said that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was furious over the escalation and warned military commanders of the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that the “completely irresponsible” attacks risked dragging Iran back into full-scale war.
He also described the IRGC’s handling of tensions with regional states as “madness,” the report said, citing sources close to the matter, and warned that the consequences could be irreversible.
The New York Times reported last week that senior IRGC commanders were increasingly driving decision-making in Tehran, with Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, unable to command the system with the authority once wielded by his father. The report added to mounting rumors over Khamenei’s health and capacity, and to growing confusion over who is ultimately directing Iran’s military and political response.
Iranian state media, citing an unnamed military official, said that the strikes on the UAE were unintentional and “the result of the US military’s adventurism to create passage for illegal ship transit” through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman through which about one-fifth of the world’s trade in oil and liquefied natural gas flows.
Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command, on Monday said American forces had cleared a mine-free route through the strait, which Iran shut in response to the US-Israeli strikes, and were escorting civilian vessels when Tehran launched cruise missiles, drones, and small boats at ships under US protection.
US military helicopters destroyed six of the boats, Cooper told reporters, saying “each and every” threat had been defeated.
Beyond mounting escorted transits for commercial vessels, the US has countered Iran’s shutdown of the waterway by blockading Iranian ports, a move that has further crippled the country’s already ailing economy and pushed it to the brink of collapse.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards issued a new warning Tuesday, saying any vessel that does not use the route approved by Tehran through the Strait of Hormuz would face retaliation.
“We warn all vessels planning to transit the Strait of Hormuz that the only safe passage is the corridor previously announced by Iran. Any diversion of ships to other routes is dangerous and will result in a firm response from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards navy,” the Guards said in a statement carried by state television.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir on Tuesday said the military was “closely monitoring developments in the Gulf” and is “prepared to respond with force against any attempt to harm Israel.”