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US rabbinical students, in Israel for the year, weigh whether to stay and how to help
(JTA) — Wade Melnick understood that something was truly amiss when he saw a car driving through the haredi Orthodox Israeli town where he was spending Shabbat.
A rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, a Conservative rabbinical school, Melnick and his wife had traveled from Jerusalem to Elad, an Orthodox town about 45 minutes northwest, to celebrate the Simchat Torah and Shemini Atzeret holiday. Their host returned from synagogue alarmed that some of the Orthodox men there were carrying phones and checking their messages — an act prohibited on the holiday except when needed to save a life.
Then the car drove down the town’s streets — another practice prohibited on Shabbat and Jewish festivals. It carried a local leader who broadcast a message instructing everyone to stay indoors. Soon afterward, sirens started blaring. At one point, the ground shook when a rocket landed a few kilometers away.
It wasn’t until after the sun set that Melnick, his wife and their host understood the scope of the crisis: Hamas had invaded Israel, killing hundreds, wounding thousands and taking a then-unknown number of people hostage, including women and children. A massive military mobilization was underway.
“We were scared,” Melnick recalled on Sunday. “It was scary — and we’re thinking about making plans to come home.”
Melnick is one of dozens of American rabbinical students in Israel for the school year, which is only just getting underway. Some, like Melnick, are looking to leave, or to send their family members home to safety. Others are stranded abroad, unsure of where they will learn this semester. And still others say they are undeterred and intend to carry on with their classes — pledging to volunteer to support the Israeli crisis response and war effort in addition to their study.
Noa Rubin, another student at JTS, which is located in New York City, spent the summer in a chaplaincy training program at a Bronx hospital. So when she heard that Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem was looking for people with mental health care training to work with people traumatized by the attack, she offered herself up.
“I’m not a professional professional,” she said. “But I thought I had some of the skills, and I’m trying to do whatever I can. It keeps me productive to feel as helpful as I can be.”
So far, Rubin hasn’t gotten any requests for counseling. Instead, with the start of classes delayed until Oct. 22, she’s turned her attention to raising funds to buy supplies and protective gear for soldiers who are heading into what could be a long and brutal war. She said she doesn’t plan to leave Israel.
“Unless my classes are exclusively online or Israel told me it was a good idea to leave, my intention is to stick around here,” she said. “I think it’s an important show of solidarity.”
Shayna Dollinger, a second-year student at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, a Reform seminary, is not able to decide whether or not to attend classes in Jerusalem. She was on vacation in Vienna when Hamas attacked, and her flight back to Israel was canceled.
So she flew to Munich and then to Porto, Portugal, where she spent the night before boarding a bus to Vigo, Spain, a coastal city where she had friends. She’s currently booked to return to California on Thursday but said she would finalize her plans on Wednesday when HUC updates students about planning for classes.
Two other students are stranded abroad, Dollinger said, while 20 are still in Israel — though messages on a class WhatsApp group suggested that not all would remain there. “A third would like to leave and are actively trying to leave,” she said. “The rest either think it’s safer to shelter in place or they want to stay to be part of the effort.”
Dollinger said she had been impressed by HUC’s planning for emergencies. The school had created a group chat for use in emergencies only — it had been used once before, after a shooting attack in Tel Aviv in August — and quickly asked the students to check in there.
“The communication has been amazing from the minute it started,” she said, adding that she thought the school was being “very accommodating” of students like her who expected to attend courses via Zoom instead of in person.
Jacob Kaplan-Lipkin, a student at JTS, said he had been surprised by how unprepared he felt for the crisis. When the sirens went off on Saturday morning, his first thought was that there was a fire alarm, or that Israel was testing an alert system the way the U.S. government did last week. And when he realized that it wasn’t a drill, he wasn’t sure what to do.
“Our building had a shelter, but no one had really taken seriously the possibility that we would need to use it anytime soon,” he said of his Jerusalem apartment building. “We didn’t really know where it was. We ran down the stairs, and we saw that there was a shelter but it was locked and no one could get in. … So we huddled in the corridor. It was my first time meeting many of my neighbors.”
Some residents of the building in the Baka neighborhood used their phones on Shabbat and holidays, and revealed the grim details of the attack as they became available. One resident was an older woman who said she was having flashbacks to the start of the Yom Kippur War, exactly 50 years earlier, Kaplan-Lipkin recalled. Then, as now, Israel was struck by surprise during a holiday.
“Everyone was absolutely stunned and said they didn’t think this was possible,” he said. “We were hearing from all these residents that this was brand new to them. It was an extraordinary contrast from the night before when we had been dancing in the streets with the Torah.”
On Sunday, Kaplan-Lipkin said, he joined classmates in dropping off toiletries and other supplies for soldiers and people displaced from the border towns that had been attacked.
“I felt viscerally the discomfort of sitting around while I was watching people leave in uniform,” he said. “I wish I had the ability to do much more, but there is an overwhelming feeling of doing what we can and of wanting to stick together.”
As a Hebrew College student who is also pursuing a Jewish day school teaching certificate through Jerusalem’s Pardes Institute, Willemina Davidson is in the unusual position of being in their second year in Israel. They said they had opened their apartment to classmates who didn’t have safe rooms in their own homes and was looking for other ways to be helpful — all while their friends and family in the Midwest keep a watchful eye on them.
“My family and friends in the U.S. are just concerned for me and for other people they know,” Davidson said. “They also know that I am less likely to stay still, so they’re hoping I will be smart about this.”
Like many U.S. rabbinical students, Davidson has become involved in efforts to build bridges with Palestinians in the West Bank. They said they expected that even though the attack represented a major challenge, they would still seek to protect Palestinian farmers whose land and harvests sometimes come under attack from Jewish settlers.
“Many of us still plan on helping with the olive harvest. I think an extra level of precaution will need to be taken,” Davidson said. “It’s a volatile time, but people will continue to do their solidarity work and help each other.”
For Melnick and his wife, Devorah Mehlman, it’s hard to contemplate adding to the aid effort given the uncertainty about their own futures. They’d like to leave the country, but flights are hard to come by. And even if they can get on one, it’s not clear where they could go — they rented out their New York City apartment for the school year. They could stay with parents in Georgia, but it wasn’t clear on Sunday whether they could attend classes on Zoom moving forward.
“I’m not someone who was very afraid to come. I was really looking forward to coming and staying here,” Melnick said. “But no year in Israel is worth this much heartache.”
He added, “It sounds like it’s going to get worse before it gets better. And we just don’t want to be here for it.”
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Iran Holds Trilateral Talks With China, Russia Amid Ongoing Nuclear Negotiations With US
Illustrative: Chinese Foreign Minister Wag Yi stands with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazeem Gharibabadi before a meeting regarding the Iranian nuclear issue at Diaoyutai State Guest House on March 14, 2025 in Beijing, China. Photo: Pool via REUTERS
Iran held trilateral consultations with China and Russia on Thursday to discuss ongoing nuclear negotiations with the United States, as a fifth round of talks between Tehran and Washington ended with no deal yet in sight.
Iranian, Chinese, and Russian officials met to “coordinate their positions ahead” of the upcoming International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) hearing on Iran’s nuclear program, set to begin on June 9.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog, which has long sought to maintain access to the Islamic Republic to monitor and inspect the country’s nuclear program, is preparing to release its quarterly report on Tehran’s activities ahead of the upcoming board meeting.
In a post on X, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs, Kazem Gharibabadi, confirmed that the three countries held high-level consultations to discuss Tehran’s nuclear program and the country’s ongoing negotiations with Washington, as well as broader regional developments.
“Given the upcoming BRICS summit as well as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in the coming months, in separate meetings with the ambassadors of Russia and China, we reviewed the development and strengthening of cooperation within the framework of these two important groups of countries,” the Iranian diplomat said.
Tehran became a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a Eurasian security and political group, in 2023 and also joined the BRICS group in 2024 — a bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa that positions itself as an alternative to economic institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Following Thursday’s discussions, Russian Permanent Representative to the International Organizations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, described the talks as highly productive, noting that they helped the three countries closely coordinate their positions.
“Met today with my dear colleagues – Permanent Representatives of China and Iran – to compare notes on the eve of the forthcoming IAEA Board of Governors session. This trilateral format proves to be very useful. It helps coordinate closely our positions,” the Russian diplomat wrote in a post on X.
In an interview with Russian media on Friday, Ulyanov reiterated Moscow’s offer to mediate the indirect talks between Tehran and Washington.
“The Russian Federation has repeatedly stated its readiness to assist Iran and the United States in reaching an agreement on nuclear issues,” the Russian diplomat said. “But for this to happen, both Tehran and Washington need to make such a request. So far, there has been no such request.”
Both Moscow and Beijing, permanent members of the UN Security Council, are also parties to a now-defunct 2015 nuclear deal that had imposed temporary limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanction relief.
On Wednesday, ahead of the trilateral meeting, Tehran reaffirmed its stance that it will not give up its right to enrich uranium under any nuclear agreement.
“Continuing enrichment in Iran is an uncompromising principle,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmaeil Baghaei, said in a statement.
However, Reuters reported that Tehran may pause uranium enrichment if Washington releases frozen Iranian funds and recognizes the country’s right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes under a “political deal” that could pave the way for a broader nuclear agreement.
The two adversaries concluded their fifth round of nuclear talks in Rome last week, with the Omani mediator describing the negotiations as having made limited progress toward resolving the decades-long dispute over Tehran’s nuclear program.
So far, diplomatic efforts have stalled over Iran’s demand to maintain its domestic uranium enrichment program — a condition the White House has firmly rejected.
“We have one very, very clear red line, and that is enrichment. We cannot allow even 1 percent of an enrichment capability,” US Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said last week.
Since taking office, US President Donald Trump has sought to curtail Tehran’s potential to develop a nuclear weapon that could spark a regional arms race and pose a threat to Israel.
Meanwhile, Iran seeks to have Western sanctions on its oil-dependent economy lifted, while maintaining its nuclear enrichment program — which the country insists is solely for civilian purposes.
As part of the Trump administration’s “”maximum pressure” campaign against Iran — which aims to cut the country’s crude exports to zero and prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon — Washington has been targeting Tehran’s oil industry with mounting sanctions.
During Thursday’s meeting, Iran and Russia also agreed to substantially deepen their military and economic cooperation in response to ongoing US sanctions targeting both nations.
Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to fund the construction of a new nuclear power plant in Iran as part of a broader energy agreement that also includes a major gas deal between the two countries.
Earlier this year, Moscow and Tehran signed a 20-year strategic partnership to strengthen cooperation in various fields, including security services, military exercises, warship port visits, and joint officer training.
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‘Only One Solution’: Pro-Hamas Dartmouth College Group Occupies Building, Injures Staff
Pro-Hamas activists at Dartmouth College strike a pose inside the anteroom of the Parkhurst Hall administrative building. They had just commandeered the area. Photo: New Deal Coalition via Instagram, Inc.
A pro-Hamas group at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire which calls itself the “New Deal Coalition” (NDC) commandeered the anteroom of the Parkhurst Hall administrative building on Wednesday but limited the demonstration to business hours, as its members went home when it was shuttered at 6pm.
Before leaving the building, however, the group contributed to injuries sustained by a member of President Sian Beilock’s staff and an officer of the school’s Department of Safety and Security officer, according to The Dartmouth, the college’s official campus newspaper.
College deans Anne Hudak and Eric Ramsey have since vowed to hold the group, which included non-students, accountable.
“While Dartmouth remains committed to dialogue, we want to be absolutely clear: there cannot and will not be any tolerance for the type of escalation we saw on our campus today,” the officials said in a statement quoted by The Dartmouth.
During the unauthorized demonstration, the agitators shouted “free, free Palestine,” words shouted only recently by another anti-Israel activist who allegedly murdered two Israeli diplomats outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC.
The following day, the group at Dartmouth defended the behavior, arguing that it is a legitimate response to the college’s rejection of a proposal — inspired by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — to divest from armaments and aerospace manufacturers which sell to Israel and its recent announcement of a new think tank, the Davidson Institute for Global Security, which it claims is linked to the Jewish state.
“We took this escalated action — one deployed several times in Dartmouth’s history to protest against apartheid — because Dartmouth funded, US-backed Israel has been escalating its genocidal assault on Palestine,” the group wrote. “In an effort to ‘dialogue,’ a group of students, staff, and faculty, and alumni spent months drafting extensively researched 55-page divestment proposal … How did the college respond? They rejected divestment on every single criteria and, the day after, announced that they are reinvesting in colonial genocide with the launch of the Davidson Institute for Global Security.”
The statement concluded with an ambiguous threat and an evocation of the memory of the Holocaust.
“So long as you fund actively imperialistic violence, we will continue to hold you accountable,” it said. “There is only one solution! Intifada! Revolution!”
Last week, Dartmouth College’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) unanimously rejected a proposal urging the school to adopt the BDS movement against Israel.
“By a vote of nine to zero, the [ACIR] at Dartmouth College finds that the divestment proposal submitted by Dartmouth Divest for Palestine and dated Feb. 18, 2025, does not meet criteria, laid out in the Dartmouth Board of Trustees’ Statement on Investment and Social Responsibility and in ACIR’s charge, that must be satisfied for the proposal to undergo further review,” the committee said in a report explaining its decision. “ACIR recommends not to advance the proposal.”
A copy of the document reviewed by The Algemeiner shows that the committee evaluated the BDS proposal, submitted by the Dartmouth Divest for Palestine (DDP) group, based on five criteria regarding the college’s divestment history, capacity to address controversial issues through discourse and learning, and campus unity. It concluded that DDP “partially” met one of them by demonstrating that Dartmouth has divested from a country or industry in the past to establish its moral credibility on pressing cultural and geopolitical issues but noted that its analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lacks nuance, betraying the group’s “lack of engagement with counter arguments.”
ACIR added that DDP also does not account for the sheer divisiveness of BDS — which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination — and its potential to “degrade” rather than facilitate “additional dialogue on campus.”
It continued, “The proposal includes no compelling evidence on the level of support for divestment among students, among faculty, among staff, and among alumni. Moreover, the proposal is silent on the matter of how divestment can be treated as a consensus position in the face of what is almost certainly deep opposition to it among some members of the Dartmouth community.”
NDC is one of many campus groups which staged an end of year action aimed at coercing college officials into adopting anti-Israel policies.
At Yale University, a pro-Hamas group moved to cap off the year with a hunger strike, choosing to starve themselves inside an administrative building in lieu of establishing an illegal encampment.
Yale administrators refused to meet with the students for a discussion of their demands that the university’s endowment be divested of any ties to Israel, as well as companies that do business with it, according to the Yale Daily News. On the fourth day of the demonstration, Yale student affairs dean Melanie Boyd briefly approached the students at the site of their demonstration, Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, advising them to leave the space because “the administration does not intend to hold any additional meetings.”
The group ended the hunger strike after just ten days, citing “deteriorating health conditions.”
In New York City, pro-Hamas students clashed with police during an unauthorized demonstration at City University of New York, Brooklyn College, continuing a series of days in which law enforcement has been deployed to quell extremist disturbances.
As seen in footage captured by “FreedomNews.TV,” students rocked officers with blow after blow to obstruct their being arrested for trespassing, prompting as many as six others to rush in to help with detaining one person at a time. The melees were unlike any seen on a US college campus this semester.
Reportedly, the aim of the group was to establish a pro-Hamas encampment on the East Quad section of campus, which they called a “Liberated Zone,” and several reports said that it attempted to block the entrance to the Tanger Hillel House after being prevented from doing so. FreedomNews captured several more fights between protesters and officers which were filmed in front of the Hillel building, where Jewish students socialize and seek support from their community.
“Tanger Hillel at Brooklyn College is appalled by the anti-Israel protest and encampment that took place on May 8, 2025 and violated campus policies and feared deeply troubling antisemitic rhetoric, including chants of ‘Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,’ and banners with inverted red triangles, a symbol widely recognized as a call for violence,” Tanger Hillel told The Algemeiner in a statement following the incident. “Targeting Hillel, the Jewish student center, is not a peaceful protest. It is harassment, intimidation, and an antisemitic act of aggression.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Democratic Socialists of America Distances Itself From Caucus Group That Applauded DC Jewish Museum Shooting
Elias Rodriguez, 30, from Chicago, taken into custody by police for allegedly shooting two Israeli Embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, on May 21, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) national organization has distanced itself from remarks made by one of its caucus groups which celebrated the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC last week.
“Democratic Socialists of America seek to democratically transform our society and reject vigilante violence. We condemn the murder of Israeli embassy workers. Any statement otherwise is not the stance of DSA,” DSA posted on X/Twitter on Wednesday.
The post came one day after the DSA’s Liberation Caucus publicly praised Elias Rodriguez, a 31-year-old far-left and anti-Israel activist who has been charged with gunning down two Israeli embassy officials as they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in the US capital.
The caucus announced that it signed onto a statement by left-wing activist group Unity of Fields which defended Rodriguez’s actions as a “legitimate act of resistance against the Zionist state and its genocidal campaign in Gaza” and called for the alleged murderer’s immediate release.
Rodriguez was charged last Thursday in US federal court with two counts of first-degree murder. He is accused of fatally shooting Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, a young couple about to become engaged to be married, as they left an event for young professionals and diplomatic staff hosted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). According to video of the attack and an affidavit filed by US federal authorities supporting the criminal charges, Rodriguez yelled “Free Palestine” while being arrested by police and told law enforcement he “did it for Gaza.”
“Excellent statement that we are proud to add our name to. Free Elias Rodriguez and all political prisoners,” the DSA liberation caucus said on social media of Unity of Fields’ note.
The liberation caucus’s comments sparked immediate backlash, with critics accusing the group of both supporting antisemitic violence and further marginalizing the Palestinian cause.
“DSA types literally think murderers, if they kill *the right people*, deserve no consequences. Socialism is a pro-killing ideology on so many levels, and they seem almost proud of it,” Reason reporter Liz Wolfe wrote.
Following the main DSA organization’s statement condemning the DC murders, the liberation caucus posted, “Liberation is not all of DSA. DSA is comprised of many different ideological tendencies, we are just one. Right wing news outlets and individuals have chosen to take the statement we signed to portray the entire organization as holding our views – this is wrong.”
DSA, one of the country’s premier leftist political advocacy organizations, has mobilized in recent years to elect anti-Israel members to the US Congress. Influential lawmakers such as US Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Greg Casar (D-TX), and Cori Bush (D-MO) are all current members of the socialist organization. Others such as Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Summer Lee (D-PA) are former members.
The organization also counts rising star and aspiring New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani among its ranks. Mamdani has made his anti-Israel activism a centerpiece of his mayoral campaign, accusing the Jewish state of committing “genocide” in Gaza and arguing that it does not offer “equal rights” to all of its citizens.
DSA has ramped up its anti-Israel rhetoric during the Gaza war. On Oct. 7, 2023, the organization issued a statement saying that Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel that day was “a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.” The organization also encouraged its followers to attend an Oct. 8 “All Out for Palestine” event in Manhattan.
In January 2024, DSA issued a statement calling for an “end to diplomatic and military support of Israel.” Then in April, the organization’s international committee, DSA IC, issued a missive defending Iran’s right to “self-defense” against Israel. Iranian leaders regularly call for the Jewish state’s destruction, and Tehran has long provided Hamas with weapons and funding.
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