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A rabbi’s lifetime of outreach and inroads
(JTA) — In 1975, Lincoln Square Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side had become the hottest ticket in town. And no ticket was required to attend services at the 600-seat Orthodox congregation that, under the leadership of the charismatic young rabbi, Steven (later Shlomo) Riskin, was filled to overflowing each Shabbat. More than 1,500 people were attending the dozens of weekly adult education classes offered, from simple Hebrew to advanced Talmud.
At that point, the synagogue’s energetic educational director, Ephraim Buchwald, 29, suggested that Lincoln Square create a Shabbat service with the potential to reach the majority of American Jews — those who were unaffiliated or marginalized and felt disenfranchised from traditional synagogues and much of Jewish life. The result was the Beginners Service, a weekly gathering that included a selection of prayers in Hebrew and English, a summary and discussion of the weekly Torah portion, and most important, an open environment that encouraged questions, comments and give-and-take between Rabbi Buchwald, and a wide range of several dozen attendees.
Fifty years later, on June 27, the rabbi, now known as a pioneer in the world of Orthodox Jewish outreach, stepped down from his post. Toward the end of a long conversation a few days later, I asked him to provide contact information for some of the program’s more memorable participants, past and present, so I could interview them.
The next day he emailed me a list he compiled of “noted notables, by category,” which included one-line bios of 117 Beginners Service attendees in “academia, business, celebrity, celebrity relatives, education, Jewish communal activism, journalism/media/publishing, law, law enforcement, medicine and psychology, philanthropy, science and math, show business and entertainment, and Torah.”
The list, and his preparation of it, gave me a glimpse into the depth of Rabbi Buchwald’s reach and impact on the spiritual lives of thousands of men and women for the last five decades. Each of the former and current students of his that I subsequently spoke with described him as having re-energized and enriched them in profound ways through his teachings, not only of Jewish ritual and text but of modeling a life of meaning and purpose. Each said they had been a guest at the Buchwald Shabbat table more than once, where they were welcomed warmly by the rabbi and his wife, Aidel.
Allan Leicht, a writer and producer for theater, movies and television, discovered the Beginners Service more out of curiosity than commitment, after moving from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side with his actress wife, Renee Lippin, in 1980. “I was looking for a synagogue to go to on Saturday mornings, but after meeting this young, enthusiastic rabbi, he won me over completely,” the soft-spoken Leicht explained. “Rabbi Buchwald’s lively discussions” about the prayers and Torah portion “were addictive,” he recalled. The rabbi “never invalidated anyone’s point of view.”
Leicht began to observe Shabbat and Jewish holidays more fully, despite the challenges presented in working in the entertainment world. He credits Rabbi Buchwald for his transformation. “I became re-awakened to my Judaism.
More than 40 years later, Rachel Priester, who was raised Christian, had a similar reaction to Rabbi Buchwald’s impact on her spiritual life. “He helps people find their way to, or back to, Judaism,” said Priester, who moved to the Upper West Side a year and a half ago and sought out Lincoln Square’s Beginners Service on her path toward Judaism. Rabbi Buchwald “welcomes you warmly and reaches out to everyone on their own level and makes you aware that you are part of something bigger, part of a community of tradition and prayer.”
Priester completed her Orthodox conversion shortly before Shavuot this year and now attends the early Shabbat morning “hashkama” minyan at Lincoln Square each week in addition to the Beginners Service, which she says “continues to bring me great comfort.”
Short in stature, prodigious in enthusiasm, charisma and compassion, Rabbi Buchwald, 80, has become an inveterate selfless promoter, using his educational and marketing talents to showcase the beauty of Judaism. A favorite story he tells is of the 19th century Chasidic leader, the Kotzker Rebbe, who was asked about two people on a ladder, one on the fourth rung and one on the 10th. “Which one is higher?” his students asked. “It depends on which one is climbing up and which one is going down,” the Rebbe answered.
“As long as you’re going in the right direction – that’s our motto,” Rabbi Buchwald told me. “It’s about giving people a positive, joyous Jewish experience. And the key ingredients are passion and follow-up.”
Tom Steinberg, CEO of a diversified investment firm and a Judaics educator at Orthodox yeshivas in Israel, views his time as a Beginners Service attendee in the early 1980s as a pivotal waystation between his Reform childhood in the San Francisco area and the many years he has spent in the Israeli yeshiva world.
He says he met Rabbi Buchwald soon after he moved to New York to start a job in finance and had decided he wanted to become observant. “On my first visit to Lincoln Square, I met the rabbi and he immediately invited me to lunch for that Shabbat,” Steinberg recalled. He found the rabbi’s teachings “masterful,” and was moved by the warmth of the Buchwald family, where he was a frequent Shabbat guest.
Over time, Steinberg moved toward a more “yeshivish” life in Jerusalem and, like his mentor, became involved in kiruv, or outreach, to young people. He has remained close to Rabbi Buchwald, and says he deeply appreciates “the amazing energy it takes to create a new organization” and keep it growing for decades. “He literally carried me on his shoulders at my wedding,” Steinberg said, attributing the feat to the rabbi’s “spiritual strength.”
In reflecting on how the Beginners Service has changed in recent years, Rabbi Buchwald said that since the Covid pandemic, the number of those who attend the three-hour sessions has decreased a bit from about 50 people a week to between 30 and 40. He estimates that half of the regulars now are not Jewish, about equally divided between those who have a Jewish spouse or partner and those who are spiritual seekers drawn to Judaism on their own.
Educator and opera singer Jennifer Moore, raised Catholic, was interested in Judaism before she met her observant Jewish boyfriend. “Seeing his devotion to his faith and how he lives his life made me draw closer,” she said, and Rabbi Buchwald’s “generosity of spirit and personal interest in each person’s journey” was instrumental in her decision to convert to Judaism. She said that becoming a Jew after Oct. 7 felt like “the right thing to do. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t aligned with my values.”
Adrianne McMillan, an African-American woman who was born Episcopal, said Rabbi Buchwald made her feel comfortable the first time she attended the Beginners Service four years ago, and over time, “he made me feel like a daughter.” Her conversion took place in 2024, and she still walks four miles from her Harlem home to Lincoln Square on Shabbat.
Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald, left, joins Lincoln Square Synagogue congregant Richard Seaman at a November 2025 event marking 38 years of the National Jewish Outreach Program, founded by Buchwald. (Courtesy Rabbi Ezra Buchwald)
Rabbi Buchwald launched the National Jewish Outreach Program (NJOP) in 1987, and promoted its first project, the Hebrew Reading Crash Course, through an ad campaign developed by the late copywriter Jesse Cogan. It included jingles on the radio, toll-free numbers, and billboards on buses and subways with catchy slogans like, “This Rosh Hashanah, Pray in the Original,” and “This Passover, Experience the Exodus From Right to Left.” The course began at Lincoln Square, with 5,000 people signing up at the outset, and later went national.
Rabbi Buchwald said reading Hebrew was key for feeling comfortable at synagogue, that learning it was relatively easy and that “it was neutral and non-threatening” compared to Shabbat observance. “For many who took the course, Hebrew reading became the gateway to greater Jewish involvement,” the rabbi has said.
Over the years NJOP has helped establish Beginners Services at synagogues around the country as well as programs like “Turn Friday Night Into Shabbat” – based on a phrase Cogan created and which became NJOP’s motto – and Shabbat Across America, a once-a-year synagogue service for unaffiliated and marginally affiliated Jews that has drawn more than 1.5 million people and now takes place in more than 40 countries, according to Rabbi Buchwald.
The Beginners Service will continue, Lincoln Square has assured its community, and though he will miss those weekly encounters, Rabbi Buchwald plans to keep busy with a highly ambitious list of projects. They include raising “billions of dollars” to allow Jewish day schools around the country to provide a free education, and promoting a campaign to have Jews around the world recite Sh’ma Yisrael twice a day “with love.” Perhaps most challenging: “convincing people to stop talking in shul,” Rabbi Buchwald said.
If anyone can do it, he can.
Gary Rosenblatt, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the former editor and publisher of The Jewish Week of New York. You can follow him as a free or paid subscriber at garyrosenblatt.substack.com.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
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Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so.
A group of Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian parents and students are suing a California school district, alleging that a high school program’s field trip to a mosque — and no other houses of worship — violated the First Amendment.
The suit, brought forth by Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area, focuses on two trips that were part of a social justice program at Palo Alto High School.
According to the complaint filed in the Northern District of California on August 7: “The district failed to maintain religious neutrality, failed to ensure equal treatment among faiths, failed to protect student privacy and failed to vet, supervise, and monitor religiously divisive outside speakers during the school-sponsored event.”
Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools nor the Palo Alto Unified School District immediately responded to requests for comment.
The trip was part of Palo Alto High’s Social Justice Pathway, where according to a promotional video, students in 10th through 12th grades take English and history courses “through a social justice lens rather than the standard analytical lens, where facts and dates are memorized.” Palo Alto High started the program in 2014.
Field trips around the Bay Area are a hallmark of the program, including travels to Angel Island, where many Asian immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the early 20th century, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Students also have heard from a variety of speakers, including a Holocaust survivor and a Cambodian refugee.
The field trips to the mosque happened in 2022 and 2025. The plaintiffs include three Jewish Palo Alto High students, at least one of whom took part in the Social Justice Pathway.
The parent plaintiffs allege that the school had not fully informed them that their children were going to participate in “religiously inflected activity.”
According to the complaint, female students were encouraged to observe the customary dress code of wearing head coverings inside the mosque. They also observed a midday prayer, interacted with participants of a Quran memorization program, received Qurans as gifts and were “taught that Islam, in particular, promotes social justice,” the suit says.
“[The plaintiffs] belong to religious traditions that practice social justice,” the suit says. “The government’s endorsement of Islam in particular as a social justice faith denigrates their respective traditions and their identities as members of faith communities due equal treatment and appreciation within the District, State and country.”
The plaintiffs allege that the visit violated the First Amendment, since the public school was promoting a specific religion, and the 14th amendment, for elevating one religion over others.
A student at Palo Alto High who is part of the Social Justice Pathway disagreed, describing it as part of a broader religion unit.
“There was never a point on this trip where I felt in any way that the mosque or the school was trying to even suggest conversion,” he wrote in an Instagram comment on a local news post about the lawsuit. “The goal was obvious to us: Learn about an underrepresented religion present in our community.”
But plaintiffs also objected to the history of one of the speakers. Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who has faced allegations of antisemitism.
In 2019, Billoo was removed from the board of the Women’s March for past remarks she had made. She faced criticism for a 2021 Facebook post, where she warned against “polite zionists” like Hilllel and the Jewish federations, saying “they are not your friends.” A tweet of hers from October 7, 2023, following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israel, also has faced scrutiny: “Pray for Gaza. We are witnessing decolonization,” she wrote.
In an emailed statement to the Forward, Billoo wrote, “Public schools have an obligation to remain neutral toward religion, but neutrality does not mean shielding students from learning about religion or religious communities.”
“Visiting a mosque, observing Muslims practice their faith, or learning about Islam is not the same as being compelled to practice Islam,” she wrote. “We are concerned that this lawsuit risks turning ordinary engagement with Islam and Muslims into something suspicious and could have a chilling effect on educators who want their students to learn about the diverse communities around them.”
But plaintiffs said allowing Billoo to speak with the students demonstrated negligence on the part of the school.
“Ms. Billoo was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.”
The school also allowed photos of the high schoolers to be taken at the event without parents’ permission, the suit says.
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Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found
(JTA) — The remains of Yehuda Katz, the last Israeli soldier still missing from the 1982 Battle of Sultan Yacoub during the First Lebanon War, have been recovered after 44 years, the Israeli military said Tuesday, bringing to a close one of the country’s longest-running missing soldier cases.
Katz, a 22-year-old tank gunner and yeshiva student who disappeared just 10 days before he was due to complete his military service, was one of three soldiers whose fate was unknown for decades after Israeli forces became trapped by Syrian troops in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 11, 1982.
Twenty Israeli soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded in the battle, with six initially listed as missing. Three were later returned or confirmed dead, leaving Katz, Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman as the only soldiers whose fate were unknown. The remains of Baumel and Feldman were recovered in separate operations in 2019 and 2025.
Katz’s remains were located during a special overnight operation carried out by the IDF in cooperation with Mossad and based on intelligence obtained in recent months. They were returned to Israel and military representatives informed Katz’s family of the discovery Tuesday morning.
For the soldiers who survived Sultan Yacoub, the news ended a wait that had followed them for much of their lives.
Avi Rath, who fought alongside Katz, said the unresolved fate of his comrade had stayed with him for decades. “The look on the family’s faces stays with you your entire life, a look that says, ‘You didn’t finish the job,’” Rath said in an interview on Tuesday with KAN public radio’s “Kalman Liberman” program. “Thank God, this closes a circle and resolves some of the uncertainty, but there is also great pain. It weighs on our conscience.”
Katz had studied in the Hesder program at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, combining Torah study with military service. According to the yeshiva, he slept barely four hours a night while immersed in his studies. He had planned to become a rabbi and teach at a yeshiva after completing his military service.
On the night before the battle, Katz gathered fellow soldiers around him and taught them Maimonides’ laws governing the conduct of Jewish soldiers in battle, the yeshiva said on its website. He then led them in singing Psalm 23, including the verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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