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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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The Lakers were about to shock the NBA. But Shabbat had to end first.
Luka Dončić was headed to Los Angeles — if the Lakers could keep it quiet for one more Shabbat.
The Feb. 2 trade that brought Dončić, widely touted as one of the two or three best basketball players on the planet, to Los Angeles blindsided the NBA — and Dončić himself. It was the most shocking and controversial swap in the history of the league, if not the history of American sports. The reporter who broke the story had to convince readers he hadn’t been hacked.
Yet a new book reveals a surprising final hangup before the deal went through. In A Hollywood Ending: The Dreams and Drama of the LeBron Lakers (Doubleday), veteran hoops writer Yaron Weitzman reveals that an unsuspecting stakeholder’s Sabbath observance put the trade — and indeed, the future of the NBA — on hold. It’s one of a few fun Jewish details in the deeply-sourced book (whose author is Jewish, in case the name didn’t give it away).
Secrecy was essential to the trade. Dončić, then 25, was beloved in Dallas, where his future with the Mavericks seemed utterly secure. Because mere rumors of a developing trade would irreversibly damage their relationship with Dončić, the Mavs had to negotiate below the radar of the scoop-hungry NBA media. For that reason, Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison only told his Lakers counterpart, Rob Pelinka, that Dončić was on the market. In turn, Pelinka only told his boss, Lakers owner Jeannie Buss.
It took three weeks for the blockbuster deal to come together, with the Lakers’ Anthony Davis — a future Hall-of-Famer in his own right — and a first-round draft pick headed to Dallas in return. By Jan. 31, a Friday night, the terms were in place.
But the Lakers couldn’t pull the trigger — yet. For salary cap reasons, they needed to complete a separate trade with the Utah Jazz — and before the Jazz could accept, they needed to do a trade with the L.A. Clippers that involved another four players, including 16-year veteran Patty Mills. Because Mills was in the last season of his contract, league rules required his agent to certify that no future contract had been agreed to under the table.
There was just one issue, Weitzman reports: Mills’ agent, Steven Heumann, was observing Shabbat and therefore offline. “This meant that all parties had to wait until an hour after sundown on Saturday night,” Weitzman writes. “In the meantime, Pelinka and Harrison [the respective general managers of the Lakers and Mavericks] agreed to keep the details quiet. Neither side wanted to risk anything leaking.”
What if something had leaked? It’s possible and maybe likely that the deal would have fallen apart. Mavericks fans would have rioted — perhaps literally — to stop a trade. Competing offers might have come in from other teams. Or Dončić’s agent might have tried to force him to a different destination. But the gag order held, and the next Laker dynasty began.
Ironically, Heumann (who did not immediately respond to an inquiry), wouldn’t have known that he was holding up The Luka freaking Dončić Trade even after Shabbat, because none of the adjacent teams or players or agents was wise to the NBA earthquake they were facilitating. Instead, his observance inverted an experience many Jews are familiar with — the excruciating wait for Shabbat to end so you can start working — by giving it to non-Jews. (Now let Pelinka try turning off his phone for 25 hours.)
The trade was as consequential as it was surprising. It rejuvenated the league’s most iconic franchise from also-ran to championship contender and doomed the Mavericks — led by Dončić to the NBA Finals the season prior — to irrelevance. Mavericks fans — who might have kept 100 Shabbats in a row if it meant keeping their hero in town — will hold Harrison in contempt for decades. And one man’s Jewish observance will always be a small part of a landscape-altering basketball story.
A Hollywood Ending: The Dreams and Drama of the LeBron Lakers hits shelves Oct. 21. The Lakers season starts Wednesday.
The post The Lakers were about to shock the NBA. But Shabbat had to end first. appeared first on The Forward.
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As Greenpoint’s Jewish community grows, so does this shul’s Hebrew school
(New York Jewish Week) — Greenpoint, Brooklyn is known for many things: its extensive waterfront, a tight-knit Polish community and a vibrant arts scene.
One thing it’s not known for: a thriving Jewish community. But that’s rapidly changing.
The Greenpoint Shul — North Brooklyn’s only non-Haredi, brick-and-mortar synagogue — is today home to some 100 member families. That’s twice as many members as just 16 months ago, according to Rabbi Isaiah Rothstein, who has led the community since August 2024.
The congregation is looking to future generations, too: This school year, the Orthodox congregation officially added a Hebrew school serving some 30 children in grades kindergarten through 8. The school provides Jewish families an alternative to the only other option in the area, the Hebrew school that’s run by Chabad of North Brooklyn in nearby Williamsburg.
“I know the power and importance of having a youth department and it being a core pillar of building a thriving and growing community,” said Rothstein, who was previously the youth director at Young Israel of Stamford, Connecticut before assuming the helm of the Greenpoint Shul.
The Hebrew school was initially founded in 2019 by Yoni Kretzmer and his wife, artist Avital Burg, who are members of the synagogue and the parents of three children ages 8, 4 and 2. For five years, the school operated independently but borrowed the space inside the synagogue. As of this academic year, the school was officially “adopted” by the shul, which did not have a Hebrew school of its own.
“We saw that there’s nothing happening in North Brooklyn,” Yoni Kretzmer, who moved to Greenpoint from Israel with his wife in 2015, said of the local Jewish education scene. “So that was basically it — we started because we thought it was possible.”
Six years later, Kretzmer is now employed by the Greenpoint Shul, where one benefit he has seen so far is getting to exchange ideas with the rabbinic leadership team. He no longer has to independently collect tuition from parents, and he can provide students with supplies and snacks directly purchased from the synagogue budget.
“The way that we can present it now is as part of a much larger structure,” Kretzmer said. “When people [are] joining, they’re not only feeling that we’re using the shul, but that they’re part of a community center in the fullest meaning of the word.”
He added, “Now I can really be a teacher and the organizer, but I don’t have to be the accountant.”
With a focus on Torah and art, the school opened with about a dozen students — split into two groups, with Kretzmer teaching the older students, and Burg teaching the younger students — and grew via word of mouth. “It was mainly parents who brought other parents,” Kretzmer said. “So the connections were kind of within the neighborhood, of people who knew each other.”
The new school bucks multiple trends. Across the country, supplementary Jewish school enrollment is down by nearly half over the last two decades, a recent study found, and many of those that remain have reduced the number of days they operate. The Greenpoint Shul’s school holds classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though different children attend each day.
While enrollment declined early in the pandemic, “once it was deemed safe to return, then it really started growing,” said Kretzmer, who is now the youth director at Greenpoint Shul.
One recent arrival is Andrew Altfest, who moved to nearby Williamsburg in 2014 and enrolled his 5-year-old son, Alden, last year.
“We really like the values that are being taught,” said Altfest, a financial advisor who grew up Reform. “Those values, they range from everything: learning Torah stories, Jewish culture, ethics. And we value the diversity of the families of the kids that are there.”
Like so many parts of Brooklyn, Greenpoint has seen a wave of gentrification and development in recent decades. In Greenpoint, this change was spurred, in part, by a massive rezoning along the neighborhood’s once-derelict waterfront in 2005. While there is no reliable data on the neighborhood’s Jewish population — studies often lump Greenpoint with Williamsburg, which is home to a sizable Hasidic community — locals believe the number of Jews in Greenpoint has grown in recent years.
“Greenpoint is not a famously Jewish neighborhood in New York City,” said Greenpoint Shul president Daphne Lasky. “I think there are other things other than Jewish community that sometimes draw people to Greenpoint: the waterfront location, the scale of the buildings. There’s so much creative energy in the neighborhood. But then you end up with Jewish families who have those interests and they also want to come together around their Jewish life as well.”
As such, other Jewish institutions have grown to meet the needs of the area’s Jewish community. The Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life, a Jewish cultural and events hub funded by UJA-Federartion of New York, was founded in 2022 expressly to serve Jews in both central and northern Brooklyn.
“We feel there’s a really significant demand,” said Neighborhood director Rebecca Guber. “Part of it, which is kind of hard to wrap your head around, is that in North Brooklyn, the only Jewish infrastructure is Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox, and that’s just not serving all members of the community.”
For now, at least, The Neighborhood does not have a physical space.
The Greenpoint Shul, meanwhile, has a long history in the neighborhood. Founded at the turn of the last century by German-Jewish immigrants as Congregation Ahavas Israel, the synagogue is in a landmarked Romanesque Revival building at 108 Noble Street whose cornerstone was laid in 1903. Today’s Greenpoint Shul is the result of multiple mergers between two neighboring Reform congregations and one Orthodox synagogue. Its prayer service is Orthodox; women sit upstairs in the balcony while men sit downstairs for prayer services. But the community is multicultural, multiracial and welcoming of all backgrounds, including many members who have recently converted to Judaism. While Orthodox families are likely to send their children to day schools and yeshivas, the Hebrew school is geared toward “children of all ages and backgrounds,” according to its web site.
“The congregation has gone through a lot of changes and growth — and shrinking and growing again — over the last 140 years,” Lasky said. “In particular, in the last 25 years or so, as Greenpoint has had its own renaissance as a neighborhood, there’s been more and more families moving into the neighborhood that need Jewish education for their children and Jewish connection for their children.”
Because of the new, formal relationship between the school and the shul, Rothstein said he’s already seen interest from prospective parents who would like to enroll their kids in the program next year. But the growth of a community isn’t just measured in sheer numbers — Rothstein added that, as a result of the Hebrew school, youth attendance at recent Sukkot and holiday events increased this year.
“We’ve seen, already, crossover, where it’s a pipeline to deeper engagement,” Rothstein said.
The post As Greenpoint’s Jewish community grows, so does this shul’s Hebrew school appeared first on The Forward.
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UN Nuclear Watchdog Believes Iran’s Enriched Uranium Survived War With Israel as Tehran Rebuffs Trump
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, May 20, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, confirmed that most of Iran’s enriched uranium survived the 12-day war with Israel in June and remains stored in damaged nuclear facilities, contradicting earlier reports of the strikes’ impact.
In an interview last week with the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said the agency’s new findings indicate that “the majority” of Iran’s enriched uranium “remains in the nuclear facilities in Isfahan and Fordow, and some in Natanz.”
Earlier this year, Israel, with support from the United States, carried out a large-scale military strike against the Islamist regime in Tehran, targeting three critical nuclear enrichment sites, including the heavily fortified Fordow facility.
According to Grossi, the three facilities were “massively damaged” in the strikes, restricting the IAEA’s access to them — and the enriched uranium inside — without “Iran’s full cooperation.”
“This will only happen if Iran sees it as a national interest,” he told NZZ.
However, Grossi’s latest assessment appears to somewhat contradict earlier reports from the White House, which claimed Iran’s nuclear facilities were “totally obliterated” and its nuclear program set back by years. US and Israeli intelligence reports have indicated the Iranian program could be set back anywhere from one or two to “several” years.
After the 12-day war with Israel, Iran halted its cooperation with the IAEA, accusing the agency of failing to firmly condemn the Israeli and US strikes.
On Monday, Tehran confirmed it ended the cooperation deal signed with the IAEA in September — which had allowed the agency to resume inspections of its nuclear sites — after Western powers reinstated UN sanctions last month.
This past weekend, Iranian officials also announced that the country is no longer party to the 2015 nuclear deal, under which economic sanctions were lifted in exchange for limits on Tehran’s nuclear program, following the deal’s expiration on Saturday.
According to the Iranian Foreign Ministry, “all provisions [of the 2015 nuclear deal], including the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program and the related mechanisms, are now considered terminated.”
Still, the regime emphasized that the country “firmly expresses its commitment to diplomacy.”
After several rounds of nuclear talks failed to yield any results, Britain, Germany, and France activated the so-called “snapback” mechanism, leading to the reimposition of UN sanctions.
However, the three European powers — all parties to the 2015 nuclear deal — announced last week that they would still pursue efforts to restart talks aimed at finding a “comprehensive, durable, and verifiable agreement.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi rejected such efforts, saying that Tehran did “not see any reason to negotiate” with Western powers once sanctions were reimposed
Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei mocked US President Donald Trump for claiming that he had destroyed the country’s nuclear facilities with his airstrike campaign in June.
“The US president proudly says they bombed and destroyed Iran’s nuclear industry. Very well, keep dreaming!” the Iranian leader said on Monday.
Khamenei also dismissed Trump’s proposal to resume nuclear negotiations, insisting that Iran had no interest in engaging under such conditions.
“Trump says he is a dealmaker, but if a deal is accompanied by coercion and its outcome is predetermined, it is not a deal but rather an imposition and bullying,” Khamenei said.
“What does it have to do with America whether Iran has nuclear facilities or not? These interventions are inappropriate, wrong, and coercive,” he continued.
Despite Iran’s claims that its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes rather than weapons development, Western powers have said there is no “credible civilian justification” for the country’s nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”