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An amended Conservative Jewish Passover policy taps into the booming gluten-free market
(JTA) — Ahead of Passover 2020 — as life worldwide ground to an abrupt halt in the face of a rapidly spreading pandemic and people faced the specter of empty grocery shelves, or staying confined at home — a range of rabbis tried to make it a little easier to observe the holiday.
Long lists of foods and newly lenient guidelines from Jewish organizations circulated among people who keep kosher for Passover, explaining which foods they could purchase and eat on the holiday, given the year’s extraordinary circumstances. The message — sometimes explicit, sometimes implied — was that these special permissions applied only temporarily.
Now, one rule instituted as a COVID provision by the Conservative movement is becoming permanent: Before Passover begins, Jews may buy certified kosher products that have kosher-for-Passover ingredients and are certified gluten-free and oat-free — even if they aren’t explicitly certified kosher for Passover.
When it first appeared in 2020, that rule was written in a way that suggested it was an emergency measure, using the words “when the situation demands.” This year, that four-word phrase has been removed from the Rabbinical Assembly’s Passover guide, and the guidance has moved from a separate section into the main list of allowable products.
The edit reflects how some shifts in Jewish practice that first appeared at the outset of the pandemic, as stopgap measures, have since been normalized. It also allows — for at least a narrow set of Jews who observe Jewish ritual in accordance with the Conservative movement’s dictates — more robust and potentially less expensive options for keeping kosher during Passover.
Rabbi Aaron Alexander, chair of the Kashrut Subcommittee on the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which issues the movement’s Jewish legal rulings, said the change does not reflect a shift in the movement’s approach to Jewish law, known as halacha. Instead, he said, it reflects confidence that the Food and Drug Administration’s strict rules about how products can be labeled can be trusted when it comes to Passover observance.
“It’s not a significant change in how we understand halacha in general and how we understand the general Passover laws,” Alexander said. “It’s always been the case that there are products you can buy without a KP [symbol] before Passover, when you can be pretty sure that there’s no chametz and that any accidental admixture would be minimal.”
The requirement for foods to be certified gluten-free and oat-free, Alexander said, is “an extra line of defense” for people buying products before Passover that are not explicitly labeled kosher for Passover.
The policy shift opens new doors to kosher-keeping Jews: Rather than seeking out specialty items with Passover kosher certification, often carried only in kosher supermarkets and in major markets, they can observe Passover by taking advantage of the increasing number of products that are labeled kosher, gluten-free and oat-free, as long as the ingredients accord with Passover laws.
The gluten-free marketplace is estimated at $6 billion a year in the United States and is growing by an estimated 10% each year, according to industry trend reports. The marketplace serves people with celiac disease — whose incidence is rising — as well as people who seek to reduce or eliminate their gluten intake for perceived health reasons.
Some people with celiac disease say they look forward to Passover because more products will hit shelves that they can count on to be free of gluten. Now, Jews who follow the Conservative movement’s guidance can benefit from some of the wide array of gluten-free foods that are already available.
On Passover, five types of grain are prohibited (except for when they are used to make matzah): wheat, spelt, barley, oat and rye. By purchasing products that are certified gluten-free and oat-free, consumers can avoid buying food that contain those five ingredients.
“In an effort to definitively alert consumers to the presence of wheat gluten in packaged foods, the FDA mandates that any product including the words ‘gluten-free,’ ‘no gluten,’ ‘free of gluten,’ or ‘without gluten’ must contain less than 20 parts per million of glutinous wheat, spelt, barley, or rye,” a footnote to the guide states. “This eliminates the possibility of a gluten-free packaged food containing 4 of the 5 hametz-derived grains in any quantity that would be viable according to Jewish law.”
Alexander emphasized that the gluten-free and oat-free guidance should be seen as “a good way to figure out whether or not the products you’re getting before Passover could be problematic.” He cautioned that looking at the rest of the ingredients is crucial: Some certified gluten-free products, for example, could still be prohibited for Passover because they contain yeast.
Sarah Chandler, an ordained Hebrew priestess and Jewish educator who used to run a pickle business, already bought food with gluten-free labels during her pre-Passover shopping.
“It’s very practical, and it’s also consistent with other levels of kashrut,” Chandler told JTA regarding her pre-Passover shopping. “The fact that you and I can go to a grocery store and buy eggs — you don’t need a kosher symbol on it. We just know that it’s eggs. We’re not worried that the egg is from a bird of prey and not kosher. We can just assume that [if] it says ‘chicken eggs,’ they’re chicken eggs.”
She added, using a Hebrew term for kosher certification, “We don’t need a hechsher on it. The hechscher just means a certain level of supervision.”
Chandler is a vegetarian and eats a variety of nut butters, which are often expensive. Recently, she bought a jar of gluten-free cashew butter that was on sale for $6 instead of its regular price $12. (A jar of almond butter by a kosher brand marketed for Passover can run around $18.) Because it’s still unopened and the ingredients are kosher for Passover, she plans to eat it during the holiday.
Kosher-keeping Jews with gluten intolerance and celiac disease have especially found a lifeline in the growing marketplace of gluten-free food.
Lisa Goldman, also known as the “Gluten Free Jewish Momma,” is an Orlando-based advocate for the gluten intolerant on behalf of her now-grown daughter, who was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2012.
“My daughter was crying over not being able to have matzah balls because matzah [is] very high in wheat,” Goldman recalled. “So it was so exciting when all of the Jewish brands started to come out with a gluten-free version of many of their products.”
By the Way Bakery, a kosher, gluten-free and dairy-free bakery in New York City founded in 2011 by Helene Godin, may be a destination where Jewish shoppers who abide by the Conservative ruling could get food for the holiday. It is offering multiple Passover items this year, though the menu isn’t certified kosher for Passover.
By the Way Bakery is certified kosher, and its individual products that are sold in Whole Foods are in the process of being certified gluten-free.
“I’m really careful with the word ‘certified,’” Godin told JTA. “We are not certified with respect to Passover. I can tell you what is in [our products]. We’re very transparent. If you go to our website and you go to the FAQ section, there’s a link to our ingredient summary. And we list everything that’s in every product.”
Some of the items on this year’s Passover menu include an orange almond cake that Godin calls “the little black dress of desserts” because it goes with everything, and a chocolate truffle torte. By the Way Bakery’s cakes and cookies are made with wheat flour alternatives, many of which fall into the category of kitniyot, or foods such as legumes, corn, and rice that some Jews, including many Ashkenazim, avoid eating on Passover. Sephardic Jews traditionally eat kitniyot on the holiday and the Conservative Movement began permitting the consumption of kitniyot during Passover in 2016.
“There are people who say, ‘You’re not kosher enough,’” Godin said. “And there are people who say, ‘Oh, I’ll eat that.’”
Another popular gluten-free kosher bakery, Modern Bread and Bagel, is offering non-kitniyot foods for Passover. Like By the Way Bakery, Modern Bread and Bagel is not certified kosher for Passover, but all of its kitchen’s ingredients are kosher for Passover.
Godin says her company gains new customers every Passover, but this year has been an especially busy time. The number of orders for the orange almond cake, which has not been on the menu in several years, was three or four times larger than what she expected.
“Our projections were that we would be up 20% over last year. And we’ve well exceeded that,” she said. “Post-COVID, people just want to celebrate and get together.”
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Antisemitism in Healthcare Is a Public Health Crisis — and Must Be Treated as One
Illustrative: Medical staff work at the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) ward at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, in Jerusalem January 31, 2022. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
While healthcare providers pledge to “do no harm,” that oath is being violated as antisemitism seeps into the very spaces meant to embody compassion and healing. This was the warning issued by Dr. Jacqueline Hart, who organized a medical conference on this issue, and emphasized that antisemitism in medicine endangers both patients and practitioners.
At the conference, titled “Addressing Antisemitism in Healthcare,” a Jewish medical student described classmates who erased her from social media groups when they learned she was Jewish, and chalked the names of Hamas “martyrs” (those who brutally murdered Jewish men, women, and children) outside the school on the anniversary of October 7.
Other Jewish medical students were labeled “colonizers,” “oppressors,” and “bloodthirsty Zionists” by their peers. A genetic counselor who petitioned to stop her professional association from platforming a speaker with a history of antisemitic rhetoric received death threats from colleagues, and had to walk into work with a police escort. One Jewish resident recalled a patient who sneered, “I don’t trust the Jew to treat me,” while the supervising physician said nothing.
Jewish patients within the mental health sphere are experiencing what’s known as traumatic invalidation — the denial or dismissal of one’s pain, experience, and humanity. Research shows that when people are silenced, minimized, or erased in this way, the psychological impact can be as damaging as other recognized traumas, leaving deep scars of mistrust, hypervigilance, and isolation.
And when bias permeates hospitals and clinics, everyone is at risk. Patients hesitate to disclose important personal information, practitioners experience significant harm, and the public’s faith in medicine erodes.
For these reasons, antisemitism in healthcare must be treated as a public-health crisis.
A National Call to Action
America’s great medical hubs — Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle, Atlanta, and others — have long set the pace for clinical innovation and high-quality care. Now they must lead again. Public and private leaders within healthcare must mobilize around confronting antisemitism head-on.
For example, longitudinal studies should be funded and conducted on the impact of antisemitism on patient outcomes, workforce retention, and mental health, and to develop antisemitism-reduction interventions — just as we do for smoking cessation or infection control.
Policies and practices that illuminate and address the issue must be implemented, including adding antisemitism metrics to existing patient-safety and employee-climate surveys; requiring academic medical centers and health systems to track and publicly report antisemitic incidents; and posting a Patients’ Bill of Rights that explicitly guarantees a care environment free from discrimination.
Healthcare facilities should review their dress codes and revise policies to prohibit staff from wearing political attire that could intimidate patients or colleagues. This will help to ensure that treatment environments remain safe and welcoming for all.
Mandatory training and education are needed, including integrating antisemitism education into cultural-competence curricula for students, residents, and continuing medical education for practicing clinicians.
Facilities should create anonymous reporting hotlines — either individually or collectively — where patients and workers can report antisemitic or other bias-related incidents without fear of retaliation, and facilities should also ensure there are penalties for retaliation.
Mental health services must be available for patients and health care workers who experience discriminatory treatment. Further, regulations should be reviewed and revised to guarantee that clinical environments remain free from antisemitic bias and other forms of hate.
Finally, medical schools’ LCME accreditation and hospital Joint Commission status should be made dependent on having an antisemitism-prevention program or training requirement.
Medicine’s social contract is built on safety, dignity, and trust. When Jewish clinicians who report antisemitism are told to “keep politics out of the hospital,” or Jewish patients fear revealing their identity, that contract is broken. The cure is neither complicated nor optional: study the problem, implement interventions, train the workforce, and enforce standards — just as we have done with other threats to public health.
What’s at stake is not only the well-being of Jewish patients and professionals, but the integrity of our healthcare system itself.
Sara A. Colb is the Director of Advocacy for ADL’s National Affairs division. Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern is the Director of Trauma Training and Services at Parents for Peace and a Lecturer in Psychology at Harvard Medical School, where she supervises psychology interns and psychiatry residents.
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Dublin City Council Withdraws Proposal to Rename Park Honoring Former Israeli President Chaim Herzog
A plaque on a stone reads ‘Herzog Park’ commemorating Chaim Herzog as the Dublin City Council has prepared a motion to rename ‘Herzog Park’ to ‘Hind Rajab Park,’ Nov. 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne
The city council in Dublin, Ireland on Sunday withdrew plans to discuss a proposal that would change the name of a park honoring former Israeli President Chaim Herzog, after the body faced heavy criticism from government officials in Ireland, the US, and Israel, as well as from members of Ireland’s Jewish community.
The Dublin City Council was set to vote on Monday on a motion to rename Herzog Park in Rathgar, in south Dublin. The park was named after the Belfast-born and Dublin-raised former president of Israel in 1995. Late Sunday, Dublin City Council Chief Executive Richard Shakespeare said he proposed to withdraw the motion from Monday’s agenda and recommended that the issue should be referred back to the commemorations and naming committee because correct legislative procedures were not followed. He apologized for “administrative oversight.”
Herzog was the son of the chief rabbi of Ireland and was educated at Wesley College in Dublin. He was Israel’s sixth president, from 1983 to 1993, and died in Tel Aviv in 1997. His older son, Michael, recently ended his term as Israeli ambassador to the US, while his younger son, Isaac, is the current president of Israel.
Herzog Park is located in an area that is the center for Jewish life in Dublin, and it is also close to the only Jewish school in the country, Stratford College. The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland (JRCI) has its home base in Herzog House, which is located next to the park and Jewish school.
In June, a motion was submitted by Sinn Féin councillor Kourtney Kenny to rename the park Hind Rajab Park to commemorate a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was trapped in a car that had allegedly come under fire by Israeli military forces in the Gaza Strip in January 2024 and was later found dead. Israel claimed its military troops were not in the area at the time.
Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin said earlier on Sunday that the motion to rename Herzog Park should be “withdrawn in its entirety and not proceeded with.” He also called the proposal “a denial of our history … and will without any doubt be seen as antisemitic.”
“The proposal would erase the distinctive and rich contribution to Irish life of the Jewish community over many decades, including actual participation in the Irish War of Independence and the emerging State,” he explained. “It is overtly divisive and wrong. Our Irish Jewish community’s contribution to our country’s evolution in its many forms should always be cherished and generously acknowledged.” The prime minister added that the “motion must be withdrawn and I will ask Dublin City Council to seriously reflect on the implications of this move.”
Ireland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Simon Harris called the proposal “wrong” and “offensive” in a statement on X. Ireland’s Chief Rabbi Yoni Wieder said removing Herzog’s name from the park would be “a shameful erasure of Irish-Jewish history and would send a painful message of isolation to a minority already experiencing rising hostilities.”
The proposal was additionally condemned by Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Helen McEntee; US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, US Sen. Lindsey Graham, Ireland’s former Minister of Justice Alan Shatter, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, JRCI Chairman Maurice Cohen, the European Jewish Congress, and several others. Herzog’s son and Israel’s current president, Isaac Herzog, said renaming the park would be “a shameful and disgraceful move.”
The backlash came amid deteriorating Irish-Israeli relations.
Ireland has been one of the fiercest critics of Israel on the international stage since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, leading the Jewish state to shutter its embassy in Dublin.
Last year, Ireland officially recognized a Palestinian state, a decision that Israel described as a “reward for terrorism.”
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Greta Thunberg, UN’s Francesca Albanese Embrace Hamas Terrorist in New Mural Shown in Milan
Greta Thunberg and UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese in an embrace with a Hamas terrorist in the artwork “Human Shields” by AleXsandro Palombo. Photo: Provided
A mural depicting Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, embracing a Hamas terrorist was displayed Friday morning in central Milan at the epicenter of a major anti-Israel demonstration that took place in the area.
The mural “Human Shields,” by Italian pop artist and activist AleXsandro Palombo, was unveiled in Piazza XXIV Maggio in the heart of Milan. The artwork had previously been displayed in front of Termini Station, Rome’s biggest train station, but was vandalized within hours by pro-Palestinian activists.
The title of the artwork references the common practice by Hamas terrorists to use civilians in the Gaza Strip as human shields by hiding themselves and their weapons in residential areas, homes, schools, and hospitals. The title of the mural is also a reference to how public figures can be used as “ideological tools within global narrative conflicts,” Palombo’s team said.
Over the weekend, Thunberg and Albanese joined the thousands of people who participated in nationwide anti-Israel marches across Italy. They led protests in Genoa on Friday and then in Rome on Sunday.
Both Albanese and Thunberg have falsely accused Israel of “genocide” in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war. Albanese, an Italian lawyer and academic, has been accused of downplaying the massacre of Israelis during the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, as well as accepting funds from a pro-Hamas lobbying group. Thunberg joined two anti-Israel “freedom flotilla” attempts to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza in both June and October.
Palombo’s team said returning the mural to public display after it was vandalized was a sign of resistance and an opportunity to reflect “on the extremist drift within activism and on those who resort to violence and censorship to silence art and impose a one-sided narrative.” Palombo chose to place the mural at the center of the pro-Palestinian gathering in Milan to emphasize “the value of art as a space for dialogue and exchange.”
“The work raises awareness about the risk that activism, immersed in a polarized media environment, may be exploited and transformed into a vehicle for radicalization,” read a description from the artwork shared with The Algemeiner. “[It] underscores the fragility of contemporary activism, exposed to communicative chaos and media opportunism, to the point of becoming a megaphone for propaganda and a fundamentalist rhetoric capable of destabilizing democracies and altering international discourse.”
Several of Palombo’s murals in Italy that commemorate either Holocaust survivors or victims and survivors of the Hamas-led massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, have been vandalized.