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A Berlin rabbi has been fired amid mounting allegations that he preyed on young women
BERLIN (JTA) — As a teenager in Berlin, Adelle was honored when a rabbi began showing interest in her spiritual development. Rabbi Reuven Yaacobov’s offer of personal instruction was an appealing prospect to the Russian-speaking immigrant with no documentation of her Jewish heritage.
Over time, Yaacobov’s private lessons escalated to phone calls and text messages and, ultimately, an invitation to a Shabbat dinner at his apartment, located so far from her home that she would need to stay over to avoid the prohibition on traveling on Shabbat.
There, Adelle was surprised to discover that Yaacobov’s wife was away and she was the only guest. After setting up the couch for Adelle, Yaacobov told her she needed a massage. There were points in her body, he said, where her energy was blocked.
He began with her back but ultimately told her that the points that needed attention — he called them chakras, a Hindu term, and sefirot, a term from Jewish mysticism — included her uterus.
“He said, ‘If I am not pressing it now, basically all that hard work I did’ – half an hour of hard work pressing on my back – ‘all that hard work is going to go to waste. If you don’t activate it all the way, it’s not going to work,’” Adelle recalled.
“I was very fresh to Jewish life. I didn’t know much,” she said. “I was not sure, but if it is a rabbi telling you that something is wrong [with you], you know, I kind of accepted it.”
After her formal conversion to Judaism, the touching escalated to pressure to have sexual intercourse, which Yaacobov said was permitted under Jewish law if he took her as a secret second wife.
He told Adelle that through her conversion she had absorbed the spirit of Batsheva, the Biblical woman whom King David famously spotted from afar and took as his wife — even though he had to have her husband killed to make it happen. Yaacobov said that only he, as a self-described descendant of David, had special powers to heal her.
When she balked, he told her that she would “stay a zero, just like you are now” and that her spiritual development would remain stunted.
“He made it very clear that I am a nobody at that point,” she recalled. “And, so, 19-year-old me, from not a very good family background — that was a statement that sounded true.”
Rabbi Reuven Yaacobov stands on stage with security guards during the ceremonial handover of a new Torah scroll that he had written to the Jewish regional congregation in Erfurt, Germany, Sept. 30, 2021.(Martin Schutt/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Yaacobov’s hold over her was so complete, Adelle said, that when her Orthodox girls school announced that students could no longer associate with the rabbi, she rejected the warning.
“They summoned me to speak about that, and told me some horrifying things about him, and I was in complete denial,” she said. “I said, ‘No, no, it cannot be, he is a holy person. It cannot be, it’s wrong, you guys are wrong!’ I was fighting against them.”
That was in 2010. For years, Adelle told her story to no one. But eventually, she learned that “there was a whole team of Batshevas” — women like her whom Yaacobov had identified as vulnerable and groomed for sex, leveraging their naivete about Judaism to his advantage.
Now, Yaacobov has been fired from his position as the rabbi of Tiferet Israel, Berlin’s Sephardic synagogue, because of the alleged misconduct. His termination came just one day after Adelle and other women — organized by a onetime champion of Yaacobov named Elena Eyngorn — brought their stories to the Jewish Community of Berlin, the group that oversees most Jewish institutions in the city and employs some of its clergy.
“In view of the seriousness of the allegations, the Executive Board was shocked and outraged and immediately released Rabbi Yaacobov and finally fired him without notice effective May 31,” Ilan Kiesling, the organization’s spokesperson, said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
He said Tiferet Israel would be “closed until the facts have been fully clarified” and that worshipers could pray at a nearby synagogue instead. He also said steps would be taken to prevent “such incidents in the future” and noted that a religious court, known as a beit din, might try Yaacobov according to Jewish law.
“The community has promised the victims unlimited support,” Kiesling said.
Yaacobov did not respond to JTA’s queries sent via Facebook messenger and WhatsApp.
Although the women and their advocates are relieved to see Yaacobov lose his pulpit, Yaacobov’s firing — which has not been publicly announced — is raising broader questions about the community and its guardrails. How could his alleged misconduct have gone unaddressed for years? Could someone have taken action earlier?
In fact, the Jewish Community of Berlin, the local police and an Orthodox rabbinical court in Moscow all received complaints about Yaacobov’s behavior with women in the past. The complaints predated the sweeping cultural shift around responses to sexual misconduct, known as #MeToo, that began in 2017 when the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was accused of being a serial sex abuser.
“If Elena was able to do this in two weeks, to pressure the head of the community and get it done and get him to lose his job, how come all the powerful people that knew about it for years couldn’t take him down?” Adelle asked. “How come?”
Yaacobov has long been a popular spiritual leader in a subset of Berlin’s large community of Russian-speaking Jews. Born in Uzbekistan and ordained by the Midrash Sepharadi Yeshiva in Jerusalem, Yaacobov, 46 and a married father of three, also studied at the Moscow Yeshiva in Russia and the Shavei Gola Yeshiva in Jerusalem before being hired by the Jewish Community of Berlin 17 years ago, according to a biography that was removed from the organization’s website this month.
Inner view of Berlin’s Tiferet Israel Sephardic Synagogue, as seen in 2016. (MaorX via Wikimedia Commons)
In addition to leading Tiferet Israel, Yaacobov has worked as a sofer, or ritual scribe, as a shochet or ritual slaughterer, and also as a mohel, performing brit milah, or traditional circumcision, on male infants. Sources in the community say he has performed circumcisions since being fired from his synagogue position. On his social media accounts, he posts inspirational videos and notes in Russian.
“Never, ever let others convince you that something is difficult or impossible,” he wrote in a post last week. “When you know what you want, and you want it bad enough, you’ll find a way to get it.”
The full scope of the allegations against Yaacobov is still unfolding. JTA has met with two women who say Yaacobov lured them into sexual relations, using pseudo-religious justifications, and spoken with a third who said she got away before he touched her. The women are being identified by pseudonyms because they asked that their names not be published.
Others told JTA they are aware of additional survivors. Eyngorn said she has spoken directly with nine, including the three with whom JTA spoke; new accounts continue to emerge, she said, as word spreads about her inquiries.
What is clear is that the testimony given to the Jewish Community of Berlin instigated immediate action — offering a sharp contrast to what happened at multiple other junctures when people raised concerns about Yaacobov’s behavior.
At least twice, women went to law enforcement but no charges resulted. In one case, Berlin’s top prosecutor declined to investigate the report it received, telling an attorney that because their client was a legal adult at the time of the incident and appeared to have been able to leave the scene if she wanted, there was no grounds for a criminal investigation.
Meanwhile, a woman who left Germany for Moscow gave a statement to the rabbinical court there over a decade ago, according to Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, then the chief rabbi of Moscow. Goldschmidt, the longtime head of the Conference of European Rabbis, said he passed the complaint along to Lala Suesskind, then president of the Jewish Community of Berlin. He was not aware of any action taken in response.
Suesskind told JTA that she did not recall hearing from Goldschmidt but said she had received a different tip about Yaacobov’s behavior — which she dismissed as a rumor.
She said a Berlin rabbi whom she would not name had come to her with reports of sexual impropriety by Yaacobov during her tenure, which lasted from 2008 to 2012.
“I said, ‘Then bring the women to me.’ No one came. No one did anything,” Suesskind said. “I am someone who does not react to rumors and doesn’t spread them. I had no facts.”
Lala Suesskind, then president of the Jewish Community of Berlin, stands during a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the deportation of Jews from Berlin to concentration camps during the Holocaust, Oct. 18, 2011.(Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
The turning point against Yaacobov came this spring after Liza Khurgin, a volunteer at a Berlin conference for Russian-speaking Jews held in March, raised concerns about his behavior following a lecture he delivered on the topic of “Kosher Sex.” She told JTA she had objected to Yaacobov’s “sexist” comments and left early — then began to get repeated messages from the rabbi.
“I don’t know how he got my Telegram contact,” she said, referring to a secure text platform. “He started to message me that I looked sad and someone broke my heart and he can help. He started to call on Telegram and tried to contact me again on Facebook, and I did not reply.”
She added, “It was not appropriate. It was very weird. You don’t expect a rabbi to act this way.”
Khurgin urged the conference organizers never to invite Yaacobov again. The organizers in turn informed Eyngorn, a former president of Germany’s Federation of Jewish Students who had nominated him to speak. Having known Yaacobov for years — he even performed her son’s bris — she was shocked.
“Before accusing someone you have to check,” Eyngorn told JTA. “I started to investigate and … realized this story had a much longer history and was more terrible than I imagined.”
Stories started spilling out, spanning years and all following a similar trajectory. Eyngorn said several women told her about how Yaacobov “groomed” them over weeks and months — after checking their age, gradually winning their trust and fealty, and ultimately swaying them to accept intimate touching and submit to sexual acts by claiming that a secretive Jewish court had prescribed this treatment for them or — in another variant — claiming that only he, supposedly a descendant of King David, could rescue their souls.
Twisted invocations of scriptures and religious law are common among sexual predators who happen to be rabbis, said Rabbi Yosef Blau, spiritual guidance counselor and rosh yeshiva at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University in New York, and a longtime advocate for survivors of sexual misconduct in the Orthodox world.
Blau recalled being consulted about a different rabbi who had been accused of abusing teens.
“They were people who at this point knew very little about Jewish law, and therefore it was possible for him to manipulate them to think what he tells them is permissible is permissible,” Blau said. “He is the rabbi who is bringing them into Judaism, defining Judaism in his terms, and that gives him a certain measure of control over them.”
While the two women who met with JTA were not legally minors at the time of the alleged misconduct, they described themselves in hindsight as impressionable and vulnerable.
Sara, who first came under his sway when she was 18, recalled Yaacobov progressing from lessons in Kabbalah and Jewish law to telling her how to walk, do her hair and nails in order to be attractive to men. The next step seemed to follow logically: photographing her in her underwear, supposedly in order to check her “chakras.” He also told her he was a physiotherapist, which further undermined her skepticism, she recalled.
Afterward, “I just left in a kind of shock,” Sara told JTA. “I thought something is obviously seriously wrong with me; that is why all of the things are happening to me that I find so difficult. So he will fix them, right? And this is the discomfort I will have to go through.”
In their final meeting, she said, he told her that a secret Jewish court required her to perform oral sex on him. He insisted he was only acting in accordance with her spiritual needs — while making her swear not to tell anyone because of the risk of consequences in the “spiritual realm.”
Estie was a bit older than the other women who talked to JTA, no longer a teenager, when Yaacobov started chatting with her after she attended a lecture he gave on family values.
She had been going through a difficult phase, having just ended a relationship. “He said, ‘I will help you,’ and he immediately started to give me advice on how to get a good guy,” she said. After they met once in public, he invited her for “training.”
From there, her story mirrored those of Adelle and Sara.
“He said, ‘Your chakras are closed, you need to open up,’” Estie recalled. Then, he invited her to his home. She was looking forward to meeting the wife and children he spoke of so warmly, and bought some kosher candy as a gift. But when she arrived at his apartment, she discovered she was alone with him.
“He said he wanted to give me a massage,” she said. “It was a weird, uncomfortable situation. I am alone with a rabbi in his apartment and he wants to give me a massage – a full-body massage. He said, ‘You should be more open, you should open your buttons.’”
Estie said she made up an excuse and left. “I did not let him do it. I got out with very little damage.” Afterward, she said, he called her incessantly.
“He said he can help me and I am denying his help, and he made me feel really bad about myself,” she said.
Estie said she had been able to cope with her trauma, in part by jokingly referring to Yaacobov as “Reuven the Masseur.” But she said she was “shocked” when she found out, through Eyngorn, that other young women had been in a similar situation to hers.
“I didn’t know that it was his hobby. I didn’t know he was so bad, that he did much worse things,” she said.
“I really trusted him,” she added. “I told him my story about my breakup and I cried. He looks for people who are weak or vulnerable at the moment. He told me, ‘I will help you.’”
Adelle, Sara and Estie were all immigrants to Germany from the former Soviet Union; about 90% of German Jews today have roots there. While Estie was exploring her Jewish roots on her own, Adelle and Sara were attending an Orthodox school created to serve young Russian-speaking women amid a broad push to connect immigrants with the Judaism they had been prohibited from accessing under communism.
Their profile — young, Russian-speaking Jews on the search for spiritual fulfillment — may have made them targets. “According to my humble understanding it is a matter of finding vulnerable people,” said Rabbi Zsolt Balla of Leipzig, who has counseled Eyngorn and some of the women as they prepare to seek redress in a religious court.
Rabbi Zsolt Balla speaks in a synagogue in Saxony, Germany, June 21, 2021. (Hendrik Schmidt/picture alliance via Getty Images)
“Someone who wants to groom people has to find the common denominator,” and in this situation, Balla said, “it was language.”
Shana Aaronson, the executive director of Magen-Israel, an advocacy group for survivors of sexual misconduct in religious communities in Israel, said it was significant that the rabbi’s alleged misconduct came as the women were being steeped in Orthodox Judaism, where rabbinic leadership confers power.
In Orthodox communities, “we are trained from an early age to do what the rabbi says,” Aaronson said. A predator’s “first step is an overstepping of boundaries, involving themselves in aspects of the person’s life that do not fall into the rabbi’s role: ‘Let me guide you and advise you on this, that and the other thing not related to their spiritual observance.”
Then, she said, they break down emotional boundaries, and ultimately give Jewish legal or “halachic reasoning for why what I am now telling you to do is OK or necessary.” Some will even bring texts to justify their actions, she said.
“Yes, we are taught that this behavior is forbidden, but it always comes back to the fact that the rabbi knows best,” Aaronson said. “It sounds absurd, but even a young woman who is educated is certainly not as knowledgeable as a rabbi. If he says in this case it is allowed, who is she to question that?”
When Adelle realized that she had been victimized, she apologized to her school’s administration for not heeding its warning about Yaacobov. She also began realizing that she needed to unlearn the twisted version of Judaism that he had taught her.
“I started to wake up and reevaluate everything he taught me, everything he said, ever,” Adelle recalled. “Three years of telling me things, three years of nonsense, along with Torah, along with wrong information, wrong halacha, wrong everything. It was like being reborn.”
The girls school was not the only Jewish institution to keep Yaacobov at a distance. ORD, Germany’s Orthodox rabbinical organization, spurned his bid for membership more than once at least a decade ago after a majority of members voted against his application. Their reasons are not public.
Now, ORD is hoping to take action to prevent harm to other women. Rabbi Avichai Apel, a board member, said the group wants to convene a religious court or beit din quickly to adjudicate the claims of Yaacobov’s alleged victims under Jewish law.
A beit din cannot put someone in jail, but it can issue pronouncements that affect a person’s role in the community. It could “issue a public statement saying that [the accused] is not allowed to interact with women or declaring him unfit to serve as a rabbi,” said Blau, who has begun advising ORD about its handling of Yaacobov. “In effect he will have been found guilty.”
Rabbi and Torah scribe Reuven Yaacobov writes sections of a Torah at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, July 10, 2014. (Adam Berry/Getty Images)
The beit din could come to that conclusion, Blau and Goldschmidt said, even if the person facing allegations is not present at its proceedings. And unlike the secular legal system in Germany, Jewish courts do not differentiate between alleged victims who are older and younger than 18.
In Jewish settings, Blau said, “an accused perpetrator is responsible whenever he takes advantage of a power imbalance, irrespective of the age of the victims.”
Apel declined to comment on Yaacobov’s case specifically but said he said he knew that sharing testimonies with rabbis could be hard for the women.
“It is a situation that nobody wants to imagine for himself, it is so terrible, really terrible,” he said. “But unfortunately they have to speak about it.”
He also said he planned to talk with his own congregation about the subject of sexual abuse, to help them recognize and prevent it, and to support survivors.
Goldschmidt said the more witnesses who appear before a beit din, the more likely the rabbinical court is to find in their favor.
“When it is a story of one man against a woman, it is her word against his,” said Goldschmidt,. “But if you are talking about a whole line of people who alleged that a person has been sexually improper with them, in 99% of the cases [it turns out] that where there is smoke, there is fire.”
Eyngorn said that, in her view, the situation is not just a fire but a conflagration. In the days after Yaacobov was terminated, she said her phone rang “every second moment” with people angry that she had worked against him.
“Women from his synagogue were accusing me: ‘You fired such a great rabbi! We are women and it never happened to us!’” she recalled. “I said, ‘It also did not happen to me; that is not an argument at all.’”
Since then, she said, some of them have called back or written to apologize, saying that they, too, have stories about Yaacobov.
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ADL and JCPA clash over teachers union, exposing a divide over how to fight antisemitism
(JTA) — Two leading Jewish civil rights groups stepped up after Jewish teachers reported antisemitic harassment last year at the National Education Association’s annual convention, only to devolve into disagreement ahead of this year’s convention.
The unusual public dispute between the Jewish Council of Public Affairs and the Anti-Defamation League brought to the fore a simmering tension over how to fight antisemitism within schools and unions. Should Jewish groups promote collaboration with the institutions on solutions — or prioritize confronting them over their failings?
Two days before the assembly, the JCPA and the NEA’s Jewish Affairs Caucus heralded new rules and policies it had developed in collaboration union leaders to “ensure the safety of Jewish members and educators at the [Representative Assembly] without undermining the union’s vital commitment to free speech and democracy.”
A day before the assembly, the ADL, which had worked with caucus members over the past year, told Jewish Insider in an unusual line of attack that it was “extremely frustrated about a so-called ‘agreement’ with JCPA that was reached without all NEA JAC leadership and delegates at the table.”
It also took aim at union leaders: “NEA’s inconsistent enforcement of its own protections has sent an unmistakable message: Jewish educators are not a priority. That must change now.”
Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, responded to the ADL’s criticism in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“When you can’t criticize substance, you find reasons to criticize process,” Spitalnick said in an interview. “In this case, we’re both very proud of the substance and the process, and the results underscore that.”
JCPA has emphasized working directly with school leaders and public officials to combat antisemitism, and opposed the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus pro-Palestinian protests.
“It is both possible and necessary to fight antisemitism — on campus, in our communities, and across the country — without abandoning the democratic values that have allowed Jews, and so many other vulnerable minorities, to thrive,” the group wrote in an April 2025 joint statement condemning the crackdown.
That letter spurred behind the scenes pushback from another legacy group, the Jewish Federations of North America.
The ADL, meanwhile, has taken on a more confrontational approach to universities, assigning them “report cards” for campus antisemitism and also empowering Jewish educators to advocate for themselves.
Notably, progressive-leaning groups like the JCPA and centrist groups like the ADL and the JFNA flip strategies when it comes to addressing Trump administration policies that undercut Jewish civil rights advocacy. The centrist groups have at times retreated from confrontation with the government, while the JCPA has been more directly critical. In one instance, the JCPA was more outspoken about a Trump administration attack on the ADL than the ADL was.
“There are absolutely those on the right who think that we should just be burning it all down, and that is not an approach that’s going to make you safer or democracy safer,” Spitalnick said. “We believe deeply that the only path forward is one that confronts antisemitism wherever it exists, and does so in a way that recognizes our safety as Jews is tied to our democratic institutions, which includes unions and public education.”
The ADL and the JCPA found common cause last year after the NEA delegates narrowly passed a measure barring the union from using, endorsing or publicizing any materials from the ADL, which boasts a comprehensive library of anti-bias education materials. (The measure was ultimately rejected by the NEA’s board of directors.)
The JCPA at that time signed onto a letter led by the ADL describing “deep concerns about the growing level of antisemitic activity within teachers’ unions,” including reports that Jewish teachers were verbally accosted during the proceedings.
The harassment, including a reported case of NEA members appearing to cheer at a mention of the 2025 attack on a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, during the convention last year, last month sparked a new antisemitism investigation into NEA by the Trump administration.
Shira Goodman, the ADL’s vice president of advocacy, said in an interview the group “immediately had to take an adversarial advocacy position to address” last year’s conference.
The ADL centered its approach on engaging with Jewish teachers who had sought their help, including the incoming president of the Jewish Affairs Caucus. Goodman said that while the ADL had “some ongoing conversations with leaders at the NEA,” the bulk of its advocacy had been to “support teachers who are doing their own advocacy.”
“Working just with leadership wasn’t going to do it, but we also wanted to be there to support grassroots folks who felt like they wanted to be and remain within their union,” Goodman said.
Goodman added that she did not feel that JCPA and the ADL were working “in tandem.”
“JCPA has said publicly that they have relationships with AFT, with NEA. Different organizations in the Jewish community have different lanes and do different things,” Goodman said. “I just want to make sure that the teachers are represented, and that if somebody is speaking for the teachers, that the teachers have been part of that.”
Spitalnick said JCPA had engaged with JAC leadership and other Jewish organizations, including the ADL, throughout the negotiations with NEA. Last year, JCPA also led a workshop at NEA’s annual convention about antisemitism.
“All I could speak to is our approach, which has been to — instead of hammering the union with constant critique and framing a sort of zero sum dynamic in which it’s the union versus the Jewish community — making clear that the union’s success and Jewish safety, inclusion, are one in the same right, and that has led to the partnership we have with NEA,” Spitalnick said.
The ADL and other legacy groups have in the past expressed qualified support for Trump administration disciplinary actions targeting educational institutions. Spitalnick was adamant that was the wrong course, including in the most recent government investigation into the NEA.
“The question that everyone should be asking is what is motivating this, and at a time when we’re seeing – whether it be Republicans in Congress or others — use our real fears of antisemitism to fundamentally try to kill the unions by going after their charter and their fundamental existence, I would ask real questions about the motivation for this investigation,” Spitalnick said.
The ADL, meanwhile, wrote in a post on X that the federal government’s investigation “underscores what many Jewish educators have been saying for the last two years: no union member should be made to feel excluded, targeted, or unwelcome because of a core part of their identity.”
Alyson Brauning, the outgoing chair of the Jewish Affairs Caucus, who had collaborated with JCPA ahead of the convention, said the difference between this year’s conference earlier this month and last was “night and day.”
“I actually got to enjoy parts of the [Representative Assembly],” Brauning said. “Our table did not experience any harassment or intimidation in the hall at all. It was actually enjoyable and fun, and we got to do the business of the RA on the floor.”
Naomi Rodriguez, the incoming chair of the Jewish Affairs Caucus who had participated in the ADL’s “Hazak” program, said she “wasn’t aware” of all the work that JCPA had done behind the scenes ahead of the assembly.
“Maybe Alyson was, and she is the chair of the caucus,” she added. “As the incoming chair, I’ll be more on top of those things.”
Rodriquez, who is currently participating in a JCPA cohort to support teachers, said that as the incoming chair she would “accept support from anybody who wants to support us.”
‘This issue with antisemitism is a huge problem, and it’s only getting worse, and I really think we all need to work together, and collaborate and coordinate to ensure that we are as effective as possible in fighting it,” Rodriguez said.
In a statement to JTA, an NEA spokesperson said that the union had “enhanced our work to counter antisemitism and ensure all of our members are respected and supported.”
“That effort included extensive consultation with the Jewish Affairs Caucus, Jewish NEA members, and partners in the Jewish community, including the JCPA,” the spokesperson said.
Following the assembly, which took place in Denver from July 3 through 6, the ADL as well as several other prominent Jewish groups that had also lent support to the Jewish Affairs Caucus published a statement saying that the results of the assembly “provides reason for optimism.”
“We commend the important steps the NEA took to foster a more inclusive Representative Assembly this year,” the groups wrote.
They added a caveat: “Yet that experience does not yet reflect the reality facing many Jewish educators in their own communities. We continue to hear from educators across the country who report marginalization within their unions, hostile rhetoric, intimidation, and exclusion…That reality requires continued attention and action at every level.”
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations also joined the ADL’s statement, which did not include JCPA.
The JCPA “chose to have their own press release in the beginning and kind of break with what we had already decided as a group, and so that was why they weren’t part of this press release,” said Stephanie Hausner, the Conference of Presidents’ chief operating officer. The JCPA, like the ADL, is a constituent member of the conference.
Hausner said she felt the dispute between the organizations ahead of the conference “took away from the real issue at hand, which is how do we support Jewish teachers.”
“For the last year I’ve been working with all the organizations on this work, and I really thought we were in that place, and I hope that tomorrow we can get back to that place where everyone’s working together because I do think that it is better for the Jewish community,” Hausner said.
The ADL and JCPA “sometimes reach out to different audiences,” she said, but “in an ideal world, we all speak from the same notes and be able to to move together and work together on a regular basis, and we wouldn’t have some of this going on, some of this back and forth.”
“There are no two organizations that operate in this space and do things exactly the same,” Hausner added. “Hopefully, some of their efforts can complement each other moving forward.”
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JD Vance tells Joe Rogan that Jeffrey Epstein had ‘connections’ to Israeli intelligence
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance claimed that the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had ties to the “highest levels” of Israeli intelligence.
“He clearly had connections to the upper, the highest levels, of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence,” Vance told Joe Rogan, one of the country’s most popular podcasters, in a three-hour interview released Wednesday.
Vance also told Israelis purportedly behind attacks on his efforts to broker a ceasefire with Iran to “go to hell.”
The remarks from Vance, who described himself as “one of the O.G. Epstein conspiracy theorists,” marked a notable embrace by a Trump administration official of theories about Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence, which have proliferated in the years since his death and often have veered into antisemitism. No evidence supports the claim, and Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former prime minister, last year publicly denied allegations that Epstein worked for Israel or its intelligence agency.
During the interview, Vance went on to theorize about Epstein’s ties to Israel, particularly his ties to the Israeli political left. Epstein had an association with Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister. Barak, whose politics in recent years have veered to the center, has denied wrongdoing and said he regrets the relationship.
“As much as I know, you know, Prime Minister Netanyahu, not a particularly popular person in the United States of America right now, Epstein seemed to be connected to the elements of the Israeli deep state that were left of center,” Vance said. It was not clear what Vance meant by “deep state,” a catchall frequently deployed by right-wingers peddling conspiracy theories.
Vance continued that, in the United States, Epstein was “connected across the board, he had Republican friends, he had Democratic friends. He had much deeper connections to the Israeli left of center than right of center. I don’t know what that means.”
The interview with Rogan was not the first time that Vance had flirted with conspiracy theories about Epstein.
“I am frankly kind of a conspiracy theory on the Epstein stuff,” Vance told the hosts on “The View” last month. “I think that it’s crazy that you have this guy who is clearly a sex predator who is hanging out with a lot of wealthy and powerful people.”
During the interview with Rogan, Vance also said that there was a “separate conspiracy that hasn’t gotten covered as much,” saying that Epstein was the “tax guy” of Les Wexner, the Jewish billionaire philanthropist whose decades-long relationship with Epstein has shadowed his philanthropic legacy.
“I think there’s an underreported, underexplored story of, was Epstein doing a lot of tax stuff that was not on the up and up, and is that one way in which he gained blackmail,” Vance said. “It’s not opposite of the sexual blackmail story, but in some ways you could imagine both things being true.”
Epstein’s relationship with Wexner has been extensively reported. Wexner, too, has denied wrongdoing and said he cut off relations with Epstein after learning about his misconduct.
“There’s so much bulls–t out there,” Vance said, referring to a recent report that Israelis are behind a paid campaign to discredit the Iran deal he brokered last month.
Vance said he did not care if Israel or any other country tried to influence outcomes — it’s “the nature of the beast,” he said — but was irked by Americans he claimed were taking Israeli money to oppose the deal.
“Many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways, you know my response to that is ‘Go to hell!’ I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people,” he said. “I represent Americans first.”
Vance’s deal with Iran, which has come under fire for its unprecedented concessions to the country regarding its role in controlling Lebanon and the Strait of Hormuz, is in abeyance. Trump resumed the war against Iran this week.
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The first synagogue inside a U.S. prison reopens — no conviction required
As prisons go, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was unusually luxurious. For one, it had flush toilets — beating out even the White House in making the upgrade, museum exhibit developer Beth Tinker told me on a recent tour.
But if plumbing reflected the penitentiary’s commitment to prisoners’ physical well-being, its biggest innovation was more spiritual. Eastern State housed the first synagogue inside a U.S. prison, complete with a Torah ark and ner tamid, or eternal light. That restored sanctuary — a short walk from gangster Al Capone’s former cell — is now newly open to the public in a museum exhibit, Freedom through Faith: Judaism at Eastern State and Beyond.
“It’s a place really of humanity, when you’re not getting a lot of humanity in this space,” Tinker said.
The synagogue, founded in 1922, hosted holiday celebrations and weekly Shabbat services. Outside volunteers brought in kosher meats. A circus performer visited and provided entertainment. After a prisoner gave birth to a baby boy, they brought in a mohel and held a bris.
Compare that level of institutional support with modern-day prisons, where there are often multifaith chapels, but a separate, dedicated space for a synagogue is rare, according to Rabbi Joseph Kolakowski, the first full-time Jewish chaplain in the history of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.
The exhibit comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that makes it more difficult for prisoners to obtain a remedy when their religious rights are violated. Last month, the Court ruled that a Rastafarian man, Damon Landor, could not sue prison guards for monetary damages after they forcibly shaved off his dreadlocks, which he kept as part of his faith. When he entered the prison, Landor carried with him a copy of a 2017 court decision that required the Louisiana Department of Corrections to honor Rastafarian religious practices — which a guard threw in the trash, according to court records.
But while Landor couldn’t sue the guard, the Supreme Court did agree that Landor’s rights had been violated. His case led the Louisiana Department of Corrections to update its prisoner grooming policy to prevent similar violations.
Eastern State, meanwhile, was accommodating Jewish religious practice decades before those legal protections existed, Tinker said.
“That’s part of what makes this synagogue and this Jewish congregation so amazing, is because they didn’t have to do it, legally,” Tinker said. “It was able to not just sort of secretly start up, but thrive.”
The synagogue’s history
Eastern State didn’t exactly start as a model of restorative justice. Opened in 1829, the state-funded prison pioneered solitary confinement in the U.S., with the idea that solitude would force prisoners to reflect on their sins and find redemption.
That philosophy shaped the prison’s design. A wagon-wheel shaped, panopticon-esque layout allowed for centralized surveillance of prisoners. Skylights in each cell represented the “Eye of God,” suggesting to prisoners that they were always being watched. Cells were attached to small outdoor exercise yards, enclosed by high walls to discourage communication between prisoners. Guards placed hoods over prisoners’ heads whenever they left their cells to prevent them from seeing each other.
But overcrowding made isolation difficult to enforce, so Eastern State abandoned solitary confinement in 1913. That same year, Jewish prisoners gathered to pray for the first time together in the prison’s emergency hospital.
The idea for a more official synagogue came from the top: Alfred Fleisher, the Jewish president of the prison’s board of trustees, advocated for the construction of a sanctuary, partly over concerns that Jewish prisoners would be pressured to convert to Christianity, according to Tinker.
In 1922, prisoners and outside volunteers built the ornate sanctuary. Lights in the shape of menorahs surrounded the ark, and a gold Star of David was affixed to the ceiling next to a skylight.
“It was a chance for the Jewish congregants to have a space that really resonated with their religion, and was a little fancier than the rest of the prison,” Tinker said. “It has sort of the gravitas that you might really find in a synagogue.”
Most of the congregants were serving time for petty crimes, Tinker said, and their stays at Eastern State lasted no more than a few years. For instance, Sydney Bleecher, a prisoner and congregant at Eastern State, was serving time after pleading guilty to stealing 542 suits and overcoats from a store. But for many congregants, the synagogue’s impact lasted beyond the lengths of their prison sentences.
“It is not easy to find words that can say what we feel about you,” Bleecher wrote in a 1948 letter to Joseph Paull, one of the synagogue’s most devoted volunteers. “You have done so much for us that we are far and away indebted to you. Maybe we can repay in part by becoming decent citizens and, like you and your wife, reach out a hand to those who need help.”
The synagogue was also unusually integrated with the outside community. Fleisher attended every service at the synagogue until his death in 1928. Sabato Morais, the spiritual leader at Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, simultaneously served as a chaplain at Eastern State.
All that support occurred despite the prison’s small Jewish population, which never rose above 80 in a prison that held roughly 1,800 people in the 1930s.
Yet according to Tinker, the synagogue never faced much pushback from people of other faiths.
“When they started it, it’s also World War I, World War II, and all that antisemitism that’s happening,” Tinker said. “It could have easily gone another direction.”
Jewish life behind bars
Most prisons today hold Jewish services in multi-faith chapels rather than separate Jewish sanctuaries — a practical arrangement that allows facilities to accommodate prisoners of many faiths in a shared space.
After Eastern State closed in 1971, its successor, Graterford Prison, also featured a dedicated synagogue. But after Graterford closed in 2018, its replacement, SCI Phoenix, opened with a multifaith chapel instead.
Today, Kolakowski, chaplaincy program director at the State Correctional Institute at Waymart, Pa., conducts services in a multifaith chapel or, when it’s occupied, a classroom shared with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
There, he leads regular services and holiday celebrations, including Passover seders and Hanukkah candle-lightings. During Sukkot, he hosts services in a makeshift sukkah.
“It’s meaningful to every inmate that practices a religious tradition,” Kolakowski said. “I remember one inmate in particular — he expressed how much he appreciated having the opportunity to have the lulav.”
But accommodating religious practice inside a prison often requires balancing spiritual needs with security concerns. When Kolakowski advocated for a Sikh prisoner to be able to wear a turban, for example, prison officials had to consider that the traditional head covering could be used to hide contraband, he said. Kolakowski ultimately got the item approved by suggesting a small turban with less fabric.
Modern-day prisons are legally required to accommodate prisoners’ religious practices unless they can demonstrate a compelling reason not to, such as a risk to staff or other prisoners’ safety. How those accommodations are carried out, however, can vary from prison to prison.
In 2023, for example, Jewish inmate Riley Benjamin sued the D.C. Department of Corrections after officials required him to produce outside proof of his Judaism before providing him with kosher meals. The jail later agreed to change its policy.
“Today, it’s really prison by prison, warden by warden, how they are defining religious freedom,” Tinker said. “One thing those laws really do is they sort of let the prison decide and the staff decide what it means to a certain extent.”
Still, there have been some successors to the Eastern State synagogue — including at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, where Rabbi Irving Koslowe convinced the prison administration to let him convert a basement storage room into an exclusively Jewish place of worship in 1959.
Koslowe died in 2000. But his great grandson, Benjamin Koslowe, visited the prison years later and wrote about the experience for Yeshiva University’s student newspaper.
In an interview with the Forward, Koslowe recalled one of his great-grandfather’s favorite jokes: “They’re the only synagogue that hopes that they don’t have a quorum.”
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