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A brand-new Jewish ritual object inspires an innovative art exhibit
(New York Jewish Week) — When Andrew Mandel dreamt up a new Jewish ritual object known as a “tzedek box,” he was admittedly most interested in the “tzedek” — the social justice — aspect, and less so the “box” part.
Mandel, a fifth-year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in New York, envisioned a new Jewish holiday, Yom HaTzedek (Day of Justice) back in 2018 as a way to make acts of social justice an integral part of religious life. To reinforce the themes of the holiday, Jews would write reflections on each effort made to help the world throughout the year, and save them in a box. “This action is not meant to self-congratulate or to rack up a record of good deeds,” Kveller, the New York Jewish Week’s partner site, wrote in 2021. “Rather, it provides a moment to reflect on the work and develop accountability around consistently being ‘shomer tzedek,’ a guardian of justice.”
When he first conceived of the holiday, the box itself was an afterthought. “I have to confess, at first, the actual box wasn’t particularly relevant to me,” Mandel, 44, told the New York Jewish Week. “It’s like — find a shoe box, find a jar. It was shortsighted, but that’s where I was.”
But as Yom HaTzedek shifted from concept to reality — the day is now officially commemorated on Pesach Sheni, or the Second Passover, observed on the 14th day of Iyar (this year May 5) — so too did Mandel’s thinking on the box itself. Conversations with renowned Jewish artist Tobi Kahn and Jean Bloch Rosensaft, director of the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum at HUC, led Mandel to believe the aesthetics of the box could help enhance the users’ spiritual exploration of justice.
And now, these conversations have inspired a new exhibit, “Tzedek Boxes: Justice Shall You Pursue,” which will open at the Heller Museum on Thursday. The exhibit features 29 tzedek boxes created by contemporary Jewish artists. They include one of Kahn’s series of seven wooden tzedek boxes, “Zahryz III,” and Eli Kaplan-Wildmann’s customizable cardboard “Pop-up Tzedek Box,” which has been massed-produced for 8,300 participants and two dozen synagogues that have all participated in the new holiday.
The exhibit’s aim, said Rosensaft, echoes the museum’s mission “to encourage the interpretation and renewal of Jewish values, tradition, and practice through the creativity of contemporary artists in works that will advance justice in our world.”
If the tzedek box sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard of its cousin — or version 1.0, if you will: the tzedakah box, a receptacle for collecting coins to be donated to charity. The words “tzedek” and “tzedakah” have the same Hebrew root: justice.
“It’s not just that we don’t really use coins anymore,” Mandel said. “There’s more ways of making change than [just] philanthropy — whether it’s advocacy, whether that’s direct service and volunteer work, whether that’s just listening and learning. A tzedek box creates an umbrella for all those different actions so we can all live out our values together to improve the world.”
In the exhibit, the artists’ tzedek boxes capture different facets of social justice: in Jewish tradition (images of doves, or flowing rivers); motivation for social action (references to heroes and past injustices such as the Holocaust); the causes people care about (the environment, food insecurity) and symbols of generous behavior (an open heart, an open mind).
“I’m not an artist myself,” Mandel said. “But now I have seen these contributions of wildly diverse, often quite moving representations of justice and righteousness, it really opens things up to how multifaceted this process [of tzedek] is. Your box really matters.”
Reva Jane Solomon’s tzedek box, “Mommy’s Justice,” is a homage to her mother’s love. (Courtesy the Heller Museum)
In Reva Jane Solomon’s “Mommy’s Justice,” the tzedek box takes the form of a purple jewelry box, an homage to her mother’s love meant to encourage small acts of compassion and justice. Holly Berger Markhoff’s “Justice Knows No Other” is a wooden box featuring an interactive scroll on which to record one’s deeds, creating a continuous chronicle of righteousness.
Kahn, whose cityscape-inspired tzedek box evokes the Jewish obligation to care for humankind, said he hoped the exhibit would inspire all Jews to adopt the ritual. “If you believe in something you should actually do it,” he said. “I’m thrilled that many people are making their own because that’s how ritual starts.”
This isn’t the first new Jewish ritual object that the Heller Museum launched into the mainstream. In 1997, it featured an exhibit of Miriam’s cups — a goblet filled with water that’s placed alongside Elijah’s cup at Passover as a call to include women and their stories in the seder. The exhibit helped introduce the now widespread practice to Jews around the world.
Rosensaft sees the tzedek box exhibition as a similar call to action. “One of the pillars of Judaism is the notion that we, as a people, have been affiliated by horrific episodes of injustice, intolerance and genocide,” she said. “We cry ‘never again,’ but we know we cannot say that if we are not prepared to work towards the causes of human rights and freedom in our own time.”
To this end, Rosensaft paired the tzedek boxes with a concurrent exhibit, “One Nation,” in which artists of all backgrounds were invited to create works that comment on the state of America past, present and future.
“A lot of that hope for the future hinges on individuals taking action to solve the problems afflicting American society,” Rosensaft said.
“Tzedek Boxes” and “One Nation” are on view at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum, (1 West 4th St.), from Jan. 26 through May 18. Or you can download the free Bloomberg Connects App and visit the Heller Museum page to virtually visit all the museum’s exhibitions, including “Tzedek Boxes” and “One Nation.”
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A famed rabbi’s yeshiva reopens for students for the first time since World War II
(JTA) — Dovid Hofstedter was visiting Belarus five years ago when he discovered that a historic Jewish school had turned into something else.
Hofstedter, a Canadian rabbi, was joining a group of rabbis from around the world at the Radin Yeshiva, nestled in the small town of Radun in western Belarus. The school was founded in 1869 by the famed Lithuanian rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, known as the Chofetz Chaim, and housed 300 students before World War II.
As Hofstedter delivered a lecture in the building, he was surprised to see it fill up with locals, who then gradually wandered out. He realized they didn’t know the building had once housed a yeshiva in a town where no Jews live today.
Instead, people had walked in expecting a play — and left when they didn’t get one.
The Radin Yeshiva had been converted into a theater, with a stage and red seats, Hofstedter told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Like many Jewish sites across Eastern Europe, where the Nazis’ annihilation was followed by decades of Soviet rule that stifled Jewish memory and communal life, the school’s history had been buried.
“In other places that I’ve been to in Eastern Europe, some yeshivas were used as a post office,” said Hofstedter. “Some were used as government buildings.”
This month, Hofstedter and another group of 100 international rabbis filled the building again, this time to inaugurate the reopened Radin Yeshiva, now fully restored to serve Torah students as a functioning school.
Yad Yisroel, a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening Jewish life in Belarus, bought the yeshiva building from the municipality of Radun (or Radin, according to its Yiddish pronunciation) in 2025. That spurred a year of planning and construction, headed internationally by Hofstedter, who founded the Torah study organization Dirshu, and locally by Moshe Fhima, who directs Yad Yisroel’s projects and leads a yeshiva in the southern city of Pinsk.
The restoration team replaced the building’s roof and windows, which had deteriorated over years of neglect. Inside, they installed a new Torah ark and recreated the wooden lecterns and chairs that filled the yeshiva before World War II. A library of books is being transported from Israel to stock the school’s shelves.
The Radin Yeshiva closed after the outbreak of World War II, when the Soviet Union occupied the region and Soviet authorities seized the building. Nazi Germany captured Radun in 1941. Some yeshiva students escaped to Japan, where they received aid from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Rabbi Mendel Zaks, the Radin Yeshiva’s then-leader and the Chofetz Chaim’s son-in-law, fled in 1941 to the United States and reestablished the yeshiva in New York City. In the 1950s, the new school moved upstate to Suffern, New York, where it remains active.
Meanwhile, more than 2,000 Jews from Radun and neighboring villages were interned in a ghetto; most were killed by the Germans and local police.
Hofstedter believes that the Radin Yeshiva will draw interest from Jewish communities across Belarus. Though the country’s 30,000 to 50,000 Jews today are largely secular, Hofstedter said a subset of the community has shown interest in reconnecting with facets of their Jewish identity that were quashed under the Soviets, and the yeshiva can serve as a focal point for that rediscovery. Many of its students will also come from abroad, as Orthodox Jews make regular pilgrimages to study the Chofetz Chaim’s teachings and visit his gravesite.
The Chofetz Chaim, who lived from 1838 to 1933 and whose sobriquet is the title of his first and most famous book, was widely hailed as the leading Jewish scholar of his generation. His establishment of the Radin Yeshiva brought the town fame in the Jewish world of Eastern Europe, where current-day Belarus and Lithuania were home to many “Litvak” Jews who followed a rigorous, anti-Hasidic religious tradition. He remains influential among Orthodox Jews globally for his works codifying Jewish law and ethics, especially his guidance on refraining from “lashon hara,” or “evil speech” about others, said Hofstedter.
There are recent signs of renewed attention to Belarusian and Lithuanian sites of Jewish heritage, according to Alena Kuliounich, the deputy chair of the Union of Belarusian Jewish Public Associations and Communities. The Volozhin Yeshiva, another jewel of Lithuanian Jewish history founded in 1803, reopened as a museum in 2024. Today, no more than a handful of Jews are estimated to live in Volozhin, now in western Belarus.
“Volozhin demonstrates that a historic Jewish site can attract considerable interest even in the absence of a substantial local Jewish community,” Kuliounich told JTA.
Hofstedter, whose parents survived the Holocaust in Auschwitz and Mauthausen before rebuilding their lives in Toronto, had a different vision for the Radin Yeshiva. He explicitly did not want it to become a museum.
“We didn’t want to just have some sort of tribute to the past,” said Hofstedter. “We wanted to be in continuity with the future, the teachings of the Chofetz Chaim for future generations.”
At the Radin Yeshiva’s rededication ceremony, he was moved to watch rabbis from the United States, Israel, Britain, France and elsewhere join to celebrate the Chofetz Chaim. The Lithuanian sage’s teachings are followed by Jews across Orthodox movements. It was rare to see rabbis with a range of backgrounds and beliefs “come together with such a feeling of solidarity,” said Hofstedter.
“There was an enormous amount of emotion at that gathering,” he said. “After almost 100 years, to be able to come back to the Chofetz Chaim’s yeshiva, to rejuvenate it and have the yeshiva functioning — it was just incredible.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A famed rabbi’s yeshiva reopens for students for the first time since World War II appeared first on The Forward.
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Police shoot dead assailant outside Israeli Embassy in Serbia
(JTA) — An assailant with knives attacked a police officer guarding the Israeli Embassy in Serbia overnight before the officer shot him dead, according to Serbian authorities.
Interior Minister Ivica Dačić called the incident a “terrorist attack.” The attacker had two knives and shouted “Allahu Akbar” at the officer 15 minutes after midnight Wednesday morning at the embassy in Belgrade. One knife hit the officer’s face.
The officer, a member of the Gendarmerie unit who was identified only by the initials D.S., killed the assailant on the spot, according to the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade. The attacker, who was dressed in black and whom Dačić described as a minor, has not been identified and was believed to be from the western city of Šabac.
Dačić said he raised Serbia’s terrorism threat level to “red,” the highest degree, triggering heightened security monitoring and increased police presence around infrastructure facilities and places where large crowds gather.
Dačić added that Serbian security services had been monitoring the attacker, who was “known to be a supporter of the Islamic State” and had posted an image of the terror group’s flag on his Instagram account.
Avivit Bar-Ilan, the ambassador of Israel to Serbia, said she was “deeply disturbed and shocked by the terrorist attack.” She thanked the member of the Gendarmerie for “his courage and decisive response.”
The attack was the second on Belgrade’s Israeli Embassy in two years. In June 2024, a man seriously wounded a police officer outside the embassy by shooting him in the neck with a crossbow.
Wednesday’s incident came the day after Israel held parliamentary elections, with preliminary results suggesting that neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition nor the opposition bloc had secured a governing majority.
Serbia had its own pivotal election on Sunday, with the country’s student-led protest movement defeating the bloc led by longtime nationalist leader Aleksandar Vučić. Under Vučić, Serbia deepened ties with Israel, including through a new joint combat drone manufacturing plant.
The victorious Student List movement said in its platform, “We will not be complicit in the systematic attempt to destroy the Palestinian people that Israel is carrying out in the Gaza Strip, and we will intensify the delivery of humanitarian aid to Palestine in order to save lives and reduce the number of casualties.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Netherlands reverses course, will sit out Eurovision again over Israel’s participation
(JTA) — The Netherlands is withdrawing from the Eurovision Song Contest, reversing an announcement that it would join the event and citing “sensitivity” over Israel’s participation.
The Dutch organization that oversees public broadcasting, the Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, or NPO, said on Tuesday that it failed to find sufficient support from broadcasters to ensure a Dutch artist could go to Eurovision.
“We have known for some time that Israel’s participation elicits various reactions in society and causes discussion and division,” said Jurre Bosman, NPO’s media director. “This is also the case among broadcasters and staff, and we understand that sensitivity.”
NPO said last month that the Netherlands would reenter Eurovision in 2027, when the world’s largest music competition will take place in Burgas, Bulgaria. The Netherlands boycotted the contest in May 2026, alongside Spain, Ireland, Iceland and Slovenia, because of Israel’s inclusion.
NPO’s pledge to rejoin Eurovision overrode a decision by the Dutch network Avrotros, which usually oversees the Dutch entry. Avrotros withdrew from Eurovision in August, saying the event “can no longer be considered neutral” with Israel taking part amid “the severe humanitarian suffering in Gaza and the ongoing restrictions on press freedom.”
Initially, NPO believed there was “sufficient support” among public broadcasters to allow the Netherlands to return, said Jet de Ranitz, the chair of NPO’s executive board. But the decision sparked backlash. Earlier this month, about 400 public broadcasting employees signed a letter titled “#NotMyEurovision” to NPO’s management and board, urging the organization to reconsider returning to the contest.
“We only want to send an artist or artists and staff to the festival if they can count on the full support of one or more broadcasters,” Bosman said.
The contest will still be broadcast in the Netherlands by the network NOS, as it was this year.
Eurovision director Martin Green said he was “deeply sorry” that the Netherlands would not participate, adding that the organizers understood the decision and “respect the strength of feeling behind it in the Netherlands.”
Ireland will also remain absent from Eurovision next year. The country’s broadcaster RTÉ said in September that “Ireland’s participation cannot be justified given the appalling and ongoing loss of lives in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there.” In Spain, the head of broadcaster RTVE also said he favored a continued boycott.
Czechia pulled out of the event this month, but its public broadcaster cited budget cuts as the reason.
The controversy over Israel’s inclusion in Eurovision has prompted mass protests. The 2026 contest drew 131 million viewers, down 35 million from the previous year.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netherlands reverses course, will sit out Eurovision again over Israel’s participation appeared first on The Forward.
