In synagogue this past Yom Kippur, someone handed me a machzor with a bookplate that read: “Dedicated by [X] in memory of Rabba Sara Hurwitz and Josh Abraham on the birth of Natan.”

Thank God, my husband Josh and I are very much alive. Somehow “in honor of” was replaced by “in memory of.” But my son, Natan, has just turned 9 years old — so what better reminder could there be to pause and examine my life? To ask the big questions that Shmuel in the Gemara (Yoma 87b) insists that we ask in the waning hours of Yom Kippur during Neilah: Mah anu, what are we? Meh chayeinu, what are our lives?

These questions don’t end with Yom Kippur. They echo back to the very beginning of our story as a people, when God calls Avram in Genesis 12:2, to leave his home with the divine promise: “I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.” The structure of this verse, which will be read in most synagogues this Shabbat, is striking. God doesn’t say “I will bless you” (that comes in the previous verse). Here, God says something different: “You shall be a blessing.” Avrahram is not a passive recipient but an active agent. His very existence, his life itself, will be a source of blessing to others.

This is God’s answer to Shmuel’s questions: What are we? We are blessings. What are our lives? Our lives are meant to be a source of blessing to the world. How do we live lives that fulfill this divine mandate?

This year, I hold these questions alongside the words of Eli Sharabi, the first hostage to publish his account of captivity. To call his book “Hostage” merely an autobiography misses its essence. It is a sacred text about what it means to live in darkness and fear and still choose life, still choose to be a blessing.

In the tunnels of Gaza, stripped of everything, Eli was forced to answer Shmuel’s questions in the starkest terms imaginable: What am I? What is my life? You would expect the answer to be: I am nothing. My life is nothing. But instead, his answer reverberates with a fierce, almost defiant vitality: “I don’t want to survive just for them [his family]. I don’t want to live just for them. I want to live for myself too. For me, Eli Sharabi. I want to live. I love life. I crave it.”

If Eli, who lived for 491 days in constant hunger, dealing with the brutality of his captors, living in the filth of the tunnels, without knowing if his beloved family were alive or dead — if he can still crave life against all odds, then I too, even when I feel shrouded in darkness and fear will not take what I have for granted, and I will embrace life.

To be a blessing begins with recognizing the gift of simply being alive, of breathing freely, off walking down the street. When we crave life itself, we become capable of blessing others. Eli writes: “I want to breathe life, to walk free, to return to the open skies, to go back home, to work, to purpose…. To return to the roads, to driving, to walking down the street, to my simple regular worry-free day-to-day.”

Sadly, Eli was released to learn that his wife Lianne and daughters Noiya and Yahel were murdered on Oct. 7 and that his brother Yossi, too, had been abducted and then killed in captivity. This week, we watched as Eli and his family buried Yossi in Israel, at long last.

Still, Eli’s testimony offers something even more profound about what it means to fulfill “and you shall be a blessing.” In absolute darkness, starving, and humiliated, he and his fellow hostages created a daily ritual to think of good things that happened to them each day and express gratitude — from sweet tea to a day without humiliation. In hell, they chose to find gratitude and see the tiny miniscule blessings in their lives. And in doing so, they became blessings to each other.

Hope was the hostages’ spiritual practice. Gratitude became resistance. Searching for good was an act of defiance against fear, and a way of being a blessing to those around them. In the tunnels of Gaza, Eli wasn’t just surviving, he was creating a practice of blessing. This is what God means when telling Avraham “and you shall be a blessing.” You don’t need to wait for perfect conditions. You don’t need to be free, comfortable, or secure.

As we move forward into a new year, Shmuel’s questions travel with me, now illuminated by God’s command to Avraham: Mah anu. What are we? We are called to be blessings. Like Eli, can we search for good even in difficulty? Can we be sources of hope and light for those around us, even when we ourselves are struggling?

Meh chayeinu. What are our lives? God tells Avraham that his life will be a blessing. What about ours? Do we only celebrate the extraordinary moments, or can we embrace the mundane — like walking down the street, breathing, being free to be at home with our loved ones? This is the wisdom of someone who faced death and chose, deliberately, consciously, to love life and to be a blessing, not despite the darkness, but in the darkness.

This year, I will hold Eli’s courage and search for good even when it’s hard to find. I will strive to make hope and gratitude a daily practice. I will try to fulfill “and you shall be a blessing” — to raise up those around me, in big ways and small.

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The Anti-Defamation League is launching a nationwide legal service to connect victims of antisemitism with lawyers who are able to take their cases on a pro-bono basis. 

The initiative comes as the ADL has increasingly turned to litigation as a tactic — the group says it has filed more lawsuits and legal complaints in the last years than in its previous 110 years combined. 

Announced on Wednesday, the ADL Legal Action Network comes out of a partnership with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, one of the largest law firms in the country. In total, more than 40 firms have agreed to participate, collectively tapping a pool of 39,000 attorneys.

The network will accept online submissions involving discrimination, intimidation, harassment, vandalism or violence and use artificial intelligence to evaluate them. Tips that make it through the system will be referred to partner firms or the ADL’s in-house litigators. 

“For decades, victims of antisemitism have come to ADL to receive frontline services,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. ​”We are now dramatically expanding our capabilities to support more Jewish Americans by helping to provide direct access to legal support anywhere in the country.”

Gibson Dunn partner Orin Snyder called the network an “unprecedented legal firewall against antisemitism, extremism, and hate.”

The initiative comes as the ADL, which is flush with donations, retreats from some of its traditional advocacy and educational work while facing an onslaught from the right, including the cutting of longstanding ties to the FBI after the agency’s director, Kash Patel, said the ADL has been “functioning like a terrorist organization.” (The group has also faced criticism from the left.)

The group recently eliminated an online resource known as the Glossary of Extremism and Hate, which counted more than 1,000 entries after accusations of bias by conservatives. It has also, for example, eliminated a signature anti-bias training for students and school teachers that included a focus on racism and LGBTQ issues.

Greenblatt has said he is intentionally retooling the organization to prioritize countering antisemitism as American Jews report increased harassment and discrimination.  

The legal network formalizes and expands the Campus Antisemitism Legal Line, which Gibson Dunn launched with the ADL, Hillel International and the Louis D. Brandeis Center in 2023. The ADL says CALL has received nearly 1,000 reports from 230 campuses and helped spur civil rights complaints and criminal cases. The new system extends that model beyond higher education to workplaces, public accommodations and allegations involving extremist organizations and individuals. 

One example that originated with a tip is a federal complaint filed by the ADL and its partners in June alleging that a high school in the Boston suburbs failed to protect Jewish students from antisemitism. 

The complaint said that Concord-Carlisle High School and Concord Middle School became hotbeds for abuse of Jewish of students, including “Nazi salutes in school hallways, students dividing themselves into teams called ‘Team Auschwitz; and ‘Team Hamas’ during athletic games, swastikas drawn in notebooks and on school property, and the use of antisemitic slurs such as ‘kike,’ ‘dirty Jew,’ and ‘go to the gas chamber,’” according to the ADL. School administrators allegedly downplayed or dismissed students’ complaints.

The district has said it takes antisemitism seriously and that it is cooperating with officials. It also said it is consulting with Jewish groups as it reviews its classroom policies and training programs. 

Directing the expanded network is James Pasch, who was tapped in 2023 to head a new litigation division for the organization. In an interview, Pasch said the organization is deliberately making the courthouse a central arena. 

“ADL does and has done, historically, three things incredibly well — we educate, we advocate and we investigate — and now we litigate,” he said. The aim, he added, is to “create life-altering costs to perpetrators who are committing illicit acts of antisemitism,” develop case law that better protects Jews, and give victims “a necessary outlet to tell their story in a complete way.”

Pasch said the ADL’s litigation team has grown into “like a boutique litigation firm inside ADL,” with roughly seven litigators plus support staff, while most large matters proceed with support from outside law firms. The expansion comes amid skyrocketing fundraising, which topped $170 million in annual donations, according to its most recent audited financial statements — a $65 million increase over its best year. 

Pasch said settlements, or even the threat of a filing, can lead to immediate impact and set standards for other institutions.

The ADL’s case list since Oct. 7 ranges across campuses, K-12 districts, workplaces and terror-finance suits. The group filed federal actions seeking to hold Iran, Syria and North Korea responsible for allegedly supporting Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack; separate complaints invoke Title VI against universities and school districts over what the ADL calls failures to adequately respond to antisemitism. The organization has also backed a church lawsuit targeting intimidation by a white supremacist group.

The initiative comes as many large firms reportedly recalibrate their pro bono work under pressure from the Trump administration, which has elevated antisemitism as a signature priority. To avoid becoming targets over more politically sensitive matters such as immigration and asylum, some firms are reportedly steering clear of those cases. Partnering with Jewish organizations on antisemitism claims lets the firms align with an issue the administration has endorsed.

Under President Donald Trump, the Department of Justice has reorganized its civil rights division to focus on a narrow list of priorities, among them antisemitism. The department has launched probes into universities accused of mishandling last year’s protests over the war in Gaza, and last month brought charges against an alleged Palestinian militant who participated in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel before entering the United States as an immigrant. 

Pasch said he welcomes federal efforts but added that increased government action is no reason for civil society to let up the legal pressure. 

“This is a moment that will take an all-of-society approach from the government, to NGOs, to private business,” he said. “In legal cases, the Justice Department generally does not represent private individuals who are victims of antisemitism, but ADL along with our partners in firms have the ability to bring those cases to the forefront.”

The ADL is not the only Jewish group also ratcheting up litigation. 

The Brandeis Center, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit dedicated to advancing “civil and human rights of the Jewish people” on Monday announced five new hires. The group is led by Kenneth Marcus, who is credited with pioneering the use of federal civil rights law — especially Title VI — to address antisemitism in education. 

The pro-Israel group StandWithUs reports that its legal team has tripled in since the Oct. 7 attacks and has been publishing semiannual reports detailing new cases.

The increase in legal activity comes amid a broader debate about how to balance civil rights enforcement with free-speech protections. As part of settlement negotiations, the ADL has demanded that school districts and universities formally adopt what’s known as the IHRA definition of antisemitism. 

But civil liberties groups and Palestinian-rights advocates have criticized the use of Title VI complaints tied to the IHRA definition because they say aggressive enforcement can stifle political discussions about Israel. The ADL and its partners counter that the cases target conduct — harassment, threats, discrimination — not viewpoints, and that filings have already yielded concrete changes on campuses and in districts.

In explaining how he selects what cases to pursue, Pasch said the criteria include whether a filing would disrupt harmful activity, strengthen or establish law, and give victims a full voice. 

“We can’t heal the injured and we can’t bring people back from the dead,” he said. “But we can provide a voice and some semblance of relief for victims, whether that be policy change or monetary relief.”

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CHICAGO — Jerry Orbach moves through the sanctuary of Northbrook Community Synagogue with the practiced eye of a man who’s spent years rescuing pieces of a fading world. The suburban Chicago congregation glows with stained glass saved from shuttered synagogues, their colors reframed along these walls. What began as one man’s mission has turned the space into a living museum — a collage of light and loss.

A large gold Star of David hangs from a chain around Orbach’s neck, catching the light from the windows he’s saved from seven shuls. At 79, the retired judge has made a second career of rescuing what others have left behind: stained glass from synagogues that have closed, merged, or fallen into disrepair.

He isn’t just saving glass; he’s salvaging light — the one thing that never stops traveling.

Each panel is marked by a small plaque: the name of the congregation, the town it once illuminated, the year it died. When the sun hits them just right, color ripples across the walls like ghosts, a chorus of light still singing long after the voices are gone. “A continuation instead of a destruction,” he says, as if arguing a case.

For more than a century, the number of synagogues in America steadily climbed, a reflection of immigration, assimilation, and Jewish ambition. But by the 1990s, that momentum stalled. In the decades that followed, it reversed. There are roughly 20% fewer synagogues today than there were in 1990, according to data gathered by Alanna E. Cooper, a Jewish Studies professor at Case Western Reserve University. For the first time in American history, more synagogues are closing each year than opening.

The walls of Northbrook Community Synagogue now hold what those closures leave behind: fragments of glass salvaged from sanctuaries across the post-industrial Midwest, where factories shuttered and congregations dwindled. Orbach has become a one-man preservation society.

A history in glass

Stained glass has long been a marker of Jewish arrival in America. When immigrant congregations began erecting monumental synagogues in the early 1900s, they built them with arches, domes, and large window apertures. Glass became the medium of belonging.

In cathedrals, stained glass told the stories of saints. In synagogues, it told the story of survival. Early designs depicted the 12 tribes, the days of creation, the Exodus from Egypt. Later came darker panels, fractured blues and reds evoking the Holocaust, followed by bursts of gold and white celebrating the creation of the State of Israel. Across a century of Jewish life, the art evolved into a visual Torah of endurance.

The factories closed. The congregations scattered. But the windows remain: fragile, luminous, still looking for a home.

Orbach leads me into a small elevator, one hand steadying his cane as the doors close. “You’re gonna like this,” he says, as the bell dings and the elevator jolts to a stop.

The basement sprawls beneath the entire building, a hidden warren of storage rooms and concrete corridors. One room is a large gym. Another section is soon to become indoor pickleball courts. But in a far corner, the scene could be straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. This is where Orbach has built something else: a warehouse of memory.

Wooden crates line the walls, some open, others nailed shut. Inside are stained-glass windows that have yet to find a new home — towering panels from Beth Achim synagogue in Southfield, Michigan, each thirteen feet tall and three feet wide. For now, they rest here, waiting for wherever their journey next takes them, like the vessels of a traveling tabernacle.

Orbach lifts his phone, flicking on the flashlight. Dust drifts through the beam. The air smells faintly metallic, like old pews and time. He runs the light along the edge of a crate, tracing the outline of a hidden window.

“I just got these in two weeks ago,” he says, like a shopkeeper showing off new stock. “Seven for the holidays, seven for the days of creation. They’re gorgeous.”

He steps closer to a crate, resting his hand on the wood as if on a headstone. This, he said, is how memory becomes a kind of faith.

The case for light

A son of Chicago, Orbach was born in Humboldt Park to parents who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe — his mother from Ukraine, his father from Poland. When he was eight, the family moved north to Albany Park, then a humming center of Jewish life. He’s stayed close to the city ever since: studying law at Loyola, serving as a prosecutor and alderman, and later, in 1988, taking the bench in Cook County. In time he rose to head the court’s law division in District Two, a job that taught him to listen before ruling. He retired two decades ago, though he now mediates and arbitrates cases — a judge, it seems, never entirely off duty.

A few of Orbach’s earliest rescues were the panels from his childhood synagogue in Albany Park. They once illuminated the sanctuary where he became bar mitzvah, where he was married, where his parents once prayed. Reinstalled now in Northbrook, they’ve since framed his grandchildren’s baby namings. “They sold the building to a church,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the idea of those windows ending up in a dumpster.”

Something shifted. He started calling contractors, preservationists — anyone with a ladder and a conscience. Soon he was showing up at demolition sites, paying crews out of pocket to let him climb the scaffolding and pry the glass from the walls. Once, at Mikro Kadosh Anshei Ticktin, an old Chicago congregation, he and his crew worked through the night, prying the stained glass from the front while a bulldozer tore into the back of the building. “By the end, there was one wall left,” he said. “It was shaking while we got the last window out.”

He talks about the windows the way some people talk about those who once prayed beneath them, as if they still have a pulse. “If you keep the memory of the shuls alive,” he said, “the people in them are alive too.”

From ruin to renewal

Among Orbach’s most prized rescues are a set of stained-glass windows from Saginaw, Michigan — luminous panels manufactured in France and salvaged just before their synagogue was torn down. He brought them to Northbrook several years ago, giving their light a second life.

A few months after Orbach installed the Saginaw windows, Cooper — the scholar who tracks synagogue closures and the fate of their sacred objects — flew in from Cleveland to see them. She’d been studying what happens to the sacred items left behind when synagogues close: Torah scrolls, yahrzeit plaques, arks, pews, memorial lights. But the stained glass, she said, posed the hardest questions.

Stained-glass windows don’t have a sacred status like a Torah scroll or even the building itself. They carry a different kind of holiness. “I’ve heard many congregations describe their windows as the soul of their congregation,” Cooper said.

She found in Orbach what her fieldwork had only theorized. “He’s creating an afterlife for these windows,” she said at a dedication ceremony at Northbrook, where they both spoke.

Standing before the crowd that day, Cooper described the scene she’d witnessed when windows were removed from Ahavath Israel in Kingston, New York, which Orbach also rescued and relocated to Northbrook. Cooper recalled workmen carrying the panels to their crates as the last members of the congregation looked on. “As they lowered the windows into the boxes,” she said, “it felt like a burial.”

Now she gestured toward the sanctuary, the glass alive with color once more. “And this,” she said, “is the afterlife.”

In his own sanctuary

Orbach has one more thing to show me, in his two-story home on a quiet suburban street. Rusty, his six-year-old rescue mutt, bounds to the door. His wife, Noreen, waves from the hallway.

The foyer is lined with photos of his two daughters and their families. Hanging above the entryway are two stained-glass windows he salvaged years ago from a shuttered synagogue in Lakeview, Illinois, where he used to go for minyan. The site is now condos.

“In my own way, this is how I keep those shuls alive,” he says, glancing up at the glass.

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