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Why Israel’s new right-wing leaders immediately made plastic plates inexpensive again
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Devora Zien’s tiny apartment in Bnei Brak runs like a factory, but, she admits, not a very smooth one. With 12 mouths to feed three times a day, single-use plasticware is a basic necessity, she says. So when Israel’s then-Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman increased taxes on disposables in 2021, Zien said she was “in total shock.”
“For me, it’s more important than bread and milk,” she said. “It’s about survival. I can’t stand in front of the kitchen sink all day washing dishes — and where would I put a dishwasher even if I could afford one?”
Liberman’s tax on disposable dinnerware, as well as another set of taxes he imposed as finance minister on sugar-filled soft drinks, were viewed by many ultra-Orthodox Israelis as unfairly targeting their lifestyle and cynically using health and environmental considerations to single out their community.
This week, after Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was sworn in, Liberman’s successor, Bezalel Smotrich, in his first move as finance minister, signed orders repealing the tax hikes on disposables and sugary drinks.
Ultra-Orthodox lawmakers hailed the move, as did many in the broader haredi population. Images made the rounds on social media of haredi men celebrating the decision by drinking Cristal Mint, a low-in-price, high-in-sugar soda, from disposable plastic cups. Beyond the relief felt by members of the community, there was also a sense that the balance in Israel’s cultural war is once again tipping in their favor.
MK Uri Maklev of the haredi United Torah Judaism party, said the tax reversal underscored the new government’s policy of “working for the citizens and not against them.”
Israel is either the world’s top or second-biggest consumer of disposable tableware per capita, depending on the analysis, making the goods a natural target for environmental activists. And the taxes were projected to bring in $350 million annually to the country’s treasury, no small amount. That’s nearly twice, for example, what the city of Jerusalem spends each year on sanitation.
But the disposables were Liberman’s only target for environmental taxes, which came as he sought to address Israel’s high cost of living by cutting taxes on other goods. And no environmental activist himself, Liberman is well known for his fierce criticism of Israel’s haredi sector, which he says contributes too little to the country through work and army service.
Avigdor Liberman, center, holds a news conference following the dissolving of the Israeli parliament, in Tel Aviv, May 30, 2019. (Flash90)
“The only thing that matters to him is sticking his finger in our eye,” said Devora’s sister-in-law Yael Zien, a media personality who advocates on behalf of Israel’s haredi population. She went on to cite Liberman’s widely condemned statement that he would send haredi Jews on “wheelbarrows straight to the dumpster.”
“You can’t compare your average, secular, two-car family that orders takeaway, with the haredis. We also host far more family functions than any other sector,” Zien said. “Why not raise taxes on a second car? Or flights overseas?”
“Haredim are actually more green than anyone else. We buy less clothes, we don’t fly abroad, and our communities rely heavily on gmachim and passing things on,” she said, referring to the free-loan establishments that provide anything from baby bottles to evening gowns.
Though the taxation touched on a sensitive nerve and was viewed by both sides as another round in the cultural war between secular and Orthodox Israelis, when the dust settled, it turned out that both sides may actually agree on some important issues.
Despite saying she reacted with “ecstasy” to Smotrich’s moves, Zien is not entirely opposed to reinstating the taxes, but this time with cooperation from the affected parties and a multi-pronged approach. Addressing the sugary drinks, Zien believes that the government should have taken steps in parallel to raise awareness in haredi society about the danger of diabetes and not just enforce acts that could be interpreted as punitive.
Yael Zien, a haredi Orthodox personality and mother, said she opposed the tax on disposables — as it was enacted, not on principle. (Courtesy of Yael Zien)
Meanwhile, environmental activists, who had marveled at the taxation on plastic dishes, are willing to admit that Liberman might have paid too little attention to the needs of haredi communities.
Yael Gini, community director at Sustainable Development Goals Israel, noted that tax hikes are just one way to combat waste, and not necessarily the most optimal. Targeting businesses or public places with a blanket ban on disposables, as France enacted this week in what activists are calling a watershed moment, might have been a more prudent first step, she said.
“It’s a shame it came to this. This isn’t sectorial but it feels like it is. [Politicians] turned it into something political and the haredim are right about that,” said Gini, formerly a program director at Greenpeace.
“But [the haredim] need to understand, it’s not an us-versus-them situation,” she said, adding that the environmental impact of Israel’s use of disposables is “a disaster for everyone.”
Despite the political uproar created by the decision to tax single use dinnerware, anecdotal evidence shows it might have been effective, especially for haredi Orthodox families living on a tight budget. Data published in April 2022 by the Ministry of Environment indicated that purchase of single-use plastics in supermarkets had dropped nearly 50% since the taxes were imposed six months earlier. Critics of this survey noted, however, that it did not take into consideration the haredi community’s tendency to shop at convenience stores and to make large purchases before Jewish holidays.
A man shops for disposable plastic tableware in the Osher Ad Supermarket branch in Givat Shaul, Jerusalem, Oct. 27, 2021. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
For Leah, a Hasidic Orthodox mother of seven living in the cloistered Bukharian neighborhood of Jerusalem, Liberman’s policy worked.
“We finally got around to toivelling a dinner set that we had been gifted years before,” she said, referencing the Jewish practice of immersing dishes and utensils in a ritual pool to ensure that they can be used with kosher food.
She also went to IKEA to buy other multi-use items like casserole dishes and admits that she would not have made the trip had plasticware remained affordable. “Life is fast-paced and that was one less thing to worry about,” she said.
The adjustment took time and there were bumps in the road. “Many plates got broken, the children argued all the time over cups, but we got through it. I bought each child their own set and encouraged them to wash it.” Leah, who asked that her last name not be printed, has very little exposure to current affairs and was not aware of Smotrich’s rollback. While the move means she would probably allow herself to be less frugal about buying plastics in the future, she was unlikely to go back entirely to the way things were before, she said.
“It’s nice to eat Shabbat meals on real plates,” Leah said. “It feels more special.”
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A retired judge needed four Torahs rescued from Indiana. So he called his rabbi. And his dentist.
Early on a Sunday morning in July a dentist pointed his black Toyota Sequoia south out of the Chicago suburbs, a rented box trailer swaying behind the hitch. In Champaign, Illinois, a rabbi who had spent the night at his mother’s house pulled onto the highway heading east. Their rendezvous: a century-old synagogue in Terre Haute, Indiana. Their mission: get the Torahs out.
Before the day was over, the operation would involve four Torah scrolls, a pair of towering brass menorahs, more than 100 boxes of books, one electric piano and — because even sacred missions deserve a victory lap — a round of golf.
The orders came from Arizona, where a 79-year-old retired judge, recovering from surgery, was running the operation by phone.
That would be Jerry Orbach, who splits his time between Scottsdale and Chicago and has made a second career of rescuing the remnants of shuls from across America. The walls of his Illinois shul, Northbrook Community Synagogue — where he serves as executive vice president — glow with stained glass he has salvaged from seven shuttered congregations across the Midwest.
So when Michael Brown, executive director of the Indiana Jewish Historical Society, called to say that the United Hebrew Congregation in Terre Haute had sold its building — and needed homes for nearly everything inside — Orbach knew exactly what to do, even if he couldn’t do it himself.
“We can’t get rid of Torahs,” he said. “We have to preserve them.”
He couldn’t make the trip. But he had a crew.
The crew
The whole operation was an in-house affair: all four men belong to Northbrook Community Synagogue. Orbach’s regulars are Dr. Michael Farr, 49, a dentist, and Farr’s best friend Jordan Ripstein, the shul’s gabbai and a violin maker who studied theoretical physics in college. The two have history. They once drove through the night to Kingston, New York, to rescue stained glass from a closing synagogue, smoking cigars and talking about life and music the whole way.
Last September, they hauled back 14 crates from the shuttered Beth Achim synagogue in Southfield, Michigan — towering 13-foot stained glass panels that now wait in the Northbrook basement for their next home.
But Ripstein was out of town. So Orbach turned to his bullpen and pulled out a rabbi.
Aaron Braun, 43, has led Northbrook Community Synagogue since it was founded in 2012 as a merger of three congregations — which makes him, in a sense, a professional preserver of shuls that might otherwise have disappeared. He is also long accustomed to his congregant’s obsession. “Everybody goes along with my meshugas,” Orbach said, using the Yiddish word for craziness. “I’m an old man, so they indulge me.”
Braun didn’t need convincing. “The chance to give Torahs a new home and see them brought back to life and used is one of the holiest endeavors we can pursue,” he said.
The extraction
The congregation they came to help is the oldest in Indiana still in continuous operation. This year, the United Hebrew Congregation celebrated 175 years in Terre Haute — a city whose Jewish community peaked at more than 1,000 people in the late 1940s, when Jewish families owned some 45 local businesses, including three of the four downtown department stores.
Today, the city’s Jewish population is estimated at just under 100. The Reform congregation, down to 45 member families, sold its building in mid-July. “We had to sell in order to continue operating,” said Scott Skillman, its immediate past president. The new owners have said they plan to use the building, known for its cavernous sanctuary and sweeping stained glass windows, as a wedding venue.
It is a familiar story across the state. Wendy Soltz, a Ball State University historian who led the Indiana Synagogue Mapping Project, has documented 66 purpose-built synagogues in Indiana dating back to 1865. Twenty-four have already been demolished.
The Terre Haute building held what the congregation couldn’t take to its smaller new locale. Nearly all of it was in the basement, down seven steps from a side door: four steps, a 90-degree turn, then three more. Farr worked a two-wheel dolly up and down that turn for more than two hours, stacking some 150 boxes of books in the trailer alongside two podiums and a pair of cast-brass menorahs, each more than six feet tall and about 150 pounds.
“We were a pretty sweaty mess,” Braun said.
When the crew opened the ark they found the four scrolls bare. In the tumult of moving out, the mantles had come off; someone had fashioned ropes of felt around them instead. “Not even gartelekh,” Braun said, referring to the sashes that traditionally bind a Torah.
The scrolls, the crew decided, would not ride in the trailer with the boxes. Braun laid them down across the back seat of his SUV and covered them with tallitot, the prayer shawls tucked around them so they couldn’t shift — “even, God forbid, in an accident,” he said. A Torah is the rare object Jews treat like a person: You stand when it passes. You kiss it as it goes by. If one is dropped, the whole congregation fasts. Braun drove north with four of them sleeping in his back seat.
Braun, examining what he could, was impressed by their condition: the calligraphy of at least three of the four looked to be in fairly good shape. The fourth scroll is a mystery: written in a slanted, old-fashioned hand, its lines ragged. “It’s not even full justified,” he said. “It’s wild.”
The getaway
The trailer was full. The Torahs were secure. And one more passenger had joined the convoy: a Yamaha Clavinova electric piano the Terre Haute congregation no longer needed, destined for Braun’s mother’s house in Champaign.
Which is how the getaway came to include a detour. The two men dropped off the piano, then headed to the golf course where Braun grew up playing and got in 18 holes.
“Dr. Farr played some of the best golf I’ve ever seen him play,” the rabbi said.
Farr, a beginner, doesn’t dispute it. “I had a good round. I definitely played better than I normally play,” he said. “Probably by virtue of the fact that we saved four Torahs that day.”
At some point a crop duster buzzed low over their cars — “a not unusual reality of downstate Illinois,” Braun said. Nobody flinched. It had been that kind of day.
Farr rolled back into the Northbrook parking lot around 10 p.m., where the synagogue’s president, Ben Resnick, was waiting in the dark to help unload. The boxes went into the social hall, stacked against the wall. The next morning, Farr was back at his dental practice — “the yank and pull,” as he calls it.
The social hall, though, is only a way station. The items aren’t necessarily staying at Northbrook; the congregation is a holding ground while Orbach hunts for their next home. He plans to call Nik Jakobs, the Jewish farmer building a synagogue in a two-acre cornfield in rural Illinois, about two hours west, to see if he wants any of the pieces for his sanctuary. He also will contact the Jewish Community Legacy Project, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that helps find homes for sacred objects from downsizing and closing congregations.
The sorting has already begun. Brown hopes any documents or photographs in the boxes will go to the Indiana Jewish Historical Society’s archives. A scribe is coming to examine the four scrolls and determine what repairs they need before they can be read from again.
Brown, who set the whole thing in motion with a phone call, sees it as “one of the few small happy threads from a sad story of Jewish decline in the crossroads of America.” He calls Orbach “an unsung Midwestern Jewish hero.”
Back in Terre Haute, the congregation is still holding services every Friday night, in space rented from a Unitarian church — a sanctuary with no crosses and, as it happens, a few Stars of David. “It’s not a closing,” Skillman said. “It’s just a shrinking of our footprint.”
And in Northbrook, four Torahs rest in the social hall. Orbach turns 80 in September. His crew is waiting for the next call.
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Conservative rabbis just told interfaith couples they don’t count — again
Acting improv students learn a fundamental tool called “Yes. . . And.” As you step into a scene, you take what you are given, you don’t ignore it, you don’t try to change it. YES, this is what I have to work with. Then comes the AND: here’s how I build on it.
The guidance issued last week from the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards giving guidance on supporting interfaith families got as far as “Yes,” but dropped the ball on “And.”
The committee’s statement, known as an Omnibus Teshuvah, recommended measures that opened the doors for interfaith families to be included in many life-cycle, religious and communal events — but declined to endorse a measure called for by many families: permitting Conservative rabbis to marry a Jew to someone who is not Jewish.
Let’s start with the “Yes!” The Conservative movement has definitively acknowledged and accepted the reality that many Jewish families are interfaith families. While this has been so for decades, the stated position since 1989 sent them a harsh and strongly disapproving message: “The Conservative movement has been committed to discouraging both the idea and the act of intermarriage.”
The Rabbinical Assembly emphasized its commitment to Jewish law, but included a statement that tolerance might “‘encourage others who are so inclined to intermarry’ without consequence.”
Those consequences were in effect tocut the interfaith couple and family out of Jewish communal life, creating bitterness, pain, and family rupture on the one side, and effectively ensuring that Judaism was diminished on the other.
In fact, one of the anecdotes I often share about why I chose to work with interfaith families and support their decisions is the time that I witnessed a Bat Mitzvah — who was raised in a Jewish home, kept kosher, had respect for Shabbat, and had attended Hebrew School her whole life — stood alone at the Bimah, because her only surviving parent had never converted to Judaism. Instead of being the proud and joyous moment it should have been, she was isolated from her father, the man who had raised her Jewishly and brought her to this milestone. My heart broke for both of them, and my shame of being even partially complicit moved me to examine and change my perspective. In the fullness of time, the RA has realized that creating tsuris at a time of joy is unacceptable. The new guidance explicitly says that that father can stand on the bimah. Mazel tov..
Deserving of equal praise, if not more, is the decision to allow grieving families with Jewish connections avenues to Jewish practices in mourning that provide comfort, strength and faith. This too is progress: A family death is not a time to wag one’s finger and metaphorically tell the mourner that they have to sleep in the bed that they made.
And representing the other end of the life cycle, a rabbi may now congratulate an interfaith family for the birth of a child. Being able to celebrate the advent of a baby into the household should always have been an open avenue of clergy communication, and that it is now is nothing but a positive change.
This turnaround is no small feat and deserves its recognition. The Rabbinical Assembly has identified and addressed many of the strictures and attitudes that previously diminished the enjoyment of a joyous event or added pain for a grief-stricken individual. An interfaith family is no longer subject to “consequences,” to use a term as stated in the 1989 decision — mostly.
All the life-cycle events that interfaith families have struggled with are at long last within the welcome embrace of the Conservative movement, save one: The wedding itself. The fig leaf in the forms of a misheberach (a blessing) by the rabbi either before or after the wedding and the blessing of the home the couple is creating does nothing but call attention to the movement’s disparagement of the creation of interfaith families. The movement is in effect saying: “We are repulsed by your decision to marry outside the strictures of our interpretation of Judaism, but we will not exact revenge upon you for doing so.” Small comfort.
Here is where the “and” can still come in — and where the Conservative movement itself has paved the way for it to happen.
The religious law prohibition against interfaith marriages derives from a verse in Deuteronomy 7:3 “You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons.”
This biblical statement has evolved from meaning marriage with the seven nations proscribed in the Torah to general intermarriage.
However, as recently as the 19th century, the renowned scholar Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch noted that the prohibition was based on the presumption that the resulting family would be estranged from the Jewish community. That presumption was based on a self-fulfilling prophecy that an interfaith family would be shunned, and therefore not engage with their community.
The committee of the Rabbinical Assembly fulfills this prophecy as it concludes the new guidance with this hurtful assertion: “The role of Conservative/Masorti clergy on the wedding day remains limited, but that specific day is only one small aspect of the establishment and growth of a family.” Relegating a wedding to be a small aspect to the ‘establishment and growth of a family’ is patently untrue, as evidenced by the great importance society at large, and Jewish society in particular place on this event.
The RA, by sticking with the prohibition against interfaith marriage, is perpetuating the very estrangement that Rav Hirsch posits is the entire motivation for opposing interfaith marriage. Nevertheless, that very foundation, the estrangement from the community, is no longer a barrier unless we want it to be. The Omnibus Teshuvah maps out how an interfaith family can be welcomed into the community and how they can engage in almost every other Jewish life cycle event and communal engagement.
Why then, does the RA persist in condemning the act of interfaith marriage?
The movement itself already has the religious law tools they can use to find a way forward. The arguments the RA used to pave the way for LGTBQ individuals, couples and families to be integrated into Jewish society are equally valid here. The first principle they used was that of Dor dor V’doroshav, that every generation is obligated to interpret the Torah in their terms — in effect, that the accumulated knowledge and experience of Judaism over time has bearing on rabbinical decisions. In terms of interfaith marriage, the accumulated knowledge and experience is demonstrating that interfaith families retain a Jewish identity and desire to remain a part of the community. Intentional interfaith families show dedication and great consideration to incorporating Judaism into their lives, and that this is not a new phenomenon.
In a decision two decades ago embracing LGBTQ Jews, Rabbi Elliot Dorff and colleagues leaned on the concept of human dignity, kavod ha briot, quoting the Talmudic stricture: “So great is human dignity that it supersedes a negative commandment of the Torah.” They point out that living in humiliation violates this idea.
Perhaps most powerfully, we read that homosexual marriage is “understood to be a profound desire by gay and lesbian Jews to sanctify their lives and establish faithful families guided by the light of Torah.” Should that “profound desire” within an interfaith marriage not carry equal weight?
Today, by continuing to deny legitimacy to an interfaith marriage, the RA relegates the couple to a lesser status, belittling them for following their emotional guidance, and denying them their full humanity.
The RA has issued some remarkable guidance in this Omnibus Responsum. YES! The many parents and grandparents who will receive with gratitude the congratulations on the birth of their children, the families who will be allowed to be united at the bimah at a B’Mitzvah, the mourners who will find strength and comfort from clergy during their time of grief — they will all be positively affected by the new permissions and guidance. These are concessions, but important ones.
In spite of the limits of this guidance I hold out hope for the “AND” that is to come. Not just the recognition that interfaith marriages happen, but the inherent truth that they can be a joyful part of the Jewish experience and a positive force in their community.
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Justice Department pledges action on antisemitic hate crimes in New York as it recognizes Ari Halberstam murder as civil rights case
More than 30 years after Ari Halberstam was killed in one of New York’s deadliest antisemitic attacks, the U.S. Justice Department has formally acknowledged that if his murder had happened today, it would be investigated as a federal hate crime and civil rights violation.
At the same time, the Justice Department also pledged that it would be devoting resources to investigating and prosecuting hate crimes across New York as antisemitic attacks continue to climb in New York City.
NYPD statistics released this week show that in the first seven months of 2026, anti-Jewish incidents rose 8.5%, and 57% of the reported hate crimes in the city involved Jewish victims. In addition, anti-Jewish incidents increased 53% in July compared with the same month last year.
Halberstam was 16 when he was murdered in 1994 when Rashid Baz, a Lebanese-born cab driver, opened fire on a van carrying Lubavitcher yeshiva students across the Brooklyn Bridge. Baz was convicted of murder and sentenced to 141 years in prison, where he died in 2023.
Because the attack was not immediately recognized as an act of terrorism and later rejected as part of a conspiracy, Ari’s mother, Devorah Halberstam, for decades fought to have her son’s killing recognized as an antisemitic hate crime and a federal civil rights matter.
“There is no question that if the murder of your son, Ari Halberstam, had occurred today, we would investigate it and seek to prosecute it as a federal hate crime,” wrote former U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in a letter dated July 23, one of his final acts before becoming director of national intelligence on Monday. The acknowledgment came weeks after Clayton met with Devorah Halberstam, who co-founded the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn. It expands on remarks Clayton delivered in June at an NYU Law School conference on combating hate crimes. “I have discussed these matters with my successor, Jamie McDonald, and we are fully aligned,” Clayton wrote.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to questions about what specific steps the office is taking under McDonald’s leadership to address the recent increase in antisemitic hate crimes across the city.
Halberstam, who is credited with helping draft New York state’s first anti-terrorism laws and has spent decades facilitating the training of law enforcement officers on combating terrorism and hate crimes, said the letter gives her hope that the federal government remains committed to confronting antisemitic violence.
“With hatred on the rise nationally and internationally, I am deeply concerned about the safety of Jewish New Yorkers,” she said in a statement. “I will continue to fight to ensure that no other mother has to bury her child because of hatred, as I did.”
Earlier this year, Halberstam hosted Mayor Zohran Mamdani at the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn. Since taking office, Mamdani has come under scrutiny from Jewish leaders over his handling of antisemitism and anti-Israel protests. Some Israeli officials have accused the mayor of fueling antisemitism through his sharp criticism of Israel.
In a statement on Monday, Mamdani called the rise in antisemitic hate crimes “unacceptable” and pointed to an 800% increase in funding for the city’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. “The work to uproot antisemitism out of this city is one that will continue,” Mamdani said, “ until we see hate crimes come to an end in the city.”
JTA contributed to this report
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