Uncategorized
Alarmed by their country’s political direction, more Israelis are seeking to move abroad
TEL AVIV (JTA) — When Daniel Schleider and his wife, Lior, leave Israel next month, it will be for good — and with a heavy heart.
“I have no doubt I will have tears in my eyes the whole flight.” said Schleider, who was born in Mexico and lived in Israel for a time as a child before returning on his own at 18. Describing himself as “deeply Zionist,” he served in a combat unit in the Israeli army, married an Israeli woman and built a career in an Israeli company.
Yet as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power, assembled a coalition that includes far-right parties and started pushing changes that would erode hallmarks of Israeli democracy, Schleider found himself booking plane tickets and locating an apartment in Barcelona. Spain’s language and low cost of living made the city a good fit, he said, but the real attraction was living in a place where he wouldn’t constantly have to face down the ways that Israel is changing.
Israel’s strength over its 75 years, Schleider said, is “the economy we built by selling our brains.… And yet, in less than half a year, we’ve managed to destroy all that.”
Schleider has been joining the sweeping protests that have taken root across the country in response to the new right-wing government and its effort to strip the Israeli judiciary of much of its power and independence. But while he considered recommitting to his country and fighting the changes rather than fleeing over them, he also accepts the government’s argument that most Israelis voted for something he doesn’t believe in.
Daniel Schleider and his wife Lior are leaving Israel for Barcelona because of the political instability in their country. (Courtesy Schleider)
“I have a lot of internal conflict,” he said about the protests. “Who am I to fight against what the majority has accepted?”
Schleider is far from alone in seeking to leave Israel this year. While Israelis have always moved abroad for various reasons, including business opportunities or to gain experience in particular fields, the pace of planned departures appears to be picking up. No longer considered a form of social betrayal, emigration — known in Hebrew as yerida, meaning descent — is on the table for a wide swath of Israelis right now.
Many of the people weighing emigration were already thinking about it but were catalyzed by the new government, according to accounts from dozens of people in various stages of emigration and of organizations that seek to aid them.
“I’ve already been on the fence for a few years — not in terms of leaving Israel but in terms of relocating for something new,” said Schleider.
“But in the past year, with all the craziness and everything, I realized where the country was going. And after the recent elections, my wife — who had been unconvinced — was the one who took the step and said now she understood where the public is going and what life is going to be like in the country. You could call it the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.
“And then when the whole issue of the [judicial] revolution started, we just decided not to wait and to do it immediately.”
Ocean Relocation, which assists people with both immigration to and emigration from Israel, has received more than 100 inquiries a day from people looking to leave since Justice Minister Yariv Levin first presented his proposal for judicial reform back in January. That’s four times the rate of inquiries the organization received last year, according to senior manager Shay Obazanek.
“Never in history has there been this level of demand,” Obazanek said, citing the company’s 80 years’ experience as the “barometer” of movement in and out the country.
Shlomit Drenger, who leads Ocean Relocation’s business development, said those looking to leave come from all walks of life. They include families pushed to leave by the political situation; those investing in real estate abroad as a future shelter, if needed; and Israelis who can work remotely and are worried about the country’s upheaval. Economics are also a concern: With foreign investors issuing dire warnings about Israel’s economy if the judicial reforms go through, companies wary to invest in the country and the shekel already weakening, it could grow more expensive to leave in the future.
The most common destination for the new departures, Drenger said, is Europe, representing representing 70% of moves, compared to 40% in the recent past. Europe’s draws include its convenient time zones, quality-of-life indices, and chiefly, the relative ease in recent years of obtaining foreign passports in countries such as Portugal, Poland and even Morocco. Many Israelis have roots in those countries and are or have been entitled to citizenship today because their family members were forced to leave under duress during the Holocaust or the Spanish Inquisition.
Israelis protesting against the government’s controversial judicial reform bill block the main road leading to the departures area of Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv on March 9, 2023. (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images)
On the other hand, Drenger said, emigration to the United States, where the vast majority of the 1 million Israeli citizens abroad live, has declined significantly. The United States is known for its tough immigration laws and high cost of living in areas with large Israeli and Jewish communities, and even people who have no rights to a foreign passport have an easier time obtaining residency rights in Europe than the United States.
Some Israelis aren’t picking anywhere in particular before leaving. Ofer Stern, 40, quit his job as a tech developer, left Israel and is now traveling around the world before deciding where to settle.
“We’re living in a democracy and that democracy is dependent on demography and I can’t fight it,” he said, alluding to the fact that Orthodox Jews, who tend to be right wing, are the fastest-growing segment of the Israeli population. “The country that I love and that I’ve always loved will not be here in 10 years. Instead, it will be a country that is suited to other people, but not for me.”
While others have already started their emigration process, American-born Marni Mandell, a mother of two living in Tel Aviv, is still on the fence. Her greatest fear is that judicial reforms could open the door to significant changes in civil rights protections — and in so doing break her contract with the country she chose.
“If this so-called ‘reform’ is enacted, which is really tantamount to a coup, it’s hard to imagine that I want my children to grow up to fight in an army whose particularism outweighs the basic human rights that are so fundamental to my values,” Mandell said.
Most people who look into emigrating for political reasons do not end up doing so. In the weeks leading up to the United States’ 2020 presidential election, inquiries to law firms specializing in helping Americans move abroad saw a sharp uptick in inquiries — many of them from Jews fearful about a second Trump administration after then-President Donald Trump declined to unequivocally condemn white supremacists. When President Joe Biden was elected, they largely called off the alarm.
The Trump scenario is not analogous with the Israeli one for several reasons, starting with the fact that the Israelis are responding to an elected government’s policy decisions, not just the prospect of an election result. What’s more, U.S. law contains safeguards designed to prevent any single party or leader from gaining absolute power. Israel has fewer of those safeguards, and many of those appear threatened if the government’s proposals go through.
Casandra Larenas had long courted the idea of moving overseas. “As a childfree person, Israel doesn’t have much to offer and is a really expensive country. I’ve traveled around so I know the quality of life I can reach abroad,” she said. But she said she had always batted away the idea: “I’m still Jewish and my family are still here.”
Clockwise from upper left: Benjamin-Michael Aronov, Casandra Larenas and Ofer Stern are all leaving Israel because of political unrest there. (All photos courtesy)
That all changed with the judicial overhaul, she said. While not against the idea of a reform per se, Laranes is firmly opposed to the way it is being carried out, saying it totally disregards the millions of people on the other side. Chilean-born, Laranes grew up under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.
“I still remember [it] and I don’t want something like that again,” said Larenas, who has purchased a plane ticket for later this spring and plans to take up residency abroad — though she said she would maintain her citizenship and hoped to return one day.
The departure of liberal and moderate Israelis could have implications on Israel’s political future. Israel does not permit its citizens to vote absentee, meaning that anyone who leaves the country must incur costly, potentially frequent travel to participate in elections — or cede political input altogether.
Benjamin-Michael Aronov, who grew up with Russian parents in the United States, said he was taken aback by how frequently Israelis express shock that he moved to Israel in the first place. “The No. 1 question I get from Israelis is, ‘Why would you move here from the U.S.? We’re all trying to get out of here. There’s no future here.’”
He said he had come to realize that they were right.
“I thought the warnings were something that would truly impact our children or grandchildren but that our lifetime would be spent in an Israeli high-tech, secular golden era. But I’m realizing the longevity of Tel Aviv’s bubble of beaches and parties and crazy-smart, secular people changing the world with technology is maybe even more a fantasy now than when Herzl dreamt it,” Aronov said. “I found my perfect home, a Jewish home, sadly being undone by Jews.”
Not everyone choosing to jump ship is ideologically aligned with the protest movement. Amir Cohen, who asked to use a pseudonym because he has not informed his employers of his plans yet, is a computer science lecturer at Ariel University in the West Bank who voted in the last election for the Otzma Yehudit party chaired by far-right provocateur Itamar Ben-Gvir. Cohen was willing to put aside his ideological differences with the hared Orthodox parties if it meant achieving political stability — but was soon disillusioned.
“None of it is working. And now we’re on our way to civil war, it’s that simple. I figured, ‘I don’t need this nonsense, there are plenty of places in the world for me to go,’” he said.
Thousands of Israeli protesters rally against the Israeli goverment’s judicial overhaul bills in Tel Aviv, March 4, 2023. (Gili Yaari Flash90)
Cohen stuck with the country after one of his brothers was killed in the 2014 Gaza War. Now, he said, his other brothers have recently followed his lead and applied for Hungarian passports in an effort to find a way to move abroad permanently.
“I’m not alone,” he said. “Most of my friends and family feel the same way.”
Others still, like Omer Mizrahi, view themselves as apolitical. A contractor from Jerusalem, Mizrahi, 27, headed to San Diego, California, a month ago as a result of the reform. Mizrahi, who eschewed casting a vote in the last election, expressed a less common impetus for leaving: actual fear for his life. Mizrahi described sitting in traffic jams in Jerusalem and realizing that if a terror attack were to unfold — “and let’s be honest, there are at least one or two every week” — he wouldn’t be able to escape in time because he was caught in a gridlock. “Our politicians can’t do anything about it because they’re too embroiled in a war of egos.”
Now 7,500 miles away, Mizrahi says he feels like he’s finally living life. “I sit in traffic now and I’m happy as a clam. Everything’s calm.”
Back in Israel, Schleider is making his final preparations for leaving, advertising his Tesla for sale on Facebook this week. He remains hopeful that the massive anti-government protests will make a difference. In the meantime, though, his one-way ticket is scheduled for April 14.
“I dream of coming back, but I don’t know that it will ever happen,” he said. “We made a decision that was self-serving, but that doesn’t mean we’re any less Zionist.”
—
The post Alarmed by their country’s political direction, more Israelis are seeking to move abroad appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
What a West Bank visit taught me about the past and present tragedies of Tisha B’Av
As we chant Lamentations on the floor, in the dark, on Wednesday night for Tisha B’Av, we will open with the word “eikha” — “how.”
That same word became the refrain of a recent eight day visit I made to Israel and the West Bank.
I traveled to Jerusalem for a week of immersive learning with 150 rabbis and cantors at the Shalom Hartman Institute’s annual Rabbinic Torah Seminar. But my learning wasn’t restricted to the beit midrash. I spent time with cousins finishing combat service; friends working late into the night in the Knesset before its dissolution; people working to build shared society in Haifa; and families grieving the loss of loved ones. And at every turn, I found myself asking “eikha.”
“Eikha” is more than a question. It is the sound made when the distance between what should be and what is becomes almost impossible to bear. Naming that distance is at the heart of Tisha B’Av — and, for me, at the heart of thinking honestly about Israel today. How will Israel move from this moment of profound moral and political fracture toward the future our prophets imagined?
On a visit to the West Bank with Rabbis for Human Rights, I connected with Israelis from across the country who had come to be a protective presence for Palestinians in Jenata, near the settler outpost of Havat Eitam. The Palestinians there face violence and intimidation in an area formally under Palestinian civil authority. We heard from a man whose brother had recently been killed by settlers, and we learned that their imam was jailed just that morning to prevent Friday prayers from moving forward as planned.
Then we were told to leave. The corner of the village we were visiting was declared a 24-hour closed military zone.
Next we traveled to Umm al-Khair, a Palestinian herding community where the Hathaleen family buried their son Awdah almost a year ago, after he was shot and killed by an Israeli settler who still walks free. Since his death, settlers have built caravans encroaching into the village, with some only a few meters from homes. This encroachment has triggered the declaration of another “closed military zone,” cutting the family off from their own bathroom and animals. They must use a neighbor’s bathroom and can only feed their animals when a soldier comes to allow it.
I asked a soldier standing guard that day whether any of it troubled him.
“Doesn’t Oct. 7 trouble you?” he replied.
I don’t know what that soldier has seen, or what he has lost. But I know his response took two griefs and set them against each other, as though one atrocity could justify another. “Eikha”: How do we nurse our deepest wounds without allowing them to justify our wounding others? How do we stay safe and moral?
This past Shabbat was Shabbat Hazon — the “Sabbath of Vision” — so named for the opening word of the Haftara, which describes Isaiah’s vision of a devastated but ultimately redeemed Jerusalem. That reading, in our current context, must push us — and, God willing, Israel’s next political leaders — to articulate compelling responses to the questions bearing down on Israeli society and on Judaism itself. To ask how we came to a point of such dire trouble, and realize a vision for redemption from it.
I keep thinking about the way slain hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin would remind his fellow captives, citing Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s words, that if they could hold onto a “why,” they could endure any “how.”
Israel and the Jewish people have profound whys. We are meant to be, in the words of “Hatikvah,” “a free people in our own land.” And to be, in the words of the Torah, “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
This Tisha B’Av, as we mourn the destruction that shattered Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel 2,000 years ago, we must also reckon honestly with the forms of inhumanity that threaten its moral future and physical safety today.
We must understand that our freedom, our holiness and our humanity are bound up in that of the Hathaleen family, and the besieged villagers of Jenata. During my visit, an Israeli cousin of mine acknowledged that everything I had seen in the West Bank was real and terrible — and that he didn’t want Palestinians living so close to Israel, out of fear of an Oct. 7 attack from the West Bank. What I wish all of us could better understand: If Jewish freedom depends upon denying Palestinian freedom, then it is neither the freedom of “Hatikvah” nor the holiness the Torah demands. I also don’t think it will make us safe.
This is, I think, the particular question facing rabbis and Jewish communal leaders like me right now: how do we hold onto our right — our obligation — to name Israel’s failures honestly, as people bound to this place and this story, without having our words weaponized to delegitimize and demonize the entire project? My criticism of what I saw in Jenata and Umm al-Khair comes from love — the same love that makes looking away impossible. Learning how to hold both at once, unflinching criticism and unwavering commitment, may be the most urgent “eikha” of this particular moment.
After Tisha B’Av comes the Shivah d’Nehemta — the Seven Weeks of Consolation that carry us into Rosh Hashanah.
In those weeks, the questions of “eikha” don’t disappear. They deepen. These weeks lead us into Elul, a time of intense heshbon hanefesh — accounting of the soul. The pairing of consolation with accounting suggests that renewal comes not through answering our questions, but through finding the courage to keep asking them.
How do we protect ourselves without surrendering our humanity? How do we acknowledge our own suffering without turning it into permission to inflict suffering on others?
Those are Israel’s questions as they move toward their October elections. They are ours as well, as we navigate being Jews in this moment.
The post What a West Bank visit taught me about the past and present tragedies of Tisha B’Av appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
To protest immigration policy, they’re saying kaddish — then marching to Comic-Con
Progressive Jewish groups across the country this week are using the fast day of Tisha B’av to protest national immigration policies, gathering outside ICE facilities, immigration courts,city halls and in San Diego’s case, culminating at a convention center. Tisha B’av protests are also planned in Los Angeles, Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.
Tisha B’av commemorates several Jewish national tragedies, including the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago. Protest organizers connect the torment tied to the destruction and ensuing exile, recounted in the book of Lamentations, to the pain experienced by immigrant families today.
“We had our sacred spaces taken away from us and we became wanderers,” Rabbi Mike Rothbaum, leader of San Diego synagogue Dor Hadash and one of the protest organizers, said in an interview. “And what is happening to the people who are in our streets? They’ve already been made wanderers once — having to escape torture, persecution, degradation — and now we’re doing it to them again.”
The protesters in San Diego — representing Jewish groups, labor unions, left-wing political organizations and social justice nonprofits — will begin by reading from Lamentations outside the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Courthouse, where immigrants are often detained following their hearings. They then will march to the San Diego Convention Center. They also plan to recite kaddish for people who have died in ICE custody or at ICE protests.
The immigration protests are part of a long history of Jewish groups using Tisha B’av as an opportunity to reflect on social ills. And while they will occur across the country, the protests are not nationally organized, according to their organizers. Instead, each one has a particular local resonance.
“San Diego is a border city,” Rothbaum said, “and the fact that we have a government that says the people born on this side of the border are more important, more precious, more sacred than people born on the other side of that border is blasphemy.”
Rothbaum’s involvement in Tisha B’av immigration actions dates back to the first Trump administration, when he was working in Massachusetts. A similar rally will unfold there this week outside New England’s ICE headquarters.
That event will include an Erev Tisha B’av program led by the state’s Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action.
Cindy Rowe, the alliance’s president and CEO, will also speak about Tisha B’av at a rally at Boston City Hall to protect the temporary protected status of Haitian immigrants, which expires Thursday. Massachusetts is home to roughly 45,000 Haitian immigrants whose legal status could be in jeopardy after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month that President Trump has broad authority to deport them.
The expiration of Haitians’ temporary protected status on Tisha B’av was “a cruel twist of fate,” Rowe said.
Tisha B’av represents “a day of mourning for the destruction of communities, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing right now in our modern day,” Rowe said. “The destruction of our own community right in front of our eyes.”
More than a dozen Jewish groups — including several synagogues, a JCC and various social justice groups — are partnering with multifaith organizations and labor unions on a Thursday afternoon event in Los Angeles, which will include testimony from clergy who have witnessed the conditions of detention in ICE facilities.
These groups held a similar event last year, when the spectacle of immigration enforcement raids was winning daily headlines. The media focus has since dwindled, but ICE detentions continue apace, according to Brooke Wirtschafter, executive director of Jewish Partnership for Los Angeles, a progressive group that focuses on local issues like housing and immigration.
“It is very much alive and real in Los Angeles in 2026,” Wirtschafter said. “If it is less dramatic than it was in 2025, it’s still very active, and so it’s important to us to continue to raise the issue.”
Likewise, a Jewish-themed immigration protest outside Comic-Con might feel dissonant to the traveling fans encountering it. Rothbaum wants it to turn heads.
“I hope when they come out and they see this group — and then they see Jews are part of this group — that they’ll think for a second before they go to the next thing, ‘Hey, what is my ethical obligation?’” Rothbaum said. “What are Americans’ ethical obligations to the people who come here, either escaping torment or looking for a better life?”
The post To protest immigration policy, they’re saying kaddish — then marching to Comic-Con appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel alarmed by reports of a possible US-Saudi nuclear deal
(JTA) — A potential U.S. civilian nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which The New York Times has reported could be announced by the Trump administration as early as Wednesday, is alarming some Israelis and Americans.
Critics are concerned that the deal, through which U.S. companies would help Saudi Arabia build civilian nuclear energy plants, could allow Saudi Arabia to eventually develop nuclear weapons. The proposed plants would have the capacity to enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel without pervasive oversight.
The arrangement would also remove one of the key incentives to encourage Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. The Biden administration had been in the process of exchanging such nuclear access for Saudi acceptance of open ties with the Jewish state when the Hamas-led attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, upended the efforts.
Now, a number of media outlets, including the Times and The Wall Street Journal, are reporting that President Donald Trump plans to move ahead with the civilian nuclear program without such strings attached, though a deal has not yet been publicly announced by the Trump administration or formally acknowledged by the Israeli government.
According to Reuters, the nuclear deal would be given to Congress for review but could only be blocked by a two-thirds majority.
When quizzed by Army Radio on the deal, Likud Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar said Israel has been clear with the United States about its red lines but would not say if such a deal crossed that line.
These are conversations that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is having with security experts, he said.
Israeli opposition politicians were blunter about the potential danger. Former Israeli Defense Ministers Avigdor Liberman and Benny Gantz both warned a U.S.Saudi nuclear deal could spark a regional arms race.
That could happen because a nuclear Saudi Arabia, which is Sunni, could spur its Shi’a rival, Iran, to take even more aggressive steps toward building a nuclear bomb. Iran already possesses enrichment capabilities, and the point of the current war launched by the United States and Israel is to keep it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Liberman, who heads Yisrael Beytenu, wrote on X that “a civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia will end with nuclear weapons [production] and lead to a mad arms race across the entire Middle East.”
Yair Golan, a former IDF major general who was a deputy chief of staff and now heads the opposition Democrat Party, said that the long desired Israeli-Saudi deal would have created important diplomatic ties and anchor a regional strategic alliance against Iran.
To give Saudi Arabia nuclear capabilities “without stringent monitoring requirements and without a framework of relations with Israel as a condition creates a dangerous reality for the State of Israel,” Golan wrote on X.
At the White House on Tuesday, Trump spoke broadly about other countries joining the Abraham Accords, the regional normalization agreements he brokered at the end of his first term in 2020, but did not mention Saudi Arabia.
The accords created a regional rubric under which Israel normalized ties with some Muslim countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. Both Trump and former President Joe Biden had sought to bring Saudi Arabia into the pact.
Tensions throughout the region following the Oct. 7 attack and the Gaza war, however, pushed Saudi-Israel normalization further out of reach. The Saudi demands for normalization sharpened in the subsequent years and include Palestinian statehood or, at the very least, progress toward that goal. The Netanyahu government has adamantly rejected such a condition in the wake of the attack and the Israeli public has increasingly opposed the concept as well.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who died last week, was an ardent advocate for an Israeli-Saudi deal. He had pushed Trump not to make concessions to Saudi Arabia without the kingdom moving closer to Israel.
Graham had continued to work on normalization in the months leading up to his death. He told CBS News in June, “We’re going to try to get Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords to end the Arab-Israeli conflict in 2026.”
Dan Shapiro, who worked during the Biden administration as a senior adviser on Middle East regional integration for the State Department, said Wednesday that a U.S.Saudi nuclear deal would make such normalization more difficult.
The plan originally was for a civil nuclear energy agreement with sufficient safeguards against proliferation to be part of a package that would include normalization with Israel, he said.
“It appears that the Trump administration has given it away without normalization,” Shapiro told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Trump’s deal “seems to have abandoned a very important point of leverage to advance another important regional goal of the United States,” he said.
“This was supposed to be a major carrot for Saudi Arabia if they were to normalize with Israel, and now that carrot has been provided without it.”As a result, he said, “the whole incentive structure would have to be redone.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel alarmed by reports of a possible US-Saudi nuclear deal appeared first on The Forward.
