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A Minnesota synagogue built an ice rink — and is inaugurating it with a klezmer skate
(JTA) — A forecasted low of -16 degrees in the Twin Cities on Thursday has the stage set perfectly for two frozen Jewish firsts — a Klezmer on Ice festival and a synagogue-run skating rink.
Such is life in Minnesota, where bone-chilling temperatures are no match for Jewish festivities.
“It kind of shows us the Minnesota-style of thinking about the winter where just because it’s freezing cold outside, you don’t have to stop doing everything,” said Marcus Rubenstein, rabbi at Temple of Aaron in St. Paul.
“I used to be a rabbi in New York. They said you couldn’t schedule any big events in the winter because no one would come in case it snowed,” Rubenstein said. “But [here] sometimes it will snow 6, 7 inches and be -5, -10 degrees, and you’ll have everybody come out. I mean people in their 80s, 90s to little kids. And they just put on their coats and go out and have fun.”
Rabbi Marcus Rubenstein of Temple of Aaron test drives his synagogue’s new ice rink. (Courtesy of Marcus Rubenstein)
Temple of Aaron, a Conservative congregation of about 700 families, is inviting families to bundle up and have fun on what Rubenstein believes is the first-ever skating rink on a synagogue property. The rink, which can accommodate about 30 people at a time, was built and is being maintained by “Ice Captains” — synagogue members who clear it of snow and shovel off any extra ice that forms.
On Thursday, skaters at the rink heard the kickoff performance of the klezmer festival, featuring Jewbalaya, a hybrid klezmer and New Orleans jazz band in which Rubenstein plays the trumpet.
But the music will be piped in from inside the synagogue — a concession, Rubenstein and others associated with the festival said, to the cold.
Last week, musicians promoting Klezmer on Ice with a pre-festival performance alongside Lake Harriett, the (usually frozen-over) body of water at the heart of Minneapolis, ran into some technical challenges. Anticipating frigid temperatures, the musicians planned to play from a lakeside booth decorated like a boom box as part of a pop-art initiative called Art Shanty. But there was a wrinkle.
“We were supposed to have a sousaphone player who by the time they got their heavy big brass instrument into the box, the valves were frozen so they couldn’t play,” said Josh Rosard, an organizer of Klezmer on Ice. The performance went on without the sousaphone.
It’s not just brass instruments that are vulnerable to cold snaps. Strings and woodwinds can quickly go out of tune in the cold, as metal contracts and wood begins to warp. Clarinets and violins, staples of the Eastern European Jewish music genre, just can’t take it.
That’s why most of the Klezmer on Ice events will take place indoors — including but not only at Temple of Aaron. On the schedule for the weekend-long festival are local and national performers Sarina Partridge, Tzipporah Johnson, Izzy Buckner, the Klezmommies and the band Midwood. There will also be a cabaret variety show; klezmer-infused Shabbat services; and a luminary Havdalah ceremony.
Rosard said he saw the event as a breakout moment for the Twin Cities’ klezmer scene and, given the strong track record of longstanding klezmer festivals at spawning new acts, an opportunity.
“I’m really excited for what players in the community are going to take out of the workshops in particular and excited to see what may come out of it in the future,” said Rosard, who grew up casually playing the accordion but got more seriously involved in the klezmer world during the pandemic. He met his Klezmer on Ice co-organizer, Jewish musician and folklorist Sarah Larsson, with whom he attended KlezCanada and the Portland Klezmer Festival.
Still, he acknowledged, “It’s a little bit tongue in cheek to do something like this in the middle of February in Minnesota.”
Rubenstein said his congregants are up for it. Temple of Aaron’s new ice rink will be open not only during the klezmer festival’s opening night but for skating sessions most Saturdays after Shabbat morning services and Hebrew school classes finish.
The sun sets ahead of the Klezmer on Ice Festival’s opening night, which features a free skate session at Temple of Aaron’s ice rink. (Courtesy of Marcus Rubenstein)
If the activity isn’t exactly standard after-synagogue fare, it’s perfectly permitted under the Conservative movement’s interpretation of Jewish law. The movement, of which Temple of Aaron is a part, permits non-competitive ice skating on Shabbat, so long as no Shabbat rules are violated (such as driving to or from a rink or paying to rent skates), and the skating takes place within the boundaries of an eruv, or Jewish legal enclosure inside which certain objects can be carried on Shabbat.
Rubenstein said he was thinking about the activity in different terms — as it relates to making Temple of Aaron a centerpiece of a St. Paul Shabbat.
“The kids are ice skating anyway,” he added. “So why not ice skate at shul and come do it together with their Jewish friends, and build community that way?”
Temperatures are supposed to rise over the course of the weekend, but the high on Friday should be in the low single-digits. So for the klezmer performance that is supposed to take place at Lake Harriet, Rosard says, a plan is in place to avoid last weekend’s snafus.
“We’ll have the sousaphone player drive up as close as possible, then run-slash-briskly walk straight into the performance shelter,” he said. “We didn’t quite have the urgency last time.”
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Loudest Anti-Israel Voices in US Congress Silent on Gaza Ceasefire, Hostage Deal
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are seen before a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on March 21, 2024. Photo: Craig Hudson/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Many of Israel’s most vocal critics in the US Congress have been silent following Wednesday night’s announcement that Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of a US-brokered ceasefire and hostage-release deal to end the war in Gaza.
As of Thursday afternoon, outspoken anti-Israel lawmakers such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), among others, have not released public statements regarding the peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
The silence is striking as each of these lawmakers has, for at least the past several months, consistently called for a ceasefire while accusing Israel of war crimes or “genocide” in Gaza.
Under the deal reached on Wednesday, Hamas will release the remaining Israeli hostages it kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, while Israel will withdraw troops in Gaza to a fixed line and free about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange. The agreement, brokered through indirect talks in Egypt with the help of Qatar, Turkey, and other mediators, is slated to take effect once Israel’s government formally ratifies it on Thursday night.
Observers have noted that many questions remain over Gaza’s future and reconstruction, especially regarding the plan’s call for Hamas to disarm and for Gaza to be totally demilitarized. However, leaders around the world cheered the development as a step toward peace.
Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Pressley, and Sanders have all erroneously accused Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza, claiming that the Jewish state has indiscriminately targeted civilian population centers and inflicted a famine in the beleaguered enclave. Van Hollen has also accused Israel of purposefully withholding food from Palestinian civilians and lying about well-documented claims that Hamas has stolen humanitarian aid. Sanders and Van Hollen have both spearheaded legislation to block offensive weapons transfers from the US to Israel.
However, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), one of the most strident opponents of Israel in Congress, acknowledged the ceasefire deal while simultaneously accusing Israel of “genocide” and calling for Israeli officials to be punished for “war crimes.”
“For the sake of humanity, let’s hope this will be a lasting and permanent ceasefire. While this is a hopeful step, we must demand accountability for every war crime committed during this genocide and continue to call for an end to the occupation,” Omar said in a statement.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the lone congressional Republican to accuse Israel of committing a genocide, also welcomed the news of the ceasefire deal.
“Thank you, President Trump!!” Greene wrote in response to the announcement.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
Another challenge for Israel has been Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom Signs K-12 Antisemitism Bill on Oct. 7 Anniversary
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks on Aug. 14, 2025. Photo: Mike Blake via Reuters Connect
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill into law which requires the state to establish a new Office for Civil Rights for monitoring antisemitism in public schools at a time of rising anti-Jewish hatred across the US.
“California is taking action to confront hate in all its forms,” Newsom said in a statement issued on Tuesday, the second anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The Oct. 7 atrocities perpetrated by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists unleashed a global surge in antisemitic incidents, which have reached record levels in the US and other Western countries over the last two years.
“At a time when antisemitism and bigotry are rising nationwide and globally, these laws make clear: our schools must be places of learning, not hate,” Newsom added in his statement.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the bill confronted Newsom, a Democrat rumored to be interested in running for US president in 2028, with a politically fraught decision, as it aims to limit the extent to which the state’s ideologically charged ethnic studies curricula may plant anti-Zionist viewpoints into the minds of the 5.8 million students educated in its public schools.
With Newsom’s signature, state officials may now proceed with establishing an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, setting parameters within which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be equitably discussed, and potentially barring antisemitic materials from reaching the classroom. However, the measure has been lambasted by anti-Israel partisans and key constituents of the Democratic Party.
Pro-Hamas groups, left-wing nonprofits, and teachers unions have emerged to denounce the legislation, which passed the California legislature last month, even as it declined codification of the widely recognized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism — the exclusion of which constitutes a significant compromise for Jewish and pro-Israel activists. Additionally, it remains to be seen what the law’s ultimate effect on ethnic studies will be.
Amid these challenges and uncertainties, the bill’s supporters praised the news of Gavin’s signing as an indication of progress in the fight against antisemitism.
“StandWithUs is grateful that Gavin Newsom has signed AB 715, a bill to fight antisemitism in K-12 schools. We are proud to be part of the largest coalition of Jewish organizations ever to support a California state bill,” said StandWithUs, a Jewish civil rights advocacy group. “Much remains to be done if California is going to earn back the trust of Jewish students, families, and educators. Going forward, we will continue to use all tools at our disposal to fight antisemitism in K-12 public schools across the state.”
Maya Bronicki, education director of the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, added, “With the signing of this bill, California’s leaders publicly recognize that antisemitism is a grave problem in our schools and have taken an important step towards protecting Jewish students and other protected groups.”
Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased every year of this decade, according to data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault.
In September 2023 some of America’s most prominent Jewish and civil rights groups sued the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California for concealing from the public its adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic and anti-Zionist themes. Then in February, the school district paused implementation of the program to settle the lawsuit.
One month later, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, StandWithUs, and the ADL filed a civil rights complaint accusing the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino County, California, of doing nothing after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was assaulted, having been beaten with stick, on school grounds and teased with jokes about Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
In other California news, a court recently cleared the way for students and their parents to sue school districts across the state over the adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic components which discredit Jewish self-determination in Israel while promoting harmful tropes.
The Algemeiner was notified of the decision by The Deborah Project, a legal nonprofit that filed the lawsuit which precipitated the ruling. In that case, the organization sued the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) over its using ethnic studies materials, which fostered aggressively discriminatory beliefs about Israel and the Jewish community, without offering parents the chance to review and approve of its contents.
The Superior Court of California, Alameda County ruled that the materials could be discriminatory and illegal to the extent that they violate civil rights laws, establishing what The Deborah Project described as a “landmark” precedent for future litigation.
“Jewish parents have been waging battle against antisemitic ‘instructional materials’ and instructors that expose their children to harm and hated,” Deborah Project legal director Lori Lowenthal Marcus said in a statement. “This is the first judicial decision addressing claims that the use of biased material violates the law. Now it’s clear: indoctrinating kids that Jews are evil oppressors discriminates against Jews; districts can be held to account and forced to stop doing it.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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EU, UN Push for Gaza Deal to Lead to Two-State Solution as France Irks Israel With ‘Day After’ Meeting
French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noel Barrot at the Ministerial meeting on the implementation of the Middle East peace plan at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, France, Oct. 9, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
As world leaders hail Israel and Hamas’s agreement to a US-backed peace plan to end the war in Gaza, European leaders are pressing to make the ceasefire a steppingstone toward a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed the newly signed deal, reaffirming France’s commitment to advancing peace, as Paris prepared to host a conference on Gaza’s postwar governance and reconstruction — a move Israeli leaders have denounced as the latest anti-Israel initiative for excluding them from the talks.
“Great hope for the hostages and their families, for the Palestinians in Gaza, and for the entire region,” Macron wrote in a post on X.
“This agreement must mark the end of the war and the beginning of a political solution based on the two-state solution,” the French leader said.
Just hours after the two sides agreed to a ceasefire deal, France brought together top diplomats from several Arab countries — Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — alongside European counterparts from Italy, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, to discuss plans for Gaza’s postwar security, governance, and reconstruction.
Turkey’s foreign minister and European Union representatives also took part in the discussions.
The meeting “will work to gather concrete contributions to ensure that the second phase of [US President Donald Trump’s] plan is implemented, specifying the details of a collective commitment based on the main parameters for the ‘day after,’” the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement before the gathering.
After the meeting, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot told reporters that participants “discussed the major fields to which we intend to contribute: security, governance, reconstruction, and humanitarian aid.”
Without elaborating, he said countries had identified contributions that they were willing to handle in post-conflict Gaza.
“We will share them with the United States so that they can integrate them,” Barrot said.
However, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar criticized France’s new initiative, saying it unfolded behind Israel’s back and describing it as “unnecessary and harmful” to the peace process.
“The invitation of openly hostile governments toward Israel — such as the Sánchez government — to discuss Israel’s affairs is especially outrageous,” Saar wrote in a post on X, referring to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Just one day earlier, Spanish lawmakers had approved the enshrinement in law of an arms embargo on Israel that Sánchez introduced to end what he called “the genocide in Gaza.”
“The participants may of course discuss whatever topics they wish — but there will be no arrangements in Gaza formulated without Israel’s consent,” the top Israeli diplomat said.
“Today we make it clear: nothing about Israel without Israel!” Saar continued. “Israel will not agree to the internationalization of the conflict!”
While the US works with several Middle Eastern countries to advance peace in the region, Israeli and Jewish leaders have criticized Europe and the UN for pursuing initiatives that they say accomplish little in practice.
In an interview with Euronews on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized EU member states for their recent moves to recognize a Palestinian state, calling the bloc “absent” from peace-making efforts and “irrelevant.”
Macron on Thursday warned that expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank would pose an “existential threat” to a Palestinian state and undermine efforts for peace in the Middle East.
Announced overnight by Trump on his Truth Social account, the newly signed peace deal will secure the release of all remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza, with Israel set to free nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, allow more humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave, and partially withdraw its forces.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen welcomed the deal, emphasizing the EU’s readiness to assist with recovery and reconstruction, while continuing to advocate for a two-state solution as part of the peace process.
“Today’s opportunity should be seized. It’s the opportunity to forge a credible political path toward lasting peace and security. A path firmly anchored in the two-state solution,” the top EU official wrote in a post on X.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres also welcomed the agreement, taking the opportunity to push for renewed efforts toward a lasting two-state solution.
“I urge all stakeholders to seize this momentous opportunity to establish a credible political path forward towards ending the occupation, recognizing the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, leading to a two-state solution to enable Israelis & Palestinians to live in peace & security,” Guterres posted on X.
Europe’s latest push for a two-state solution comes after several Western countries — including France, the UK, Australia, and Canada — recognized a Palestinian state at last month’s UN General Assembly, a move Israeli and US officials have criticized as rewarding terrorism.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas also joined European leaders in their calls for a two-state solution, expressing hope that the Gaza deal “will serve as a prelude to achieving a sustainable political solution that ends the Israeli occupation and leads to the establishment of a Palestinian state along the June 4, 1967, borders.”
However, Netanyahu warned on Sunday that the creation of a Palestinian state would be “the ultimate reward for Hamas after doing the greatest massacre against the Jews since the Holocaust.”
Israeli officials have noted that they in effect gave the Palestinians a state in Gaza in 2005, when Israel completely withdrew all military and civilian personnel from the enclave. Hamas, an internationally designated Islamist terror group, was subsequently elected to power in parliamentary elections and then violently seized total control of Gaza in 2007.