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With Oct. 7 on their minds, Jewish teens head to gathering of thousands with renewed sense of priorities
When 18-year-old TJ Katz was elected last February to be international president of BBYO after four years of deep involvement with the Jewish youth organization, the New Jersey teen was exceedingly excited.
Serving as the face of a movement that reaches over 70,000 teens in 62 countries, Katz told an interviewer, put him in a unique position “to tangibly impact the lives of thousands of people.”
After graduating high school, Katz deferred admission by a year to the University of Florida to focus on his role as BBYO’s so-called Grand Aleph Godol — top leader — just as the organization was on the threshold of celebrating its 100th anniversary.
Then came Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and the ensuing surge in antisemitic and anti-Israel ferment.
“My inbox was flooded with hundreds of emails from teens genuinely ready to unite and do what they can to help,” Katz said of the response to Oct. 7. “There has never been a more monumental time to unite.”
Now BBYO is preparing for its International Convention (IC), to be held this year in Orlando, Florida, on Feb. 15-19. Over 3,700 teens will come together for the largest annual Jewish teen gathering in America not only to herald the 100th year of BBYO, known years ago as the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, but to find support, strength and solidarity at a challenging time. Many teens come to IC from communities where they are among the only Jews.
This won’t be the first major national gathering of BBYO teens since Oct. 7. Thousands of BBYO teens from around the country joined the over 250,000 participants at the March for Israel on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on November 14, 2023.
“As I walked into the rally, I immediately began seeing friends from around the country,” Josh Danziger, a high school senior from Houston, wrote in The Shofar, a BBYO online publication. “Jewish teens overcame differences in background, practice, and belief because of an authentic love for Am Yisrael.”
In a sign of the concerns that were occupying the minds of Jewish teens even before Hamas’s attack on Israel, Danziger launched a Jewish Security Alliance with other BBYO teens last year. The impetus was the 2022 attack at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, by a gunman who took several people hostage. The alliance trains young Jews across the country to prepare for potential antisemitic threats, anti-Israel harassment, physical violence or an active shooter situation. Danziger and some of his BBYO peers also formed an Antisemitism Response Club to bring teens together for discussions and events.
“I feel a responsibility to my people,” Danziger said. “I want my peers to know what to do. As Jews, we have a religious obligation to protect and take care of our community.”
Shortly after Oct. 7, BBYO’s CEO, Matt Grossman, embarked on a multicity listening tour to understand how Jewish teens were feeling, what resources they needed, and where they see their role in building a hopeful and secure Jewish future.
“While on the listening tour, I was particularly interested in hearing how teens’ lives have changed since the October 7 terrorist attack in Israel,” Grossman said. “This was not a political discussion but a human and emotional one.”
Among the things Grossman heard was how important it is for Jewish teens to be with Jewish peers at a time when they are feeling particularly isolated.
“Being in an environment with other BBYO teens is like a breath of fresh air,” said Denver teen Jacob Malek. “When you go into a meeting, you don’t have to worry about who you tell you’re Jewish; you can just be you. You don’t have to think about what if someone else thinks of you differently because you’re Jewish; being Jewish is the reason that you guys are together.”
BBYO put together a resource page on its website with webinars, articles, and special events to help parents and teens respond effectively to antisemitism and hate in their communities, schools, and on social media. Together with the Anti-Defamation League, BBYO also created a joint website for teens to report antisemitic incidents.
“As a teen-led organization, one of the things we always have to measure is what we talk about and think about and how we lead BBYO as a movement even in difficult times,” Grossman said. “Jewish teens will never be alone because they have BBYO. And that’s an amazing gift.”
BBYO was founded on May 3, 1924 as the Jewish teen group Aleph Zadik Aleph by a group of 14 young Jewish men in Omaha, Nebraska. Twenty years later, an assembly of young women founded B’nai B’rith Girls, and together the two organizations eventually became BBYO. It now has more than 725 chapters and an alumni network of over 400,000.
Hundreds of BBYO teens at the March for Israel rally in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14, 2023. (BBYO)
Due to unprecedented demand to attend, IC 2024 will be the largest-ever convention in BBYO’s history. Over 5,500 attendees representing 46 countries are expected, including teens, donors, parents, alumni, educators and influencers.
Over the course of five days, the convention, whose theme is “Forever Young,” aims to shape the narrative of how teens combat antisemitism, embrace democracy, and fuel their enthusiasm for making a difference in their communities and worldwide, according to organizers. The teens will hear from and meet inspiring speakers, get leadership skills training, serve the local community, learn together, celebrate Shabbat and have access to exclusive music performances.
A Museum of BBYO and the election of the 100th board of Aleph Zadik Aleph (AZA) and the 80th of B’nai B’rith Girls (BBG) will honor the movement’s history.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” said Debbie Shemony, BBYO’s senior vice president for marketing and communications. “It will impact the attendees in ways we can’t even imagine yet.”
Over the course of 2024, BBYO chapters in cities around the world will host large-scale centennial celebrations, and the movement will launch an initiative for teens to log a collective 100,000 hours of community service.
For many attendees, IC is a much-anticipated reunion with their peers. Teens who have participated in the summer leadership and travel program offered by the organization can reconnect with friends from around the country – and sometimes the globe.
Last summer, Emma Gornstein, a high school junior from Ardsley, New York, participated in both a chapter leadership training institute at BBYO’s summer home in Starlight, Pennsylvania, and a BBYO Passport travel experience to Central Europe.
“They were amazing experiences and I learned so much,” said Gornstein, who has been active in BBYO since eighth grade. “I’m looking forward to a lot of reunions at IC.”
Even if IC is one of your first experiences with BBYO, she said, “the energy there is contagious and you are bound to make at least one friend.”
Rabbi Daniel Septimus, a former BBYO international president who is now the CEO of Austin’s Jewish community center, Shalom Austin, said the movement is a terrific framework for connecting Jewish teens locally, regionally and globally, and bringing them together for leadership opportunities.
“BBYO is doing an incredible job of really teaching the value of K’lal Yisrael, of Jewish peoplehood, and that we are all bound to each other,” Septimus said.
His daughter, high school sophomore Talia Septimus, represents the third generation of the family’s involvement in BBYO.
“It’s pretty amazing,” Talia said. “I love that my grandparents and parents had their own ways of being involved in BBYO, yet I can take my own path.”
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The post With Oct. 7 on their minds, Jewish teens head to gathering of thousands with renewed sense of priorities appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why Does the Media Not Tell the Truth About Hezbollah’s Attacks on Israel?
Firefighters respond to a fire near a rocket attack from Lebanon, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, near Kiryat Shmona, northern Israel, June 14, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Last month, the BBC News website published a report by the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Lucy Williamson under the headline “Fires in northern Israel fuel demands to tackle escalation with Hezbollah.”
The following day, the BBC News website published another report by the same journalist on the same topic titled “Israelis using gardening tools to fight wildfires sparked by Hezbollah rockets.”
A couple of weeks later, that pattern was repeated. On June 19, the BBC News website published a report by Williamson headlined “Israel and Hezbollah play with fire as fears grow of another war,” which was previously discussed here.
Late on June 22, the BBC News website published another report titled “Unable to back down, Israel and Hezbollah move closer to all-out war,” which is credited to “Lucy Williamson, Reporting from the Israel-Lebanon border.”
If one assumed that the reason for the appearance within days of a second report on the same topic by the same journalist was the emergence of new information concerning the situation on Israel’s northern border, one would be wrong.
A considerable proportion of Williamson’s second report (which was also translated into Swahili) consists of interviews with people on both sides of the border: Israelis from Kiryat Shmona and Malkiya, and two residents of southern Lebanese villages.
Failing to clarify that her interviewee lives in a town described as one of the “bastions of strong Hezbollah support” where a strike against a Hezbollah command center took place in March, Williamson tells her readers that:
Fatima Belhas lives a few miles (7km) from the Israeli border, near Jbal el Botm.
In the early days, she would shake with fear when Israel bombed the area, she says, but has since come to terms with the bombardments and no longer thinks of leaving.
“Where would I go?” she asked. “[Others] have relatives elsewhere. But how can I impose on someone like that? We have no money.”
“Maybe it is better to die at home with dignity,” she said. “We have grown up resisting. We won’t be driven out of our land like the Palestinians.”
Readers may recall that just days earlier, another BBC report from southern Lebanon promoted that same “Nakba” comparison.
Similarly failing to note Hezbollah’s presence and infrastructure in Mays al Jbal (also Meiss al Jabal), Williamson continues:
Hussein Aballan recently left his village of Mays al Jbal, around 6 miles (10km) from Kiryat Shmona, on the Lebanese side of the border.
Life there had become impossible, he said, with erratic communications and electricity, and almost no functioning shops.
The few dozen families left there are mainly older people who refuse to leave their homes and farms, he told the BBC.
But he backed the Hezbollah assault on Israel.
“Everyone in the south [of Lebanon] has lived through years of aggression, but has come out stronger,” he said. “Only through resistance are we strong.”
Williamson fails to remind her readers that Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon 24 years ago, and that the only “aggression” has been in response to attacks by Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, such as the cross-border attack that sparked the war in 2006.
As in her previous report, Williamson portrays the events resulting from the Lebanese terror group’s decision to attack Israel on October 8 as “tit-for-tat”:
But as the tit-for-tat conflict grinds on, and more than 60,000 Israelis remain evacuated from their homes in the north, there are signs that both Israel’s leaders and its citizens are prepared to support military options to push Hezbollah back from the border by force.
Also, as in her own previous reports and in most other BBC content, Williamson fails to explain to her readers that according to UN Security Council Resolution 1701, Hezbollah should be nowhere near the border with Israel ,and that the UN’s “peacekeeping force” in Lebanon has failed to enforce that resolution since it was passed in 2006.
Williamson’s framing of the situation in the north of Israel includes the following:
The dangerous stalemate here hinges largely on the war Israel is fighting more than 100 miles (160km) to the south in Gaza.
A ceasefire there would help calm tensions in the north too, but Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is keeping both conflicts going, mortgaged by his promise to far-right government allies to destroy Hamas before ending the Gaza War. [emphasis added]
And:
Demands for political change are likely to increase when Israel’s conflicts end.
Many believe Israel’s prime minister is playing for time: caught between growing demands for a ceasefire in Gaza, and growing support for a war in the north.
In other words, Williamson’s framing ignores the fact that Hamas chose to attack Israel on October 7, and that Hezbolah chose to attack Israel on October 8, and almost every day since then. She erases the fact that Hamas has rejected multiple ceasefire offers in order to promote a narrative whereby it is Israel’s prime minister alone who is “keeping both conflicts going”.
Moreover, she tells BBC audiences that:
The problem for Israel is how to stop the rockets and get its people back to the abandoned northern areas of the country.
The problem for Hezbollah is how to stop the rockets when its ally, Hamas, is being pounded by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Williamson cites a statement made by the UN Secretary General on June 21:
Hezbollah is a well-armed, well-trained army, backed by Iran; Israel, a sophisticated military power with the US as an ally.
Full-scale war is likely to be devastating for both sides.
The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said it would be a “catastrophe that goes […] beyond imagination”.
Like the UN Secretary General, Williamson has nothing to tell her audiences about the Lebanese state’s decades-long failure to tackle the Islamist terrorist organization that has repeatedly dragged that country into conflict, and has nothing to say about the failure of the United Nations to enforce its own resolutions designed to prevent further conflict.
The BBC’s sidelining of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and its whitewashing of the failures of the UN forces that are supposed to enforce it, did not begin in October 2023: that editorial policy has been evident for many years.
Now, however, that policy is being used to advance framing of a potential escalation after over eight months of continuous attacks on Israeli communities by Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations, as something that is the responsibility of Israel alone.
Hadar Sela is the co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.
The post Why Does the Media Not Tell the Truth About Hezbollah’s Attacks on Israel? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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University of Toronto is granted an injunction to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment that has been on campus for two months
The University of Toronto has received an injunction to dismantle the pro-Palestinian encampment on its property. The 98-page decision from Justice Markus Koehnen of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice said that members of the encampment must take down the tents within 24 hours, by 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July 3. Toronto Police will have […]
The post University of Toronto is granted an injunction to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment that has been on campus for two months appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Jewish Cemeteries Vandalized in Cincinnati, Montreal
Vandals in Canada targeted a Jewish cemetery. Photo: Screenshot
Vandals have targeted notable Jewish cemeteries in Cincinnati, Ohio and Montreal, Canada, sparking outcry and concern over mounting threats of antisemitism.
Vandals at Montreal’s Kehal Yisrael Cemetery placed memorial stones in the shape of a Nazi swastika on top of tombstones. Ones with the last names Eichler and Herman were targeted in the antisemitic attack.
Placing memorial stones on graves is an ancient Jewish custom to memorialize the dead. Jewish cemeteries oftentimes have stones nearby tombstones for mourners.
Canadian leaders decried the vandalism.
“It is absolutely abhorrent and revolting to defile the dead with swastikas,” Jeremy Levi, the Jewish mayor of a Jewish-majority suburb of Montreal, commented on X/Twitter. “This desecration at the Kehal Israel cemetery in Montreal is beyond contempt. [Canadian Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau, step aside and get out of the way so we can reclaim our country. May this Kohen’s neshama have an Aliyah on high.” One of the tombstones vandalized belonged to a Kohen.
The leader of the Conservative Party in Canada’s parliament and candidate for prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, lambasted Trudeau and denounced antisemitism. “We cannot close our eyes to the disgusting acts of antisemitism that are happening in our country everyday,” he posted on X/Twitter. “The prime minister must finally act to stop these displays of antisemitism. If he won’t, a common sense Conservative government will.”
Canada, like many countries around the world, has experienced a surge in antisemitic incidents since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Meanwhile in Cincinnati, vandals targeted two historic Jewish cemeteries this past week, toppling and shattering ancient tombstones — some dating back to the 1800s.
According to a statement from the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati, 176 gravesites in Cincinnati’s West Side were ruined “in an act of antisemitic vandalism.”
“Due to the extensive damage and the historical nature of many of the gravestones, we have not yet been able to identify all the families affected by this act,” the statement continued. “Our community [is] heartbroken.”
The Cincinnati Police Department and the FBI are investigating the incidents.
The destruction of monuments is the latest in a greater trend of antisemitic vandalism. In an incident over the weekend, vandals in Australia targeted war memorials dedicated to Australian veterans who sacrificed their lives in Korea and Vietnam with pro-Hamas graffiti.
A couple weeks earlier, vandals in Belgium defaced two memorials for Holocaust victims with swastikas and a phrase calling for violence against Israel. In Germany, meanwhile, at least seven stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks in the sidewalk meant to mark Jewish homes seized by the Nazis, were defaced with the message “Jews are perpetrators.”
The US, Canada, Europe, and Australia have all experienced an explosion of antisemitic incidents in the wake of the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, and amid the ensuing war in Gaza. In many countries, anti-Jewish hate crimes have spiked to record levels.
According to the B’nai Brith, antisemitic incidents in Canada more than doubled in 2023 compared to the prior year.
The post Jewish Cemeteries Vandalized in Cincinnati, Montreal first appeared on Algemeiner.com.