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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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The post A Berlin rabbi has been fired amid mounting allegations that he preyed on young women appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Invoking Torah, Minnesota Jews mobilize against ICE operations
(JTA) — The Hebrews’ flight from Egypt is on a lot of Jewish minds right now, as the annual cycle of Torah readings has reached the Book of Exodus.
But for many Jewish leaders in Minnesota, the ancient story has particular resonance.
With Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descending on the Twin Cities in search of undocumented immigrants and stirring chaos and pushback, the story of Exodus — about a king who tries to thwart the growing number of “foreigners” in his midst, and the leader who seeks to protect them — is inspiring widespread anti-ICE actions.
“As we’re currently reading in the Torah, Moses confronts Pharoah knowing it won’t be easy, and feeling his own doubts about such an act,” Rabbi Aaron Weininger, who leads the Conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in the suburb of Minnetonka, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And in doing so, the Israelites enslaved in Egypt are able to get unstuck. They’re able to taste freedom.”
Inspired by such teachings, and frequently invoked Jewish injunctions like “welcoming the stranger,” Jewish groups are signing on to open letters, and synagogues are actively involved in pro‑immigrant actions and advocacy. The Jewish presence at an interfaith anti-ICE rally this week is expected to be substantial.
“Our community members and staff live and work in every corner of society. There are too many stories of lives upended by what the government itself refers to as the ICE surge,” reads an open letter, issued Monday, spearheaded by the Jewish federation and signed by around two dozen Jewish groups.
Jewish groups “are deeply concerned by the current volatile situation throughout the Twin Cities and Minnesota,” according to the letter. Its signatories as of press time include 13 area congregations, ranging from Reform to Modern Orthodox; two Jewish day schools; Minnesota Hillel; the Minnesota JCC; the progressive group Jewish Community Action, and Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minnesota.
ICE’s presence — which includes masked, heavily armed officers conducting aggressive traffic stops, neighborhood raids and street patrols — has led to a lack of caregivers tending to local Jewish seniors, according to the letter.
It follows an earlier open letter from 49 Minnesota Jewish clergy, distributed on Friday, that describes “grief” and “horror” over ICE “wreaking havoc across our state.”
Quoting Deuteronomy — “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” — the rabbis and cantors spotlight the “tragic death” of driver Renee Good at the hands of an ICE officer Jan. 7 and include a prayer to “spread a canopy of peace and protection over all those wrongfully targeted by ICE at this moment.”
Both of those letters precipitated what is turning into a larger institutional Jewish pushback to ICE. On Wednesday, leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements issued a joint statement to “condemn, in the strongest terms, the violence with which the Department of Homeland Security is enforcing American immigration law — above all, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as well as in cities and towns across the nation.”
“Our sages taught that the Book of Deuteronomy’s directive, ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue’ (16:20), implies that the law must be enforced through a fair process, and that one should pursue justice whether it would be to one’s advantage or to one’s loss,” the statement reads, with the Jewish leaders further calling on the Justice Department to investigate Good’s death.
Rabbi Jill Avrin, campus lead at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, said it was “unprecedented” for such a wide variety of local Jewish groups to sign onto such messages.
“We have a really diverse Jewish community here, and we felt that this is a moment that is impacting all of us,” Avrin, who helped draft the letters, told JTA.
The multiple open letters are trying to appeal to shared spiritual values as the standoffs between protesters and ICE agents become increasingly fraught. A number of prominent figures — most recently Bruce Springsteen — have compared ICE’s tactics to the Gestapo; at the same time, an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service over the weekend has prompted concern and controversy across the interfaith community and led at least one Republican to compare the protesters to Hamas.
Local Jewish leaders say they are not dissuaded from what they view as a Jewish imperative to respond.
“Judaism isn’t about skipping the hard parts,” Weininger said. “It’s about noticing the struggles for centuries that have led us to this point: slavery, persecution, destruction, exile, coming home.”
Rabbis have been active in local mobilizing against ICE. They attended a community vigil for Good; Weininger discussed the issue during his Shabbat sermon. He also helped draft the rabbinical open letter, and this week is one of around 80 to 90 rabbis — many others from out of town — planning to attend an interfaith march in Minneapolis with more than 600 clergy present. Around 50 of the rabbis expected to attend are part of T’ruah, a Jewish social justice network, which mobilized after local clergy put out the request.
“What’s scary is that lawful actions are being targeted,” Weininger said about the situation on the ground. “We’re talking about protest and prayer and taking action in community, and even those modes of engagement are under attack.”
Recalling how Minneapolis Jews similarly mobilized in 2020 to protest George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, the rabbi described “a real sense of civil society here, and I think that is true of the Jewish clergy community in how people care for one another.”
Rabbis also spoke out at a Tuesday interfaith press conference denouncing ICE and outlining plans for this week’s march. “As people of faith, as leaders of faith communities, we are called to say, ‘Enough. Not on our watch,’” Rabbi Tamar Magill-Grimm, who leads the Conservative Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, said while standing next to a local imam.
Some Jewish groups across the country have raised concern about ICE’s activities for months, with some synagogues posting signs identifying themselves as houses of worship that agents do not have authority to enter. Rabbis affiliated with T’ruah have participated in “ICE watch” actions in other cities.
But Minnesota’s Jews have now witnessed firsthand the effects of a sustained, targeted ICE presence on their community. Local synagogues have hosted “upstander” training seminars for congregants to learn how to react in the face of an ICE encounter. For many congregants, the experience has pushed them to action — but it’s also invoked an eerie sensation, bringing echoes of a dangerous past.
“As a Jewish parent in Minneapolis, history feels too close right now,” one Twin Cities resident told Daci Platt, a fellow Minnesotan who works at Kveller, a JTA sister publication. “The sense of safety we usually rely on feels shakier than it ever has.”
Jewish community organizations are particularly concerned about the threat the ICE raids, which have focused primarily on non-white Twin Cities residents, pose to a caregiving workforce largely composed of immigrants.
“Jewish seniors are not having their basic needs met because their caregivers are too afraid to come to work,” says the letter spearheaded by the federation.
Amy Weiss, CEO of Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minnesota, told JTA that ICE has also affected her organization’s ability to serve its nonsectarian clients more generally. Much of their own staff are from immigrant communities, and Weiss worries about drawing attention to them by sending them out into the field to help clients.
“People are afraid to go to work. They’re afraid to leave their homes,” Weiss said. “I don’t see this as political. When you look at our mission, to support people in need, then this is very basic. These are the very basic needs of the community.”
The open letter also notes that there are Jews “who are immigrants themselves, have family members who are immigrants, or could be reasonably perceived to be immigrants. Many of these people are scared to leave their homes out of fear of being arrested and deported.”
The federation-backed letter is careful not to deride all law enforcement. It states, “We affirm our commitment to the rule of law, the lawful implementation of statutes, and the thousands of law enforcement officers charged with keeping us safe, whose efforts we deeply appreciate.”
Avrin, too, praised local law enforcement, whom she called “amazing” and “not the same thing as the ICE agents who are here on the ground.” She also noted that not all of the Jewish communal leaders shared the specific goals of this week’s march, which other Jewish leaders helped plan. The march’s demands include “ICE must leave Minnesota immediately” and “ICE should be investigated for human and Constitutional violations of Americans and our neighbors.”
“This moment is a moment that calls for coalition,” she said. “We are acknowledging and naming that we might be showing up with people whom we don’t actually agree with their broader platform.”
That discomfort has also arisen in some of the language of the opposition. As ICE protests in Minnesota attract growing national attention, comparisons to Nazis and the Gestapo have also grown. Avrin said the JCRC discourages such rhetoric
During a concert in New Jersey last weekend, Springsteen decried “heavily armed, masked federal troops invading an American city and using Gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens.” He then repeated a catchphrase popularized by Jacob Frey, Minneapolis’s Jewish mayor: “ICE should get the f–k out of Minneapolis.” (On Tuesday, Frey, along with other state officials, was subpoenaed by the Justice Department for alleged obstruction of immigration agents. Some of his critics have called attention to his Jewish identity.)
The faith-based protests suffered a distraction when anti-ICE protesters disrupted a St. Paul church service. The protesters, including Black Lives Matter Minnesota, claimed that one of its pastors also works as a local ICE field office leader. The Trump administration has announced an investigation into the protest, which officials said could amount to a violation of a federal law permitting free access to any worship site.
Following the protest, Cities Church in Minnesota issued a statement saying the protesters “accosted members of our congregation, frightened children, and created a scene marked by intimidation and threat. Such conduct is shameful, unlawful, and will not be tolerated.”
The statement added, “Invading a church service to disrupt the worship of Jesus — or any other act of worship — is protected by neither the Christian Scriptures nor the laws of this nation.” A founding pastor of the church has ties to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary.
One Republican, Rep. Will Self of Texas, said the protesters — who had livestreamed themselves from inside the church — reminded him of Hamas livestreaming on Oct. 7.
“When you livestream something, you want it to cause terror in the population,” Self told the far-right TV network Newsmax. “So when they livestreamed it, I compare them to Hamas, who livestreamed the attack in Israel that killed thousands of people.”
American Jewish leaders, for whom the freedom of worship in America has long been a key policy plank, say they disagree such a protest in a house of worship. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, who heads T’ruah, told JTA her organization “would not organize a protest of a church.”
The local JCRC also criticized the church protest, which comes in the aftermath of recent pro-Hamas synagogue protests in New York that were widely condemned by Jewish and progressive leaders alike.
“That is something we are absolutely opposed to. We would never encourage people to disrupt a worship service. That is not aligned with our values in any way,” Avrin said. “In my opinion it doesn’t reflect the broader efforts that are happening on the ground. That’s going to happen any time you have a large movement.”
Jews in that movement are focusing on injunctions drawn from the Bible. Speaking at New Birth, a historically Black Baptist church in Georgia with links to the family of Martin Luther King Jr., Georgia Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, gave a biblically inflected anti-ICE message.
“How can it be that masked federal agents set up checkpoints in American cities, demand papers, rip Americans from their cars, and throw them to the ground? Kill? Kill? With apparent license from the very top,” Ossoff told the congregation. “There’s a wickedness to the program. I don’t know, Pastor, where it is in scripture that it says ‘deny care to the sick, take from those with the least to give to those with the most, violate the house of worship to hunt down the refugee.’ Where in the scripture are those lessons taught?”
Ossoff, who is defending his seat in a tight reelection campaign, added that he and the church’s pastor had been “texting” about the Exodus journey of Moses, and how he used his staff to rally the Israelites.
In the face of the groundswell in Minnesota, President Donald Trump again forcefully rebuked the protesters and defended ICE.
“They’re apprehending murderers and drug dealers and a lot of bad people,” the president said of the agents during a press conference to mark one year of his second term.
Holding up images he said were of immigrant criminals apprehended by ICE, including one who he claimed was connected to Hezbollah, Trump asked the White House press pool, “Why don’t you talk about that more?… Do you want to live with these people?”
The president also referenced the church protest. “I have such respect for that pastor. He was so calm. He was so nice. He was just accosted,” Trump said of the clergyman whose sermon was interrupted. (He was not the pastor the protesters were targeting.) “What they did in that church was horrible.”
Trump, too, has been a mobilizing force for Jews in Minnesota. Following the president’s derogatory comments last month about the Somali population in the state — which Trump said justified the ICE raids — many local Jewish leaders had held coalition meetings with interfaith partners.
For some in the room at the time, Avrin recalled, it was the first time they had come face-to-face with these partners since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the start of the war in Gaza, which frayed many Jewish-liberal coalitions when other communal groups denounced Israel and “Zionists.”
Such partners had “stopped speaking to us, basically,” she said.
But for the Jewish leaders in the room, the Talmudic imperative to love the stranger overcame lingering uncertainty about reconfiguring these coalitions: “We can’t walk away from that just because we’ve been hurt,” she said.
The post Invoking Torah, Minnesota Jews mobilize against ICE operations appeared first on The Forward.
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San Diego Jewish groups decry disinvitation of rabbi from MLK Day event over ‘concerns about potential disruption related to Zionism’
(JTA) — The organizers of a Martin Luther King Day event in San Diego have come under fire from local Jewish groups after a rabbi said he was disinvited from speaking at the event due to his “connection to Israel.”
Rabbi Hanan Leberman, the leader of the Conservative Tifereth Israel Synagogue in San Diego, had initially been slated to give the closing prayer at the city’s All Peoples Celebration, which was organized by a community group called Alliance San Diego.
“This year, for the 38th annual All Peoples Celebration, we invite you to Choose Courage; to decide, with intention, to do what is right even when the fear and opposition are loud,” a description of the event read. “Now more than ever, our voices must rise above hesitation. We must claim our dignity and echo the notion that any attack on one, is an attack on us all.”
But in a post on Facebook Sunday, Leberman said he was “deeply upset” to learn he had been disinvited from the ceremony, writing that the reason behind the decision was due to his “connection to Israel.”
Born in Chicago and raised in Philadelphia, Leberman moved to Israel at 20 and served for three years in the IDF’s undercover counterterrorism unit, often as its cantor. He was ordained as a rabbi in the Masorti movement in Israel and worked there before moving to San Diego in 2024.
“The decision to disinvite me is, in my view, a disservice to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” wrote Leberman. “I believe the organization would benefit from deeper education about what Zionism truly is and about what the Jewish community is facing today—from both the left and the right.”
Alliance San Diego appeared to dispute Leberman’s account in a post on Instagram Sunday. The group wrote in a statement that it had asked two speakers to give up their slots “in response to concerns about potential disruption related to Zionism and anti-Zionism” but said they had not been disinvited. The other speaker has not been publicly identified.
“Our intention was never to exclude Jewish faith leaders or Jewish voices from this space,” the statement said. “As an organization working across many communities under immense strain and confronting assaults on immigrant communities, including Jewish and Israeli immigrants at a time of rising anti-semitism and fear, we acknowledge that our decision contributed to that pain rather than alleviating it.”
The MLK Day event was sponsored by the San Diego PBS station, several local universities and the American Federation of Teachers, whose head Randi Weingarten has faced criticism from the right over her response to antisemitism and from the left over her support for Israel.
No Jewish clergy spoke at the event, now in its 38th year, according to the Times of San Diego.
The decision to disinvite Leberman was decried by nearly four dozen synagogues and Jewish groups in San Diego in a joint statement published Sunday.
“Calling this gathering the All Peoples Celebration is difficult to reconcile with the exclusion of a Jewish leader for holding beliefs that are held by a strong majority of the Jewish community globally and here in San Diego,” the groups wrote. “Many now see this decision as turning the event into an ‘All Peoples (except for Jews) Celebration.’ That outcome should give everyone involved pause.”
Over the summer, all of the participating Jewish organizations in San Diego’s annual Pride festival pulled out of the celebration over the inclusion of a performance by anti-Israel R&B artist Kehlani. At the time, the Jewish groups cited “serious safety concerns” as the reason behind their withdrawal.
The post San Diego Jewish groups decry disinvitation of rabbi from MLK Day event over ‘concerns about potential disruption related to Zionism’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Longtime dean of Ziegler School retiring as Conservative seminary plots new course
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, the longtime dean of Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, will retire at the end of the school year, the president of Ziegler’s parent institution said Wednesday, in what may signal a broader transformation of the Los Angeles Conservative seminary.
Jay Sanderson, president of American Jewish University, confirmed the news in a phone interview with the Forward.
“He has served the Jewish world admirably, honorably for more than 25 years, leading an upstanding rabbinical school and making his mark on hundreds of Jewish leaders across the country,” Sanderson said.
Artson, who is also a vice president at AJU, is not leaving the school entirely. Sanderson said he will take on a “more senior role” in the administration of AJU, which also includes graduate schools for education and business. He will also continue teaching as the newly inaugurated Mordecai Kaplan Chair.
Artson did not reply to inquiries Wednesday night.
Sanderson, who became president in May 2025, has been making noise about bigger changes ahead at Ziegler since his arrival. In a podcast interview posted Jan. 15, he said he wanted AJU — which is already nondenominational other than Ziegler — to be “less denominationally driven.”
“What I was alluding to is an idea that has been talked about in the Jewish world for 15 years, that no one, frankly, has the courage to do, which is to create a multi-denominational rabbinical school, teaching 21st century skills, and bringing people across denominations to learn together,” Sanderson told the Forward. (Trans-denominational rabbinical schools do exist, including one in Los Angeles — the Academy for Jewish Religion, California.)
AJU sold its 22-acre hilltop campus prior to Sanderson’s arrival to a neighboring Jewish day school for terms that were undisclosed at the time. Sanderson said Wednesday that while he hadn’t seen the exact documentation, he thought it was between $55 million and $60 million. He said AJU netted very little of that, however, because most of the proceeds went to pay off debt on the campus.
Ziegler has since moved to LA’s Westside, and AJU’s administration — which had planned to stay on campus until 2027 — moved out 18 months early.
Artson, a leading intellectual in the Conservative movement, helped spearhead the push to legalize gay marriage under halacha, or Jewish law. He argued that “committed, permanent, exclusive homosexual relationships between equals” could not have been biblically prohibited because they were unknown until the modern era. The responsa he published in the 1990s making that case is still taught in rabbinical schools today; the Conservative movement did not formally sanction gay marriage until 2012.
And at a time when Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative flagship, was seen as cloistered, his arrival at AJU in 1999 — it was then known as the University of Judaism — helped shape its brand of Conservative Judaism as a movement that could be both compassionate and capable of interfacing with the public.
Rabbi Adam Kligfeld, head of Temple Beth Am, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, said hundreds of Ziegler-ordained rabbis and untold numbers of people in their communities have benefited from Artson’s “visionary leadership.”
“His impact is wide and deep and will be felt for a very long time,” Kligfeld said.
In 2024, Artson and Ziegler Vice Dean Rabbi Cheryl Peretz were investigated and cleared by the Conservative movement after they were accused by former students of enabling a toxic culture at the school. A letter from AJU responding to the complaint acknowledged it and pledged “to do better.”
Sanderson, who did not say what the plan was to replace Artson, said that Ziegler students’ response to the news of the dean’s impending departure was mixed.
“I am signaling that we’re going to be looking at things and potentially changing things going forward,” Sanderson said. “So naturally, some of the students were excited, and some of the students were anxious.”
The post Longtime dean of Ziegler School retiring as Conservative seminary plots new course appeared first on The Forward.