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‘We were broken to see what we saw’: US rabbis visit Israel during wartime
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Wearing army-green helmets and bulletproof vests, the group of American rabbis and community leaders stood next to the ruins of a building at Kibbutz Be’eri as Cantor Luis Cattan chanted El Maleh Rachamim, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, for “all those who were murdered in Israel and beyond.”
The group then collectively said the Mourner’s Kaddish and walked silently back to their bus.
So ended the first day of a three-day solidarity mission to Israel, which brought the group through the ravaged communities of southern Israel, to a volunteer center in Jerusalem and back home. One of multiple such missions taking place this week — another was organized by New York’s UJA-Federation — the goal of the trip was to expose the participants to the horrors of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, provide them with opportunities to give back to the country and help them articulate a message to bring back to their communities.
“I hear over and over again American Jews saying there are no words,” said Rabbi Neil Zuckerman of New York City’s Park Avenue Synagogue. “I think there are a lot of words, actually. And I think being here gives us some words that need to be spoken about what’s happening here, the moral clarity that’s here, both the pain and the incredible acts of unity that we see.”
Cantor Luis Cattan sings a prayer for the dead at Kibbutz Be’eri on a mission of Conservative Jewish leaders to Israel on Oct. 30, 2023. (Screenshot)
The group of 34 consisted of 19 Americans and 15 more Israeli counterparts and support staff, and was organized by the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center, a complex that serves as the home base of Conservative Judaism in Israel. It ran from Monday to Wednesday. The goal, said Fuchsberg CEO Stephen Daniel Arnoff, was to help “our colleagues from North America have a firsthand, very human experience of this horrible time in our world.”
After landing at Ben Gurion Airport on Monday, the participants first traveled to Ofakim, a southern Israeli city that also suffered the Hamas invasion, where they visited the home of Rachel Edri, who became an Israeli folk hero after stymying terrorists by offering them cookies. From there, the group went to Be’eri, where attackers killed more than 100 people.
They were the first civilian group since the massacre, aside from journalists, to tour the site, where homes are burnt and blood and knives still line the floor. They ended the day at Camp Shura, a military base that has transformed into a facility for identifying the bodies of those killed in the invasion.
“What I saw and experienced yesterday is imprinted in me for the rest of my life,” said Rabbi Marc Soloway of Congregation Bonai Shalom in Boulder, Colorado. Arnoff said, “We were broken to see what we saw and the difficult but natural response was to say the prayer for the dead.”
Tuesday was spent volunteering at a relief center in Jerusalem and meeting with families directly impacted by Oct. 7 and Israel’s ensuing war on Hamas in Gaza. Those included Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, whose son Hersh Goldberg-Polin is held hostage by Hamas, along with about 240 others. The couple have become two of the leading faces of the movement demanding the hostages’ freedom, which has galvanized Jewish communities across the United States and beyond. Before they spoke to the delegation, Goldberg-Polin’s parents had made the reverse trip — returning to Israel after a short stint advocating for their son in New York City.
“I am in shock, walking through the world without my heart,” Goldberg told the group. She and Polin described the horror of not knowing whether Hersh is still alive, after he was last seen in a video lifting himself up with his own strength into the rear of a Hamas pickup truck on its way back to Gaza — after he had lost one his arms in a grenade attack that killed 18 of 29 people who were crammed alongside him in a roadside bomb shelter.
“We are not convinced that the Israeli government is putting the hostages front and center,” Polin said. “They are talking about war and victory, but they are not talking about the hostages. It is critical even in Israel that we are not forsaking the 239 hostages. The biggest moral victory that this country needs now is to see 239 hostages returning to their families.”
Goldberg described herself as a naturally shy person who has become incapable of feeling emotions such as nervousness or fear when thrust onto the public stage to push for her son’s release. But she said that small gestures still make a difference. “It actually helps, receiving the one-line message on Whatsapp,” she said.
The final day of the trip was about “resilience and inspiration” for “clergy and communal leaders to go back home, representing tens of thousands of people who are frozen with fear and don’t know what they can do to help,” said Arnoff. “Now, they can go back and explain what they saw, what they witnessed.”
The solidarity mission is part of Fuchsberg’s broader efforts to respond to the crisis. It has also turned its Jerusalem campus into a sanctuary for 200 evacuated families from Israel’s south and north, living in dorms generally reserved for students on the Conservative gap-year program Nativ. It has also opened its synagogue for young Israelis of all stripes to sing and pray together.
“I came here because it’s home and I needed to come home and really give the message to everyone here who is struggling, who have lost people ,who are hurting — you’re not alone, we are with you,” said Rabbi Annie Lewis of the Shaare Torah congregation in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
A personal moment for Zuckerman came when he was able to give a quick hug to his son, who is serving in the IDF in Gaza. He compared the experience of being a pulpit rabbi now to how he felt at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Whatever we were planning on doing this fall with our communities, we’ve pivoted,” said Zuckerman. “This is very much a marathon, not a sprint.”
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The post ‘We were broken to see what we saw’: US rabbis visit Israel during wartime appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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How reality TV got real: A review of Emily Nussbaum’s ‘Cue the Sun!’
There’s a trope on sitcoms where characters think they’re being filmed for a reality television show, when in fact what they’re experiencing is real life. (Real life within the fictional […]
The post How reality TV got real: A review of Emily Nussbaum’s ‘Cue the Sun!’ appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Israeli Cabinet to Meet Tuesday to Approve Lebanon Ceasefire Deal
A view shows the moment of an Israeli strike on a building, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, in the Chiyah district of Beirut’s southern suburbs, Lebanon, Nov. 25, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Adnan Abidi
A senior Israeli official said on Monday that Israel‘s cabinet would meet on Tuesday to approve a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah, and a Lebanese official said Beirut had been told by Washington that an accord could be announced “within hours.”
Israeli officials had said earlier that a deal to end the war was getting closer though some issues remained, while two senior Lebanese officials voiced guarded optimism even as Israeli strikes pounded Lebanon anew.
US news website Axios, citing an unnamed senior US official, said Israel and Lebanon had agreed to the terms of a deal, and a senior Israeli official told Reuters that Tuesday’s meeting was intended to approve it.
Israel‘s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said Israel would maintain an ability to strike southern Lebanon under any agreement.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on the Axios report.
The US has pushed for a deal to end over a year of hostilities between the Iran-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon and wields significant political and military influence in the country, and Israel that erupted last year following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.
Since the Hamas onslaught, which launched the war in Gaza, Hezbollah has been firing barrages of rockets, missiles, and drones at northern Israel almost daily, forcing tens of thousands of Israelis to flee their homes. Israel had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah but drastically escalated its military operations over the last two months, seeking to push Hezbollah forces further away from the Israel-Lebanon border. The intensified fighting has raised fears of a wider Middle East war.
In Beirut, Lebanese Deputy Parliament Speaker Elias Bou Saab told Reuters there were “no serious obstacles” left to beginning implementation of a US-proposed ceasefire with Israel.
Bou Saab said the proposal would entail an Israeli military withdrawal from south Lebanon and regular Lebanese army troops deploying in the border region, long a Hezbollah stronghold, within 60 days.
He said a sticking point on who would monitor compliance with the ceasefire been resolved in the last 24 hours with an agreement to set up a five-country committee, including France and chaired by the United States.
A Western diplomat said another stumbling block had been the sequencing of Israel‘s withdrawal, the Lebanese army’s deployment, and the return of displaced Lebanese to their homes in south Lebanon.
Efforts to clinch a truce appeared to advance last week when US mediator Amos Hochstein declared significant progress after talks in Beirut before holding meetings in Israel and then returning to Washington.
“We are moving in the direction towards a deal, but there are still some issues to address,” Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said, without elaborating.
Michael Herzog, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, told Israel‘s GLZ radio an agreement was close and “it could happen within days … We just need to close the last corners,” according to a post on X by GLZ senior anchorman Efi Triger.
A second senior Lebanese official, speaking on condition of anonymity earlier in the day, said Beirut had not received any new Israeli demands from US mediators, who were describing the atmosphere as positive and saying “things are in progress.”
The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah spiraled into full-scale war in September when Israel went on the offensive, pounding wide areas of Lebanon with airstrikes and sending troops into the south.
Israel has dealt major blows to Hezbollah, killing its leader Hassan Nasrallah and other top commanders and inflicting massive destruction in areas of Lebanon where the group holds sway.
Diplomacy has focused on restoring a ceasefire based on UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended a 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war.
It requires Hezbollah to pull its fighters back around 30 km (19 miles) from the Israeli border, behind the Litani River, and the regular Lebanese army to enter the frontier region.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said the test for any agreement would be in the enforcement of two main points.
“The first is preventing Hezbollah from moving southward beyond the Litani, and the second, preventing Hezbollah from rebuilding its force and rearming in all of Lebanon,” Saar said in broadcast remarks to the Israeli parliament.
Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said Israel must press on with the war until “absolute victory.” Addressing Netanyahu on X, he said “it is not too late to stop this agreement!”
But Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said Israel should reach an agreement in Lebanon. “If we say ‘no’ to Hezbollah being south of the Litani, we mean it,” he told journalists.
Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem said last week that the group had reviewed and given feedback on the US ceasefire proposal, and any truce was now in Israel‘s hands.
Branded a terrorist group by the United States, the heavily armed, Shi’ite Muslim militant group has endorsed Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri of the Shi’ite Amal movement to negotiate.
The post Israeli Cabinet to Meet Tuesday to Approve Lebanon Ceasefire Deal first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Take Action Now: Help Stop These 6 Media Outlets From Running Biased Stories Against Israel
The Wall Street Journal’s previous office in Palo Alto. Photo: Wiki Commons.
If we’ve learned anything about the reporting from inside Gaza in the past year, it’s that there is virtually no such thing as professional journalism inside the Strip.
On multiple occasions, HonestReporting has exposed Gazan journalists who have disqualified themselves from claiming to be reporting objectively. Some have publicly expressed their antisemitism or blatant anti-Israel bias. Others have been revealed to be active supporters of terrorism, or friends of Hamas.
Media outlets have taken action against several of these exposed journalists, and their bylines can no longer be found on mainstream media reports from Gaza.
But others have continued to report, as media outlets prefer to sweep the issue under the carpe,t hoping that the problem will simply disappear.
But it won’t.
It’s not enough to expose the biased, antisemitic, or terror-supporting journalists. It’s time to expose the six media outlets whose silence has protected 20 biased journalists.
HonestReporting is launching a social media campaign to hold these outlets accountable. We demand they stop letting these “journalists” report on Israel-related issues.
Six major outlets employ 20 journalists tied to bias or even terror groups. Despite clear evidence, accountability is ignored. Over the next few weeks, we’ll expose how they infiltrated newsrooms—why it matters, and what you can do about it.
Stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/BOZ3r4k6Yd
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 19, 2024
Reuters
The agency still employs eight journalists exposed for infiltrating Israel, expressing biased views, or having unethical ties with Hamas:
- Yasser Qudih: Infiltrated Israel on October 7, and was honored by Hamas. He also won the 2024 Pulitzer prize with Reuters photography staff.
- Doaa Rouqa and Hamuda Hassan: No action taken after they celebrated images of October 7 atrocities.
- Iraq Bureau Chief Timour Azhari: Covers the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, yet demonizes Israel online.
- Suhaib Jadallah Salem, Mohammed Jadallah Salem, Fadi Shanaa, and Ibraheem Abu Mustafa: All received awards from Hamas. But Reuters had no problem with this, or with the terror groups‘ paraphernalia that decorated the Reuters office:
The Associated Press
The wire service still employs seven journalists who either infiltrated Israel or collaborated with terror groups:
- The agency hasn’t taken action against Hatem Ali and Ali Mahmud, who were in exactly the right place on October 7 to capture images of Israelis kidnapped to Gaza:
- Adel Hana, Hatem Moussa, Fatima Shbair, and Khalil Hamra: All participated in official Hamas propaganda events, yet were and are defended by AP. Adel Hana also taught media courses for the Hamas-run Information Office.
- Mohammed Zanaty: A Lebanese cameraman who supported an ally of Hezbollah online, yet AP kept silent on the matter.
AFP
The wire service stood by Mohammed Baba, a photojournalist who participated in a Hamas promo and was honored by the terror group.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), New York Times (NYT), and CBS News
Zero action has been taken against the following journalists:
- Abeer Ayyoub, WSJ: Shared terrorist propaganda.
- Samar Abu Elouf, NYT: Honored as Hamas “work partner.”
- Yousef Masoud, NYT: Infiltrated Israel on October 7.
- Marwan Al-Ghoul, CBS News: Spoke at an official event of the PFLP, a proscribed terror organization.
These 20 identified journalists have proven they cannot report on Israel objectively. It’s past time for these outlets and journalists to be held accountable.
How You Can Help
Take action now. Demand accountability from Reuters, AP, AFP, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CBS News: These journalists must no longer be allowed to report on Israel for any respectable publication.
Go to HonestReporting’s dedicated Call Out Complicity page, where you can sign the petition, send emails to editor,s and post our campaign content to social media.
We must get loud.
We must demand action.
HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
The post Take Action Now: Help Stop These 6 Media Outlets From Running Biased Stories Against Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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