If you are in New York City and struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call 1-888-NYC-WELL for free and confidential crisis counseling. You can also dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.
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Yeshiva University is left in mourning after a beloved gay alum dies by suicide
(New York Jewish Week) — Before eulogizing their friend on Thursday night, Beth Weiss draped a rainbow flag with a Jewish star over the podium.
It was a potent symbol of the twin identities that Weiss and others who knew Herschel Siegel said he had struggled to reconcile, particularly as a student and 2021 graduate of Yeshiva University. Siegel died by suicide Friday in Atlanta, where he grew up and had been living.
Weiss said during the eulogy they recalled having “a conversation with a gay friend about what it felt like to be queer in the Orthodox world” for the first time with Siegel, a classmate at Y.U., the Modern Orthodox flagship in uptown Manhattan.
“I can’t tell you how invaluable conversations and connections like that are,” Weiss said. “We talked about our dreams for the future, but also the reality of how our future might look because of our queerness.”
Weiss’ comments, delivered at a memorial held on the Y.U. campus and organized by some of Siegel’s friends from college, reflect a narrative solidifying around Siegel’s death. Many believe — based on their conversations with Siegel, his social media posts and their own experiences — that Siegel had considered that there may have been no place for him as a gay man in the Orthodox community where he grew up and attended college.
Even as some in Siegel’s community have downplayed the focus on his sexuality following his death, friends say his suicide should be a wakeup call at a time when Yeshiva University is deeply divided over whether and how to include LGBTQ students. In recent years, the school has fought not to have to recognize an LGBTQ student group, even petitioning the Supreme Court for relief. A trans woman was also told she could no longer pray in a synagogue affiliated with the school.
Weiss told the New York Jewish Week that there are many “Orthodox queer people who are possibly suffering, who feel like they are alone, and who feel like they don’t have a future,” adding, “I know that Herschel felt that way at points in his life because he told me.”
Experts caution that it is a mistake to attribute suicides to single causes. Still, there is no question that LGBTQ youth are at increased risk, particularly when they are not accepted in their communities. According to a 2023 survey by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention in the LGBTQ community, 41% of LGBTQ young people seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.
Siegel made his struggle transparent. In an Instagram post from March that has circulated widely after his death, he wrote about how the word “abomination” in a Torah portion brought up trauma for him as a gay man within the Orthodox community.
“According to that trauma, my very EXISTENCE as a gay, Jewish, Male was an abomination,” Siegal wrote. “And even decades later, that fear-based thought pattern erupted into my consciousness, at the most unexpected of times.”
He then asked, “Do we ever REALLY heal from the deeply traumatic memories within us? Or is it rather a Journey, like many other emotions, and then we come to realize that one day we are at ease while riding ‘the trauma-coaster’?”
Siegel ended the post on a positive note, sharing gratitude for anyone who “has ever experienced a profoundly traumatizing event within your lives. … The fact that we made it this far is something to be proud of in and of itself!”
He died a month later, on the eve of the Shabbat when the weekly Torah portion includes the Jewish legal prohibition on homosexual intercourse, calling it an “abomination.”
“I think about the bravery, the heroism, the strength of this kid,” said Mordechai Levovitz, a therapist and the clinical director of Jewish Queer Youth, an organization that seeks to support and empower Jewish LGBTQ teens, with a focus on the Orthodox community. “I think any person at all willing to endure a community in a religion that is very cruel to him — and yet sees the value because there is also still value — is someone that I think we can look up to, and that we can learn from, and that we can be inspired by.”
He added, “But also, we can admit and witness and bear the fact that it is because of the community that we created that this kid could not find a future for himself and thought that it would perhaps be better off if he was not here, or if he did not exist.”
Not everyone who has commented on Siegel’s death is connecting it with his sexuality. Rabbi Ilan D. Feldman of Beth Jacob Atlanta, Siegel’s synagogue, wrote an email to the congregation saying that “our thoughts and tefillos [prayers] go out to the Siegel family, whose agony can never be fully fathomed, and who will be embraced and supported by us, their community.” Siegel is survived by his parents and five siblings.
Feldman presided over a funeral on Sunday that people who were present said was attended by about 200 people, with more than 450 tuning in on Zoom. Levovitz said that at the funeral, the rabbi referred to Siegel as being “mentally ill.” Mental illness is considered the strongest predictor of suicide.
Feldman told the New York Jewish Week over the phone that “even by reducing this story to a one-dimensional story of a guy who was gay, who committed suicide, we’re actually doing a disservice to gay people.” He also said Siegel’s family is distressed by the narrative, which they believe is untrue.
“The storyline of this particular case is an openly gay person who had wonderful relationships with the entire Orthodox community, including haredi Orthodox leaders,” Feldman said. “And now we’re going take this guy after his death, during his shiva while his family is grieving, and start talking about [how] gays are marginalized and whether this drove him to suicide, when this is the one case where an Orthodox community embraced a gay person with love and with no exceptions.”
But he acknowledged that there is “a big difference between pressures from the Jewish community and pressures from Jewish tradition,” which under Orthodox interpretations does not permit homosexuality.
“If he ever felt pressure, it was relieved by the love that he received in the community, but the pressure may have been there because Jewish tradition is inconsistent with gay activity,” Feldman said.
A source in the Atlanta community who said he had known Siegel since Siegel was a child said Siegel’s death comes on the heels of another suicide in the Atlanta Orthodox community, also of a young person who identified as a member of the LGBTQ community.
“There is a cloud of sadness. People just feel confused and lost. This is the second time in six months,” the source said. “It’s just resonating very hard for people. Young people taking their lives, it’s not supposed to be something that is normal and is regularly happening.”
Hundreds of people attended the funeral for Herschel Siegel last weekend in Atlanta. (Courtesy)
Chaim Nissel, a dean at Yeshiva University who was an associate provost during Siegel’s tenure as a student, spoke at the Thursday night gathering and said he had known Siegel well, and even had the student visit his home. (Nissel was originally named in the lawsuit by the YU Pride Alliance against the university but was dropped after Y.U. argued that he did not have authority over whether the LGBTQ student club was approved.)
“He struggled to reconcile his identity and love of Torah,” Nissel said. “He died from mental illness.”
Yeshiva University had previously released a statement about Siegel’s death.
“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Herschel Siegel, a member of the Yeshiva University family,” the statement said. “We express our deepest condolences to his family. May his memory be a blessing.”
Siegel’s family did not respond to a request for comment. People close to the family said they were too distraught to speak to the press. The source from Atlanta who knew Siegel since he was a child said the family was “angry for the way that this is being spun,” suggesting that Siegel’s sexuality should not be the only focus.
“I do resent anyone that is trying to make this about him being gay,” the source said. “It’s the chicken or the egg situation. Did being gay in the Orthodox community make his depression more triggering, or was it that he was depressed, and felt alone, which made being gay so much harder?”
Even his closest friends say it’s impossible to untangle those forces.
“Herschel struggled with mental illness and struggled with accepting himself as a gay Orthodox man,” said Emily Ornelas, a friend who was close to Siegel when he was at Y.U.
“That’s a reality,” Orneles said. “Gay people in any organized religion struggle with that. But I do wholeheartedly believe that by the end of his life, he had come to terms with and accepted himself and was able to love himself for who he was in whatever capacity he could. I feel that is true.”
Ornelas says she is choosing to remember the many bright spots in her friend’s life, rather than focus solely on trying to identify reasons for his death. She recalled the way he connected with children when the two staffed a Passover retreat, as well as his energy in his many theater performances at Y.U., the way his smile lit up a room.
“I remember that his hugs were absolutely crushing,” Ornelas said. “I think he could have cracked my ribs easily. I remember that when he smiled, he smiled literally with every single one of his teeth. You could probably count them. I can hear his voice. He has a very particular affect to the way he spoke, and I think it was like a tiny bit of a Southern drawl. He was just like a really big part of my life — and all of our lives — for a very long time.”
At the memorial service, Weiss exhorted others who might feel tormented about being gay in an Orthodox community to hold on, despite their pain.
“You are not alone,” they said, holding back tears. “You have a future, and you have people who love and see you fully. You have people who celebrate all the wonderful, beautiful parts of you. And if it feels like you don’t have those people yet, we are here waiting for you with open hearts.”
They then shifted to a “a message to everyone else here with us tonight” — those who identify as allies, and those who are just deeply sad about their friend’s tragic death.
“Be like Herschel,” Weiss said. “Be like Herschel and embrace and love each of us with enthusiasm and with joy. Be like Herschel and see us as the full, valid and nuanced human beings that we are. Be like Herschel, and support us unconditionally. Be like Herschel so that we can continue to be here even though Herschel can’t. And be like Herschel, so that this never ever happens again.”
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The post Yeshiva University is left in mourning after a beloved gay alum dies by suicide appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Bedouin shepherds found it. A bishop sold it. An Israeli agent bought it. Now you can see it up close.
The magnificent 717-centimeter ancient Isaiah scroll on view right now at The Israel Museum, for the first time in 60 years, is drawing so many people that the museum has set strict guidelines for visitors.
To see the scroll — meaning the original, handwritten, non-facsimile, version that survived for two thousand years in jars hidden in a cave — with your own eyes, all 23 1/2 feet of it, you need to register by 8 a.m.
Once you are at the exhibit entrance, you need to wait your turn; you have to watch a film first about the incredible story of how the Isaiah scroll was found by Bedouin shepherds in a remote cave near the Dead Sea, sold to Archbishop Samuel, head of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, then read and evaluated by a professor whose son became Israeli military royalty, photographed by an American scholar, sent by the bishop to the U.S. for a tour of several leading universities in the hope of snaring a very high price, and then at long last, clandestinely purchased by an agent hiding that he was representing Israel from a small and seemingly innocuous ad in The Wall Street Journal. Then you have exactly 10 minutes in a temperature-controlled room with the scroll.
There is something spiritual and moving about seeing this gigantic, complete, handwritten scroll that was literally hidden in a cave for millennia. What is remarkable about it, Professor Noam Mizrahi of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem explains in a video you can watch after you check the scroll out for yourself, is first of all its age.
“It is over two thousand years old,” he explains. To be precise, the scroll was written in 125 BCE. The other amazing aspect of it is its fullness — not only are all 66 chapters there, but the Hebrew is written in a full way.
What does that mean, exactly? Consider the first line, “This is the vision of Isaiah the son of Amotz,” written in the scroll as “Yishayahu ben Amotz.” You can see with your own eyes that the original scribe wrote “Yeshaya,” and that another, later, scribe, added a letter, the ayin, so that it now reads “Yishayahu” as Isaiah is pronounced in today’s Hebrew.
It offers a glimpse into ancient pronunciation, Mizrahi explained. I would add that it also offers a glimpse into editing — writers are never done.
And maybe the Jewish people are never done discussing what the vision of Isaiah is, and what it means. This particular scroll wasn’t a museum artifact in the early days.
“It was in use for at least 100 years,” Mizrahi said — you can tell from the corrections.
But back to that fullness. This is a neatly written scroll of a text so many of us recognize — timeless, the curator Hagit Maoz commented in the video, and about peace, and justice. Maybe my vision is failing, but it was hard to make out psukim, or verses, I knew by heart.
This is not because the handwriting wasn’t neat — each aleph was distinct and perfect — but because the letters are small. I found myself cheating by taking a picture with my phone and enlarging it. Then I felt guilty for wasting a bit of my precious ten minutes on technology.
My group included a woman with a seeing-eye dog. If I could barely make out the letters, what could she see?
But the scroll is not just about seeing. It is about feeling. You can feel that this text is connected to this place. It’s the feeling of being here, of being near something written thousands of years ago by hand, something ours, something whole. There is the feeling that this is where Isaiah roamed, and this is where this incredible book — this timeless piece of Jewish literature — began.
Once the ten minutes are up, visitors are ushered into another room with a copy of the Isaiah scroll enlarged, and with key verses highlighted. There was the dream of peace, I thought as I looked at individual verses — the wolf dwelling with the lamb — and then there is the reality. The other day, I heard a young guy tell a date he had done 600 days of miluim, or reserve service.
I found myself refocusing on the true story of how the Isaiah scroll made it to the public. I couldn’t get enough of the details.
From shepherds to The Wall Street Journal
When Bedouin shepherds chased a sheep sometime in early 1947, they reached challenging terrain across from the northwest rim of the Dead Sea that no one else was willing to enter.
They heard a piece of pottery in a cave crack.
Curious, they went inside and found seven scrolls inside jars in the cave. They took them out, not knowing what they were. The museum explains that the bishop, who purchased the scrolls, consulted Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who immediately realized he was looking at an ancient Isaiah scroll and copied some sections; he told the bishop he was interested in purchasing the scrolls, both the ones in his possession and those still with the shepherds.
According to the Israel Antiquities Authority website when Sukenik learned of the scrolls’ discovery, he set out to investigate their significance. “Braving Arab-Jewish tensions, he travelled to meet the Armenian dealer at the British divided military zone of the Jerusalem border. In this clandestine meeting, the dealer held up a fragment of leather for the professor to examine. As Sukenik peered through the wire, he recognized the ancient writing.”
Incredibly, on Nov. 29, 1947, on the very same day as the United Nations vote on the Partition Plan, the historic vote which led to the establishment of Israel, Prof. Sukenik bought three of the seven scrolls.
Meanwhile, the bishop decided to get another opinion on his four scrolls, from an American scholar in Jerusalem who was the first to photograph them. By March 1948, convinced of the scrolls’ value and concerned for their safety as the War of Independence raged, the bishop had his assistant take the scrolls to a bank in Beirut, where they were held in a safe.
In Dec. 1948, the bishop headed to Beirut, picked up the scrolls, when gone to New Jersey, where he hoped to sell them.
Echoes of history
Learning of the scrolls, I couldn’t help but think of the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever and the Paper Brigade in Vilna. As the Nazis tried to annihilate the Jewish people, great writers risked their lives to save Jewish literature and culture, to hide it for the future. It’s a repeating theme in Jewish history — the military battle and the cultural battle, continuing at the same time.
Sadly, Professor Sukenik lost a son to battle in the war.
Then the professor himself died.
But the family’s passionate connection to the Isaiah scroll was not over. The professor’s other son, Yigael Yadin, who would become both a major scholar and a military leader, was in New York in the early 1950s and happened to read a small advertisement in The Wall Street Journal offering four scrolls. He guessed that the Isaiah scrolls his father wanted had been spirited off to the United States; he wired Israel to tell the new government to find $150,000. (Here, some Jewish philanthropy helped.)
It turns out that the bishop’s representative had tried to sell — to the Library of Congress, the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, Duke University, and The University of Chicago — but all refused. He failed because Jordan claimed the scrolls belonged to it because of where they had been found, while Israel claimed they were theirs because of cultural heritage.
Yadin hired an agent to conceal that Israel was the actual buyer, and the four were purchased on July 1, 1954. On July 9, the Isaiah scroll was separated and spirited to Israel by plane, with other planes escorting it for safety.
The Israel Museum built the Shrine of the Book to house the scroll, and it was opened to the public in 1955. But in 1968, the real scroll was replaced with a very good facsimile for the scroll’s continued safety.
Now, in honor of the museum’s 60th anniversary, the real thing is on view. My advice — don’t miss it.
“A Voice from the Desert: The Great Isaiah Scroll” is on view at the Israel Museum through Oct. 3.
The post Bedouin shepherds found it. A bishop sold it. An Israeli agent bought it. Now you can see it up close. appeared first on The Forward.
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When Gloria Steinem identified as a Jew most
Gloria Steinem, the journalist and organizer who became the most recognizable face of America’s modern women’s movement, died Wednesday at her New York City home. She was 92.
For more than half a century, Steinem pushed American women to imagine lives beyond the limits society had set for them. She co-founded Ms. magazine, helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus and turned phrases like “sexual harassment” from unnamed experiences into subjects of national debate.
Steinem was the daughter of a Jewish father, Leo Steinem, and a Protestant mother, Ruth Nuneviller. She was raised without much religion and generally described herself as secular, but she was unequivocal about where she stood when Jews were targeted: “Never in my life have I identified as a Christian,” she said, “but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”
Her mother taught her to value her Jewish roots. Steinem told the Forward in 2015 that her father rarely discussed his heritage; it was her non-Jewish mother who presented Judaism to her as something positive — “She also told me Jewish men made better husbands” — and taught her about her paternal grandmother.
That grandmother was a feminist pioneer in her own right. Pauline Steinem, who kept kosher, was an educator, suffragist, delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women and the first woman elected to Toledo’s school board — and during the Nazi’s rise in the mid-1930s, she worked to rescue members of her family from Europe.
A feminist Seder became her strongest connection to Jewish ritual. Steinem participated for decades in an annual women’s Seder, calling it the first spiritually centered experience of her feminist life. What drew her to Judaism, she said, wasn’t the law — it was “the mystical part, the Kabbalah, the Shechinah.
She recognized how antisemitism and misogyny fed each other. In her memoir, Steinem recalled a cabdriver telling her that feminism was a Jewish plot to destroy the Christian family. Her response to such hatred was not to distance herself from Jews, but to identify with them more strongly.
That identification outlasted her. Gloria and her sister, Susanne, donated a catalog of jewelry seized from Nazi victims to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum — in honor of their grandmother.
Steinem continued writing and advocating for equality into her 90s. Her final book, An Unexpected Life, is scheduled to publish later this month.
The post When Gloria Steinem identified as a Jew most appeared first on The Forward.
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UK to ‘reset policy’ on West Bank settlements, Miliband tells parliament
(JTA) — The new British government plans to announce in the coming weeks a comprehensive package of economic sanctions and other measures designed to prevent the Israeli expansion of West Bank settlements.
Overall the U.K. needs “a comprehensive reset of our policy” when it comes to the West Bank, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the House of Commons on Tuesday. He spoke during his first question and answer session with lawmakers since he and the government he represents were sworn into office in July.
Miliband added that the new measures would include a ban on goods produced in the settlements and targeted sanctions on British institutions and individuals.
“We are looking, indeed, at our wider economic relationship with the occupied territories, and the different tools we have to tackle it,” Miliband explained. “We do not want British companies financing, constructing, or advertising new settlements. The work we are now undertaking is how we can stop that.”
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar warned Tuesday that if the U.K. acted against his country, the Jewish state would take retaliatory steps against Great Britain.
“We are prepared and I hope they will not make the mistake of doing this. If they do, there will be a reaction,” Sa’ar said in a podcast interview with the Hebrew news website Ynet.
Tensions between Israel and the U.K. have been escalating in light of Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.
The U.K.’s decision under the last government to recognize Palestinian statehood in 2025 inflamed the situation, which is expected to get worse should Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu win the October 27 election in Israel.
Any government that Netanyahu forms is expected to be right-wing and to continue the policies of the existing government, just as the U.K. under Miliband and the new Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, are more willing than their predecessors to go head-to-head with Israel on the issue
Miliband already floated the idea of targeted sanctions after Israel’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim in August, a move that he said would undermine any two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Miliband went further on Tuesday when fielding a number of questions from lawmakers frustrated about the lack of U.K. response to Israeli actions in the West Bank, such as terror activity by Israelis against Palestinian civilians and continued settler building. This includes the opening of E1 bids last month.
The foreign secretary explained that his words reflected the policies Burnham had considered even before he entered Downing Street in July, such as a ban on trade for goods produced in the settlements. “We are obviously working across government and with our allies on these measures,” Miliband said.
Israel has said that it has a right to build settler homes in Area C of the West Bank, which is under Israeli military and civilian control and where all the settlements are located. Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was divided into three areas, with sections A and B, under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.
The International Court of Justice in 2024 issued an advisory opinion explaining that such construction in Area C is illegal, affirming a long-held stance of the U.N. and many nations, including the U.K.
Concern has been particularly high with regard to the E1 project, which would add 3,400 homes to the municipal boundaries of the city of Ma’aleh Adumim by building on an underdeveloped hilltop. The Palestinian Authority and the international community, including past U.S. administrations, have warned that the project would block contiguous Palestinian development in that area and thus make a Palestinian state untenable.
Miliband referenced that viewpoint when speaking to the House of Commons on Tuesday, explaining that E1 development had long been considered a “red line,” because the project “cuts through the heart of the West Bank and risks making a Palestinian state unviable.”
He affirmed the U.K.’s commitment to a two-state resolution, explaining that his government would not stand idly by while that vision was being destroyed by Israeli actions on the ground in the West Bank.
In a harshly worded attack on the U.K. and Miliband in August, Sa’ar on X warned that UK’s statements on Israel were fueling antisemitism in Great Britain and emphasized that the Jewish people had a right to build anywhere in their ancestral homeland.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post UK to ‘reset policy’ on West Bank settlements, Miliband tells parliament appeared first on The Forward.
