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A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Tucked in the far corner of a large, brightly-lit exhibition hall on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, there is a delicate-looking piece of art with a strong political message.
At first glance, it appears to be three circular vases with flowers in them. The ceramic vases sit on shelves attached to the wall, and colorful collages hang above them. On closer inspection, visitors will notice that the flowers are made out of paper and that affixed to each vase is an image of the Palestinian flag printed on foam board.
A nearby label written by the curators of the exhibit, titled “Tikkun: For the Cosmos, the Community, and Ourselves,” explains that the piece was inspired by a conversation the artist, Tosha Stimage of Berkeley, had with a Palestinian man. He told Stimage about the plants that are native to Palestine — “a place which he can no longer access due to the ongoing conflict in the region,” the curators write.
The label also includes a note about the flag: “Some may find its presence at The CJM troubling or confusing, while others may find it appropriate and forthright. Stimage recognizes the potential for these divergent responses and hopes to use them as a means of generating dialogue.”
On a Sunday afternoon in October, Maury Ostroff read the label and walked away without inspecting the artwork.
Visitors to the “Tikkun” exhibit are encouraged to share their responses to the artwork via comment cards. (Andrew Esensten)
Asked how the presence of the flag made him feel, Ostroff, who is Jewish and lives in Muir Beach, in Marin County, replied, “Unhappy.”
Why?
“It’s not offensive to me in the same way that a swastika is. My skin is a little bit thicker than that. But I wish it weren’t here.”
He added, “What’s so Jewish about this? What’s so ‘tikkun olam’ about all of this?”
For the “Tikkun” exhibit, which opened Feb. 17 and runs through Jan. 8, the CJM invited both Jewish and non-Jewish Bay Area artists to contribute new works on the theme of repair, however they chose to interpret it. “No one is listening to us,” the piece by Stimage, who is not Jewish, is the first work of art featuring the Palestinian flag to be shown at CJM in recent memory; the museum could not say when or if the flag has been displayed on its walls before.
The piece prompted several internal conversations among CJM staff when it was first submitted and, since it has been on display, has generated a variety of responses from museumgoers who have left comments in a box at the entrance to the exhibit. Intentionally or not, Stimage has raised numerous questions with the artwork, including: Does a work of art that is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle for statehood belong in a Jewish museum? And what is the role of a contemporary Jewish museum, anyway?
“To truly be a contemporary art museum, meaning embedded in the contemporary issues of our day, our job is to provide a platform for dialogue and to share a diversity of perspectives on our walls,” said Chad Coerver, CJM’s executive director since September 2021. “If any institution [like ours] took the path of withholding artwork that troubled our staff, our board or our community, it would be very difficult to mount exhibitions.”
CJM is a member of the Council of American Jewish Museums, a network of 76 museums across the country. CAJM does not have guidelines about the kind of art its member museums can and cannot display, according to Executive Director Melissa Yaverbaum.
J. reached out to several CAJM member museums in New York, Los Angeles and other places by email to ask if they had ever shown artwork with Palestinian iconography or works by Palestinian artists. The museums declined to answer or did not respond.
In recent years, two Jewish museums have been embroiled in controversy over issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago staged an exhibit in 2008 on Israeli and Palestinian concepts of homeland that included maps and portraits of Palestinians. Following outcry from members of the local Jewish community who felt the exhibit presented Israel in a negative light, the museum decided to close the exhibit after only a few weeks. And in 2019, the director of the Jewish Museum Berlin resigned after the museum tweeted a link to a pro-BDS article in a German newspaper. (The museum previously came under fire for welcoming anti-Zionist scholar Judith Butler and representatives of Iran.)
In a joint interview with J., two CJM staffers who worked on “Tikkun” — co-curator Qianjin Montoya, who is not Jewish, and a Jewish senior curator who served in an advisory role, Heidi Rabben — shared the story of how Stimage’s piece came to be in the exhibit. (Montoya’s co-curator for the exhibit, Arianne Gelardin, no longer works at the museum.)
Since 2009, CJM has invited local artists from different backgrounds to create new work as part of the museum’s annual Dorothy Saxe Invitational. The idea for “Tikkun” was hatched before the pandemic put the planning process on hold. Once the CJM and Saxe — a local philanthropist and art collector — agreed on the theme, the co-curators invited artists “already engaged in healing through their relationship to community or in their practice of daily life,” Gelardin told J. last February.
The 30 artists who accepted the museum’s invitation were given only four months to conceive of and submit new works. That was likely the shortest timeline in the history of the invitational, which has been held 11 previous times, according to the museum. Each artist received a packet of materials compiled by CJM staff, with input from the Shalom Hartman Institute, a non-degree granting Jewish education center, to guide their thinking on “tikkun.”
Stimage was invited to participate because she is “very active” in the Bay Area and because “her work reflects ideas of community and connection,” Montoya said.
The curators said Stimage’s inclusion of the Palestinian flag in her submitted piece came as a surprise and prompted challenging conversations. However, they noted that they found the content of some of the other artists’ work surprising, too, and that it’s not unusual for contemporary artists to push the envelope in their work.
“I wouldn’t say we expected to receive a piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we weren’t steering anyone away from that, either,” Rabben told J., adding that the submission guidelines did not place any topic off limits. “That’s a commitment from the museum to authentically represent the creative spirit of the artists that we’re working with,” she said.
Still, the curators said they engaged in a dialogue with Stimage in order to better understand each aspect of her piece and her overall intentions. Through those conversations, the curators learned that Stimage wanted to explore a moment of “rupture,” and that through her piece she hoped to communicate “that before healing or repair might happen, you have to first acknowledge that rupture,” Rabben said.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco is showing “Tikkun,” an exhibit of works by Jewish and non-Jewish artists on the theme of repair. (Andrew Esensten)
Coerver, who was involved in some of the conversations, stressed that “careful consideration” was given to including the piece in the exhibit. “We felt an artwork addressing the plight of the Palestinians was appropriate in an exhibition on healing and repair,” he said. (No work submitted as part of the Dorothy Saxe Invitational has ever been outright rejected, the museum said.)
Stimage did not respond to interview requests from J. According to a CV on her website, she was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2016. She is a past fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and was an artist-in-residence at Facebook in 2018. She also owns a floral gift shop in Oakland called Saint Flora.
Her work often touches on Black identity; she created a piece honoring Sandra Bland, an African-American woman whose 2015 arrest and death in a Texas jail cell sparked protests, and contributed to a 2019 San Francisco Art Institute exhibit on the Black Panther Party.
“I have a responsibility to create things that will, to the best of my present knowledge, do more good than harm, heal, inspire and uplift other humans,” she told the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper in 2015.
Stimage’s precise views on Israel are unknown. CJM referred J. to her artist statement for “No one is listening to us,” which reads: “Olive, sage, and sumac are flowering plants native to the Mediterranean (including regions of Gaza and the West Bank) that have a direct relationship to contested ancestral land and affect the livelihood of so many Palestinian farmers and families caught in the conflict. They are positioned in the space of The Contemporary Jewish Museum as a metaphor for the ongoing conflict over land rights and the desperate need for restoration and healing of an age-old wound.”
The curators told J. that during their conversations with Stimage about her piece, they asked her why including images of the Palestinian flag was important to her but did not request that she remove them.
“We determined that none of [the piece’s] components in and of themselves signified something problematic or concerning,” Rabben said. “Of course, we had the awareness that the symbol [of the flag] will be read in a variety of ways by a variety of people.”
(Rabben pointed out that the exhibit includes other works with national symbols rendered in provocative ways, such as a black-and-white photograph of an American flag that was torn apart and partially reassembled by Mexican-American artist Jose Arias.)
The Palestinian flag — which contains the Pan-Arab colors of black, white, green and red — was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. Since then, it has been the primary symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
For decades, the PLO was considered an enemy organization by Israel, and anything associated with it “had no place in Israeli public life,” said Eran Kaplan, an Israeli-born professor of Israel studies at San Francisco State University. Israel never went so far as to ban the flag. However, during the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, Israeli soldiers sometimes followed orders to confiscate the flag from protesters in the West Bank and Gaza.
With the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993, Israel and the PLO recognized each other as negotiating partners. Yet the Palestinian flag remains a contentious symbol in Israel today. Kaplan noted that it recently served as a flashpoint during the funeral procession of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American broadcaster who was killed in the West Bank in May. (The IDF conducted a review and admitted that the Israeli soldier who shot her had most likely misidentified her as an armed militant.) After warning Abu Akleh’s family not to display the flag, Israeli police attacked mourners in East Jerusalem, ripping flags out of their hands and off of the vehicle carrying her casket.
Today, the flag holds different meanings for Israelis and American Jews from different generations and political persuasions.
“There are large segments in Israeli society who view any form of Palestinian national identity as a threat to the existence of Israel,” Kaplan said. “There are others who view the PLO as legitimate partners in any form of negotiations [over the creation of a Palestinian state], but there’s an absolute split over those questions.”
Given the sensitive nature of Stimage’s work and others in the exhibit, the curators decided to solicit feedback from visitors via comment cards available at the entrance to the hall. Rabben said the museum has received a number of comments specifically about “No one is listening to us,” most of which were positive. “The majority of those comments were ‘Thank you for offering space for this topic at the museum,’” she said.
Last month, a security guard sitting in the “Tikkun” exhibition hall told a reporter that he had not witnessed any expressions of outrage or protest through the first nine months of the exhibit. “When we opened we were afraid of negative reactions, but they’re not stressed about it,” he said of visitors. “We have shown worse things here.” The guard, who has worked at the museum since it opened in 2008, mentioned a 2010 exhibit, “Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf,” which included a copy of Hitler’s autobiography. “Some people were cussing us out” for displaying the book, he recalled.
Meanwhile, on the same floor as “Tikkun,” there is another, smaller exhibit containing potentially offensive art. A sign outside of the room warns visitors that inside is a Hitler marionette created by the parents of puppeteer Frank Oz. “Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today,” the sign says.
Coerver, CJM’s executive director, said he was proud that the museum’s three current exhibits — “Tikkun,” “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History” and “Gillian Laub: Family Matters,” which includes photographs that Laub took of her Trump-supporting relatives — are raising “challenging questions” and providing opportunities for both visitors and museum staff to “expand our horizons.”
“We’ve been wading into some issues that I think are a little thicker than maybe we’ve been confronting in the past,” he said, “and I hope that continues.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
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Elected PA Jewish judge leaves Democratic party, citing ‘disturbingly common’ antisemitism
(JTA) — An elected Supreme Court justice in Pennsylvania announced Monday night that he has left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent, citing concerns about antisemitism.
In a statement, David Wecht, who is Jewish and served as Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party chair from 1998 to 2001, said he believed antisemitism has moved from the fringe of the Democratic Party to the mainstream.
“Nazi tattoos, jihadist chants, intimidation and attacks at synagogues, and other hateful anti-Jewish invective and actions are minimized, ignored, and even coddled,” he wrote. “Acquiescence to Jew-hatred is now disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party.”
Wecht wrote that he had long understood that antisemitism “always festered on the fringe” of the right, a fact that hit home in 2018 when a far-right shooter killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh where he and his wife were married in 1998.
“In the years that have followed, that same hatred has grown on the left,” he said in his statement. “It is the duty of all good people to fight this virus, and to do so before it is too late.”
Wecht previously made national headlines for his 2020 ruling against an effort to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania.
Through a spokesperson, Wecht declined to be interviewed about his exit from the Democratic Party.
Wecht’s comments come as Democrats wrestle with a range of internal tensions over antisemitism. The ascent of Graham Platner, an oyster farmer who recently covered up a Nazi Totenkopf skull-and-crossbones tattoo, to become Maine’s Democratic candidate for Senate, and the increasing coziness between some progressive politicians and Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer who has said he favors Hamas over Israel, have particularly alarmed some members of the Jewish community.
Wecht is the son of renowned forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, who was involved in investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Wecht’s mother, translator Sigrid Ronsdal, spent the first six years of her life living under Nazi occupation in Norway.
“I know David and his legendary father, Cyril,” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who has clashed with his party over Israel, tweeted following Wecht’s announcement. “As I’ve affirmed, I’m not changing my party—but I fully understand David’s personal choice. The Democratic Party must confront its own rising antisemitism problem.”
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At Abraham Foxman’s funeral, an elegy for the last generation with direct ties to the Holocaust
(JTA) — As mourners gathered Tuesday for the funeral of Abraham Foxman, they were saying goodbye not only to one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the last half-century, but to one of the dwindling number whose moral authority was forged in the Holocaust itself.
Foxman, who died Sunday at 86, spent decades as one of the world’s most recognizable Jewish advocates, serving for nearly 30 years as the ADL’s top professional and another two decades before that in its leadership ranks. Presidents sought his counsel. Antisemites sought his absolution. Popes welcomed him. Prime ministers argued with him.
Many of the speakers at Park Avenue Synagogue credited his accomplishments to his outsized personality, his sense of humor and his intuitive leadership skills. And yet his past hung heavy over the funeral, which also served as an elegy for the last generation of survivors and how, like Foxman, they shaped Jewish communal life in the years after World War II and the founding of Israel. Born in Poland, Foxman survived the war in the care of his Catholic nanny.
“His life story of rising from the ashes is our story,” said Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, in a video tribute. “It is the story of our people born in the world at war. The Holocaust shaped Abe’s character and defined his mission to combat antisemitism and hypocrisy, to call up racism and bias, to speak up for the Jewish people and a Jewish democratic state of Israel.”
Others recalled that beyond fighting antisemitism, Foxman’s past inspired him to build a communal juggernaut that championed pluralism, democracy and civil rights.
“He knew exactly what the absence of those things looked like,” said Stacy Burdett, a former ADL colleague, referring to the Holocaust. “Abe lived in our world as a moral witness, not just to what human beings can survive, but to what they’re obligated to defend.”
Packing the sanctuary were Jewish communal leaders, former ADL colleagues and bold-face Jewish activists such as the lawyer Alan Dershowitz and the New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. (Not able to attend was Jonathan Greenblatt, Foxman’s successor at ADL, whose mother died in Florida on Saturday.)
When they weren’t recalling Foxman’s early trauma and subsequent accomplishments, eulogists painted a portrait of a Jewish communal warrior as a consummate hugger.
Thomas Friedman sent a video tribute, recalling how they met when the future New York Times columnist was a camper and Foxman was a counselor at Herzl Camp in Webster, Wisconsin. (That’s also where Foxman met his wife, Golda, who survives him, as do his two children and four grandchildren.) Friedman said that no matter how often or angrily they disagreed over something Friedman had written, usually about Israel, Foxman would sign off with affection.
“It’s true, if Abe really disagreed with you, you always knew because his text would end ‘love you, hugs,’” said Burdett. “The more strongly he disagreed, the more hugs and the more emojis.”
Former White House domestic policy adviser Susan Rice, in a video tribute, recalled shouting matches with Foxman during the Biden administration that left aides outside her office terrified.
“And when Abe and I emerged laughing and hugging,” she said, “we both had to reassure my team that all was fine, that we loved each other and not to worry.”
Rice credited Foxman with helping shape the Biden administration’s national strategy to combat antisemitism, and thanked him for defending her when others attacked her personally for administration positions on Iran and Israel.
But even as his children and grandchildren recalled Foxman as a family man, the shadow of the Holocaust fell across the synagogue’s ornate, Moorish-style sanctuary.
“You were a hidden child,” his daughter Michelle said, “and at the same time, you sought to hide the trauma from your children.”
She said she learned much of her father’s Holocaust story not from conversations at home but from his speeches, interviews and articles.
Foxman, who became ADL’s national director emeritus when he stepped down in 2015, was certainly among the last survivors to lead a major Jewish organization.
Fewer and fewer of those witnesses remain; according to the Claims Conference, as of January 2026, an estimated 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors are still alive. Nearly all are “child survivors” who were born after 1928.
In discussing how Foxman’s childhood shaped his activism, Sarah Bloomfield, director of the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, recalled his traumatic childhood. His Polish Jewish parents fled to present-day Vilnius after the Nazi invasion of Poland; when Vilnius too came under Nazi control, his parents left him in the care of his nanny, who baptized him as a Catholic.
“This is what he said: ‘I’m only here because one Polish woman made a choice to save a Jewish child,’” Bloomfield recalled Foxman telling her. “She risked her life to protect the life of another human being, a Jewish child in Hitler’s Europe. Her name was Bronislawa Kurpi.”
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue, said Foxman was less interested in the “logistics” behind his survival (he and his parents were only reunited after several bitter lawsuits) than in the “singular moral act” of his rescuer. “In a world consumed by fire,” Cosgrove said, “one human being chose courage, one person chose decency, one person chose light.”
His grandson Gideon recalled asking Foxman how his history shaped his life’s work.
“He said that he felt obligated to make something of himself so that all the other Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust didn’t die in vain,” Gideon said.
And up until the end, said Burdett, Foxman was still feeling that obligation, shaped by a cataclysm that for many is becoming a distant memory, when recalled at all.
She recited his remarks last year during Yom Hashoah ceremonies at the U.S. Capitol.
“As a [Holocaust] survivor, my antenna quivers when I see books being banned, when I see people being abducted in the streets, when I see government trying to dictate what universities should teach and whom they should teach,” Foxman said at the time. “As a survivor who came to this country as an immigrant, I’m troubled when I hear immigrants and immigration being demonized.”
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Israeli report on ‘systematic’ Oct. 7 sexual violence seeks to shift debate from denial to accountability
(JTA) — A sweeping new Israeli report on sexual violence committed during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and against hostages in Gaza concludes that the crimes formed part of a deliberate strategy. It also lays out a roadmap for turning two years of documentation into legal prosecution.
The report concludes that “sexual and gender-based violence was systematic, widespread, and integral to the October 7 attacks and their aftermath.”
The report comes from Israel’s Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, an independent panel convened in the immediate wake of the attack. The commission was led by Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an attorney and international law expert who was recently awarded the Israel Prize, Israel’s top civilian honor, for her work.
Starting by collecting online material filmed or circulated by Hamas, the commission labored for two years in an effort to generate a factual record that Elkayam-Levy said could withstand the scrutiny and denial that has accompanied claims about sexual violence on Oct. 7 and in its aftermath, particularly the idea that the sexual violence was systematic.
Researchers reviewed and analyzed more than 10,000 photographs and video segments, amounting to more than 1,800 hours of footage, alongside more than 430 testimonies from survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts and family members.
They identified 13 recurring patterns of sexual and gender-based violence across Oct. 7 attack sites, abductions and captivity, including rape, gang rape and other forms of sexual assault, sexual torture, forced nudity, threats of forced marriages, postmortem abuse, the public display of victims and the filming and dissemination of sexualized violence.
The evidence “proves that it wasn’t isolated violence, it wasn’t random,” Elkayam-Levy said. “It was a strategy, carried out with exceptional cruelty on victims and on hostages in captivity.”
The report also says genocide must be examined as a possible legal characterization, citing the “scale, coordination, and systematic nature of the violence,” the targeting of civilians as part of a campaign to destroy Israelis and Jews, and the infliction of severe bodily and mental harm, “including through sexual violence and torture.”
The report devotes specific attention to sexual violence against men and boys, documenting rape, sexual torture, mutilation and sexualized humiliation that the authors say has often been overlooked in public discussion of Oct. 7.
The report includes testimonies that have already surfaced, such as from Amit Soussana and Keith Siegel, two former hostages who said they had been sexually assaulted by their captors.
But it also includes accounts that had not previously been made public, including cases of sexual violence inflicted in the presence or near vicinity of family members. In at least one case the researchers documented, family members held hostage together were forced to perform sexual acts on one another, an example of what the commission characterizes as “kinocidal” sexual violence, meaning violence aimed at destroying family structures by exploiting familial bonds.
Yet the report aims to go beyond simply documenting horrific traumas. A 70-page legal section argues that the documented acts support prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and sexual and gender-based violence linked to terrorism.
It notes that victims of the Oct. 7 attacks represented 52 nationalities, giving multiple governments potential avenues to investigate and prosecute through domestic terrorism laws, extraterritorial jurisdiction or universal jurisdiction.
So far, those efforts remain “scarce and fragmented,” the report says, with investigations or legal steps undertaken in the United States, France, Germany and Canada, as well as at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. In the case of the ICC, its prosecutor sought warrants for Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif over crimes including rape and other sexual violence, but all three Hamas leaders were killed by the IDF and the proceedings were terminated.
The report argues that sexual violence prosecutions do not have to depend only on direct survivor testimony, a central issue for Oct. 7 cases as many victims were murdered, witnesses were traumatized and released hostages could speak only after months in captivity. International courts have relied on direct witnesses, expert witnesses, forensic material, circumstantial evidence and digital documentation, while ICC rules do not require corroboration for sexual violence crimes.
“The report shifts the global conversation from whether this happened to what the consequences should be,” Elkayam-Levy said in an interview ahead of the report’s release. “We’re going to see a before-and-after moment with it.”
Whether that comes to pass remains to be seen. The report arrives in a climate of denial around sexual violence on Oct. 7 that was fueled in part by early accounts that were later challenged. Critics of Israel’s claims have repeatedly pointed to disputed elements in an investigation published in The New York Times in December 2023, including the case of Oct. 7 victim Gal Abdush, whose relative questioned whether there was proof she had been raped, and to accounts of sexual violence by ZAKA first responders that were later debunked. Those cases helped denialists attack the wider body of evidence documented by UN officials, Israeli investigators, journalists and groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Elkayam-Levy herself has been the subject of criticism, with a March 2024 report in Yedioth Aharonoth citing unnamed government officials questioning the commission’s structure and the accuracy of some of her early public claims, including a widely debunked account that a pregnant woman had been found with her womb cut open — criticism that was picked up by skeptics of Oct. 7 sexual violence claims.
In response, Elkayam-Levy said some of the early mischaracterizations reflected the confusion of the first days after the attack, when first responders and those recovering hundreds of bodies were working in traumatic circumstances.
“It is precisely because of that early chaos, and the widespread denial, that this report was prepared under the strictest international verification standards, with every testimony and piece of evidence carefully cross-checked and corroborated,” she said.
Elkayam-Levy said the backlash she personally experienced was “very scary,” with threats to her life and antisemitic groups circulating her image alongside accusations that she was “lying about Hamas.”
The team, made up of about 20 employees and additional volunteers and contributors, worked from a hidden location, with some researchers choosing to remain anonymous throughout.
Elkayam-Levy said the release of the archive may not stop denial from “social media trolls,” but it changes the evidentiary landscape in ways serious observers can no longer ignore.
She pointed to remarks made early on in the war by philosopher Judith Butler, who cast doubt on reports of rape on Oct. 7, comments Elkayam-Levy said caused deep anguish to victims and those documenting the crimes.
“Every item is now archived and here to stay, for her to feel ashamed of what she did and to be remembered as a person who did not stand with the victims, who forgot the purpose of her work as a feminist,” she said.
Elkayam-Levy is optimistic that prosecutions could result. She said accountability may unfold over years and across borders, with some Hamas leaders and perpetrators already hiding in Turkey and Qatar and others likely to reach Western countries.
“I think it will be the same as the Holocaust, that different Nazi leaders were prosecuted around the world,” she said.
Still, Elkayam-Levy said even successful prosecutions would not be enough to convey the magnitude of the crimes or preserve their place in historical memory.
“You don’t learn about the Holocaust from the prosecution of a single person,” she said. “You learn it from the documentation, from the witnesses, the survivors.”
The report calls for an “incontrovertible judicial record,” citing the Nuremberg trials, recent German prosecutions of ISIS crimes against Yazidis and Ukraine’s war-crimes documentation as models for legal efforts that can establish an enduring record as well as punish perpetrators. It recommends a coordinated strategy combining Israeli proceedings with international cooperation, evidence-sharing, specialized war-crimes units and prosecutors trained in sexual and gender-based crimes.
The Civil Commission is not alone in arguing that the sexual violence of Oct. 7 requires a legal response. The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel submitted an early report to the UN in 2024, and the Dinah Project, led by legal experts at Bar-Ilan University’s Rackman Center, published an 84-page report in July concluding that Hamas used sexual violence as a “tactical weapon” during the attacks and in captivity. A month later, the UN Secretary-General listed Hamas among parties “credibly suspected” of patterns of rape or other sexual violence in armed conflict.
Elkayam-Levy said the new report should not be treated only as a document for prosecutors, legal scholars or women’s rights advocates. Sexual violence is too often treated as an issue that “belongs to women’s committees,” she said, when the findings should also be studied by those responsible for national security and counterterrorism.
Accountability should also extend to social media platforms, after Hamas-led perpetrators filmed and circulated images of victims to “glorify the atrocities in real time,” according to the report.
The commission has drawn support from high profile figures including David Crane, founding chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, former Israeli Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and tech executive Sheryl Sandberg, who has campaigned internationally for recognition of Oct. 7 sexual violence.
The archive is led by Karen Jungblut, a former archivist at the USC Shoah Foundation. The commission has also been approached by people trying to document sexual violence in other atrocity settings, Elkayam-Levy said, including Druze contacts seeking guidance after recent attacks in Sweida, Syria.
The report’s release came a day after the Knesset overwhelmingly passed a law establishing a special military tribunal to try captured Hamas-led Oct. 7 perpetrators, with authority to impose the death penalty in some cases. But it warns that capital punishment could deter international support and extradition, noting that comparable hybrid courts combining domestic and international elements do not permit capital punishment.
Executions, Elkayam-Levy further argued, could overshadow the legal record, divert attention from victims’ suffering and turn the proceedings into a global controversy. “My fear is that the terrorists will be remembered more in the universal, historical memory than the victims themselves.”
In taking testimonies from survivors, Elkayam-Levy said, one of the final questions her team asked was what gave them strength and what justice meant to them. The answers, she said, were striking for how little they had to do with indictments or convictions.
“More than anything else, they want the truth to be heard and for them to be recognized and believed,” she said.
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