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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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Palestinian Authority Condemns Hamas for US Talks
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the 79th United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters in New York, US, Sept. 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
The Palestinian Authority (PA) denounced Hamas for what it called “contacts with foreign parties,” seemingly referring to the terrorist group’s recent direct negotiations with the United States on the possibility of releasing US hostages being held in Gaza.
On Tuesday, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for PA President Mahmoud Abbas, condemned Hamas for opening communication with foreign parties, accusing the terrorist group of “dividing the Palestinian national position” and breaking laws against such contacts, the official PA news agency Wafa reported.
“Opening channels of communication with foreign parties and conducting negotiations with them without a national mandate is a violation of the Palestinian law that criminalizes communicating with foreign parties,” Rudeineh said in a statement.
He also said the talks undermine ongoing discussions for post-war rebuilding efforts – particularly the Egyptian-Palestinian plan for Gaza’s reconstruction outlined in the emergency summit in Cairo earlier this month – and weaken efforts to prevent “the displacement of Palestinians from their homeland.”
The presidential spokesman urged Hamas to transfer control of the Gaza Strip to the PA, aiming to reunite Gaza and the West Bank “under the rule of a single national authority, a single law, a single weapon, and a single legitimate political representation.”
The PA, a rival of Hamas, has sought to publicly distance itself from the terrorist group while also engaging in Palestinian reconciliation talks. However, PA officials have been regularly rationalizing Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and in some cases even denying it took place or falsely claiming Israeli forces carried out the onslaught that started the Gaza war.
In a separate statement this week, Abbas’s ruling Fatah Party accused Hamas of “only representing itself and Iran, as one of its agents in the region.”
Iran has backed Hamas for years, providing the terrorist group with weapons, funding, and training.
“Those who accepted the description of ‘nice’ from the American envoy [Adam Boehler] after offering concessions do not represent our people,” Fatah said.
“Statements made by Hamas leaders who fled Gaza and are living in luxurious hotels in Qatar reveal the extent of Hamas’s involvement in these conspiracies and schemes that target our people and their just national cause.”
Last year, Fatah, the main Palestinian faction in the West Bank and the movement that controls the PA, lambasted Iran for meddling in internal Palestinian affairs, accusing the Iranian regime of spreading chaos in its territory.
Over the past few weeks, meetings between Hamas leaders and US hostage envoy Adam Boehler have been reported, focusing on the possibility of releasing US hostages being held in Gaza.
“The reason that I met Hamas is because I want to work to help to get Americans and Israelis out,” Boehler said during an interview with Israel’s Kan News.
He also explained that he wanted to understand the terrorist organization’s demands for ending the Gaza war. “Some of the things that they talked about were relatively reasonable and workable things,” he said.
On Monday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the talks with Hamas were a rare and isolated event, and they have not yet produced any results.
“That was a one-off situation in which our special envoy for hostages, whose job it is to get people released, had an opportunity to talk directly to someone who has control over these people and was given permission and encouraged to do so,” Rubio said.
This week, US President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, traveled to Qatar, which hosts several Hamas leaders, to join an Israeli delegation for talks with Hamas about extending the fragile ceasefire in Gaza.
While Israel hopes the US will push forward a plan for a two-month truce extension, starting with the release of about half of the living hostages, Hamas has so far rejected the plan, insisting on immediate talks about the second phase of the ceasefire, which would end the war and lead to a full Israeli troop withdrawal.
Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists started the war in Gaza when they murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages during their invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
Earlier this year, both sides reached a ceasefire and hostage-release deal brokered by the US, Egypt, and Qatar.
The first phase, which ended on March 1, saw Hamas release 25 living Israeli hostages and the remains of eight others – in exchange for about 1,800 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel – as well as five living Thai hostages.
Most Arab states have rejected Trump’s plan to “take over” Gaza to rebuild the war-torn enclave, while relocating Palestinians elsewhere during reconstruction efforts.
Trump has called on Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states to take in Palestinians from Gaza after about 16 months of war between Israel and Hamas.
Middle Eastern leaders, expected to bear much of the financial burden of rebuilding Gaza, have struggled to propose their own plan but insist on a role for the Palestinian Authority, while also advocating for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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Iran’s Growing Military Ties With China, Russia Present a ‘Danger’ to US and Israeli Security, Experts Warn
A Chinese warship sails during the joint navy exercise of Iran, China, and Russia in the Gulf of Oman, Iran, March 12, 2025. Photo: Iranian Army/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Expanding military cooperation between Iran, China, and Russia presents a rising threat to the US and its allies in the Middle East, especially Israel, according to experts who spoke with The Algemeiner.
The warning came as Iran, China, and Russia on Wednesday concluded three days of joint naval drills in Iranian territorial waters in the Gulf of Oman, located in the northern Indian Ocean, bolstering defense cooperation as tensions in the Middle East mount over Tehran’s expanding nuclear program and terrorist proxies across the region.
The joint drills — called the Maritime Security Belt 2025 — also took place near the strategic Strait of Hormuz off southeast Iran, a critical passageway for global energy supplies through which a fifth of all crude oil traded worldwide passes. Iran has previously threatened to close the waterway if conflict breaks out with the US and Israel.
According to Jack Burnham, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, such joint drills will allow the three authoritarian regimes to become more interoperable with each other while gaining valuable experience operating in a strategically sensitive environment.
This week’s joint naval exercise was the fifth conducted by Iranian, Chinese, and Russian military forces since 2019.
“The most recent iteration of these naval drills between Iran, China, and Russia highlights these capitals’ growing ties during a period of international turmoil,” Burnham told The Algemeiner. “In recent months, Russia and Iran have cemented closer defense ties, China has allegedly shipped missile components to Iran and its proxies, and China and Russia celebrated the anniversary of the Ukraine war by reaffirming their ‘no limits’ partnership.”
He also explained that such cooperation will allow the Iranian, Chinese, and Russian militaries to feel more comfortable operating together if a regional crisis emerges, adding that joint exercises may eventually lead to other forms of defense cooperation, “such as transferring cutting-edge military technologies between authoritarian states bent on challenging the West.”
“For Israel and for the region, the possibility of Iran and its proxies strengthening their already-comprehensive arsenals via access to Chinese and Russian weapons components presents a clear danger to its security,” Burnham said.
According to Iranian state media, this week’s joint drills featured warships and combat and support vessels from the Chinese and Russian navies, as well as warships from Iran’s naval forces, including both the regular military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an internationally designated terrorist organization.
The Iranian Navy’s deputy head of operations, Rear Admiral Mostafa Tajeddini, said these exercises aimed to “strengthen security in the region and expand multilateral cooperation between participating countries,” with the main goal of enhancing maritime security in the northern Indian Ocean, the Iranian state news agency IRNA reported.
The naval drills were monitored by observers from Azerbaijan, South Africa, Oman, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Qatar, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, and Sri Lanka who traveled to Tehran.
In a statement, the Chinese Defense Ministry said the drills aimed at “enhancing military trust and strengthening practical cooperation,” including simulated strikes on maritime targets, visit-board-search-seizure operations, and search and rescue missions.
Both China and Russia have had deep interests in Iran as a partner in the Middle East. Beijing has continued to purchase Iranian crude oil despite Western sanctions and remains one of the top markets for Iranian imports. Meanwhile, Russia has relied on Iran for the supply of bomb-carrying drones used in its war on Ukraine.
According to John Lee, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington, DC-based think tank, cooperation between China, Russia, and Iran has evolved from primarily political, diplomatic, and economic coordination to increasingly include military elements over the past half decade.
“Such exercises indicate that these three countries are preparing to work together across multiple potential conflict zones from the Middle East and Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe to Northeast Asia,” Lee told The Algemeiner.
“That they are practicing tactical strikes against sea-based targets as well as search and seizure operations is a simulation of what would be needed during a hot war with the US and its allies,” he continued.
Lee also explained that these three countries are united by their goal of undermining American power, with Iran trying to weaken Israel and disrupt stability in the Persian Gulf, Russia aiming to challenge NATO and expand into Eastern Europe, and China focused on integrating Taiwan and controlling the South China Sea.
With Iran seeking to coerce and gain leverage by disrupting shipping in the Persian Gulf, Lee argued that US hard power and influence are the key factors preventing these objectives from being realized.
“In a war scenario, the Persian Gulf and other choke points such as the Gulf of Aden become of immense strategic and tactical importance,” Lee said. “Deeper cooperation with Russia and China could allow Iran to exert its presence and influence in these bodies of water.”
Iran’s growing ties with China and Russia come at a time when Tehran is facing increasing sanctions by the United States, particularly on its oil industry, as part of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign aimed at cutting the country’s crude exports to zero and preventing it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Even though Tehran has denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon, the UN nuclear watchdog – the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – has warned that Iran is “dramatically” accelerating uranium enrichment to up to 60 percent purity, close to the roughly 90 percent weapons-grade level.
On Wednesday, the UN Security Council met behind closed doors to discuss Tehran’s nuclear program and its obligation to provide the IAEA with “the information necessary to clarify outstanding issues related to undeclared nuclear material detected at multiple locations in Iran,” diplomat told Reuters.
Tehran has repeatedly claimed that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes rather than weapon development.
However, Western states have said there is no “credible civilian justification” for the country’s recent nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”
Last week, Iran’s so-called “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Tehran will not be bullied into negotiations after US President Donald Trump revealed he had sent a letter to the country’s top authority to negotiate a nuclear deal.
Last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi rejected the possibility of nuclear talks with Washington.
“There will be no possibility of direct talks between us and the United States on the nuclear issue as long as the maximum pressure is applied in this way,” Araghchi said during a joint press conference with his visiting Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.
China will hold a meeting on Friday in Beijing with Russia and Iran on the Iranian “nuclear issue”, its foreign ministry said at a press conference, further highlighting the growing cooperation between the three powers.
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‘Little Gaza’: US Sen. Tom Cotton Introduces Legislation to Combat Campus Radicalism
US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) speaks during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, March 11, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson
US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has proposed two new bills which would impose legal sanctions on purveyors of seditious, pro-terror ideologies on university campuses and the higher education institutions that harbor them, advancing the Republican Party’s offensive against the pro-Hamas student movement.
Shared first with Breitbart News, a news outlet that was instrumental in launching US President Donald Trump’s populist movement, the “No Student Loans for Campus Criminals Act” and “Woke Endowment Security Tax (WEST)” come amid a series of riotous demonstrations promoting antisemitic ideas, as well as the goals of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, and a widespread perception that elite universities have not done enough to combat them.
“First, any pro-Hamas protester convicted of a crime should be ineligible for federal student loans, and federal student loan relief. The American people should not be on the hook for the tuition of Little Gaza inhabitants,” Cotton said in a social media post on Tuesday announcing his introduction of the bills. “Second, our elite universities need to know the cost of pushing anti-American and pro-terrorist agendas.”
He continued, “The WEST Act would tax the largest university endowments to help pay down national debt and secure our southern border.”
As Cotton mentioned in his social media posts, the No Student Loans for Campus Criminals Act would prevent any campus protestor convicted of a crime from receiving federal student loans or student loan relief. Meanwhile, the WEST Act would institute a 6 percent excise tax on the endowments of 11 American universities, using the proceeds to pay down the national debt and secure the southern border shared with Mexico. According to Cotton’s office, the bill would generate $16.6 billion in revenue.
Republican lawmakers have called for holding higher education accountable since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel set off an explosion of antisemitic sentiment on college campuses, causing a succession of conflagrations which still are still burning hot at schools such as Columbia University.
In December, the Republican-led US House Committee on Education and the Workforce issued a report, which said that nothing short of a revolution of the current habits and ideas which constitute the current higher education regime can prevent similar episodes of unrest from occurring in the future. Colleges, it continued, need equal enforcement of civil rights laws to protect Jewish students from discrimination and “viewpoint diversity” to prevent the establishment of ideological echo chambers. It also said that “academic rigor,” undermined by years of dissolving educational standards for political purposes, would guard against the reduction of complex social issues into the sloganeering of “scholar activism,” in which faculty turn the classroom into a soapbox and reward students who mimic them.
The new Trump administration has taken steps to convert this vision into policy since assuming power in January.
On Friday, it canceled $400 million in funding to Columbia University as punishment for the school’s alleged harboring of antisemitic faculty, students, and staff and shielding them from disciplinary sanctions. Prior to that, US President Donald Trump issued a highly anticipated executive order which calls for “using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”
A major provision of the order authorizes the deportation of extremist “alien” student activists, whose support for terrorist organizations, intellectual and material, such as Hamas contributed to fostering antisemitism, violence, and property destruction on college campuses. That policy is currently being challenged in the courts, as a federal judge in Manhattan has halted its application to the case of a male alumnus of Columbia University who was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after being identified as an architect of the Hamilton Hall building takeover, which took place during the closing weeks of the 2023-2024 academic year.
On Monday, US Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced that dozens of colleges and universities will be investigated for civil rights violations stemming from their alleged failure to address campus antisemitism. McMahon named 55 institutions, public and private, in total that were not included in the administration’s February announcement of five investigations of antisemitism at Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
The new schools include: Harvard University, Swarthmore College, Drexel University, and Princeton University — all of which have struggled with antisemitic anti-Israel activity and pro-Hamas agitation, as The Algemeiner has previously reported.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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