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A Jewish federation had big plans for a community campus. Then the money ran out.
(JTA) — When the Jewish federation in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, laid off its entire support staff earlier this month, the move didn’t come as a surprise. Instead, it felt like an inevitable next step in an inexorable trajectory of decline that has unfolded in public over the course of months, upending the infrastructure that had long organized Jewish communal life in the state capital.
The slow-rolling collapse in Harrisburg, which has roughly 9,000 Jews in the city area, has included the closure of programs, the displacement of Jewish institutions and the planned sale of the Alexander Grass Campus for Jewish Life, which was purchased by the federation for $4.5 million in 2022 and envisioned as a hub for Jewish life in central Pennsylvania.
The downfall has also featured an unusual intervention by Jewish Federations of North America, the umbrella organization for 141 local federations that usually work highly independently. JFNA dispatched a former federation leader to help the Harrisburg Federation make hard financial decisions as it became clear its situation was not sustainable.
“While well-intentioned, there were clearly mistakes made that have set back Jewish life in Harrisburg and caused distress and division,” JFNA’s president and CEO, Eric Fingerhut, wrote in a letter to the community in April, in which he called the local federation’s business model “not viable.”
At the time, Fingerhut expressed optimism that the situation could turn around, writing, “Despite all that has transpired in recent years, I am confident the members of the Greater Harrisburg community can come together to repair what has been broken and build a bright future.”
Four months later, that optimism is being tested as Harrisburg’s Jewish residents have watched core functions of the local federation evaporate.
Gila Ogle, the head of the Silver Academy, a Jewish day school in Harrisburg, said there was a “deep desire to ensure a vibrant future for Jewish life in Harrisburg,” but lamented that there is no longer a local Jewish federation to support it.
“What people are saying is, ‘Well, now what’s our opportunity? How can we come together?’” she said.
The Silver Academy officially learned in June that it could no longer be housed in the Grass Campus, Ogle said. The school will open this fall in the educational wing of Beth El Temple, a Conservative synagogue in Harrisburg. The synagogue is also hosting senior programs previously operated by the JCC.
Ogle said the school had seen a small decline in enrollment over the past year, a trend she attributed to the “unsettlingness of the whole situation” for families.
“Families have a lot of concerns, and I think that’s fair,” Ogle said. “We’ve really done our best to communicate transparently and keep families looped in and part of the process, but it is hard.”
The Silver Academy was not the only institution housed on the Grass Campus that was hurt by the Harrisburg federation’s downfall.
When Rebecca Anzel first heard about the looming closure of her 3-year-old daughter’s preschool in April, she was “shocked and confused.” Her daughter attended the Brenner Family Early Learning Center, which shut down on May 1, just over a week after Anzel and other families were informed of its closing. The preschool has no plans for reopening.
“I was devastated for my daughter, because I was worried about what that would do for her development and progression,” Anzel said at the time.
Now, as the federation’s collapse enters its final stages, the institutions it once supported are beginning to chart a future without it.
“It wasn’t that the Harrisburg Jewish community failed; it was that the business construct, the model, was failing and was faulty,” said Marc Terrill, the former head of the Jewish Federation of Baltimore, whom the national organization dispatched to Harrisburg to help the local federation deal with its finances. “They recognized that this isn’t the end to Jewish life in Harrisburg. They want very much a reset in putting together a financial, an organizational, construct that is more similar to what the most thriving Jewish communities in North America have.”
The abrupt closure of the campus comes as Jewish institutions increasingly rethink the necessity of large physical hubs amid rising operational costs and shifting demographics. While closures on the scale of Harrisburg’s are rare, in 2022, the Jewish Federation of New Mexico collapsed following a spate of bitter legal and boardroom battles and a widening financial crisis.
For some in Harrisburg, the federation’s short-lived experiment with the 6.4-acre campus underscored the need to pursue a more flexible model of community building.
Terrill pointed to the purchase of the Grass Campus as the pivotal decision in the federation’s unraveling.
“What’s been called into question is the business model,” said Terrill. “That wrapped around a number of things, but really, the thing that was the large decision that became existential was the purchase of the Grass campus.”
Rabbi Ariana Capptauber, the former leader of Beth El Temple and ex officio member of the Harrisburg federation’s board, said that she hoped the sale of the campus could serve as a turning point for the local Jewish community to reexamine how it organizes and sustains Jewish communal life.
If these developments serve as “a wake-up call” that lead to a more creative use of the community’s resources, Capptauber said, “then it could be really good.”
The financial strain surrounding the campus had been mounting for years.
While the federation had a net income of $2.9 million in 2023, according to public tax filings, in 2024, the organization operated at a $3.3 million deficit.
Sam Levine, a member of the federation’s transition committee, told The Burg in May that expenses to run the campus were “considerably higher than anticipated,” adding that the organization was also “depending on some donations, which unfortunately did not materialize.”
Since the property was purchased, the mortgage for the Alexander Grass Campus had risen to $9 million, Jeanette Krebs, a member of the federation’s transition committee, told Penn Live.
“We are continuing to work through a debt elimination strategy which includes monetizing real estate. Much remains to be seen regarding how things will turn out,” Krebs told JTA in an emailed statement. “I think there are several things that we can all agree on in Harrisburg. Most importantly, that there is a future, people care deeply and we are committed to learning from our mistakes.”
Parents and other stakeholders said they learned little about the looming crisis before programs began shutting down. For Anzel, the lack of communication compounded the distress of losing her daughter’s preschool.
“We have not been given any sort of explanation at all other than major donors fell through, and so now we’re sort of left to try to fill in the blanks ourselves,” Anzel said.
Dana Ray, another parent at the Early Learning Center who organized a letter signed by parents calling on the federation to preserve the center, said that the prevailing sentiment among parents at the school had been “anger and sadness.”
Terrill said that there had also been a divide within the community over the initial move to the Grass Campus.
“There were some people that were very anti-campus,” Terrill said. “They thought that there was a different way to go, and ultimately a decision was made to go, and that had certain implications for it.”
Levine, the transition committee member, told local outlets that the federation is not planning to file for bankruptcy in hopes that local donations and the sale of the campus will help buoy the organization as it faces roughly $500,000 worth of debt on top of a large outstanding mortgage.
For Terrill, the “cautionary tale” of the collapse of the Harrisburg Federation was that there’s “no substitute for building community consensus, effective governance, and effective planning.”
The federation’s transition committee, which was announced by Fingerhut in April, has held roughly 200 conversations and listening sessions with community members as it charts what comes next.
“In a nutshell, the business plan, if you could call it that, was very reactionary,” Terrill said. “What they’re looking to put in place in response to lessons learned is an approach that’s quite different. That is linked to transparency, to financial discipline, to right-sizing, to community input.”
But as the Harrisburg federation begins selling off the campus that was intended to secure its future, local rabbis and parents say the federation’s unraveling has meant the loss of a central part of the local Jewish community’s infrastructure.
“It kind of makes me sad that now we’re sort of forced to leave this really, really lovely, vibrant Jewish community where she’s learning and actually retaining information about Judaism,” Anzel said of her daughter, who is now enrolled in a different preschool. “I don’t know where else she’s going to get that, and I’m really sad.”
Rabbi Tzvia Jasper, the senior rabbi of Temple Ohev Sholom, said that while many were “understandably upset” by the situation, it had also given way to a new sense of community.
“It’s certainly a really devastating time for our community, but in the same vein, I think there’s a lot of anticipation for what this new moment is going to bring,” Jasper said. “With any big change like this, comes the opportunity for creativity and innovation to sort of rethink and restructure the community and find out what the needs truly are.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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ICE targets an anti-Israel protester — this time, a Hasidic Jew
(JTA) — Yehonatan Ovadia, an Orthodox Jew from the anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic sect, has joined a number of protests around New York and New Jersey against Israel.
Now, he’s at risk of being deported there.
Ovadia, 35, is originally from Israel and moved to the U.S. on a temporary religious worker visa in 2022, according to the text of a lawsuit requesting Ovadia’s release. His legal status in the U.S. was revoked earlier this year in connection with a November 2023 protest that he attended during which an Israeli flag was taken down from the town hall of Ramapo, New York. Ovadia said he was there but did not tear down the flag, and hate crimes charges against him were dropped.
But after a request to extend his stay in the United States was denied on the grounds of that protest, according to government documents shared with JTA, Ovadia was detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in August, and remains in ICE custody in New York.
“In violation of our nation’s laws, he overstayed his welcome and refused to depart,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “He will receive due process and remain in ICE custody pending the outcome of his immigration proceedings.”
ICE’s nationwide surge affected the area’s Jewish community earlier this year when the agency detained Ari Ladino, a Jewish bridal shop owner in Teaneck, New Jersey, and his mother. Both are originally from Bogota, Colombia.
Ovadia’s arrest by ICE comes as President Donald Trump’s administration has cracked down on pro-Palestinian activism, including with last year’s high-profile detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent pro-Palestinian protest leader at Columbia University. The administration has accused Khalil and other pro-Palestinian activists and campus protesters of antisemitism.
Such an accusation would be particularly fraught against Ovadia, who is Jewish and holds anti-Israel views for religious reasons. Satmar Jews believe that a state of Israel cannot be established before the arrival of the Messiah.
In a lawsuit filed in August requesting Ovadia’s release, his lawyers argued that the Trump administration was penalizing him for protected speech motivated by religious beliefs. The government took “an official position,” Ovadia’s lawyers wrote, by preferring “one religious position within Judaism and [penalizing] an adherent of another.”
Unlike many Satmar Jews, who oppose Israel but are not active in political pro-Palestinian spaces, Ovadia has protested against Israel a number of times, including alongside members of the pro-Palestinian Hasidic group Neturei Karta.
His lawyer, Eric Lee, shared a statement from Ovadia on Wednesday after The New York Times broke the story of his detention: “From the Jewish people to our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank and all over occupied Palestine! We didn’t forget from you! We are following you and we know that you are facing genocide! Please be strong and continue to believe!
“We know that the Zionist criminal war machine [is] torturing you every day and they want to silence you!” Ovadia said in his statement. “BUT we will be your voice! We will SHOUT AND DEMONSTRATE for you from New York, Washington, Canada, London and from every place that we can be free in the world!”
Chris Godshall-Bennet, another lawyer representing Ovadia, told JTA that the timeline on his client’s possible deportation is unclear, but the government designated Israel as “the location to which they would try to deport him” during a hearing on Wednesday morning.
Ovadia was one of two Hasidic men arrested in 2023 after a larger group protested outside Ramapo’s town hall, where an Israeli flag had been mounted a month earlier, shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. Surveillance footage showed at least four men removing the flag and then cutting it up with scissors, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s notice of denial to Ovadia. He denied having any role in removing the Israeli flag or knowing ahead of time that his companions would do so.
He was arrested and charged with criminal mischief, petit larceny and conspiracy, all as hate crimes. The hate crime charges were dropped and in February 2024 he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, according to his lawsuit, resulting in a $200 fine plus an additional $125 charge.
“I said, ‘You know, I don’t have power, I’m out of money, I have no time, I am a teacher, I need to teach students every day,’” he told the Times. “‘Let’s end this with disorderly conduct.’”
With his religious worker visa set to expire in November 2025, Ovadia applied for a new visa in September, sponsored by Congregation Bnai Yoel in New York’s Orange County, according to USCIS denial notice. USCIS did not deny the request for the work visa, and said that Ovadia was not found to be “inadmissible” for a “conviction or commission of a crime involving moral turpitude.” But the federal agency did not approve the request either, and denied Ovadia an “extension of stay” in the country “as a matter of discretion,” citing the 2023 protest; without an extension of stay, Ovadia had no legal status in the U.S. following his visa’s November expiration.
The DHS said that it is “a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live in the United States of America.”
“The Trump Administration acted well within its statutory and constitutional authority, as it does with any alien who advocates for violence, glorifies and supports terrorists, harasses Jews, and steals property,” DHS wrote.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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French far-right leader accused of antisemitism, defended by Israeli minister
(JTA) — A French far-right leader is battling antisemitism allegations days after his party made historic gains in the country’s Senate elections — and an Israeli cabinet minister has come to his defense.
Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s nationalist, anti-immigration National Rally, came under fire this week for accusations that he made antisemitic remarks in private messages.
The controversy arose after the National Rally, whose leaders have sought to distance the party from the antisemitic roots of its founders, jumped to at least 14 seats in the French Senate elections on Sunday. The results meant the party and its allies surpassed the 10-seat threshold to form a parliamentary group in the upper house for the first time.
The Senate will remain controlled by a traditional conservative and center-right alliance, though that bloc lost several seats. The National Rally’s progress will give it more funding and better representation in leadership roles and committees.
Mediapart, a left-leaning French investigative outlet, reported on Monday that Bardella years ago allegedly sent antisemitic statements, including messages that said “all the banks are owned by Jews” and “the Jew must dominated (sic) other peoples, crush them and rob them, a Zionist is necessarily and profoundly Jewish.”
The messages were allegedly sent between 2013 and 2015, during Bardella’s early years in the party, then called the National Front. He joined the party in 2012 at age 16.
Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, who invited Bardella to a Jerusalem conference on antisemitism in 2025, defended him against the allegations. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he knows Bardella personally and that they are in regular contact.
Even if the quotes attributed to Bardella were authenticated, Chikli said, “a man is not sealed at 17. What matters is the 15 years that followed, and the man he became.”
Chikli referenced Bardella’s visit to the sites where Hamas killed Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. He said that Bardella spoke in Jerusalem “against antisemitism and against anti-Zionism” and opposed President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state.
“No one will convince me that Jordan Bardella hates the Jewish people or the Jewish state,” said Chikli. “Just as no one will convince me that Emmanuel Macron respects them.”
Mediapart, which has a history of exposing political scandals, said it independently authenticated Bardella’s alleged conversations and drew them from a larger base of evidence corroborated by witness accounts. JTA has not independently verified the messages.
Bardella said on X that the alleged conversations were “blatant falsehoods” designed to undermine the National Rally ahead of France’s presidential election in April 2027. Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s presidential candidate, is polling in first place as Macron prepares to step down because of term limits.
Mediapart, which has a history of exposing political scandals, said it independently authenticated Bardella’s alleged conversations and drew them from a larger base of evidence corroborated by witness accounts. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has not independently verified the messages.
Bardella said on X that the alleged conversations were “blatant falsehoods” designed to undermine the National Rally ahead of France’s presidential election in April 2027. Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s presidential candidate, is polling in first place as Emmanuel Macron prepares to step down because of term limits. Le Pen and Bardella have led the National Rally as a duo, and Bardella was set to be the party’s candidate until a July court ruling, which upheld criminal financial charges against Le Pen while also lifting a ban on her seeking public office. She has said she would name Bardella prime minister if she wins.
Bardella also said at a parliamentary meeting on Tuesday that he plans to take legal action against Mediapart, including possible complaints for forgery and forged documents, and accused the outlet of waging “total war” against his party. Le Pen, sitting next to Bardella, said that she had “absolute confidence” in him.
Israel’s Chikli said on social media that he and Bardella had common enemies. “Like the leftists in Israel, the leftists in France are experts at character assassination,” he said in his post, sharing a photo of himself shaking hands with Bardella at the Nova massacre site.
Chikli has cultivated ties between the Israeli government and European far-right parties, including others that have been criticized for histories of antisemitic and neo-Nazi figures in their ranks, such as Vox in Spain and the Sweden Democrats in Sweden.
Bardella, the National Rally and Chikli did not immediately respond to JTA requests for comment.
Chikli and Bardella both also accused Mediapart of a left-wing agenda. They each noted that the outlet’s co-founder, Edy Plenel, expressed sympathy in 1972 for the Palestinian militant group Black September, which killed 11 Israelis in a terrorist attack at the Munich Olympic Games that year. Plenel later disavowed those comments, which he said he made when he was 20.
Michel Wieviorka, a Jewish French sociologist who researches racism and extremism, told JTA that the antisemitism allegations strike at the heart of the National Rally’s aim to prove their “respectability.”
Le Pen has sought for over a decade to detoxify the party’s image. In 2015, she expelled from the party her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, a co-founder of the National Rally in 1972 who was repeatedly convicted of hate speech and Holocaust denial. Another founder and early leader of the party was Pierre Bousquet, who formerly served in the Nazi Waffen-SS.
Today, support for Israel has become key to the National Rally’s avowed renunciation of its antisemitic past.
“The strategy of [Bardella’s] party is to appear as the best friend of Jews, and Israel,” said Wieviorka.
Bardella invoked his visit to Israel in his denial of the alleged antisemitic messages.
“Since I began my political engagement, I have never had any ambiguity on the subject of the fight against antisemitism, to the point of being received, in 2025, by the Israeli government,” he said on X.
Meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on X that the accusations against Bardella revealed “the true face of the far right.”
“To all those with short memories: antisemitism is not a slip-up for the [National Rally], it is the history of this party,” said Barrot.
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In a time of uncertainty, European Jews renovate synagogues and dedicate Torah scrolls
(JTA) —
Getting a “200-year-old lady” ready for a major debut is quite a task. But in Vienna, the Jewish community’s historic main synagogue made it just in time for the Jewish New Year.
The “lady” — Vienna’s stately Stadttempel synagogue, or City Temple — has been rededicated after more than a year of top-to-bottom renovations, from floors to windows, to the heating and cooling systems, from safety features to restroom facilities. The job cost more than 10 million euros, or $11.3 million.
The synagogue was “still beautiful but has its signs of age,” Rabbi Jaron Engelmayer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a phone interview. “And it wasn’t adequate for some matters of today.”
“The whole concept was sticking to what it was and still is, but it has a new face,” said Engelmayer, who has been chief rabbi of Vienna’s Jewish community since 2020. The Orthodox congregation also inaugurated a new Torah scroll in ceremonies Sept. 15. Parts of it incorporated earlier manuscripts “written in the old synagogue of the Middle Ages in Vienna,” making it a bridge to history, he said.
Large and small, Jewish communities in Europe are marking the season of renewal in concrete ways at a time of uncertainty seeded by antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. In Budapest, the historic Rákospalota synagogue — used as a library warehouse for decades — recently held its first service in its renovated premises. And a 15-member Jewish prayer group in Leipzig has welcomed its first Torah scroll, on a 99-year loan.
All are looking to the future, whether fixing a hole in the roof or dedicating a holy book.
“Jews by definition have to be optimistic,” said Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, head of the Munich-based Conference of European Rabbis, which represents some 800 Orthodox Jewish communities.
“They have no other choice. And having said that, if in the past there was a tendency to say, ‘okay, the situation is bad over here, let’s go somewhere else,’ today, wherever you look, the situation is not good,” he said.
Taking action is more constructive than regretting current circumstances, said Rabbi Elisa Klapheck, head of Germany’s non-Orthodox General Rabbinical Assembly, which has 45 member rabbis. “We can lament antisemitism, we can lament attacks on Jewish communities, but that doesn’t help us,” she said. “So I think on a smaller scale, but maybe a much more resilient scale, the chagim [holidays] have shown that there was a positive atmosphere.”
Ruth Ellen Gruber, developer of the Jewish Heritage Europe portal, a project of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, expressed amazement at the pace of the rehabilitations.
“Despite increasing incidents of antisemitism, there are so many synagogue restoration projects that I cannot keep up,” said Gruber. Whether maintenance or preservation, all are “sign[s] of resilience among Jewish communities, volunteers, researchers, NGOs, civic bodies, and others,” she said in an email to JTA.
Examples include the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue in Constanta, Romania; the grand synagogue in Metz, France; the domed synagogue in Trencin, Slovakia; the Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Larissa, Greece; and the historic Yanbol synagogue in Istanbul.
“Some will serve as museums or cultural centers that usually house Jewish heritage exhibitions; others will serve as venues for both Jewish worship and cultural events,” she said.
In Leipzig, Rabbi Esther Jonas-Maerten doesn’t actually have a synagogue building for her Beth Ez Chaim “Lehrhaus,” a study group that meets in private homes. But she now has a Torah scroll for participants in the program, which is open to all who wish to learn more about Judaism.
The scroll, on a 99-year-loan from the Kehilat Shalom synagogue in Gaithersburg, Maryland, will be formally dedicated in ceremonies on Oct. 4. “That will be the first public event with our new Torah,” Jonas-Maerten, a Conservative rabbi, told JTA in a phone interview.
After a long and fruitless search for a scroll her group could afford, she asked Washington, D.C.-based Rabbi Lauren Tuchman to share her appeal: “I wrote a letter basically saying, ‘Most wanted! A sefer Torah!” Jonas-Maerten recalled. “Within two weeks, I got a response.”
The U.S.-Europe connection has been a fruitful one, when it comes to Torahs.
Last year, the Conservative congregation Ki Tov in Warsaw received the gift of a scroll from New Jersey sister congregation B’nai Sholom/Fair Lawn Jewish Center. The scroll, originally from Europe, was donated in memory of Holocaust survivors.
The independent Berlin-Brandenburg congregation Ohel Hachidush received its first scroll in 2008 from Shir Tikvah in Troy, Michigan, and purchased a second scroll in 2024 from retiring Rabbi Moshe Halfon of Mount Sinai Synagogue in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Both needed repair, especially the first one, Cantor Jalda Rebling, a Jewish Renewal movement ordainee who co-founded Ohel Hachidush with Anna Adam, told JTA.
“Its brokenness is also a symbol, I always say, for our Jewish history here in Europe,” said Rebling, “because all our Jewish lives are broken, and we all love this Torah.”
Vienna’s Jewish community currently has about 12,000 members. Before World War II, it numbered close to 200,000, according to the community’s website. Many fled, and about 47,000 Austrian Jews, most of them from Vienna, were murdered in the Holocaust.
Today’s community is “quite small in numbers, but very highly active and diverse in its traditions,” said Engelmayer, whose mother’s family came from Switzerland and father’s from Poland. “It goes from Ashkenazi to Sephardi, from secular to ultra-Orthodox, and it’s a whole range between. And it feels like a family.”
During Engelmayer’s tenure, “there was the COVID crisis and afterwards the war in Ukraine, which brought a lot of fugitives and refugees to Vienna – also Jews. And of course, the 7th of October, which brought a big rise in antisemitism, which is still being dealt with today.”
Nevertheless, celebrants went “through the streets of Vienna with high hats and proudly Jewish, bringing the new Torah scroll into the restored synagogue,” Engelmayer said: All those challenges led to “an increase of inner strength, of holding together, of answering to the crisis by much more Jewish life and being more active and more visible.”
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