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10 months into leadership crisis, fighting has renewed over German rabbinical schools’ future
BERLIN (JTA) — A plan to get Germany’s non-Orthodox rabbinical schools back on track after nearly a year of tumult has hit a snag: the country’s main Jewish organization says it can’t fund the group that took control of the schools in January.
The Jewish Community of Berlin had announced in a surprise move that it had paid 25,000 euros to buy out the ownership stake of the schools’ founder and rector Rabbi Walter Homolka, who stepped down from almost all positions amid investigations into whether he abused his power.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany, the country’s main Jewish group, had been working on a plan to overhaul the schools and initially expressed skepticism about the Berlin Jewish community’s purchase. But the Central Council’s president, Josef Schuster, said he had been persuaded to work with the new owners after getting assurance that Homolka would have no role at the revamped schools.
Now, the Central Council says its auditors have advised that it cannot legally pass along government funds to the Jewish Community of Berlin. The Central Council announced on Thursday that it would instead create a new foundation to support the Reform Abraham Geiger College and Conservative Zacharias Frankel College, and it could move to reopen the schools with new names. (Both schools are named for prominent 19th-century German rabbis.) The Central Council has supported both schools to the tune of about $530,000 a year.
“The takeover of the rabbinical training centers by the Jewish Community of Berlin was done with the best of intentions,” Schuster said in a statement. “However, it is not possible for the Central Council to support rabbinical training in the present support structure.”
Jewish Community of Berlin President Gideon Joffe attacked the plan as an “abuse of power,” saying that his organization would “not bow to the feudal fantasies of omnipotence harbored by old white men.” Joffe and Schuster have sparred intensely over the future of the two seminaries.
Joffe said the Central Council already had ceased transferring funds to the seminaries, “massively hindering rabbinical education in Germany, which it actually claims to protect.”
In fact, it is usually an entity’s owner — which since January has been Joffe’s group — that would be responsible for securing funding. The three major and longtime funders of the seminaries — the Central Council, the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Brandenburg Ministry of Science — have all been aligned, declaring together in December their support for an independent liberal rabbinical seminary under a new structure.
The Central Council was in the midst of devising that new structure when Joffe’s group swooped in and purchased a leadership stake in the schools. The council had hired Gerhard Robbers, an expert in religion and law, to develop a new model for the schools, after an initial version of its commissioned investigation reported that Homolka had created a “culture of fear” there. A final report of the investigation by the law firm of Gercke Wollschläger is due out soon.
The council released Robbers’ “roadmap” for the schools on Thursday. He recommended that the Central Council establish a foundation under which two independent seminaries and a cantorial program would operate, under the auspices of the University of Potsdam. A board including the elected president and appointed executive director of the Central Council as well as representatives of both the Progressive and Masorti (Conservative) movements — appointed by themselves — would make fundamental decisions together. In general, the roadmap is designed to ensure stability and quality of education, and to prevent any one person or group from monopolizing the structure, Robbers wrote.
“If bringing in existing institutions is not possible or proves inopportune, institutions could be newly established,” Robbers’ recommendation says. “Through them, existing tasks, staff and students could be taken over. Appropriate names for the institutions should be found in agreement with the stakeholders.”
Schuster said the dramatic changes were warranted by the recent findings against Homolka. The former rector announced this week that he would resign from the leadership of another institution he had created: The Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Scholarship Foundation for talented Jewish students; he has also sought legal relief against the criticism against him, with some recent, albeit partial, success.
The Central Council aims to “offer students and employees a secure perspective, securing teaching in the long term and restoring lost credibility,” Schuster said. “With the present findings on the abuse of power, discrimination and the prevailing culture of fear at rabbinical training institutions, there can be no ‘business as usual.’ A new beginning is necessary.”
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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