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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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The post A brand-new Jewish ritual object inspires an innovative art exhibit appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Italy Arrests Nine Over Alleged Hamas Funding Through Charities
President of the Palestinian Association in Italy, Mohammad Hannoun, carries a Palestinian flag during a nationwide strike, called by the USB union, in solidarity with Gaza and against the government and its plan to increase military spending, in Rome, Italy, November 29, 2025. Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said Mohammad Hannoun is among nine people arrested on December 27 on suspicion of financing Hamas through charities based in Italy, in an operation coordinated by anti-mafia and anti-terrorism units. in Italy. REUTERS/Remo Casilli
Italian prosecutors said on Saturday they had arrested nine people on suspicion of financing Hamas through charities based in Italy, in an operation coordinated by anti-mafia and anti-terrorism units.
The suspects are accused of “belonging to and having financed” the Palestinian group, which the European Union designates as a terrorist organization, prosecutors in the northern Italian city of Genoa said in a statement.
Those arrested allegedly diverted to Hamas-linked entities around 7 million euros ($8.24 million) raised over the last two years for ostensibly humanitarian purposes, prosecutors said. Police seized assets worth more than 8 million euros.
The investigation began after suspicious financial transactions were flagged and expanded through cooperation with Dutch authorities and other EU countries, coordinated through the EU judicial agency Eurojust.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni thanked the authorities for “a particularly complex and important operation” which had uncovered financing for Hamas through “so-called charity organizations.”
The Israeli prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meloni’s support for Israel during its war with Hamas in Gaza has triggered large and repeated street protests in Italy.
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What if Donald Trump puts his name on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum?
What if I told you that this morning, I found the following Truth Social post on my newsfeed?
“THE TRUMP US HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM HONORS will be broadcast tonight, on CBS, and Stream on Paramount+. Tune in at 8 P.M. EST! At the request of the Board, and just about everybody else in America, I am hosting the event. Tell me what you think of my “Master of Ceremony” abilities. If really good, would you like me to leave the Presidency in order to make “hosting” a full time job? We will be honoring true GREATS in the History of the Holocaust, from the Elders of Zion and the NSDAP to John Birchers and Groypers. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION.”
If you said this post wasn’t real, you would be right. If you said that I tweaked a recent Truth Social post, swapping the US Holocaust Memorial Museum for the former John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, you would be right about that too.
But if you said that this post was unthinkable, my response would be “Think again.”
The phrase “Thinking the unthinkable” was all the rage in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was an era darkened by the threat of mushroom clouds, the theatrics of Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, and the theories of Herman Kahn, whose notion of the Doomsday Machine features in Kubrick’s masterpiece. Kahn coined the term “unthinkable,” insisting that while “nuclear war may seem highly unlikely, indeed unthinkable, to many people — it is not impossible.”
To this very day, the threat of a nuclear holocaust remains all too real and thinkable. But it has been sidelined by a different kind of threat, one that has buried the very concept of the unthinkable.
So many words and acts once considered unthinkable have, under the two Trump presidencies, become not just thinkable and not just doable, but also increasingly unremarkable. Is there any word or act we still consider safely and surely unthinkable? Is there anything at all that, to quote Herman Kahn, while it may seem highly unlikely, indeed unthinkable, to many people — is not impossible?
To find an answer, it helps to suggest a limiting case on our government’s effort to make all things thinkable, and thus acceptable, even normal. Consider the fake post with which I began this column — namely, that Donald Trump would one day plaster his name on the building that houses the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Can there be anything more unthinkable than Trump stamping his name on the USHMM, the very institution that is dedicated to reminding the world of the consequences of acting on the unthinkable?
In his reflections on life under totalitarian rule, The Captive Mind, Polish poet and Nobel Prize Laureate Czeslaw Milosz observed that all “concepts men live by are a product of the historic formation in which they find themselves. Fluidity and constant change are the characteristics of phenomena. And man is so plastic a being that one can even conceive of the day when a thoroughly self-respecting citizen will crawl about on all fours, sporting a tail of brightly colored feathers as a sign of conformity to the order he lives in.”
We see such plasticity on the sets of Fox News, the corridors of Congress and in the board rooms of media, legal, and tech titans where talking heads, politicians and CEOs happily crawl about with many-colored tails of feathers. This is also true in the board rooms of the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts and the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. (The names of these sites must be written in full to fully grasp the absurd character of this era.)
But the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will always be exempt from this creeping rot of the absurd, right?
Wrong.
In early May, the USHMM, which like the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts is both privately and federally funded, announced an overhaul of its board. Nearly all its Biden-appointed members were fired, replaced by a choice assortment of Trump appointees. They include Sid Rosenberg, a conservative talk-show host who spoke at a Trump rally last year, denouncing the Democrats as “a bunch of degenerates.”
Another Trump appointee, Martin Oliner, published an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post earlier this year in which he called for the forcible removal from Gaza of Palestinians, whom he described as “fundamentally evil.” In another piece, titled “Make the Holocaust Memorial Council Great Again,” he warned that the USHMM was not meeting its “important role.”
Equally troubling was this fall’s temporary closing until next February of the museum exhibit dedicated to America’s wartime response to the Holocaust. The ostensible reason was to “upgrade the exhibit,” an Orwellian phrase that some staffers fear means the blurring the historical record, one that includes the disinterest of the White House, the fecklessness of most Jewish leaders, and the polite, yet potent antisemitism at the State Department.
In his landmark work The Abandonment of the Jews, the historian David Wyman offers a similar conclusion on the American public’s response to the Holocaust: “Few American non-Jews recognized that the plight of the European Jews was their plight too. Most were either unaware, did not care, or saw the European Jewish catastrophe as a Jewish problem, one for Jews to deal with. That explains, in part, why the United States did so little to help.”
Is it possible that because too many of us remain unaware of or indifferent to the Trump administration’s abandonment of the unthinkable, we have invited the catastrophe now enveloping our nation? A catastrophe that already announces itself in the mass and often violent arrests and deportations of men and women because of their skin color? In the lawless killing of civilians in international waters? In the unconstitutional deployment of the National Guard in our cities? For those who do not yet have an answer, it is worth giving the matter a bit of thought — even if you find those thoughts unthinkable.
The post What if Donald Trump puts his name on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel becomes first country to recognize Somaliland, drawing condemnation from Egypt, Turkey and Somalia
Israel became the first country to formally recognize Somaliland, a self-declared sovereign state in the Horn of Africa, in a decision that was immediately condemned by Somalia and other nations.
“The Prime Minister announced today the official recognition of the Republic of Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state,” wrote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office in a post on X. “The State of Israel plans to immediately expand its relations with the Republic of Somaliland through extensive cooperation in the fields of agriculture, health, technology, and economy.”
Somaliland’s president welcomed the announcement from Netanyahu in a post on X, adding that he affirmed the region’s “readiness to join the Abraham Accords,” the normalization agreements between Israel and a handful of Arab states that was brokered during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Somaliland proclaimed independence from Somalia in 1991 during the country’s civil war, but has failed to receive recognition from the international community in part due to Somalia’s opposition to its secession. Somalia officially rejects ties with Israel, and has consistently refused to recognize the state of Israel since 1960. Somalia and Somaliland are overwhelmingly Muslim.
“The ministers affirmed their total rejection and condemnation of Israel’s recognition of the Somaliland region, stressing their full support for the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Somalia,” Egypt’s foreign ministry said in a statement following a phone call between Egypt’s foreign minister and his Somali, Turkish and Djiboutian counterparts, according to Reuters.
In November, the Israeli think tank Institute for National Security Studies argued in a report that recognizing Somaliland could be in Israel’s strategic interest.
“Somaliland’s territory could serve as a forward base for multiple missions: intelligence monitoring of the Houthis and their armament efforts; logistical support for Yemen’s legitimate government in its war against them; and a platform for direct operations against the Houthis,” the report read.
It is unclear if the United States will follow suit. In August, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz wrote to Trump urging him to recognize Somaliland.
“Somaliland has emerged as a critical security and diplomatic partner for the United States, helping America advance our national security interests in the Horn of Africa and beyond,” wrote Cruz.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel becomes first country to recognize Somaliland, drawing condemnation from Egypt, Turkey and Somalia appeared first on The Forward.