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A German town built a granary atop its Jewish cemetery. Now the bones are yielding insights about Ashkenazi DNA.
BERLIN (JTA) – The city of Erfurt in central Germany is home to an impeccably restored medieval synagogue made possible because local Jews had been expelled long before the Nazis began their campaign to destroy Jewish sites.
Now, Erfurt’s long-hidden Jewish past is again offering new insights — this time about the genetic history of Ashkenazi Jews.
Human remains from a medieval Jewish cemetery in Erfurt have allowed what researchers say is the largest ancient Jewish DNA study to date. Conducted without disinterring any remains, in keeping with Jewish law, the study published Wednesday in the scientific journal Cell found that Erfurt’s medieval Jewish community was more genetically diverse than their modern-day cousins, and carried many of the same Jewish genetic diseases — such as Tay Sachs and cystic fibrosis — that affect Ashkenazi Jews today.
“There have been many previous DNA studies, but not of Jews,” said geneticist Shai Carmi, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose search for study material led him to an archaeological dig at the Jewish cemetery in Erfurt. He and his collaborators were able to analyze DNA of 33 individuals who died between 1270 and 1400, using teeth they found there.
The study follows a similar analysis revealed in August by researchers in England, who studied the DNA from skeletons found at the bottom of a medieval well and concluded that the remains were likely of victims of an antisemitic massacre in 1190. Analysis of six individuals prior to their identification as Jewish revealed that Ashkenazi Jews developed a unique genetic variation centuries earlier than realized.
The Erfurt analysis also includes samples from before the epidemic of Black Death that was until recently understood to have created the genetic “bottleneck” that created the genetic markers common among Ashkenazi Jews today.
Erfurt’s Jewish settlement existed from the 11th to 15th century, with a brief gap following a 1349 massacre perpetrated after the Jews were falsely blamed for causing the bubonic plague. Surviving Jews returned there, but after all Jews were expelled once and for all in 1454, the city built a granary on top of the Jewish cemetery.
Karin Sczech participates in the excavation at the medieval Jewish cemetery of Erfurt. (Courtesy of TLDA Ronny Krause)
In 2013, the city approved the repurposing of the unused granary into a parking lot. Because it was an historic site, a rescue excavation was initiated, overseen for the State of Thuringia by German archaeologist Karin Sczech.
Meanwhile, Carmi had been looking for Jewish cemeteries anywhere in the world “where we could analyze remains already excavated,” he told JTA in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. “I consulted historians and eventually reached the archeologist in Erfurt.” Fortunately, he said, “they still hadn’t reburied the remains.”
He approached Sczech, who later became a co-author of the new study. In 2018, with a supportive judgment from Rabbi Ze’ev Litke — an Israeli expert on genetics and Jewish law — and permission from Erfurt’s then-rabbi, Benjamin Kochan, work began to extract and analyze DNA from detached teeth found in the graves. (About 500 Jews live in Erfurt today, most of them having migrated from the former Soviet Union since 1990.)
American geneticist David Reich picked up the teeth and brought them back to the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where drilling and DNA extraction took place.
While the skeletons were reburied, the teeth are still stored at the research institutes where they have been analyzed, in case scientists need to retest to verify the result.
The project provides an ethical basis for studies of ancient Jewish DNA, Carmi said. “Of course we couldn’t just go to a cemetery and dig and take out skeletons; this would be prohibited,” he said, referring to Jewish law prohibiting the removal of bones from where someone was buried.
But Litke opined that the study could be done, because the bones already had been disturbed for an unrelated reason. “He recommended using teeth, as the analysis does almost no damage,” Carmi said.
There are many motivations to study Jewish DNA: One can find lost relatives going back a few generations, and answer questions about Jewish origin of partners intending to marry. But the goal of Carmi’s team was “to fill the gaps in our understanding of Ashkenazi Jewish early history.”
There are several non-destructive ways to obtain DNA from human remains, said Carmi, who also works as a consultant to an Israeli firm that helps clients trace their genetic roots.
“You can take an almost microscopic slice of bone and extract DNA in a solution, or put the entire bone in a solution and extract the DNA without drilling, without disturbing the dead. This opens the way to doing studies even without teeth,” he added.
His team found that the Erfurt community appeared to fit into two genetically distinct groups, descending either from Middle Eastern or European populations. This genetic variability no longer exists, Carmi said.
At the same time, Carmi said, the analysis found remarkable continuity in the local community, as well. “One third of the Erfurt individuals descended from one woman through their maternal lines,” he said, adding that evidence suggested that she lived between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago.
In a press statement, geneticist Reich of Harvard said the work “also provides a template for how a co-analysis of modern and ancient DNA data can shed light on the past. Studies like this hold great promise not only for understanding Jewish history, but also that of any population.”
The research team, with more than 30 scientists, included Hebrew University’s Shamam Waldman, a doctoral student in Carmi’s group, who performed most of the data analysis.
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New York City Officials Condemn Formation of Anti-Israel ‘Global Oppression’ Group in Mamdani Admin
Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS
A growing number of New York City officials are speaking out against the new “Global Oppression and Public Health Working Group” formed in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, arguing that the coterie foments antisemitism and increases hatred against the city’s Jewish community.
A cohort of staffers within the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reportedly formed the group and declared its purpose is to explore how supposed “global oppression” operates and affects health equity and the wellbeing of certain communities in the city. In its initial meeting, which lasted one hour, a presenter explicitly cited the conflict in Gaza as “ongoing genocide” and framed it along with other forms of alleged oppression as relevant to health outcomes, the New York Post reported.
“We really developed in response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” one presented said, according to video acquired by the Post. “And the working group aims to address the growing interests among the health department staff to learn about current and ongoing global oppression in its many forms and how it influences the advancement of health equity.”
Critics, including City Council leaders, say the working group crossed a line by focusing on international politics and critiques of a foreign government instead of core public health responsibilities like managing diseases. They argue this represents a misuse of taxpayer-funded time and resources.
Joann Ariola, a member of City Council, lambasted the group’s presentation as a distraction from the city’s actual health issues. She also accused the staffers of injecting “antisemitic activism” into city agencies.
“New York City already has an overwhelming plethora of health-care issues on its own. There is no need to begin a discussion on the problems facing other countries when there are so many issues to be tackled here at home,” she said in a statement.
“What this is, to be clear, is thinly veiled antisemitic activism that is attempting to normalize itself within a city agency,” she continued. “If Mayor Mamdani truly wants to create a New York for all New Yorkers, then he will join the growing chorus of lawmakers in condemning this group, because health care is not the arena for cultural or political bias to be tolerated.”
Lynn Schulman, a council member representing Queens, said she was “deeply troubled” by the group and urged the staffers to refocus their efforts on the critical health issues impacting the city’s residents rather than foreign affairs.
“I’m deeply troubled that New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) employees launched a so-called ‘working group’ focused on foreign political issues — during work hours and using city resources — while New Yorkers face serious and urgent public health challenges at home,” she said in a statement.
“This incident is especially troubling given the alarming rise in antisemitism we are seeing in New York City, including multiple antisemitic incidents reported in recent weeks,” she continued. “Hosting a meeting that promotes inflammatory accusations while ignoring antisemitism entirely only deepens division and alienates Jewish employees and residents.”
Figures from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) released last week showed anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city skyrocketed by 182 percent in January during Mamdani’s first month in office compared to the same period last year.
Mamdani assumed office amid an alarming surge in antisemitic hate crimes across New York City over the last two years, following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
Jews were targeted in the majority (54 percent) of all hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024, according to data issued by the NYPD. A recent report released in December by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism noted that figure rose to a staggering 62 percent in the first quarter of 2025, despite Jewish New Yorkers comprising a small minority of the city’s population.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin called for an investigation into the health workers’ group.
“Our health-care officials should be fighting infectious diseases and addressing skyrocketing health-care costs instead of spending public time debating geopolitics on city time,” said Menin, who represents Manhattan.
“A thorough investigation into the use of taxpayer resources is necessary to protect the public trust and address the unacceptable rise in antisemitism across New York City,” she added. “Hosting a meeting that promotes inflammatory accusations while ignoring antisemitism entirely only deepens and alienates Jewish employees and residents.”
The outrage over the group has gone beyond city council to former officials and prominent associations.
Mark Botnick, an aide for former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, suggested that the group’s political bias could endanger the city’s residents.
“This is shocking. If these NYC Health Department staffers truly believe Israel is committing genocide, will they now boycott the Israeli pharmaceutical companies that make lifesaving drugs New Yorkers depend on?” he said. “Or is this just performative politics that has no place in a taxpayer-funded public health agency?”
Yael Halaas, president of the American Jewish Medical Association, also condemned the group’s presentation.
“This is a meeting using New York City Department of Health resources that promote libel against the Jewish people,” she said.
Moshe Spern, president of United Jewish Teachers, claimed that the presentation is part of a broader pattern of city officials abusing their powers to spread anti-Israel propaganda throughout critical agencies.
“Jewish city workers are struggling and honestly all agencies are turning a blind eye,” he said. “That is why we are all collaborating together. They cannot and will not divide the Jewish community anymore. We cannot allow this bias in NYC to continue.”
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and anti-Zionist, is an avid supporter of boycotting all Israeli-tied entities who has been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric. He has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide”; refused to recognize the country’s right to exist as a Jewish state; and refused to explicitly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been associated with calls for violence against Jews and Israelis worldwide.
Leading members of the Jewish community in New York have expressed alarm about Mamdani’s election, fearing what may come in a city already experiencing a surge in antisemitic hate crimes.
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University of Nebraska Says BDS Measure Passed by Student Government Isn’t School Policy
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) participating in a “Liberated Zone” encampment at University of Nebraska, Lincoln in November 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) has implored the public not to regard a student government resolution endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel as an official statement of policy, citing its irrelevance to the institution’s decision-making process.
“While the University of Nebraska respects student governance and our students’ right to voice their perspectives, the members of the NU Board of Regents do not have plans to act on the divestiture resolution passed during Wednesday’s [Associated Students of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln] meeting,” board chairman Paul Kenney said in a statement. “Our Board of Regents retains final authority of university policy … UNL remains committed to fostering a safe and respectful environment for students, faculty, staff, and community members.”
As reported by The Algemeiner last week, UNL’s student government agreed to a vote on the measure, an initiative pushed by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization. The resolution passed on Wednesday by a wide margin after being doggedly argued against by Jewish students who were subjected to unfounded allegations about links to Israel.
Launched in 2005, the BDS campaign opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country with economic, political, and cultural boycotts. Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end,” and delineate specific restrictions that its adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students applying to study abroad in Israel.
The student government, facing public scrutiny, ultimately amended the resolution to remove any mention of Israel and rename it the “Divest for Humanity Act.” The measure demanded divestment from armaments manufacturers to block “weapons complicit in the genocide and atrocities worldwide.”
SJP exalted its passing as a victory for its mission to foster a climate in which pro-Israel support in the US is untenable.
UNL’s SJP chapter has praised Hamas terrorists as “our martyrs,” promoted atrocity propaganda which misrepresented Israel’s conduct in the war against Hamas, accused Israel of targeting “Palestinian Christians,” and distributed falsehoods denying Jewish indigeneity to the land of Israel. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, the group has denounced UNL’s alleged ties to Israel, which includes a partnership in agricultural research, as investments in “death” even as it accuses the institution of Islamophobia.
The national SJP group, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.
“Divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said in September 2024. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
At the time, the tweet was the latest in a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
Antisemitism on college campuses is pervasive, Jewish students reported in a recent survey conducted by the StopAntisemitism advocacy group.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents reported having “been a victim of antisemitism on campus” while 88 percent who brought the matter to campus officials said they were dissatisfied with the handling of the investigation. Sixty-five percent said they felt “unwelcome as a Jew in certain spaces” at some point and 61 percent said diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives do little in the way of reducing hatred.
“The 2025 findings prove that antisemitism on campus is systemic, not episodic. It is embedded in the culture, policies, and power structures of higher education,” the group said. “Jewish students who report harassment are routinely dismissed, ignored, or retraumatized. Administrators hide behind ‘process,’ either because they too are afraid or, worse, because they are complicit. Faculty validate and amplify extremist rhetoric, some even teaching it in class. And DEI offices, the very departments tasked with protecting minority students, often serve as engines of anti-Jewish hostility.”
Elite colleges are often the most hostile environments, the group said in a report which assigned mediocre and failing grades to over a dozen elite American colleges, citing the institutions’ failing to mount a meaningful response to the campus antisemitism crisis.
Of all the Ivy League universities assessed by StopAntisemitism, only three — Cornell University (C), Dartmouth College (B), and Princeton University (D) — merited higher than an “F.” StopAntisemitism, which is led by executive director Liora Rez, said other schools in the conference, such as Harvard University and Yale University, continue to offer Jewish students a hostile environment, citing as evidence feedback it has received from Jewish students who attend them.
“At Harvard, Jewish students report high levels of self-censorship and antisemitism, with federal authorities finding the university showed ‘deliberate indifference.’ Despite new initiatives, the campus climate remains tense and accountability uncertain,” the report said. “At Yale, Jewish students faced harassment, exclusion, and blocked access, prompting a federal investigation. Despite policy changes, the campus remains hostile and unsafe for Jewish students.”
Other elite schools such as the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Wesleyan University didn’t perform well either. Ds and Fs were given to the lot. Meanwhile, in the Washington, DC metropolitan region, a destination for students aspiring to future roles in government, American University and Georgetown University earned Ds.
“Even since the recent Gaza ceasefire agreement, antisemitism remains loud, bold, and unchecked, revealing that none of this is about Israel but instead is about Jew-hared, plain and simple,” the report said. “Coordinated protests, ideological harassment, and institutional apathy continue to endanger Jewish students. Families must confront the facts: Are you prepared to send tuition dollars to a school that allows your children to be threatened, targeted, and blamed simply for being Jewish?”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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NCJW names new leader as group steps up work on Israel, antisemitism
The National Council of Jewish Women has named Jody Rabhan, its longtime policy director, to lead the organization as it grapples with how to balance progressive advocacy with support for Israel.
The 133-year-old group has helped rally Jews in favor of reproductive rights, especially after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade four years ago, but drifted closer to more conservative Jewish establishment organizations amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Some of the drive behind that shift appeared to come from Sheila Katz, before she announced she was stepping down as CEO in the fall. “We need those who claim to be our friends to passionately and unequivocally condemn antisemitism,” Katz posted shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack. “Silence is not neutrality; it’s complicity.”
The organization joined with a coalition of Jewish groups that took an especially hard line on criticism of Israel, including the Conference of Presidents and the Brandeis Center, during a spat with former President Joe Biden’s Education Department.
“Oct. 7 really changed everything, and that trajectory for NCJW was very real,” Rabhan said in an interview with the Forward. “And in some ways that made a lot of sense for us.”
Rabhan referenced instances of sexual assault against women on Oct. 7, and against Israeli hostages in Gaza, and said that NCJW was well-positioned to address antisemitism on the left because it participated in many progressive coalitions. “It’s work that we are committed to continuing,” she added, noting that countering antisemitism and hate was a new addition to its current strategic plan.
Israel has “certainly always been part of our portfolio and that’s only going to grow,” said Laura Monn Ginsburg, the president of NCJW’s board of directors.
But Rabhan, who first joined NCJW over 25 years ago, also emphasized the importance of staying “in community” with non-Jewish organizations on the left. “Particularly in this moment, where we’re in an administration that is really testing the levers of our democracy, we need one another more than ever,” she said, referencing President Donald Trump.
Katz, who now works for the Jewish Federations of North America, praised Rabhan in a text message as a “powerful and deeply trusted choice” to lead the organization, and said she would continue “strengthening both our communal voice and our broader civil rights impact.”
NCJW has undergone several significant changes in recent years. Nancy Kaufman helped shift its focus from community service to advocacy during her time as CEO in the 2010s, including relocating its headquarters from New York to Washington, D.C.
Katz was hired shortly thereafter as a rising star in the Jewish world. She came from Hillel International, where she served as vice president for student engagement and participated in a New York Times investigation into sexual harassment allegations against financier and philanthropist Michael Steinhardt.
During her tenure, Katz helped mobilize Jews following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, including raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to help fund abortions and providing educational materials and other resources for synagogues and Jewish organizations that wanted to get involved in promoting reproductive rights.
More than 2,000 clergy signed onto its “Rabbis for Repro” campaign, while synagogues across the country hosted their own “Repro Shabbat.” Yet NCJW has since had to navigate deep divisions in the reproductive rights world over Israel following Oct. 7 that have included allegations of antisemitism at major abortion advocacy nonprofits.
NCJW has not historically lobbied on behalf of Israel, even as it has long worked on gender equality issues there. Nevertheless, it has occasionally found itself targeted by progressive activists including the local D.C. chapter of the Sunrise Movement, which briefly sought to boycott the organization over its stance on Israel.
“Sometimes you have to change partners in certain moments — and we’re not afraid to do that when necessary,” said Ginsburg, the board president. “But overall we want to be in partnership and we want to find a way to make that work.”
The post NCJW names new leader as group steps up work on Israel, antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.